22. My birth chart breakdown: understanding your paradoxical nature (feat. Karen Hawkwood)

You've probably been told there's something wrong with you: maybe you're "too sensitive" or "too impractical." Maybe one side of you is full of dreamy ideas, and another side of you is hyper-critical and cynical. 

All of us come with internal contradictions. Most approaches to personal development ask you to "resolve" them... but what if these tensions are meant to be held in creative relationship instead?

In this episode, I'm letting you in on the paradoxes that make me ME. I've asked my longtime mentor Karen Hawkwood to analyze my astrological chart as a live case study of her method. Listen to hear more about:

• How we often woefully misunderstand our own medicine 
• How to broker peace between different parts of yourself that rub against each other
• Why things like internal tension and struggle (which conventional self-development try to get rid of) are actually vitally important 
• How to carry paradox intentionally and skillfully

You'll start recognizing your own patterns in ways that will surprise you, and ultimately liberate you.

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Simone highly recommends!

• Karen's Paradox School is open for enrollment: www.theparadoxschool.com
• Listen to Karen's podcast Human Equals Paradox: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/human-equals-paradox/id1793972271
• Hang out with Karen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kjsassypants/

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

Before we dive into today's conversation, I need to tell you something. This episode is going to mess with your head in the best possible way.

For most of your life, you've probably been told there's something wrong with you. Maybe you're "too sensitive," "too impractical," "too intense," or "too something." Maybe you can't stick to plans the way you're supposed to. Maybe you feel like you're constantly at war with yourself—one part of you wants to dream big and take risks while another part is screaming about being realistic and following the rules.

If any of that sounds familiar, I have news for you: You're not broken. You are not defective. And you don't need to be fixed.

What you need is what I got from today's guest, KJ, also known as Karen Hawkwood. My dear friend and longtime mentor is going to show us a completely different language for understanding who you are and how you're really made. This isn't about adding more healing or growth to your life. It's about developing an intelligence around the paradoxes inside you and discovering that that's actually where your genius lies.

In the next hour and a half, KJ is going to show you why what you think are your problems maybe aren't, why all the tensions inside you maybe don't actually need to be resolved, and why the thing that makes you feel the most broken might be the very thing that makes you most powerful.

Now here's something unique about this episode. KJ is going to use me as the guinea pig. She's diving deep into my specific astrological chart and archetypal makeup. You're going to watch her decode the blueprint of someone you already know. And as you listen to KJ map out my paradoxes and contradictions, you're going to start thinking, "Wait, I do something similar," or "Oh, that's why Simone gets away with that," or "I have a very similar internal tension that I've been fighting instead of working with."

You are going to start recognizing your own patterns and maybe finally be able to start giving yourself permission to embrace—maybe even champion—the parts of you that you've been trying to deny, punish, shame, or resolve.

Fair warning: this conversation is dense. But if you give it your attention, if you can lean in and really let these ideas land, I promise you—you are never going to see yourself the same way again.

So grab your coffee, put your phone on airplane mode, and give us the next 90 minutes. We're starting mid-conversation because honestly, we don't know how to start and stop in a normal way. But once we get going, you're going to catch up quickly.

Here we go.

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A Conversation Between Simone and KJ

Simone: There is an enormously important place if you want to change the world, if you want to be an ally, if you want to be of support to important movements—an enormously important place for doing the work on yourself.

If you don't understand who you are, how can you ever hope to be helpful? Because we are each born with a unique set of gifts and medicine, and you have to understand what that is and know how to express it. And know how to express it coherently and sustainably for you to be of the greatest help to whoever needs your help.

Because how you do that, how you contribute, is going to look different from how anybody else contributes. And the more you understand yourself, the more you can unlock your own potential to be of help.

KJ: One of the things I was just going to add about what you were saying about everyone having their own gifts—I think there's also a necessity. It doesn't have to be the whole focus because it can become very self-absorbed, but a lot of times our particular medicines are not really what we would choose or what we want them to be, much less what we think they should be. And then we have feelings about that.

And so part of being able to inhabit our medicines in the most truly generative way is we kind of got to get over ourselves about what our medicines are. Because it's not always the thing that people think they want or should have.

Simone: Give us an example or two.

KJ: Well, one of the ways that I think about this is that first of all, I'm significantly against any people outside of a given indigenous culture borrowing or helping themselves to that indigenous culture's traditions. And that includes this idea of "totem animal" or "spirit animal." That is not language that any of us should ever be using unless we come from within that tradition.

However, the other thing that I noticed—and this is part of how you can tell appropriative, disconnected borrowing of an idea that people don't really understand versus people who actually live it—is that everybody wants their quote "spirit animal" to be bear or lynx or eagle. Nobody wants it to be earthworm.

Simone: Yeah, we want it to be something cool and sexy.

KJ: Our definition of cool and sexy. Because let me tell you, when you actually understand—which I'm not saying I do, but I get a teeny bit of it—the actual medicine of earthworm, it's fucking astonishing. The actual medicine of, let's just say this one would be a hard one for most of us: cockroach.

Simone: Yeah.

KJ: But I'll tell you, one of the medicines of cockroach right now, just off the top of my head—they're fucking unkillable. Nobody wants their medicine to be cockroach medicine.

Simone: No one's going to be like, "My spirit animal is a cockroach" or "an earthworm."

KJ: Right. Or a flea or a maggot.

Simone: Yeah. But all those beings serve absolutely critical functions in an ecosystem.

KJ: Maggots are astonishing. I don't like dealing with them—I used to work as a veterinary technician and they come up sometimes. I don't like dealing with them any better than anyone else does, but they have extraordinary medicine. It's the reason they were used as a medical technique in the Middle Ages. They would induce maggots into a wound to clean out the necrotic tissue. It saved people's lives.

Simone: I believe you.

KJ: Leeches—there's another one. Leeches have been used as medical technology. There is nothing in nature—this is part of where I go to course correct for my own human arrogance and ignorance—nothing in nature is wasted. Nothing in nature is extraneous. Nothing in nature is optional. It is the most ridiculously intricate and finely tuned system of necessity that could exist. And so everything within it has medicine, everything.

But we have just the narrowest, the most self-absorbed and arrogant and narrowest little window of what we think is cool and sexy. And so we treat ourselves like that too. I know a lot of people who really are sad that they're not sparkly and they look at sparkly people and are like, "That's how I should be. That's the good medicine to have."

And part of what they really are is gentle. They're like—I'm picturing in my head kind of a fawn color, like really soft, like a soft kind of tan. And they're looking at pink glitter or gold glitter and just envying, and not understanding the true gentleness and the true softness and the true gift that their softer, quieter nature really brings.

Simone: Because it's not what the larger culture has taught us to value.

KJ: Yeah. It's not what gets held up as "Look at them, they're amazing."

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that—well, this isn't the whole definition of my own medicines—I carry a lot of death medicine. There's a lot of the way that I work that is destructive, and it is generative destruction, but it's death medicine. And I was really hinky about that. And I kept asking whoever and wherever I could sort of get that, like "What am I meant to do?" I was like, "I want a different answer. I want it to be something else."

I can't be something else. I'm who I am. But it took me—I had to really work with my feelings about that before I could inhabit it and really be in what is truly my medicine in a clean and generative way.

Simone: So that brings us to why I asked to talk to you in the first place, which is someone could say, "How do I know what my medicine is? How do we begin to understand our own medicine," especially when it's tricky, because it's often not what we think it is. It's often not what we want it to be. And it's often at odds with what culture values and what culture makes it easy to, quote unquote, "monetize" and capitalize on.

KJ: Yeah, "capitalize"—that's a verb we should all be examining in our lives. But the other thing that I'll layer in here is that our medicines, our essential nature as people, is also full of paradox.

Simone: Yep.

KJ: So it has internal complexities and internal tensions just within the way that we are made as people, in addition to the tensions that exist between that inner complexity and the outer world. So lots of layers of tension and complexity.

Simone: And now I just remembered that we were going to do my chart as a way of exploring how some of these inner tensions and paradoxes might play out and how to understand them in order to understand what you're meant to do in the world and how to be of service. And not only how to be of service to other people, but how to live well outside of the dictates of what your culture says it means to live well, what capitalism says it means to live well—meaning living well in terms of really expressing your own nature, who you're meant to be, how you're meant to move through the world, how you're meant to be fed, all these things.

Like I said, KJ has been helping me with myself for a long time, and so I thought it would be fun if I asked her to break down the tools that she uses for me on me, and to share that with the world, because I don't think I've ever done that before.

KJ: Okay. Well, what I really do is see really deeply into the human psyche, into human nature. My primary tool for doing that is Western astrology, but I also combine it with depth or analytical psychology, which comes largely from the work of Carl Jung, but also a lot of the neo-Jungians and the heirs to his work.

And it's really about the two of them together. And what I'm trying to do with that framework—which is always, I think, the more important thing than what the framework is, is what do we do with it—is to help people become more and more comfortable with their own paradox, which is to say it a different way, to help people get to know all of themselves, all the nooks and crannies, and who's hiding in the cupboard under the stairs of you.

Because our true nature is tremendously complex, all of us. And we innately want to resolve those apparent contradictions, and there's no resolving and there's no need to resolve. That's my approach—we don't need to make everything match. We don't need to flatten it down until it's all the same. We need to build our capacity for our own complexity and our own apparent contradictions. We can be this way and that way. And that doesn't mean anything is wrong. And in fact, that's a strength once we can come to work with it.

So yeah, you tell me how specific you want to get. And one of the things I will say is that in my work with clients and what I teach my students is I'm very deliberate about not using the technical language of astrology with my clients unless they want me to. If they already speak that language, then we can speak that language, but it's not actually necessary. And I've gotten—if I dare say so myself—I've really built a lot of skill with taking what the technical language of astrology is telling me and translating it into the language of story, language of myth, the language of metaphor. Because that's human language. That's what all human beings respond to.

So if I'm going to talk to you about yourself, my instinct is to talk to you in the language of story. But the chart is always behind what I'm doing. So if you want me to tell you what I'm doing technically, I'm happy to do that.

Simone: Well the thing is, I always get frustrated when I just get technical astrology language thrown at me. Because I'm like, "I have no idea what you said. You might as well have been speaking in Ancient Aramaic."

KJ: Exactly. I don't know what you just said, so just make it make sense to my brain.

Simone: For people.

KJ: I hope so too. I mean, I think you're quite a fascinating person, even beyond knowing you and loving you the way that I do. But you have a particular set of paradoxes that are emphasized in your nature, which we will talk about. Other people will have different paradoxes, but the push-pull of what it takes for you to be you—it's like that for all of us. And I hope everyone who ends up listening to this can really hear and find their own push-pulls and bring a little more space and a little more grace to those places as a result of this conversation.

Simone: It's a life changer to feel like you're not fucked up or broken because there are contradictions inside of you and there's one part of you that's like this and another part that's like that. It doesn't mean you're a hypocrite. It doesn't mean you have to be fixed. It doesn't mean you have to force yourself to a kind of consistency that's not actually true to the complexity of who you actually are.

And when you allow all those parts together to breathe and dance together, that's really what it means to be authentic. Like we talk—I talk about the word authenticity a lot, and authenticity is so paradoxical and complicated. For this reason, I don't think you can truly inhabit your authenticity unless you know how to dance with your own paradoxes and you are comfortable doing so.

So let's get into it.

KJ: Singing the song of my people. I feel like I should write you a check for writing copy for me, because if there is one thing that I will be saying until I depart the body and become an ancestor, it is everything you just said so beautifully.

So, all right, so one of the first and biggest push-pulls that I see in you is—and of course this is a human thing, but it's really pronounced in you—the tension between limits and limitlessness. Because you have so much of you that is so team limitless. Anything is possible. All things are possible. They're all possible right now in this moment. And the gifts that you have at seeing possibility are considerably higher than most people. It is one of your superpowers.

And at the same time, in the very same breath—I would probably say that team limitless has a few more points on the board than team "What the fuck are you doing? There are limits and we need to respect them"—it's a very long team name, but that is still a really strong team in you. And I think the fact that you have the two together as strong as they both are is actually part of your genius. And I also think that is part of what makes it can make it really uncomfortable to be you.

One of the things about having a lot of that limitlessness energy of possibility, of excitement, of enthusiasm, of the awareness of all the sparkly things that could be, is that we live in the earthy world. We live in the world of time and space and gravity where we have to do things like sleep and eat, which takes away—all of that requires the limited time and energy and space that we have. And so the more possibilities you can see, the more frustrating and disappointing it will inevitably be that you can only make one of them real any given moment. You can make multiples of them real, but not all at the same time. Because that's one part of the limit—you can go wide or you can go deep, but if you move towards one, you're pulling away from the other. You can't have wide and deep at the same time.

So people who have a lot of that sense of possibility in them, but do not have the strength that you have around the need for limits, the need for structure, the need to make things manifest—it's easy to just play with the possibilities all day and never do anything with any of them. Part of what that does is it protects you against the frustration and the disappointment of having to pick one of a hundred shiny things to try to make it real. And then also the shiny thing, once you bring it down into the world and you start concretizing it, it's never as shiny. It's never as shiny when we pull it out of our imagination or out of our perceptive field or whatever that is, and try to make something real—it gets all dented and scratched and one leg shorter than the other or whatever it is.

But the part of you that loves limits and concretized, manifested, real, substantive stuff is like, "But it exists. You made it real." But you have to deal with the imperfections. You have to deal with the fact that it's never going to live up to your imagination.

Simone: It feels like I have, inside me, there's the creative team on one side, and then there's the legal team and the engineering team on the other side. And the creative team is like, "Let's do this!" And the legal team's like, "Well, here's 18 reasons why we can't do that." And the engineering team is like, "Well, here's everything that needs to happen." And the creative team is like, "You guys are such party poopers. You are the worst ever. Don't you see how exciting this could be? Why do you always have to be such Debbie Downers?"

And then the legal team is like, "You are head up in the clouds and come back down to earth. No one can connect to what you're saying." And so it's always maddening to be inside my head. And before I really started working with you, I just felt broken because I didn't know how to coexist with both sides of me.

KJ: This is it, because the creative team is not wrong. And the legal and the engineering—I love that metaphor. Partly because I worked in corporate for 25 years, so I sat in those meetings. I was literally in those meetings. Because the two—I love that you brought in both of those because they're both really good examples of team limits.

Because the legal team will say to the creative team, "People are going to go to the hospital. People are probably going to die if we make the product the way that you're describing it, which is super exciting and fun, except it's going to hurt people, which you're not thinking about. But it's our job not to let the company get sued into bankruptcy and disappear, because then we can't make anything. If we actually just let it all hang out, do whatever seems fun, we will have a very short life as a company." So we're trading some fun and excitement and sparkling in the moment for longevity.

The engineering team, on the other hand, is like, "We have to build this. And you have literally designed it with things that defy the laws of physics." And almost inevitably between the design team, like the creative team and the engineering team, there came a point if it was really one of those where the engineer would throw their pen down on the table and be like, "Then you build it. See how far you get building a teleporter inside a waffle maker so that the waffles will teleport themselves to the table and land on the plate because the people would be delighted with that. And if you can figure out how to get that teleporter inside the waffle maker, go for it."

And then the creative—but see, this is the thing, right? Because then the creative people are like, "Oh, you're so mean. You just don't want to help me. You're just so boring. You have no imagination. You're just so limited."

Simone: "You're just negative and you just don't like fun ideas."

KJ: Yeah. "Come on, you've got to hold the—just believe it into being!"

Simone: Yeah.

KJ: And the engineers are like, "No, I actually live in the physical world. I don't know what universe you're living in, but it's not this one." But the thing is, the legal team and the engineering team by themselves, they would not have a company either.

Simone: Right.

KJ: Because they don't come up with the possibilities. They don't have the genius ideas that just pop into being. You need all of it.

Simone: So how I lived for a long time is either in the shame of the legal and engineering team, or the shame of the creative team. It's either like, "Why can't you go and make these amazing things come true? What's wrong with you? Maybe you're not trying hard enough. Maybe you just are missing something that other people have." So that's the creative team shaming the legal engineering, or legal and engineering shaming the creative team like, "You are so impractical. You are so irrational. You are so detached from reality. You're never going to get anything done in the world and no one's going to like you or relate to you when you are like this."

KJ: Or respect you.

Simone: Or respect you. Right. And so all of my life, it was just one side shaming the other before the other side takes over trying to shame the other until I realized, "Oh, they are not—they're both parts of me and they work for the same company."

KJ: That's it.

Simone: They're on the same team ultimately. They don't have to keep shaming each other. We can actually work together and we can work with our differences. And that just changed everything for me.

KJ: One of the pieces that I'll add too, because this was a game changer for me, and it is for a lot of people, is to really explain to people that the teams do not have to understand each other. And they don't even have to like each other. The only thing that's required, at least at the beginning, is that they respect each other.

And if you're like, "I think you all on the other side of the table are complete lunatics," okay, you can think that. Are you willing to work respectfully with them and when it's their turn to—I talk about who's on the bus. Because I've always had this imagining of all of us as like those movies where a whole bunch of random people get locked in a basement together or something, and they have to work together to figure out how to survive. But they don't know each other. They don't understand each other. They don't like each other. But it's like, okay, but either we get along or we die. We're all like that. We're all that movie on the inside.

But I joke about being on the bus because the bus, the wheel of the bus is like our decision making. And when one archetypal part of us has the wheel, like when legal has the wheel, everything gets really boring and really careful really fast. When creative has the wheel, they're firing fireworks out the windows, the bus is up on two wheels. So everyone will drive the bus to where they want it to go, and everyone in the back of the bus is screaming, begging them to stop.

If who's driving the bus is like a serial hijacking, which is what happens in that shaming—and that trading off the shaming is like engineering will shame creative and yank them out of the driver's seat and jump into the driver's seat and be like, "We are driving this bus towards structure and rationality and sensibility and safety and clear achievement of milestones in our project plan."

And then eventually creative's going to freak out because they're not getting fed. They're not getting what they need, so they're going to hijack and turn. But all that is is just war.

Simone: Yeah. And then the bus is going zigzag crazy directions.

KJ: Screaming around, going back and forth between different neighborhoods. And no wonder we feel like, "What the hell is wrong with me?" because our bus looks like a very drunk set of people are driving it. And they're not drunk, but they're upset and they're struggling with each other.

Once that respect can come into play, like you really learned how to do, it becomes—there's still an alternating of drivers, but it's negotiated. And then who's driving is actually the most advantageous for the whole bus in terms of where we're going, to be driving at that moment.

Simone: And we make a food stop.

KJ: Exactly. And then a bathroom stop, then a beach stop.

Simone: I feel like this whole process of using this language to really understand yourself and your own paradox is like installing a really skillful and compassionate negotiator inside the bus who has equal—he respects everyone equally, but like eyes on the prize, eyes on the destination. Like, "I respect you all and I'm going to call the shots on who gets to sit at the driver's seat based on what's going to be the most advantageous to us." And I feel like that makes all the difference.

KJ: All the difference. You don't need different parts of you, and you don't need to resolve your inner tensions. You just need that negotiator, kind of traffic controller, to reorganize the parts of you. None of the parts of you need to be any different than they are. And here's the other—but reorganizing those relationships between them.

Simone: That's everything. The great thing about having the negotiator too is that when you are—you know, one part of you is shaming a different part of you, you are going to get that mirrored from the outside as well. Because some people have shamed me my whole life for being like, "Your head is up in the clouds, you're so unrealistic. Why don't you just follow normal rules?"

And when I don't know how to respect that part of me inside the bus, then I can take on that. I can internalize that criticism and think, "Yeah, maybe something's really wrong with me," or I will say, "No, this is unrealistic. You need to be practical," and I'm telling someone else to be practical. And then they're telling me, "You're mean," and I can internalize that too.

And so when you see all the different aspects of you and you understand what their gift is, and you also understand what their shadow is, then you are actually immune from so much of what might be directed at you from the outside. You're immune from internalizing any negativity around that because you are not shaming yourself. You're like, if somebody calls me impractical, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm sometimes like that because it's a part of my nature." It's how I work with that part of me that matters.

KJ: Because also the thing I want to note—I'm going to go back to that. "Impractical" is subjective. It is as subjective as "beautiful." And this is one of the things that is like learning to decode language and be able to discern judgment—which I'm not saying judgment is always wrong, but that's a conversation for maybe a different podcast—from factual description.

Because somebody saying "you're impractical"—it's like, well, according to who? According to what metric? How? Where's the threshold? Who gets to say? How impractical is too impractical? How practical is too practical? What does that even mean?

And so that helps to unwire the charge around it. But yes, if we are still feeling internal shame, we are incredibly vulnerable to then other people shaming us on that same sore spot. Part of what will also happen is that we are often activated into pretty intense defensiveness around a part of us that we are holding shame in. And we will leap into defending in whatever ways we defend. And that's, again, a longer conversation. Because defensiveness is a whole topic unto itself. There's incredible varieties of what constitutes defensiveness.

But how we know that we are not in that loop is when someone hurls a description at us. And it would be like saying to you, "You, you Korean!" You're like, "Yeah. And?" It's a descriptor. It's literally just a factual thing. It doesn't hold any charge one way or the other.

Simone: This is one of the first things that you did for me was to take the charge out of the word "irrational."

KJ: Yeah.

Simone: I don't know if you remember.

KJ: I do, because a lot of you is irrational and a lot of people who just heard me say that are going to be like, "What?" But this is the whole point. The word does not mean what you think it means.

Rational knowing is getting to the answer to a problem—I'm using a math problem as a very crude example—by adding one and one and one and one and one. And that's how I know the answer is five. Irrational knowing is, "I just know it's five." It's a much more—and this is not quite the same as intuition, but it is a more direct knowing, which doesn't always make it right. But it's a more immediate kind of flowing in the perceptive field way of knowing things.

Rational is very structured, and there's this clear articulated chain of links to how we know things. Both of them are equally valuable, but because of cultural bias in Western eyes, particularly coming out of the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution in Europe, and the way that those cultural values have been forcibly exported to the rest of the world, the rational ways of knowing were the only good ones and the irrational ways of knowing have been completely demonized or dismissed. But they're all part of human nature. Knowing the rational side of us is only half, basically.

Simone: I mean, I've been called irrational my whole life and that was something that I was trying so hard to fix about myself until you told me this, I don't know, maybe eight, nine years ago. And it was like one of the biggest transformative moments for me ever.

KJ: Because, well, let me just illustrate really quickly, so Western astrology works with four elements. We work with fire, earth, air, and water. The rational elements are earth and air. The irrational elements are fire and water. In your chart of the 13 quote "planets"—I know they're not all planets, but we'll call them planets for the moment—of the 13 planets that I work with, eight are in fire and water. Eight out of 13.

So how else would you be is my point. This is how you were made—to know things and perceive things and operate through the strength of the irrational. It's just that it was never presented to you as a strength, only as a liability and a problem.

Simone: That's right. And I can't even to this day overstate what a difference that understanding makes because it allows me to not only approach my personal life, but also my professional life, my business in some very unorthodox ways with actually a lot of confidence and verve. And very few people have been given permission to do the same. They don't have the language to be able to do so. And it hurts my heart, which is one of the reasons that I—

KJ: Mine too.

Simone: —spread the good word about your work. Thank you. And I'll just give a quick note. You said "very unorthodox."

KJ: Yeah.

Simone: The orthodoxy is only rational because our culture decided that it should be. That's right. And then just ran around for 400 years telling everybody that the other half of human nature was wrong. And so all of us can—but yeah, if you don't have a model, if you don't have some way to see yourself reflected back in this mirror that can show these kind of complexities, how are you going to know? You just hold yourself up to the orthodoxy to whatever they say you should do. And you're like, "Well, guess I'm broken."

Simone: Yeah. I think the whole thing of like, "You're never going to get anything done unless you have a plan," and I have never planned. And just making a plan made me want to die inside. And how I know it's time to do things is I just know.

KJ: That's irrational knowing.

Simone: And if you were to ask me why I can't set a sensible plan and follow it, it just feels like it just goes against some kind of core knowing about myself and just the core design of how I'm made. The whole culture tells you, you have to plan, you have to write things down. You have to follow steps A, B, C, and the whole time, I was like, "That makes no sense to me." And the only reason that any of my shit works is because I have learned how to trust myself with this. Do it your way.

KJ: With your strengths.

Simone: Exactly. I have no idea what's next, but I'm going to know when it's time. How do I know? I'm just going to know.

KJ: You've learned to trust that and not question yourself. And not feel, most importantly, like you have to justify or defend—

Simone: That's it.

KJ: —your way of being to other people. Because someone asking you "Why can't you make a plan and stick with it?" Because the implication is just dripping off that question that you should be able to, because that's what good people do. And there is no more sense in asking, when I look at you through my lens and I see all this fire and all this water, that makes as much sense to ask you a question like that as to ask you like, "Well, why can't you breathe under water?" It's just as absurd. But because culture has that bias, people don't think it's absurd. They think that that's the way everyone should be.

And so yeah, my whole—helping people really expand themselves to be aware of all of their paradoxical nature is the start. But then what we do with that is help you figure out how to live your life your way.

Simone: Yeah. And I feel like me having done this work with you for so long, understanding myself so well and really being at ease with who I am and having pride in who I am and loving who I am actually—looking back, I think this happened subconsciously, but subconsciously surround myself with people who no longer say shit like, "Why can't you just X, Y, Z." And they're very different from me. Like my closest friends, my family, my husband, like they are built very different from me. And yet when I say like, "Oh, I'm going to change this giant plan that we worked on for five months at the last minute, I'm going to do something totally different."

When I do things like that, they're not like, "What's wrong with you?" They're not like, "I don't understand, defend yourself." Everyone's like, "Okay, there's Simone doing the Simone thing, I don't get it, but I'm going to support her because we love Simone."

KJ: And because you work best, you are happiest and you are most in your zone of genius when you are the most in your own, what I call archetypal nature. And they've seen the evidence of that. That's right. And so they've learned to trust it. And so that dynamic that you just said about the people, the closest people around you mirrors what I was talking about, about the inner dynamic. As you've come into more mutual—not more understanding, the inner parts of you, legal and creative don't understand each other anymore than they ever are going to—respect. But they've learned to respect each other and work together. And now that same dynamic has replicated itself between you and the other human people in your life. There's that mutual respect and then things work way better.

Simone: My husband told me when we first started dating that he thought I was fucking with him and like sabotaging the relationship because of how fast I changed my mind about things and how unpredictable and irrational I was. He was like, "This girl is messing with me." And then soon after he realized, "Oh no, this is just how she's built," and he learned how to work with my nature very early on, which is why—

KJ: Which is endless credit to him. Because I don't know him, but I do have some sense that he is a much more structured and deliberate person than you are. And you beautiful complements. Like you've learned how to work as complements to one another where you balance each other in that way instead of clashing. But it was probably quite a moment for him to come to terms with who you are.

Simone: This is not to over-romanticize everything. Because as with my husband, as with my best friend, both of whom feel very different from me, there are times when I want to strangle them and rip their hair out. And there are times when they want to strangle me and rip my hair out because like, "Oh my God, why are you making life so difficult? Why can't you be like—this is ineffective?"

Because we all have our human moments and when the difference becomes—there's a lot of friction around the difference. It can be like, "Ah, you're driving me crazy and I kind of hate you right now. And I don't know why we're in a relationship to begin with because obviously we're so different we could never get along."

But those moments of combustion happen. But then when you have this fundamental relationship way of regarding the other person with affection and respect, not always understanding, then you can resolve those moments. You can create repair and you can create movement from that. It's actually makes for such healthier relationships when there are times when, because of our differences, we're going to feel like choking the other person. And that's okay.

And once again, that exact same dynamic happens on the inside of us, inside that bus where creative is going to want to murder engineering, and the engineering is going to want to murder creative. And then it's okay, it's going to be crunchy sometimes, but then the negotiator always steps in at the end and says, "Okay, we're all on the same team."

KJ: And this is—so one of the principles that I think is a prerequisite for working with paradox because the tension is a given, is that tension is not bad. And this is one of the things that I do get a little frustrated with, kind of the combination, like the broad scale self-help world, new age world, like this whole kind of what I call the psychospiritual world in a broad sense—is tension is bad, that we should always go for ease. "Let it be easy, let it be."

Well, listen, there are ways that we need to get out of our own way. There are ways that—listen, I'm a champion at making things harder for myself than they need to be. Now, some of that also goes back to my archetypal nature, which doesn't mean there isn't room to move and shape and work with it, but I like to remind people that if you actually felt absolutely no tension in your body, you'd be dead.

Tension makes your heart beat. Tension expands your diaphragm so that your lungs will take in breath. Tension moves your intestinal system to digest your food. Tension tightens your muscles so that you can get up and get a cup of tea.

Simone: Tension holds, like makes cells be intact.

KJ: Absolutely. Tension moves the nutrients in and out of the cell. Now all the scientists are probably cringing because I'm explaining it very badly, but hopefully you get the point. Tension to me is generative. Or at least it can be. Sometimes it is only destructive. But I really—so when you said, when you were talking about engineering and creative wanting to murder each other, if you can stay with it without actually killing anyone, there is, there can be, and there often is this kind of release. There's like a breakthrough moment that emerges out of the tension that actually wouldn't without the tension.

But holding the tension and keeping it from becoming destructive is the trick. That's the skill. And if we can do that, there just inevitably seems to be this kind of breakthrough thing that will happen that leads forward that is generative. So yeah, the tension is not comfortable. I don't love my inner tension. I don't love outer tension any more than anyone else, but I've built a lot of respect and appreciation for tension and the generativity that it can bring.

And I've seen, especially with my clients and with my students, the ways in which we try to minimize or sort of slacken tension in ourselves—we can't do anything. Slackening the tension literally just takes all the traction out of the picture. So that is one thing that I always like to say when I get the opportunity is don't demonize tension. Don't be afraid of it. Learn to discern as always. There's some kinds of tension that are enormously more useful and generative than others, but tension's a good necessary thing.

Simone: That's such a powerful idea. I love that. So I think we did a pretty good job of covering one kind of paradox.

KJ: Yeah.

Simone: You said there's another.

KJ: So this is kind of—I'm going to add this more briefly because it's like a different dimension in a way of the expansion versus limits, or possibilities and limits. And this is again, a thing I think a lot of people aren't as aware of about you because you have the possibility side of you also brings a sense of utter and complete faith in the benign purposefulness of existence.

Simone: Yeah. When you told me this for the first time, I was like, "Wait, not everyone has that?" And you were like, "Oh no." I'm like, "Wait. Oh no. Also not just the truth, that's just plainly apparent that everyone—that the universe is benign and purposeful. What are you talking about?"

KJ: And I know I can see on your face, you still feel that way. You're still like, "Yeah, of course. How is that not the case?"

Simone: Yeah.

KJ: And the limits of team legal, especially, although engineering does get in on this, is the experience of doubt. And the experience of feeling inadequacy, which again, the perception of inadequacy is not automatically a bad thing that we need to get rid of. There's a lot of stuff that I end up saying that is not necessarily something we need to get rid of because ultimately, the archetypal root of the team limits that I talk about is an energy that wants us to be excellent.

And excellence is a process. Excellence is not a destination, it is a pursuit. And so ultimately, underneath the recognition of flaws or inadequacies at its clean root is the opportunity to become more excellent. Now, note please, everyone who's ever listened to this, I did not say "perfect." I did not say perfect. I do not mean perfect. Please, for the love of cheese, do not equate excellence with perfection. That is not that. Excellence is getting better. Not becoming perfect.

And so the faith in the benign purposefulness of life, there's nothing more to do. You just exist in that place. And the side that carries the doubt. And some of the kind of heaviness, like the awareness of flaws and failings and imperfections, that side of you—not just you, but it's sharper in you—is made to struggle. And again, we have demonized struggle and I totally get that there are places we struggle that we don't need to, but there are places we need to struggle. Because struggle builds us, struggle hones us, it shapes us. And it kind of strips away the extraneous to reveal like the bone structure underneath. Struggle is an incredibly beautiful experience. Not fun. I did not say fun or pleasant, but it's an incredibly beautiful experience. And you need struggle. You are made—I don't talk about "meant," I have a hard time with "meant," but I will say you are made to struggle, to push yourself to never be satisfied and to doubt. To doubt yourself.

Simone: Can you imagine how horrible it is when you are made this way and you don't know that you're made this way and you just think you are just broken because you never feel like anything's enough, which is hard enough, but then you feel like, "Oh, this must be because I'm defective or I have some trauma that I need to heal, and once I heal it, I'm not going to struggle anymore. I'm not going to live with this perpetual weight on my back of like some gnawing at me. Like you're making gnawing motions of something is not quite right. I have to improve something. I have to tend to something, that perpetual sense of, 'Ah, not enough.'"

And to know that it's not because of a wound. It's not because I'm broken. It's not because I don't have self-esteem. It's not because any of these things, it is my archetypal makeup. And mind you, that doesn't make it delightful to carry this part of me. It still sucks.

KJ: Often.

Simone: I talk about this with my people because I immediately, after I finish a project, I already hate it. Every single thing I've done in the past, I am horrified by it. The second it's done, I'm like, "Disgusting. Get away from me." It's because all I can see is where it could be better. Which is wildly unfair to the project itself and my past self if you're objectively looking at it. But it's not about objectivity. It's that critical part of me that says, "How can this be better?"

And one of the biggest liberations of my life is when I just let myself be this person who is immediately horrified by my project the minute I complete it and know that it's not a reflection on me, it's not a reflection on my project, it is just a reflection of that relentless drive inside me that is obsessed with asking, "How could this be more excellent?" And it is because of that that I have become so excellent at so many things, at least compared to before.

KJ: I'm not done. You're not done. None of us are done. But this is a thing. I mean, I think the people in your immediate world actually do know how hard you work. And that you don't just sparkle unicorn your way—as much of a sparkle unicorn as you are. You do not just sparkle unicorn your way into everything. You don't just wake up like this, you work your ass off.

Simone: I do.

KJ: And you have done that steadily for more than a decade. And without this part of you, without this—this is archetypally what I talk about as the responsible adult elder. Without this part of you, you wouldn't have kind of the steel in your nature that becomes like the load bearing structure to hold and channel and funnel all the bright sparkly possibilities into something real that is inevitably so imperfect. Because everything is. That then you have to deal with that feeling of like, "Oh, I hate this. I should never have done this."

Simone: But, and it's not just that, you know, I once again shame myself for the longest time. Because when I look at other people and other people's projects too, all I could see is, "Well, that's stupid because da da da, well that could be better because," and I'm like, "Why am I such a bitter, mean, hateful person that I can't just appreciate what other people—why do I always have to come in with like a—" I mean, I don't often say it out loud, but in myself, I'm like, "Ugh, gross. Ugh, not good enough. Ugh." Like, and it's like. "Who are you?"

And being other parts of me being like actually so loving and gracious. And because that's a part of me too. I'm the loving gracious, like, "Let's all get along and hold hands."

KJ: Accepting, welcoming, and holding. Yeah.

Simone: "We're all one" kind of—that part is horrified at the critic. Like "You are the meanest person ever. You need to go smoke something like exactly you unclench your asshole. Like what is actually wrong with you?" And that critic part of me is looking at the kumbaya part of me being like, "You are actually a pathetic loser. Like, you don't have any standards. You need to stop smoking bowls because exactly. Whatever you're doing over there. You just think everything is great the way it is."

KJ: Exactly. "And everything is far from great."

Simone: Exactly. And so the tug of war between these two parts too. Once again, until I had this understanding, it's like always just one side shaming the other. Like the loving, compassionate, gracious side shaming the critic for being so mean and judgmental and intolerant and bitter and cynical and "what's wrong with you." And then that part shaming the other side saying "you don't know shit," and so that was another really difficult one for me as well. And it's one I still daily actively engage the negotiator because, and there, once again, like you said, there's always that tension.

KJ: And that's where the negotiator can step in and say, "Okay, peace. Peace. You both carry, you both are bringing important things to the table. We're all trapped in here. We have to learn to work together or we'll all die." That's just the truth. But this is—that is a classic.

So this is what I mean by paradox. Like again, I could come up with endless examples, but for anyone who's like, "What does that word mean?" Everything and everyone is perfect right now in this moment, as is, as they are permanently and forever. Everything. Everyone is flawed and imperfect and needs to be improved. Or could be improved. Both of those are true at once. That's paradox. And that's why we cannot approach paradox with our rational cognitive minds because they break when we try to hold these two impossible things together. But they are both true among many, many, many others.

Simone: How I have explained the difference between a contradiction and paradox, largely I learned from you, but how I have kind of articulated it is a contradiction is where two things are presented, where one seems to be at odds with the other, and only one of them can be right, and you have to resolve the difference to get to the truth. Whereas in a paradox, there's two things that appear to be opposite, and it is only by holding both aspects that you can actually understand the truth. You don't—there's no resolution. If you have to resolve it, it's a contradiction. If you can only resolve it by holding them both and appreciating a bigger picture of the truth, then it's a paradox.

KJ: And technically that isn't even resolution. I'm not going to—it's expanding. Exactly. It's the only way to hold the seeming impossibility is to expand your perspective to where you can hold both. And so a lot of times though—so yes, and I actually love that refinement. I don't think I've ever heard you say that. And it's extremely useful. So I'm always looking for refinements on my understandings.

The thing that I see in people though, is more often than not, we see things as contradictions when they're actually paradoxes. A contradiction to me is on the order of "Would you like to go to Italian tonight or to Mexican?" Because we cannot literally go to both restaurants physically at the same time. So that is something that has to be resolved in order to have dinner. But our archetypal nature, "Are you legal or are you creative?" That's a paradox. There is no—that's the wrong question. Because we frame it as a contradiction, it's one or the other and the truth is it's both.

Simone: Yeah.

KJ: So, yeah. So, okay. Final set of—this is the one that was in my mind from the beginning that again, I think is not always apparent to people. That's one of the things I think might be useful about this reflection of you is that you have a side of you that is so open. That is—what you see is what you get that doesn't want to hide anything, so comfortable with shining and radiating and just being in the world, unfiltered. And you have a side of you that is so private and that is deeply and intensely and kind of fiercely private.

And all people, like, again, people are like, "Well, isn't everybody?" To some extent private, public, visible, invisible—that's a dimension that all of us have to work along and figure out what's right for us. But there's a sharper contrast between these two sides of you, the part of you that's so open and so wants to just give yourself to the world wholesale, doesn't want to hold anything back, just would literally make every detail of your life public. The parts of you that are intensely private wouldn't show anybody anything. They really would keep 98% of it.

Simone: Yeah. And is like horrified by the display.

KJ: Exactly. And is deeply threatened and deeply uncomfortable. Like it feels really unsafe. I think a lot of the privacy part of you is like, "No, it's not safe for the world to know this much about me." And I think you navigate that really beautifully. But I don't know, it made—the tension. I didn't always—

Simone: I didn't always.

KJ: You've learned. Yeah. Because I think that's the only way we can, and again, this is where hijacking the bus. You probably had the open part of you take the wheel and just start throwing your panties out the window. And then the privacy part was like, "What? She's gone insane. Get her out of there." And then the privacy got the wheel and then put on dark goggles and a mask, and blacked out all the windows.

Simone: And we're like, "Oh, we can't breathe. What's happening? We can't see. Okay. We're so suffocated." That's right. And this is another one of those things. So easy to pathologize yourself for. It's like, "Oh my gosh. Why are you so—stop oversharing." And on the other hand it's like, "Stop being such a shut in recluse."

KJ: People will be like, "Why are you sharing all this stuff?" And then other people are like, "Why are you hiding things from us?"

Simone: Exactly.

KJ: And so again, and that balance has shifted at different times in your life. Before you had a family that was a different place, before you were in a long-term relationship that was in a different place. As you've done different things in your work, the emphasis of your work has shifted in different ways. That line needs to be renegotiated between these two sides of you that are always going to be kind of tense with each other, but where the right respectful balance is between them needs to be renegotiated regularly.

And there's one other point I want to make about the openness and privacy thing too. These tensions are always with us. This is not something to solve. That's why I always know that "solve" is in the word "resolve." So when people are trying to resolve, they're trying to solve something, this isn't something that needs to be solved. It will never be solved in the sense of one side or the other going away. It's with you forever. It's with me forever. It's with everybody forever, whatever their pushes and pulls are.

And so getting comfortable and also realizing—this is one thing you said before really beautifully, and I just wanted to tag this on. A lot of the people that I've worked with over the 12 years or so that I've been in practice either have intentionally come to me because everything else they've tried hasn't worked, quote unquote, or they discover in our work is that they thought that by doing coaching, doing therapy, doing hypnotherapy, doing trauma work, doing—and I'm not saying all those things weren't valuable because they were and are and I've done them and will do them. But what they were trying to do that they didn't know, because they didn't have this framework, was eliminate part of their archetypal nature so that we could get the resolution so they could get to resolution. They were trying to shame a part of themselves out of existence basically. And a lot of times when people don't realize that's what they're doing and they're trying to work through a modality like trauma work—good trauma work in the hands of a qualified practitioner will change your fucking life. I mean, no argument there, but what it won't do because nothing will do this is eliminate part of your archetypal nature. It can't, but if that's what you think it's supposed to do.

Simone: So give me an example. What are some ways people can try to eliminate part of their archetypal nature through trauma work?

KJ: So an example might be that they have a part of themselves that I talk about as the challenger warrior, and I hope those names are evocative to give you that feeling of this fierce, strong, kind of impulsive, energetic, driven, assertive part of us.

And if that part of you has been—okay, let's say that you have this in you pretty strongly. Like this is a strong part of your makeup. But let's say you grew up in a family with one or both parents that were super angry in a really destructive way all the time. And you experienced a lot of emotional, psychological, verbal, or possibly physical violence in that upbringing. That's what that archetype looks like to you.

That's not what it actually is, but it's been distorted. It's showing in a super shadowy way. So as soon as you start to feel any kind of anything that might eventually become anger, you're like, "Oh God, no, no, no, no, no. That has to go away." Because you've seen it in such a destructive way that you want no part of it. But what you don't realize, and there's no way for you to realize, is that the way that it was modeled for you and that you were on the receiving end of it was not clean. It was enormously twisted and shadowy, which does not, by the way—let me always say for the record—does not justify the behavior ever, but how the challenger warrior can work can look really different from that.

But first, the first thing is you have to be willing to accept the fact that you have one—that that is one of the people in your bus, and then be able to get to know it. But if this is a person who thinks that their relationship with not just anger because anger is only one way of expressing it, but loving challenge that kind of like, "I'm"—I don't think this will be on video, but like I'm leaning forward with my body kind of pushing my shoulders forward because the challenger wants challenge.

And if they feel that come up in them and they don't know anywhere else for that impulse to go, than to be aggressive, not assertive, but aggressive and dominant and violent towards another person or an animal or any, they're just going to be horrified and they're going to think, and naturally so, "That came from my trauma. That came from the—that is only in me because of my parents and if I do enough trauma work, I will peel that off. I will dissolve that. I will let it release out of my system."

And so when it keeps coming up, they're going to think that they've failed or that the work is failing. And it's not, it's not. And that hurts my heart. Like, and I've worked with so many people who were trying to eliminate their primal animal or their challenger warrior or their responsible adult elder, which is behind that whole, like you were saying about that kind of critical—I'm not going to call it judgmental, but like evaluating with a clear cold eye. And they're just horrified by that in themselves, and they want it to go away.

So many people that I have done this kind of rehabilitative work by helping them to see that it isn't going to go away, but also it doesn't need to. You don't need to get rid of it. It's a huge—it's just, it's my, probably my favorite part. I don't know if I have a favorite, I have a lot of favorite parts, but that's one of my favorite parts of the work that I do.

Simone: Yeah. Culture teaches us that the healthy, in quotes, way to be is one way and one thing. I mean, one of the many things that we've already talked about, so much of it that I have realized is not due to my trauma, is not because I haven't gotten enough therapy or coaching, whatever, is not because I'm—that's it. Is that part of me as well as the melancholy that I always live with, the kind of heaviness of existence that I'm always very acutely aware of. Now I know that the part that senses that is one person on the bus. That's not the only part of me. But that's an important person on the bus and I allow that tension to exist.

And I think it's one of my issues that I get really fired up about too, about the enforced uniformity of what it means to be a healthy human and what it means to live well. And it means that we're not allowed to have tension. We're not allowed to have paradox. We're not allowed to have darkness and weight when in fact nature requires all of those things.

KJ: Yes. Singing the song of my people.

Simone: And I think to tie it back to what we started the conversation with, I think when you really understand and embrace, and again, you don't have to love or enjoy—there's certainly many aspects of myself that I don't love or enjoy all the time—but when you can coexist respectfully and skillfully with all the different people inside the bus, like I said earlier, that's when you can bring a genuine authenticity to the people that you're around. And I think people who are in my world and like being in my world can kind of intuit that. They can smell it from me. Is it that I am not just one thing and I am not at war with myself. And I think that's really powerful and I think it is a quality that you probably kind of have to cultivate if you hope to steward a mission or lead in any way.

KJ: Yeah, I would agree because wherever you're at war with yourself, that will come out in—I mean, whether you want it to or not, whether you try to hide it or not, it will come out, it will leak out into everything that you do.

Simone: I think this is one of the biggest ways we cause unintentional harm when we are trying to help. Is when we have paradoxes inside of us that we can't make sense of. And we live with the pain of that, and we're trying to solve that pain from within by trying to fix the world. And in the process, you can do so much damage. And not only does this apply to activism, it applies to those who hold practitioner type roles, whether you're a therapist, coach, healer, a facilitator—

KJ: A hundred percent.

Simone: Which is why I think the language that you are teaching is so—like I said, I'm sure it's not the only one, but it is a language that I have found to be so enormously not only transformative, but also rarely taught and rarely understood in this world. And I think this world that we're living in now and in the years to come, there are so many crises of enormous complexity. And I think the only way we'll begin to find a way towards peaceful, flourishing, coexistence as human beings is when we have enough people working on the issues who really have this depth of understanding of themselves and integration of all that they are. Because then we can engage with the complexity and paradoxes of the world in a clean way.

KJ: Hell yes to all of this.

Simone: All of this. If you want to learn more about this language and this deep and precise way of working, which I think is so powerful and so beautiful, KJ just happens to have a course starting, tell us about that.

KJ: Okay. Which is not necessarily why we had this conversation, but it's incredibly helpful to be able to say to people—

Simone: It is, and I'm not apologetic about that, I think.

KJ: Well, I mean, it was, but also I would have this conversation with you for no reason or any, because it's my favorite thing. But yeah, if people want to know how to do this, I will say, and this is the thing that I will say—all—there are many really brilliant systems of perception and engagement with the human psyche in the world. And I'm glad, I love that there are so many different beautiful, powerful ways to engage the human psyche. And all systems have gaps. And that's okay, because no system can be complete. That's just, I just don't think that's a real thing.

And what I will say, so my system has gaps too, because they all do. But the way in which it can pinpoint these push-pull places that it can help to zero in on this essential paradox of someone's nature, in my experience, is unparalleled. I've never seen anything that can do that as quickly and as precisely as this can.

So the Paradox School, because I'm not a particularly fancy namer, so everything is called paradox—it gets to the point. There's no deceptive advertising here. So the Paradox School is a 12 month program, and you don't have to know anything about astrology. You don't even have to be particularly into astrology or excited about astrology. The astrology here is a language, and what matters is what we say in the language. It's what we're using the language to talk about. But you have to learn the language first, and that part can be a little bit tedious. I won't lie. It's doable. I mean, it's not hard. It just takes a little while, which is why it's a 12 month program.

But the astrology is the framework of the language. It's what my teacher would call the anatomy, if you will, of the system. But what we get to talk about in this language is everything that Simone and I spent time with today, and that's what it lets you see. That's what it lets you start to see in yourself and in other people.

Simone: But how many archetypes are there total?

KJ: In my system there are 13.

Simone: 13, okay. So we've only talked about a few, a handful of them today in my chart, in my makeup. But there are more, and I'm always so fascinating to see what people are made of.

KJ: And not everybody has all the archetypes. So like, you don't have—I mean, this might sound a little odd, but it's because it comes from a different direction in you. You don't have the nourisher, off the top of my head. You don't have the nourisher, you don't have the curious child, but you do have the adventurer. What's the difference? And the adventurer has some resonance. So a lot of that curiosity and that restlessness and that big dreamy idea—that's the adventurer. You have a massive adventurer. You have a pretty big mermaid. I would say adventurer and mermaid are your two big archetypes, but you also have a really substantial visionary revolutionary. You have a really solid, responsible adult elder, like we talked about. You don't have a very strong primal animal, but even though it's kind of smaller in you, it sits—it sits in the doorway. Like it sits in the foyer of your house and kind of guards the door is really what it's doing.

So anyway, so in the Paradox School, we spend a year learning to look at people like this. Yes, there's a technical structure that goes into it, but it's really a world sense. It's a worldview world sense about how people work and with paradox at the heart of it. And so that's really what we're learning and that requires immersion. You know, this is not a 13 week self-paced, just give you a bunch of information. Because we don't learn a whole new worldview from information. We don't. We learn it from being and from dwelling.

And the way that we learn that—all the material is prepared. Because I've taught this a few times. This is my third year of the school. And so what that does is it frees all the calls and we have four calls a month and all the calls are direct mentorship. So I work with each person. Unless somebody doesn't want to talk to me, which nobody has to talk to me. But if people turn up on the calls and they want my time, I focus on each person individually and I move from person to person. And everybody gets to listen and watch really all of what I do with each person. But what that allows me to do, and this is one of my favorite parts about the school, is I meet each person, not only where they are in the material, but I do my best to meet—because I know everyone's charts. So I know everybody's archetypal—I know the archetypal nature of all of my students and I do my best to meet them and engage them in the way that they work best.

And so nobody has to be like everybody else. It's not a cohort that has to march in step. Everyone doing the same thing at the same time and then moving on to the next thing. Because that's not how real human beings work.

Simone: Home, how medicinal must be to be seen and regarded in that way, with that depth.

KJ: And you know, that's what my students have said to me. That's what my—so like some of my students, the way that they bring in information and make sense of it is much more sort of earthy and grounded and tactical. And they need real world examples. Not metaphors, not hypothetical examples, but actual human experience. Other people need me to tell them a story. And it doesn't matter how real it is, some people need to feel it, and if they can't feel it, they can't—it doesn't go in, they can't, they want to get a hold of it, but they've got to feel it. Other people need to work through the rational, logical, sort of reasons behind what I'm saying.

I love all of that. I can meet anybody in any of that. Some people take longer.

Simone: What I just—I couldn't do what you do, meet everybody where they're—

KJ: That's okay. Different people have different strengths and not all of those modes are as easy for me. I can tell you a story if you wake me up out of a sound sleep. Some of the other stuff is harder, but I've learned, I've learned because I want people to be able to see through this lens. And everyone learns differently. And everyone engages differently. And that's what makes this possible. That's why this is not a hundred people, it's not a thousand people. It's never going to be because this is too rich and deep to kind of be packaged on a shelf. Which is not saying anything about anybody who has other stuff. I have other stuff that I offer like that, but not this.

And also there's again, that world sense and the values that they soak in over time. So that's why it's a year. We've got the structure is kind of pretty normal. We meet on Zoom four calls a month. You don't have to be on all four calls. It's ideal if you're on at least one call a month so that you can get your mentorship time. We have an offline space on Circle. The platform is Circle, which I really like. It's worked really well for my community so far. And the students that have come out of the last two years have really said more even than I could have imagined about how—

Simone: I know some students who've been through Paradox School. And the how they come out on the other side has been just incredible to watch. Incredible.

KJ: Wow, that's incredibly lovely to hear. I couldn't forget that some of my students are in your world.

Simone: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what happened to you? And it's like they've been through Paradox School and just like, just what I mean by that is they're just so much more fully and deeply and colorfully of themselves and at ease being so, and when that transformation happens to a practitioner who then works with other humans, that's everything. How the hell are you going to guide other people through the experience of their being human if you barely understand yourself?

KJ: And that's, I mean, that's how I feel about it. I've been talking to—so that's what I want more than anything in the world.

Simone: I've been talking to so many of my close friends about lately about how self-awareness is actually pretty rarely taught. It's so easy to find teachings on like paradigms and systems and tools and techniques and modalities. But who's going to teach you self-awareness? Like real skillful self-awareness. And I feel like I kind of gave myself an education to help with my cause. I'm just relentlessly curious about myself that way.

But I think there's a huge gap and an issue in practitioner trainings of any kind where you're trying to work with tools and modalities and techniques, but actually, there's a great amount of research that indicates that the most important ingredient in outcomes of therapy is the relationship with the practitioner. Not what modality they're using, not what tools you're using. It's not that. And so it's the relationship, meaning who's the human being who's showing up to these sessions? Who's the human being who's showing up to teach and to transmit and to facilitate and do all of that. And if you don't really, if you don't know yourself in this deep and intricate and precise and complex way, then there's honestly not much hope that you can be as helpful to other people as you really can be.

And so I found myself thinking, "Oh my gosh, I wish there was like a school for self-awareness." And then I realized that what you do is pretty damn close to the ultimate self-awareness school. And not just understand yourself, but teaching people how to skillfully carry all that you—all that is you, and to express your own nature in clean and healthy ways. So.

KJ: That, I can say if anyone—I mean, for all the people that are already enrolled in this year's school and that have done in the past, if you show up and participate and engage, like anything, you've got to show up for the work to work. But you will come out the other side at least knowing yourself in a whole new way. Like at layers of depth and complexity that you never have before. I know that to be true. And many of the, most of the people who've come through the school are practitioners. So they already know themselves, at least to some degree. They've had training, they've got modalities, and those things are all good. I'm not saying this is better, it's not, but it fills in gaps. And because that self-awareness to the best of my ability—I'm a human like anybody else. I've got my own flaws and stuff that I can't see too, but that's the world sense within which we are holding all of this and modalities and techniques, as valuable as they are, it's like what's the world sense within which that's being held.

So I love your comment about the research shows that it's the relationship with the practitioner, not the modality, that's actually more correlated with outcomes. That makes all the sense in the world to me. And I will just add, one of the things, when you have this lens, when you have the archetypal astrological lens, even at a pretty basic level. Not only do you understand your own complexity and your own archetypal nature, but if you work with it with your clients, if you fold it in to the modalities that you already use, not only do you see that complexity in the paradox in your client, which allows you to bring the tools and modalities that you have to the places where they're going to matter the most. But you also can start to see where your client might activate you.

Simone: Ooh, that's so important.

KJ: Because they have a thing that's a thing that's tough for you or painful for you, or ouchie for you, or that you're still working. And it doesn't mean don't work with them by any means. I'm not saying that at all. But you can actually be a more effective practitioner because you're aware that there might be—and you have to hold it lightly and actually meet the real person. Don't ever let the chart be instead of the person, but that there might be something about that person that makes you a little squidgy. And if you didn't have this lens, you wouldn't know why. And if you can see that, you can meet yourself and then with more compassion and more grace and more curiosity, and it allows you to be more skillful.

Simone: And when does the next round of Paradox School start?

KJ: We are actually formally—we're starting next week, however, what I want everyone to understand, so next week is June 25th is when we start. It's the welcome call. The official classes start first week of July, which is the following week. But I, and I can say this because I've had people do it in the last two years, is if people can come in, even by the end of like the first month, it's still totally doable. Like there is not a significant deficit if you were to join by like the end of July. So there is still plenty of—I have eight seats as of this recording, this conversation, and you could realistically come in by like the end of July and still have a fantastic experience.

Simone: Okay. So yeah, this applies if you are, if you just want to do this work for yourself, so to understand yourself better and maybe your loved ones better. Or if you're a practitioner and you want to add this to your skillset, add this to enrich the way you understand the world and yourself and relationships, which is only going to make your work better. 

I'm going to put all the links in the show notes, Paradox School. Paradox School is open right now, but so are other things. If you're interested, I'll tell you where to find KJ on the socials. And then I'm sure you'll be back for another conversation at some point.

KJ: I hope so. These are some of my favorite conversations in the whole world.

Simone: Yay.

KJ: Yay.

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First of all, if you've made it through this entire conversation, thank you. I know that was a lot, but I also know that if you stuck with it, you probably got some really meaningful shifts along the way.

If you want to dive deeper into this work, all the links to find KJ and learn about Paradox School are in the show notes. And honestly, if any part of this conversation resonated with you, she also has a podcast called Human Equals Paradox. You can find that wherever you're listening to podcasts.

I cannot recommend her work highly enough. There are many accessible price points where you can begin to learn, including for free from the podcast and from her writing. It genuinely changed my life and has for the past nearly decade, and I've watched it change the lives of so many people in my world.

But even if you never take another step with this material, I want you to remember just one thing: the parts of you that feel the most complicated, the most contradictory, that hold the most tension—those aren't bugs in your system. They're features, maybe even treasures. And the world needs you to figure out how to embrace them and use them.

Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time.