What if your deepest purpose isn’t something to find—but to remember? In this inspiring episode, author and executive coach Suzanne Roberts shares insights from her book Deeper Than That: The Pathway to a Vibrant, Purposeful, and Liberated Life. Discover how to awaken Soul Consciousness, understand the difference between stillness and sedation, and use your longing as a guide to healing and inner freedom. Learn how aligning your energy can unlock purpose, presence, and the boundless love within.
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Suzanne Roberts – Author Of It’s Deeper Than That: Pathway To A Vibrant, Purposeful, And Liberated Life
Suzanne Roberts is the Founder of UnifyingSolutions. She’s a Coach and Author, a Facilitator and Speaker with over five decades of experience guiding individuals, leaders, and systems toward generating sustainable change.
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Suzanne, thank you so much for joining me. It’s delightful to see you.
Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here.
Introduction To Suzanne Roberts’ Work
As usual, I hope you can get us started by talking a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it and what you most want people to take from your book. It’s deeper than that, the pathway to a vibrant, purposeful, and liberated life.
Thank you for asking that. It’s interesting. I’m actually integrating in my life right now legacy work, which I’m really calling from the book, The Great Reconnection, really how to have a soul-led life, whether it’s leadership or loving or being within yourself. I’ve been an Executive Coaching Consultant for many years with my company, UnifyingSolutions.
I’ve done a lot of racial equity work and all kinds of things. I’ve worked in prison bringing leadership within a men’s prison. On the side I was teaching Polarity therapy, which is a system of how energy talks about a wireless system of how energy operates through form to remember itself, so we could say our soul consciousness is operating through form to remember itself.
As human beings, we have an opportunity in this life to turn our attention inward and have contact with this very living energy, which is our soul, which is a drop of the eternal ocean of love. We don’t generate our own energy. It’s a gift that’s given to us and it’s up to us to decide if we wanted tune into that gift or not.
We have the opportunity in this life to turn inward and connect with the living energy of our soul—a drop from the eternal ocean of love. This energy isn’t self-generated; it’s a gift. It’s up to us whether we choose to tune into it or not. Share on XI really applied this concept of soul consciousness operating through form to human development and social development and now calling that the great reconnection. I talk about it as Polarity in the book, but I’m synthesizing now this energy system with all the work I’ve done with coaching. Really, I just started my first cohort of The Great Reconnection Signature Leadership Program, bringing leaders through a six-month cohort to help them be soul-led and what does that mean. What does it mean for your soul to inform leadership? That’s what I’m up to now.
What I hope people get from the book is really a few different things. One is I take people on a journey, my journey of healing from childhood sexual abuse and using this model of energy to restore me internally. That’s the first section of the book. The second section of the book is called You. The first section is Me, then it’s You.
How does this living model of energy work and what can we learn from it? What’s the difference between aloneness and isolation or what’s the difference between stillness and sedation or what’s the difference between longing and wounding? Just to try to start getting our mind to look at things in a different way and get us out of our habit of bonding with our wounding and our surviving and moving us towards liberation and thriving. The last section of the book, it’s called Everyone. If life energies in everyone and everything, how come our social systems don’t reflect that?
I built a practice called Collective Power that in very diverse rooms with complex diversity that we can collectively thrive. The book ends on a very positive note that personally and collectively, we have a pathway to find liberation. That’s what I want. I want the book to be a very uplifting, hopeful pathway towards personal and collective liberation, that it’s possible and for us to think and live differently. That’s a whole big long-winded answer to what you just asked.
It answers the question beautifully. Thank you. One of the things that’s been a guiding principle in my work for the past 51 years is what’s practically effective to help the people who are coming to me. I started as a probation officer and those people had serious problems. Whether it was a six-year-old who was up on charges for insurance fraud, setting the family car on fire or the kids that were raised in homes with bullet holes in the kitchen walls.
They didn’t need psychological theory. They didn’t need pie in the skies. They needed practical help. That’s been a guide of mine over the decades. I love the way Guy Finley says that there is nothing more practical than true spirituality. What I really like about your book is the idea of helping people become aware of what their energy flow is, the fact that they have an energy flow. The fact that their consciousness is connected to that. Say a bit more about the, if you will, whether you want to start with the you right, the you position or the us position in your book. How do you want to talk about what you’re offering people in the Polarity experience?
The Polarity Model
I think that all energy operates through energy movement. I’m going to make like the infinite practical, and I’m going to take it down to something that we can all relate to, which is a battery. A battery conducts energy between two poles, a positive pole, a negative pole, and a neutral gradient. A battery also has a liquid medium that allows the conduction of energy in the battery.
When we turn on a light, I always like to think about, most people turn on a light and they don’t think how’s the light happening. People will trace it back to the plug. How’s it getting to the plug? There’s a station. What’s fueling the station? Is it solar? Is it wind? Is it cold? People don’t know. What’s the energy in coal or what’s the energy in wind? What’s supplying that? I think about us, we are breathing. Our heart is beating. We are not doing that.
Most of us don’t go, “What’s letting my he beat?” We do know that with death, the soul leaves the body. We could say the soul is the current of energy that lets your heart beat. What is the soul? I would say this. We can’t know this with our mind is a thing. This is where the challenge comes in. The mind can’t understand the soul, nor can the mind understand the source of energy that gives life to the soul or the source of energy that gives life to all of creation. It is way beyond the mind. To try to figure it out with your mind, you might as well lay that down now because it’s not going to happen.
However, we can cognitively think about the fact that if the soul is conducting energy, how does it do that and compare it to the battery? If the soul is a positive pole, like in a battery has a positive pole. In the negative pole, we would say is either the physical body, the material world, within us, it would be our physical body. It would be our form that the soul is sending energy through form back to itself through a neutral gradient. We call that the ideal pattern.
I have graphs in the book, and also, in the book, you can link into a book portal where you can see me teaching this. I have meditations, I have a journaling workbook, so you can stay engaged with the book. If we just look at that basic thing that the soul’s conducting energy, sending a current through, forms back to itself, that means that in an ideal way, we are designed to remember who we are as a radiant soul. That operating system is happening inside of us while we’re breathing, while our heart is a beating. It’s like the soul calling to itself or calling us home to it.
Only, most of us are paying attention to the world outside of us, not the world inside of us. That soul is a drop of the eternal ocean of love. We could say the eternal ocean of love is within us. Why not get to know that? There’s so much outside of us, why not get to know that energy current that’s running inside of us. We have access to a self-renewing energy so that we have access to a resource inside of us that’s giving us a very gift of life?
Most of us focus on the world outside, not the world within. Yet our soul is a drop from the eternal ocean of love—meaning that ocean lives inside us. With so much pulling our attention outward, why not get to know the energy flowing within? Share on XOne more thing I’ll say about it, in a battery, we have a liquid medium in our physical body. How our soul conducts energy is through a liquid medium as well. Our cerebral spinal fluid is literally conducting the energy of our soul. I think that’s magnificent. As you and I are sitting here, whether we’re paying attention to it or not, our soul is conducting energy. The eternal essence of love is pulsing inside of us. Where’s our attention?
One more thing and then I’ll let you ask a question. Having that living model, because I love physics, having that living model and observing that model is how I found restoration inside myself for my trauma, because I was like, if there’s a benevolent energy sending energy through me, but I hate myself and want to die from my trauma, how can both of those things be true? I couldn’t deny away the fact that there was a benevolent source of energy inside of me because of physics. I applied that to my self-hatred and wanting to die until I could want to live. It was a long-winded answer, but there you go.
It leads me to the words you recite to yourself in the mirror on a daily basis, or did, anyway, which is?
My soul is a drop of the eternal ocean of love, so there is love inside of me. I just would look in the mirror because I hated myself and wanted to die so much from the abuse, but then there was this living reality from physics I couldn’t deny. I just would repeat it to myself. I would go like this, “My soul is a drop of energy.” I knew it was true, so I just kept repeating it. I loved physics and chemistry, so I needed to have a laboratory experiment. I’m like, “I don’t feel this thing I’m repeating, but let me go in the laboratory of myself and see if I can feel it or experience it.” That’s why I’m saying your mind can’t understand it. We can’t experience it.
I went and laid on the ground in this beautiful area in California where I was alone and I would just sit there and lay there and I could feel the earth, I could feel gravity. I magnetized to the earth lying down and I could see these beautiful leaves fluttering the wind and the sky. It was interesting. After I just was there for a while, all of a sudden, I started to feel and energy current inside of me and I was like, “It is true.”
I think we need experience and understanding to go together. It’s like just repeating it without the experience wouldn’t have worked. It’s living inside of us. We’ve experienced it, whether it’s in a moment of seeing a beautiful sunset or the love of a loved one or something. We’ve had a moment where time has stopped for a second, where we’ve had access to a state and that’s inside of us all the time.
As you’re talking, I think it’s Myrtle Fillmore. Do you remember the story of the Fillmores? She had one of those serious chronic diseases that deteriorates the body. I don’t know whether it was ALS or MS or something. She hated her body. She was just full of rage at her body. Somehow or another, I don’t remember the exact origin of the story, she found herself sitting in front of a mirror in her wheelchair and railing it and then deciding, “Let me just flip it around. Let me just sit here until I’m not so angry at my body and then I start to appreciate my body and then I find the radiant energy that you’re referring to flowing through my body.”
The Role Of The Mind: Obstacles To Love/Energy Are Mental Constructs
She did that and a healing occurred and that was the beginning of she and her husband were two of the big people promoting the Unity. I guess you’d call it a religion, but it’s more of a spiritual movement. The clarity that my intellect can provide is not the essence of what I experience, but it can be used to highlight when I’m off the mark. My intellect can’t find words for understand or communicate about this energy that animating energy, the soul energy, whatever you want to call it, God energy, and yet it can see the effects of kinks in the hoses that would let that energy flow through my system. Much like we can’t see the wind, but we can see the effects of it.
Rather than setting my mind to go out and look for love like the Course in Miracles and some other texts remind us, just look for the obstacles that you find that you’re holding onto inside of yourself, the obstacles to feeling what’s already there. That just kept coming back to me as I was reading your book, the similarities between the Polarity work and what you’ve developed with it and basically every great spiritual teaching that’s ever resonated with me is mind blowing. They’re the same thing.
Yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s all in the mind.
Before you go into the battery, to clarify the statement, it’s all in the mind, my mind just said, “My obstructions to feeling the loving energy that’s animating me, those obstructions are all in my mind.” The animating energy, the truth isn’t all in my mind.
No, but in the battery for energy to flow freely, for the soul to conduct freely, the mind would be the neutral gradient in the ideal pattern. We know the mind does not stay neutral and it can’t because if we’re meant to consciously remember, we have to forget to remember. If, otherwise, we would just stay, we wouldn’t be in a world of duality.
In order for us to consciously remember, we have to forget to remember?
We have to forget to remember. Share on XYes.
Help me wrap my mind around that.
When babies are born, you can see they’re so ethereal because they just come from a spiritual realm into the physical realm, but their attention is still very diffuse and etheric. As the senses start to take over and we orient towards the physical world through sight, if you have all your senses intact, but we touch yourself right now, doesn’t it feel solid?
Yet we know it’s not.
We see as if we’re all different. We have the same energy inside of us, but we start looking out. We smell and we taste and we touch and we hear and it pulls our attention out away from the center. We start seeking our fulfillment from the surface, like whether do we belong or can I find safety out in the world? No, mostly not.
I’m glad you use safety because it’s fulfillment and safety. It’s these two things that drive when my focus is external.
External and belonging. Who are you going to belong to?
Safety is tied into belonging.
In dignity and all of that. We start trying to find it out there and it won’t work, but the mind will seek itself over and over again. Also, in the book, when it shows the mind becoming the positive pole, the mind refers to the mind. Let’s say I hate myself and that’s the dominant narrative in my mind, that’s not accurate because I’m a drop of love, but my mind hates. Every experience routes, “I’m unworthy.”
I’m routing my mind every experience through my wound. When you do that, it literally siphons the energy that could be free flowing so you actually don’t have as much potency inside. You don’t have as much wellspring because you’re diffusing it to outer seeking. I have something in my book. I read it in my book and the documentary of the launch. When you start outer seeking, you’re determining who you are from changing circumstances. Everything’s transitory. Don’t let anybody or anything outside of you or even your own mind tell you whether you have value or not.
You are breathing, so you are already valuable. You can’t not be. I think it’s one of the hardest things for people to come to terms that they always say we might have been victims to an experience in life, but we are not victims to our own soul. If we’re leading from victimization, we’re going to miss our own inherent radiance. We don’t want to take that victimization inward. We want our mind to move more and more towards neutrality, more and more towards stillness.
It’s one of the things I talk about in the book. I think people need to know the difference between stillness and sedation because people think sedation is stillness. Stillness is actually very alive and dynamic. It’s not frozen. Stillness can be hard. Our minds towards neutrality can be hard and life-giving, whereas sedating and letting our mind run wild is also hard. One is life-giving and one is life-taking.
People need to know the difference between stillness and sedation, because many mistake sedation for stillness. True stillness is actually alive and dynamic. Share on XI don’t want to ever say this is easy. It requires commitment and dedication to say, “I’m not going to indulge my mind in a wounding pattern,” or if I am, I’m going to have a pity party for five minutes and then stop. I’m just going to say I’m going to indulge my mind. We are doing it. The experiences are over. For most of us, “I’m not with my father anymore raping me. I have a choice.” I can keep my attention there as if it’s still happening when it’s not or find this incredible radiant life energy inside of me and I still have to work with my mind, but I have a resource inside of me while I’m working with my mind as opposed to a deficit.
It’s an internal resource. It’s an infallible guidance system.
It’s there all the time.
One of the problems that I’ve experienced is that in our culture, this Western culture that I was raised in, I was taught and everybody that I was raised around was taught that when there’s an upset energy inside of me and anger attention or whatever. Any of the emotions I might call negative or physical sensations that I don’t like, what I need to do is scan the environment to figure out who I need to attack or run away from or bribe or seduce to get them to change so I don’t have to feel this.
The problems that are created by that are using that same energy signal of the sensation or emotion or whatever the thoughts, etc. When they go in the negative direction, use them as a trigger to initiate an entirely different process, which is a calming and returning the focus inside with a breath and an internal focus with some simple questions like, “How am I creating this right now?”
Rather than continuing to feed the conditioning that the outside events are causing my emotions, I wake up to the fact that this is an inside job. The source of energy you were talking about is flowing in and through me. Not in a sense from an external source, but from this one source, the connection of everything. In my mind, I’m trying to say these words again. How many times have I tried to explain this? My mind is fumbling because there aren’t words to express how I can have this deep experience of being separate from you and the world around me and then in the next moment, have the felt sense of the connection of everything. Words fail and what’s next? Breath is good.
Stillness.
Stillness. Awareness.
Stillness. Awareness, livingness.
The watching my thoughts, understanding that they aren’t who I am and I don’t have to believe them. I can just watch them and make observations about how when they go into a direction that produces a discomforting energy in me. I don’t have to believe that. I can sit in the questioning state. I can be taught in the moment.
You’re saying something that I don’t think is in the book. It’s in the documentary. There’s someone who has many intersections of identity, but the world sees them as a Black man. They go by they/them as their pronouns. They internalized a criminalized sense of themselves as if they were a threat in the world. They believed they were a threat and they had enough validation outside that the world was a potential threat for them.
When they experienced their living energy, they found safety in that living energy. They were able to go, “I can observe whether outside there is danger right now or not, and there might be, but I have holiness inside of me, which no one can take away from me. I might walk out my door and get shot, but if I’m going to walk out my door and get shot, I want to get shot while I know my own holiness.” I love that they said that. We’re already whole and holy inside. We don’t have to create wholeness, we have to become it.
We’re already it.
Cultivating Longing & Humility As Pathways To Inner Resource & Self-Knowledge
We are aware of it and tune into it and choose to know it, to not think it’s something I have to earn. I don’t earn it. It’s already been given. Now I have to honor it. I think humility is crucial. I think there are a couple of ingredients that are really crucial, one is longing, to be able to sit with the ache of separation from our own deepest self in a way that’s life-giving.
I hunger for greater contact inside. The more food we have, the more fed we get by this loving energy, the more hungry we are for it and to be able to sit in that in a beautiful generative way. I think people start to feel that ache of separation and they think they connect it to their wounding. They put it over there with the wounding and don’t seek inside.
I think when we understand in the battery, there’s an outgoing current and an incoming current. That incoming current that’s natural is our longing to return. We have this inherent impulse to return and remember. When we can cultivate the longing, it serves us to follow that inner impulse that’s already there. I think we need longing. I think while we don’t need it, we have it. We want to cultivate it, I guess, is what I want to say.
Also, humility. I think it’s really vital to understand that we don’t create this own energy and to bow to it and say, “Thank you for giving me this gift of life where I have the opportunity to remember and return to the truth of who I am. Thank you.” To have a certain humility about it softens the ego. It does. It’s like, “I did not create this energy. I am breathing. My heart is beating because I’ve been given this gift and this opportunity to consciously know the truth of who I am.” I find that necessary.
One of the trip ups or traps from my experience when we start using words like humility is all of the meaning that’s been accrued in people’s minds about, “This means you’re less than and you’re not worthy and you grovel in the dirt and hope somebody doesn’t step on you.” Whereas the other meaning for it is, like what you’re saying, it’s this recognition. The way of mastery says it is, “I don’t know who created me or when I was created.”
Just begin right there. I’m not driving the whole bus. I do have dominion over where to focus my thoughts and that’s a creative force. It’s going to have a real impact in my life. Yet, I’m like everybody else. I’m just a part of this flow. There’s the ancient Aramaic definition of humility that looks something like this ability to look for and see the highest and best in another, whoever you’re looking at, and then choose to cooperate only with that.
There might be sadness, anger, fear, woundedness and the results of that coming out of that person, but there’s also the same connection within me. If I can tap into that, if I can align the antenna here, as you’re talking about with the cerebral spinal fluid as a conductor for this energy, if I can get in alignment with that, it changes my perception and the whole experience. It’s like that ancient Aramaic definition for prayer. Something similar to set a trap for God or to align your antenna to receive this same energy you’re talking about, this animating life force energy.
It will teach us if we’re willing.
Asking to be taught moment to moment. The poet Rilke said, “We must learn to live in the question.” Why? We need to learn to live in a questioning state because whenever a mind, any mind asks a really good question, that mind is not capable of comprehending the answer. If the perfect full force answer were to respond every time a mind asked a really good question, it would sound like gibberish. It would sound like coming from a language they don’t speak.
It would sound like vibrations from another dimension that are trying to break through. There wouldn’t be the ability to comprehend. We must learn to live in that questioning state. I’m paraphrasing a little here. If we do learn to live and get comfortable with the not knowing and the questioning state, we might live along someday into an answer.
We would stop caring if there was an answer.
The answer is you don’t need the answer with the logical frontal lobes. People say, “What do you mean by that?” If you have a kindergarten class or a first-grade class and you have somebody talking about science, and they say, “How do they get those rockets to launch satellites and stay in orbit?” You can have the NASA scientists come and explain to that class and they can’t understand a tiny fraction. Let that person go through college and grad school with an emphasis on science and physics and then hear that lecture and they get it. That’s us. We can’t know what our minds ache to know, but that longing is a good thing because it’s that energy bringing us back to the source.
We want to appreciate the separateness that we have because we’re longing for the homecoming within. We want to not numb the longing for homecoming because if you think about it, the soul is calling to us. My oldest son is a composer and he wrote this piece a long time ago, which is a Persian word for call of prayer to attention. He started out with this slow, three-minute gongs. It’s beautiful, and then after three minutes, all this freneticism came on top.
If you could listen deep enough, there is this call to prayer or this call to home. That’s what’s going on inside of us. Our mind is frenetic, it’s fickle. It’s distractible, it’s everywhere. Yet, there’s this calling to home happening inside of us all the time. We have to get still enough to hear it. Yet the aching of separation will help us want to get still enough and learn to build our capacity, I guess, is what I would say.
There’s a constant calling to come home within us, but we have to be still enough to hear it. Share on XShifting From External Seeking/Conditioning To Internal Focus & Questioning Beliefs
As we were experiencing it, this call to just being with it and experience it, if we can just either watch how the mind wants to label it as something negative or just notice that every judgment and label carries with it a tightness or attention and we can let go of that. We get ushered into an experience that we can’t get through the conscious, logical front lobe of the brain. That idea of how we’ve been trained by our culture, our parents, they did the best they could, but we’ve been trained to interpret these energies as bad or wrong, whether it’s the longing, the yearning, the loneliness, whatever, rather than just observing them.
Also, if we haven’t trusted people, then why would we trust this energy? I think that’s why experimentation or you say asking questions is like, “Did this energy hurt me?” I think we have to question, “Did it hurt me?” No, actually, it didn’t. We do need to be in our own laboratory and be asking the question so I can go, “If I go a little bit deeper inside and I rest a little bit more and I use my breath and I find a little bit more stillness, is there danger in here?” We’re used to watching for danger. We have to check it inside. Is there danger here? The answer is no.
If the answer comes back yes, breathe and soften because it’s probably an errant message.
Check it again. What is dangerous then? How am I thinking this is dangerous? Life energy, it’s like a waterfall. The more it flows, the more intense it is. It’s compelling, it’s dynamic and it’s powerful. Just to go, “Is this power hurting me?” It might be intense, it might be whatever, but then to keep asking the question over and over. I think that what happens is if our mind is saying, “It’s dangerous,” it’ll perceive danger when there is no danger. When I’ve been with my teaching team, we’ve had to really work this out. I’m like, “Go inside.” I’m doing it. I’m asking, “Is there danger here?” Actually, no, there isn’t. It feels intense sometimes and hard. I also feel cared for in it inside.
I feel a warmth or something that can hold me. Also, for me, when I was surviving the abuse with my father, I did go to a holy state of consciousness to survive. I really went to a state of consciousness where I felt held by grace, mercy, and love. I don’t think there is any other way I could have survived, honestly. It was associated with my trauma. I didn’t understand it was me. It took me a while. I don’t need trauma to have that.
I really like how you talked about in the book that at this younger age, the mind doesn’t have the capacity to blame the outside, 5 or 6 or whatever your age. Before that, when these bad things are happening, it’s as natural as my next breath to think, “That’s because I’m bad or wrong or I screwed up.” In some silly way, a little way from the human perspective, that might help me feel like, “If I just change this or that that I’m doing, then I’ll get to safety. If I please the outside person, if I’m the problem, then I can change me.”
It’s that weird little twist. You download all of these beliefs and thoughts and conclusions as you’re just going through your life, whether there’s a trauma event or not, and that just gets solidified and then you live from that. Part of this process is learning to question even that. Question everything, I believe about myself and the world around me.
In reference, the ideal wireless pattern, the soul is operating through form to remember itself. It’s designed. We didn’t design it. Energy can’t move without it. If that’s there happening, then how can I use that as a reference point? I think we need reference points. If we don’t have reference points, we’ll just keep doing the same thing. Our reference point, hopefully, is accurate life-giving.
For me, I’m really glad, I liked physics. I’m glad that I was curious about energy movement in a way that I could understand human consciousness because it gave me a reference point to true. I’m still truing to it. I don’t think we are 100% there. We’re in choice over and over again at any given moment. What are we referring to in that choice? You think it’s a lifelong path.
What I really like about your book and the way you’re talking about it is that you’re referencing this energy and as energy, it’s always in motion. If you are aware of the energy, just to discern that there’s a little bit of something there. I’m not even going to put words on it because if I don’t put words on it, these energies that come up in me, there’s some pretty solid research that suggests that in about 90 seconds, the energies that I call emotions are going to run their course, unless I keep banging the gong. If I’m thinking about this energy or that energy or this emotion and I give it a word, because the mind is so well-trained, it races off into explanations about how and why that’s happening and who’s responsible. I can keep that going for months, years, decades.
If you watch kids, they run through emotions fast. It comes, rises, explodes, and falls down, but if you get the mind involved, it just perpetuates.
For decades, I’ve talked to people to just watch babies, watch little kids, and toddlers. They’re upset and big crocodile tears and then you change their focus of attention and they’re smiling, but the tears are still dripping and they’re happy. It’s just this instantaneous connection without all the labels and judgments and self-referential thoughts is where we started.
This is one way of thinking about when the scriptures say we got to return and be like little children living without judgment. Living with the potential to experience and discern but not get tired or tense to try and push it away or hold onto something in that state. Of that wide open experience, like we were when we were infants, we do better as adults if we can train ourselves to that. The healing starts to happen automatically if we train ourselves to do that.
The healing doesn’t need me to think about how it works. It just does what it does. If you would get centered, take a breath, think about what we’ve talked about so far, all the various things that we could go into different directions, what’s something you want to either go back and reference again or highlight that we haven’t even touched on yet from your body of work or this book?
The “Everyone” Section: Applying Life Energy/Polarity To Social Systems & Collective Power
I would like to head into the everyone section of the book because I’ve applied it to human and social development. I studied gender in leadership and looked at what are the qualitative research that I did and compared it to the quantitative. I started looking at racial dynamics and all the intersections of class, race, gender, religion, and how those forces shape us beyond what we understand and create divisiveness instead of unity.
In all my coaching clients, I do have people unpack their intersectional shaping so that they’re not just automatically absorbing what society has shown them as if it’s accurate, because society is human-designed and not replicating life energy or source energy. When you get into that part of my book, I share my own lived experiences in terms of how I shut down my knowing and how I had to reawaken my knowing. How could I apply it to create social fabric or social systems that reflect life energy, that life is in and everyone and everything.
Race is at the bottom of every intersection. If you look at anything, race is always at the bottom. Whether it’s infant mortality or housing or economics. I deliberately looked at like, how does the life energy operate inside of us? There is a one river that we could say links us to the source of life for all of creation. We call that river ether. Out of that river, all the other rivers flow. Ether operates through our joints in our body, which is very fascinating.
I was like, “What if I bring diverse groups of people together, whether I’m in the prison or intentionally building diverse groups of people or in organizations and we just connected the wrist? Not like touchy feely. I want to personally connect with you, but looking at it as a science experiment that we’re connecting ether to ether here.”
I started watching that life currents, then the group became one system and the life energy started running through the whole group and required every living system to become animated. Rather than social systems say you have value, you don’t have value, this living energy says we all have value. We all deserve to be radiant and fully alive. Watching people that are normally marginalized come to life in a diverse community, it’s something that I want the world to experience and see.
We all have value, and we all deserve to be radiant and fully alive. Share on XWhen I just did the book and documentary premiere, it was in a historically Black theater in Columbus, Ohio. It was probably 50% diverse, racially diverse and all kinds of diversity. There were about 300 people there. We built collective power by the end. To feel that in that room is so restorative. I want everyone to experience that because forests are biodiverse. They thrive best with biodiversity. We don’t know how to do that because we haven’t been socialized.
That’s something that’s really vital to me that I bring out at the end of the book. It’s like me, you and everyone. In the book portal, we’re putting a trailer for the documentary. I’m working right now to get licensure for the documentary because, at first, I was just going to put it in there, but I want to create those experiences in person. I want the documentary to travel with me or you can buy it and show it at home. I want us to create those experiences together through the documentary with me being there.
When I did the book signing that night, people were coming up to me and saying, “I came in here disconnected and I’m leaving reconnected and I’m leaving restored in a way I didn’t know was possible in a room like this.” I had so many people come up to me and say, “I want that. I want that for as many people that want it too. I want that.” That’s what I would say here.
I think about you say race is at the bottom of things and my mind goes, “Yeah, but that’s a made up term.” It’s skin color or it’s geographic location, but we’re all just part of that same flow of energy that you talked about. Every level of applying a thought and then a word and then my history of experience to something removes me every step of the way from the actual direct experience.
It’s important to me to make sure that when we’re building collective power, there is diversity. We need it.
To be able to see that our judgments about bad or wrong, different is silliness. Programming. It’s at the level that you cannot experience what you want us to experience, what’s available. The Way of Mastery, in the first part of the book, it says, “Listen, this is a pathway not about the intellect. The intellect was never designed to be your primary user interface with life,” to use the computer analogy. Einstein said, paraphrase him, we’ve been given a precious gift and a faithful servant.
The precious gift is the intuitive mind. The ability to connect to that source that you’re referring here. The faithful servant is a conscious, logical mind. The problem is we’re living in a culture that’s forgotten the precious gift. We aren’t training people to tune into this energy flow you’re talking about, or their ability to have insight, intuition, inspiration, and creativity flowing through them.
We don’t train that into our kids anymore, but we do train them to make sure they’ve got the right answer and we punish them if they get it wrong and we reward them if they get it right. There’s so much conditioning to rely on these frontal lobes, but that was never how we were designed to interact with the world. The more we can make that shift to this awareness of the gift and move the faithful servant out of the form of master, which it is in this culture.
Intellect is everything. Accumulation of stuff and money is everything. The more we move out of that, the more we usher ourselves into an experience that there aren’t any words for. You’re doing that in this collective. Let me ask about the documentary. You say you’re working on the licensing for it. It’s finished, right?
We had the premier already.
What’s the status there and what can the audience expect when they might be able to tap into this?
Here’s what I would say. There will be a trailer in the book portal, which you can get to the book portal either through the book or you can get to it by going to my website, UnifyingSolutions.com. In the front, it says Book Portal and you can click into there. As I said, there are meditations, there is journaling workbook that you can do with or without the book. There are teaching videos.
We’re working so you can buy the documentary and use it at home, or you can have me come create an event like I did, so that we will show the documentary but also have the experience. I’ll read some from the book and the documentary is absolutely beautiful. It’s so well done. I want to travel and bring this to people so that we can come together and have this experience because that’s what I want.
The book is titled, It’s Deeper Than That: Pathway to A Vibrant, Purposeful and Liberated Life by Suzanne Roberts. I love how you talked about, I think when you went to learn Polarity for the first time, or maybe it wasn’t Polarity, but some energy work and you said, “Can I help me with that?” It’s deeper than that and that’s what it stayed with you all the way into the title of your book. I love that. I greatly appreciate your taking time to meet with us and I look forward to watching the documentary and sharing with you some of the similarities between the body of work that gave rise to Journey’s Dream and what you’re doing. Perhaps that’ll be a different conversation for us.
Thank you so much for having me and I really appreciate who you are and how you’re being with all of this too. Thank you.
You’re entirely welcome and deserving and who I am and how I’m being with all of this is something that’s accessible to all of us if we just keep going back to the tools or the wisdom or the experiential practices that have been laid out for thousands of years. Thank you so much. It’s a thank you. It’s a pleasure meeting you and I look forward to our future contacts.
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Suzanne Roberts is the Founder of UnifyingSolutions. She’s a Coach and Author, a Facilitator and Speaker with over five decades of experience guiding individuals, leaders, and systems toward generating sustainable change. She’s the Creator of The Great Reconnection. She supports visionary leaders, change-makers, and purpose-driven individuals in unlocking clarity, restoring alignment, and living vibrantly, thereby fostering personal and collective liberation. She lives in Akron, Ohio, with her husband and three dogs, finding restoration in nature and joy with family and friends. She premiered her new book and documentary titled It’s Deeper Than That.
Important Links
- UnifyingSolutions
- The Great Reconnection
- The Way of Mastery
- It’s Deeper Than That: Pathway to A Vibrant, Purposeful and Liberated Life
About Suzanne Roberts
Suzanne Roberts, founder of UnifyingSolutions, is a coach, author, facilitator, and speaker with over five decades of experience guiding individuals, leaders, and systems toward generating sustainable change.
Creator of The Great Reconnection™, she supports visionary leaders, change-makers, and purpose-driven individuals to unlock clarity, restore alignment, and live with vibrancy —fostering personal and collective liberation. She lives in Akron, Ohio with her husband and three dogs, finding restoration in nature and joy with family and friends. She recently premiered her new book and documentary, It’s Deeper Than That.
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