Ep.30: The Power of Being Raw

In this episode, I explore what it means to show up raw in body, mind, and spirit, and in the everyday moments of our lives. I reflect on the layers of conditioning, perfectionism, and “shoulds” that disconnect us from ourselves, and why waking up is less about becoming "better," and more about showing up more fully as who we already are.

The episode explores:

• Why showing up raw is more powerful than showing up polished
• Waking up as a process of deprogramming and reconnection
• The RAW acronym: Reconnected • Authentic • Wild
• The juicy goal of showing up as “the most human person in the room”
• Why authenticity may be one of the most radical practices of our time

The conversation touches on themes of:

authenticity • waking up • deprogramming • embodiment • sovereignty • reconnection • wildness • just being you

Listen on Substack, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Wake Up, Human. It's episode 30, a nice round number, and I'm celebrating having made it to 30 episodes at long last. 

I'm your host, Shannon Wills, and I'm so grateful that you're here with me for this episode. Whether you've been listening for all the other 29 episodes, or whether this is your very first episode, I am so, so glad you're here. 

This is a bit of a new chapter for Wake Up, Human. I've been mostly away from the podcast for some time. And I'm coming back with a bit different energy that I think is going to be really fitting for this time and this iteration. And I'm excited to share it with you. 

So today I'm going to be kind of introducing that a little bit. I'm going to be talking about what it means to show up raw, and the power of being raw. And I will be talking about what that means. But really it's about, in general, the power of allowing ourselves to live as our raw selves in a world that wants us to be polished up and tied up in a pretty bow. 

As we know, life is not about being tied up in pretty bows. Life is actually much more about being raw. And when we show up raw, we're much more likely to show up as our real selves, and we're much more likely to show up authentic in the world, and to be our true selves, and to live our true lives. Who doesn't want to do that, right? 

So I am all about being raw right now, and I'm going to talk about it more on the inside. So I hope you'll join me. See you there…

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Welcome to the Wake Up, Human Podcast. I'm Shannon Wills, a curious wanderer with a passion for digging into life's mysteries and mining them for wisdom to apply to our modern lives. This podcast explores the ways we humans have become disconnected from our native ways of knowing, what we have lost, and what we can gain by coming back into wholeness. Each episode will explore this theme of reconnecting with our innate human power in order to heal ourselves, our relationships, and our planet. 

Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let's jump into the latest installment of Wake Up, Human. 

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This is episode 30. And I'm grateful for any of you who have been around through these 30 episodes. There's been a lot of ups and downs. And I'm grateful for you being here if you're brand new, just wondering what this podcast is about. Thank you so much for being with me. And I hope this episode is of benefit to you. 

I'm going to be talking about the power of being raw. And this is a really kind of a living theme for me right now. 

You know, I haven't been podcasting much for a while. I've been in a bit of a cocoon in my life, I could say. A cocoon, in that it's been a time of transformation. There have been some massive shifts. I've let go of things, I've offloaded things, I've shifted my home and my neighborhood, and a lot of aspects of my life have changed. I've been involved in a legal case. I've had ups and downs with jobs and with finances, and at times things have felt pretty topsy-turvy. 

And you may you may have the same experience, which is that when things become really topsy-turvy, it becomes kind of ridiculous to try to keep up the pretense of everything being refined and perfect and, you know, coloring within the lines, when it's really so clearly not the case. 

And at some point we can just go, “You know, this is life. Life is a little messy, life is a little dirty, life is a little crazy.” And it's actually easier to just show up raw and say, “You know what, forget it. I'm gonna show up as me, because that's really the best I can do right now. Like, I don't have the energy to show up with any kind of masks on or any kind of layers, you know?” 

The wonderful thing about a cocoon is that it is, you know, a transformative time. And when we go through a transformative time, whether we want to or not, we come out different on the other side. 

Whether we step out of one phase of life into another on purpose, or consciously, or whether we're kicked out of one phase of life and into another — which is kind of what happened to me — when we land wherever we land next, we're transformed, we're different. 

And one of the ways I'm transformed and different is like, I'm just really feeling a lot more raw. And Wake Up, Human wants to be a lot more raw too. 

So Wake Up, Human is what it is, and it's about what it's about. It's not changing drastically. But I have found myself coming back to it and ready to create more podcast episodes, asking what it should be about. What it should be or shouldn't be about. 

And then I found my mind — heard my mind — saying things like, “Well, it should be a little more refined, a little more focused, a little more niched down,” you know… whatever it might be saying. Or, you know, “It should be more edited, it should be more organized, it should be more simple.” 

And all of those shoulds — I'm just releasing that layer of shoulds. 

Because Wake Up, Human is actually about, setting aside all of the philosophy… it's actually about living a life that is not about shoulds. It's about living a life that is fully our own, and then finding practical ways to become more aligned and awake in our lives. 

So it's kind of ironic that I would put a bunch of shoulds on myself around the podcast. But I think that's something a lot of us do. Shoulds are common in our culture and our language, and so I'm guessing you've probably got some shoulds that you're carrying around, just like mine. 

So, I look at Wake Up, Human, and my creation, and all the shoulds I'm trying to put on top of it. 

What's your creation? What are you excited about these days? And are you telling yourself that it should be one way or another? Or are you just doing it?

That's what I mean by raw. It's one of the things I mean by showing up raw. 

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So one of the things I wanted to talk about is, “What do I mean by waking up?” Because waking up can be pretentious. It can be esoteric. It can be confusing, generalized… or it can be raw. And the way it can be raw is this: 

Imagine that every one of your cells gets filled with something that is not you. Every single cell is so filled with this, maybe this gooey, sticky substance that gets inside all of your cells and fills them up and acts like it's you. 

And when it's in every single one of your cells, and someone asks you, “What do you love? What do you want to do? What lights you up? What's your gift to the world? What's your dharma? What's your passion?” It can be really hard to answer that question, if all of you is filled up by something else that's in the way. 

And that is what happens with the shoulds. Not just the shoulds that we put on ourselves, but the shoulds that culture puts on us about how we should or should not show up in the world, what we are or are not allowed to say, for example, or what's reasonable or realistic to want to do or be or become.

So waking up in this sense is like a detox. It's like a deprogramming of the cellular gunk that has gotten into all the cells of our body. 

And you can imagine the kinds of things that I'm referring to. You know, it's everything from media and propaganda, and things that are less toxic, like just really thoughtful teachings that we receive from people who love us. 

But it adds up… these external inputs add up over our lives until at some point we can really question, like, “Who am I really? What do I want, really?”

And when we go to work on ourselves, on answering that question, then we can look at, you know, what is the gunk that's in the cells of our mind? What's the gunk that's in the cells of our body? And what's the gunk that's in the cells of our spirit, if we want to look at it that way? 

And those can be different things. But by looking at it as this, waking up is not transcending into a different reality. It's actually reconnecting intimately with the fullness of who we are, which I would offer is actually is a shift into another reality. It's a deepening into a deeper reality, a more integrated reality that's even more full and more real, and includes the shadow, and also includes the transcendent. 

So the clearest thing right in front of me is that waking up is not about lofty or high esoteric goals, but at its essence, it's an experiment in living more attuned to who we're born to be. 

Like waking up, it doesn't mean “waking up into the next level of consciousness.” It actually just means waking up more fully into your life. And that is actually waking up into the next level of consciousness, because it's the next more integrated level of consciousness. 

So it's practical, and it's also spiritual. 

And so I would invite you to ask this of yourself as well. You know? How's your embodiment, your connection to your body? How's your clarity of mind? How's your energy level? How's your alignment to and connection to your gifts? 

Bring these questions down into your day-to-day life. Are you happy with the way you're showing up in the world? Are you eating? Are you sleeping? Are you spending time with people you love or people who inspire you? Are you connecting with things that bring you joy? Do you feel connected to your purpose? 

These are not just “nice to have” in life. They're actually like the fundamentals of being a fully formed and fulfilled human being. 

This is really where we need to start with waking up. We need to start with ourselves, and being really clear with who we are and what we want. Because if we're too involved in the conversations around us, we can start thinking about how we should show up according to the conversations happening around us. 

And of course, we want to show up respectfully and thoughtfully. We want to educate ourselves, we want to engage with people in a way that's meaningful and helpful. But if we're doing that from a sense of should, which is actually out of a sense of fear, sometimes, an emotional place that's telling us how we are or are not allowed to show up, then it doesn't do any good to mold ourselves to that conversation. 

What does do good is to clarify ourselves, ground ourselves, center ourselves, and enter that conversation from our self. 

You know, there's a a quote by the Buddha… I might be paraphrasing this, but he says, “It's better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at someone else's.” 

Dharma of course being, at least by one definition of the word, our life purpose, kind of what we were born to do and be in the world. 

Better to fail at our own than to succeed at someone else's.

So if I were to be, you know, jumping into this podcast and trying to make it sound like someone else's, I could be really successful. But some small part of me or a large part of me is not going to be fulfilled by that. Whereas if I give it my all as me, as authentically as I can be, as real as I can be, and I fail, there's still a sense of fullness in that, of going all in on our own lives and not someone else's. 

And that's what I mean by being raw, you know? So we need to be willing to be messy, to fail, to be imperfect — which we are anyway. Nobody's perfect. So we show up just, you know, with all the bruises and knocks and cuts and wounds that we've sustained over this life, and yet we're still here being ourselves anyway. 

So what do we do in this process of becoming more raw? I want to be talking about this more over future episodes, but I think one of the things that we really need to do is to be open. We need to be open to the depth journey. We need to be open to delving into shadow parts of us, inviting in shadow parts of us, letting all parts of us be part of the conversation. 

So, coming to the table with our imperfections and living our lives from that place of, “Let's just see who I am. I want to see if I can do this. I want to see if I enjoy this. I want to see how I can show up when I don't care what other people think of me.”

So, what's important today in this podcast episode is I just want to introduce this idea of the RAW life. 

And actually, as I was considering it, an acronym came to my mind. Is that the word? An acronym? I was sort of meditating on it and inviting in, “What does RAW mean? Why is this word coming to me?”

And what came to me after that was, “Oh, RAW is actually an acronym. It stands for Reconnected, Authentic, and Wild.”

It's kind of cool, isn't it? I think that's what RAW actually is. Reconnected, authentic, and wild really fits the bill for me. It's what I want this next chapter of Wake Up, Human to be. It's how I want my life to be lived. 

I want to be reconnected to all of life, which, you know, is what I've talked about in all of these other 29 episodes. I want to be authentic to myself. I want to be my sovereign self so I can show up powerfully in the world for the people I love, the beings I love, the causes I love, and the fight that I want to fight. 

And I want to be wild. I want to be living in remembrance of what it really means to be fully human, like just a raw, human and organic being. Like, what does it mean to be the most human that we can possibly be? That's what wild suggests for me. And so I want to be talking more about wildness as well in this next phase. 

So, I don't know… what do you think? How does that land with you, if you think about being raw, tender, showing up authentic, sovereign, and reconnected to your wildness, reconnected to life, the web of life, and reconnected to your own wildness, your own innate nature? Doesn't that sound powerful? Doesn't that sound like living in that kind of life would give you the kind of power to achieve your dreams, your goals, and your mission in this life? I think it's really juicy. 

So when I think about this next chapter and this next step for Wake Up, Human, I want it to be a vehicle for authenticity. I want to be an authenticity activist.

I I've tended not to use the word authentic — ever — because it's become so generalized. And it can be hard to understand, it can be watered down or confusing. It could, you know, cause people to roll their eyes as soon as they hear it. 

So I've tended not to use “authentic,” but I really want to jump back in and use it, because what I mean by authentic is really being true to yourself:

To thine own self, be true.

Authentic to yourself. Not authentically showing up to someone else without your mask. Not “authentic relating.” Not “I'm gonna be authentic on social media. I'm an influencer, but I'm authentic.” That's not what I'm talking about. 

I'm talking about deepening more deeply, more deeply, more deeply into intimate relationship with who we are as human beings, to know ourselves intimately, to hear our intuition intimately, to feel our gut instincts intimately, to honor our hunger and our thirst and our anger and our fatigue and our excitement. To be authentically a human being. 

That's a different level of authenticity, to be authentically a human being.

How do we be authentic human beings? That's a question, isn't that? An exciting question. Because authentic human beings are present in the world. We honor the world, we honor life. We honor other beings, we live embodied in our bodies, we live in relationship to the cycles and seasons of life, and to the world. We understand ourselves as threads in a much, much bigger web. 

And then we understand our responsibility to life. We understand reciprocity and give and take. We don't live in greed. We live in relationality. That's what we can do when we become authentic human beings. That's what we can do when we detox ourselves from the gunk that is in our mind-body-spirit cellular matrix, and become clear. 

And I'm not trying to romanticize a perfect world. I know it's not perfect. I'm just reflecting back the way I want to use this word, authentic, like what an authentic human does. Because that is not perfect. No human is perfect. Part of our authenticity is our imperfection. 

That's what raw is about. Showing up authentically despite the imperfections. 

And it's a little bit radical when we do that as well. There's resistance in that. Because allowing ourselves to show up imperfect in a world that really wants us to strive for perfection for its own reasons is a way of resisting. We shouldn't be trying to be perfect. Perfection is actually one of those sticky sources of gunk that has gotten into our cellular matrix and gummed us up in the first place, and separated us from being able to understand what we really want. 

And when I talk about Wake Up, Human reawakening our essential powers, that's related to the de-gunking too. Because all that stuff that's in us causes us to forget not just what we love, and what we want vs. what we should want, but also how powerful and tuned in and authentic we already are. 

And when that gunk has all cleared out, we can get a better sense of who we are truly. I can say what comes through me authentically and easily, when all “that which is not me” is not in the way, blocking its passage. And doesn't that feel good? 

That's why we all want that state of flow so badly, right? Because we understand that someone who's in that state of flow, their essence is flowing through them. Their essence is flowing through them naturally, organically, and aligned with their authentic selves. 

But if our essence is not flowing through us, we're blocked. So this is the work of getting unblocked, deprogramming, unlearning, de-gunking and detoxing, and reconnecting and rerouting and remembering and becoming who we've always meant to be. 

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As I was sitting outside this morning considering this embrace of rawness, I was sitting in silent awareness and I was just kind of watching my awareness. And and I thought, in sitting silently in simple awareness: that's raw awareness. Simple attention is raw attention. Feeling my body fully embodied, sitting silently with my body and feeling it, that’s raw physicality. Or moving, simply standing, moving simply, being completely connected to our movement is like raw motion. 

I was just really feeling into the truth of that. I could feel that in my cells. And then I was watching my — what I wanted to say is, I was watching my roommate's dog, Lila. And she was watching some squirrels up the tree. And she was so interested in these squirrels. They were, you know, running up and down the tree and clicking and squeaking and chasing each other, and causing branches and leaves to fall and sort of rain down over Lila's head. 

She was barking at them, and excited. And at some point, she knew she wasn't going to get those squirrels anymore. And she was just fascinated in watching them. Looking up at the tree, just completely focused and sort of enraptured by them. Watching for them, waiting for them to come around, back around the bend, maybe waiting for one of them to fall out of the sky so she could grab them. 

And I was watching her, and I thought, “You know what, that's also raw. It's actually deeper than “authentic” in a way, because it's just raw presence with life, in life: a hundred percent dog. It's just a hundred percent who she is in her element, in her native awareness, in her native focus, fully tuned into those squirrels. 

And we humans are made to be like that too. That's why animals are such good teachers and good mirrors. Because they show us how to live fully within our true nature. 

Lila is really not trying to impress anyone, or pretend she's who she's not. And she's definitely not thinking about whether she should or should not chase those squirrels. Of course she's not. That's for the most part a human issue. 

But we can learn from the animals and the other beings what it's like to live in authenticity of being, for the most part without all the gunk on top. That's what it means to be raw, is just being involved directly in life, directly engaged in the simplicity of life, even within the complexity. We're not trying to over-engineer or overperfect it. We can show up more like Lao Tzu says when he says that the modern man learns something new every day, but the wise man forgets something every day. 

And I think that that return to raw human, raw humanity is exactly that. It's a forgetting and a falling away and a letting go of all that is not us, to land in that raw, primal, complete human state. And then to be able to live that, even in our crazy complicated world. 

So this type of waking up is quite simple. It's nothing extremely lofty. It's an inquiry into what is and is not authentically human, with this fun, sort of cheeky goal of asking, “How can I become the most human person in the room?” That's — that's a goal. I want to be the most human person in the room. Yeah. I think that's a loftier goal than, you know, moving humanity to Mars, for example. 

So I'm just taking a step back and recalibrating a bit, and simplifying what I want to be doing here. Giving myself some grace to show up with more rawness and more of my own authenticity, and to come in a little bit more exploratory. 

I want to explore this with people. I want to explore this with you. I want to explore us becoming our more authentic and wild and relational and reconnected human selves. And I want to bring the conversations and perspectives and offerings that explore that in practical, everyday worldly ways. 

Because I know it's not just me. I know other people are longing for this type of wild, reconnected reality. We're struggling in this world that really keeps us busy and distracted and fragmented and, you know, running around, spinning around on the merry-go-round. And even asking who we are authentically can feel almost comical or ridiculous or impossible. 

But it's actually essential. It's essential to living lives that we really love, that bring us joy and fulfillment, with raw, unfiltered awareness of who we are, what our gifts are, and what we're here to contribute. So that we can actually do it — take it off of our to-do list and actually do it. 

So this is not “for the faint of heart”-type work. It's deep, depth work, as I said. It's “peeling off many layers” work. It's the opposite of lofty. It's a bit dirty. 

We need to get our hands and feet and faces dirty. When we do the work of becoming more raw, we have to be willing to dig in the mud and let ourselves get sucked into the muck in the darkness. Because it's it's down there in that muck that we're going to find those shiny diamonds of who we are buried under all the shoulds. 

So I'm showing up. I'm going to be asking my authentic questions, showing up authentically as who I am, bringing some pieces of myself into Wake Up, Human and this podcast that might not have been here yet. And I'm actually excited about that. I just want to be real. I want to be real with y'all. 

So I invite you to show up authentically as you are. Be real, come along with me as a fellow authenticity activist. Let's own it. I would love to meet you in that space of exploring who we are, what we're here for, and what it means to be truly human. And we can go from there. 

So that's my spiel for this episode. And again, I'm so grateful to be here as we're working to get unstuck, more reawakened back into reconnection with ourselves, with each other, with the natural world, and with cosmos and with spirit. Let's plug back into connection with all of that. I think that's what we're here for anyway. 

So thanks again for being here with me. And I look forward to journeying with you on this next iteration of Wake Up, Human as it wakes up into whatever new, wild, raw version of itself it decides to be next. 

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That's it for this episode of the Wake Up, Human Podcast. Thanks again for sticking with me over the years, for hanging out all the way to episode 30, and for waking up with me. 

If you liked this episode and you know someone you think might benefit or enjoy it, please forward it to them. This podcast is still a labor of love for me, and I'm thrilled when it can be of benefit to someone else. 

Also, if you love this podcast, please give me a review wherever you give podcast reviews, so the word can get out a little bit more to people who might be interested to listen. 

If you'd like to learn more about me, you can find me on my website, shannonwills.com, or you can also find me on Substack, at wakeuphuman.substack.com. 

Wishing you all the best until we meet again on the next episode of Wake Up, Human!