The Everyday Mystic

The 1-in-4 Crisis: Navigating the Energetics of a Connected Culture w/ Jeff Hamaoui

• Corissa Saint Laurent • Episode 126

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In the corporate world, friendship is often treated as a consequence of long hours together, not as a strategy for success. But Jeff Hamaoui, co-founder of the Modern Elder Academy (MEA), argues that connection has critical operational implications.

In this episode, Jeff joins Corissa to discuss the 1-in-4 Crisis: the staggering reality that 25% of Americans have zero friends at work. They explore why professional distance is a liability and how prosocial leadership leads to higher retention, innovation, and a deeper sense of purpose.

A self-described skeptic who once rolled his eyes at "shamans in smocks," Jeff shares how the death of his young friend Zach forced him to move from a head-centric worldview to a heart-centered faith. He breaks down friendship not just as a social activity, but as a practice of managing the energetic field between people.

In this episode, we cover:

  • Prosocial Companies: Why the data supports building friendlier workplaces to improve performance and innovation.

  • The Skeptic’s Path: Jeff’s initial resistance to spiritual work and how grief became his most profound teacher.

  • Managing the Field: How to view your relationships as an energetic entity that can be elevated or drained.

  • Transcendent Connection: The sign Jeff’s friend Zach promised to send from the other side and how it realigned Jeff’s belief in the transcendent.

Notable Quotes:

"One in four Americans feels like they don't have a single friend at work... Just imagine how that feels." — Jeff Hamaoui 

"Loneliness sits in the same part of the brain as hunger. We hunger for each other." — Jeff Hamaoui

"There is a field that we co-create with people... the practice of friendship is about how do we manage that field?" — Jeff Hamaoui

Resources & Links:

Connect with Jeff at MEA: https://www.meawisdom.com/ 

Connect with Corissa:

If this conversation awoke or inspired something in you, please consider leaving us a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review to help us reach more people.

Thanks for tuning in!

Jeff Hamaoui:

One in four Americans feels like they don't have a single friend at work. Just imagine, imagine how that feels. Pro social companies promote friendship in work, between colleagues. And guess what? People perform better, they show up better, they're more innovative, they stay around longer, you retain them, they have a sense of purpose. Of course you do, right? So these are good things, these are emergencies. As one system breaks down in its weird and angry way, another system might be allowed to take place and take root.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Welcome to the Everyday Mystic, where we explore the intersection between human ambition and spiritual truth, helping you master the flow in life and in business. I'm your host, Carissa St. Lawrence. Today I'm sitting down with Jeff Homowie, the co-founder of Modern Elder Academy. We discuss how Death taught him the depth of friendship and the danger leaders face by not integrating it into their culture. Before we get into it, if you're already feeling a tension between your external success and your internal truth, I want to invite you to look at my private advisory. It's a partnership where we operationalize your inner wisdom and scale your executive capacity. You can explore the details at carissaintlaurent.com/slash advisory. Now here's my conversation with Jeff Hamui. Hey Jeff, thanks so much for joining us on the Everyday Mystic.

Jeff Hamaoui:

Thank you, Carissa. It's nice to see you.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

You too, you too. And and nice to see you and this gorgeous background. We were talking about it before. We hit record that you live in a home that was designed by an artist. And I'm always really moved by environments. I studied environmental design and spaces have always been really important to me. And I think they are to all humans, whether we understand that or not. But living in a space that's intentionally beautiful and has so much love in it, there's something really special about that. So how did you land in the space that you're in now?

Jeff Hamaoui:

Chris, so I wish I could give you like a deeper, meditative, soulful answer. I was a founder at something called the Modern Elder Academy, which is the world's first midlife wisdom school. And I worked with a guy called Chip Conley and a lady called Christine Sperber. And the three of us were trying to open up a new campus. And we came here to Santa Fe. And in between meetings, my wife said, Hey, I think I think I've found the house. So I drove for an hour to look at this place. It's probably the biggest financial decision I've ever made. And it took me an hour to say yes, let's just do it. I didn't know where it was relative to the rest of the city. I didn't have any data. And it just turned out to be one of those good decisions. But I research genes more than I research this house.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Well, then I would say it's absolutely a soulful decision, a spirit-led decision, because of exactly that, of where there is no need to have all the rational thinking and all the analytical breakdown and spreadsheets. It just felt right.

Jeff Hamaoui:

Right. Yeah. Literally. We both walked in. We were like, okay, this is this is the place.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Done. Where do we sign? Well, I know you split your time between there and Mexico, and I'm in Mexico right now. What called you to this beautiful land?

Jeff Hamaoui:

So 2017, December 2027, my wife and I had been working together running a an innovation and sustainability company, looking at global sustainability, how you work at a systemic level to shift food systems, energy systems, waste systems. And we as a family had hit a bit of a roadblock. Not even a roadblock, just one of those sort of intense pinch points that you hit in life where we were working all the time. We had two very young children. We were living in the Bay Area, just north of San Francisco, and we were stressed out. There was this moment where we looked at each other and said, Is this really is this really what we're trying to do? The business that I was I was running had offices all over the world. We were traveling all over the place. We were both intensely occupied. And the answer that came back was very simple. It was like, no, this is not this is not how we want to live either with our children or spend our time or whatever. And so we took a sabbatical, we drove down to Baja, essentially go down the 101, which then becomes the 101, and then you just keep going south for over a thousand miles, and you turn up in this little town of Todos Santos. And if there's a spiritual path for someone like me, it is in and through the ocean. So the thought had been to go to Mexico, explore the possibility of buying a piece of land and building a small surf house somewhere. Todos Santos was our first stop. And on the road there, as luck would have it, someone said, Hey, have you heard of this thing that Chip Collie's doing down there? And I was like, Nope, no idea what he's up to. And so I got introduced to Chip and his then business partner, Christine Sperber, and they had just started setting up this Midlife Wisdom School, MEA. And so I was invited to the very first week. And it was kind of magical, right? One of those sort of magical bits of emergence where I was trying to find what the hell I was going to do next. And I did the week. And then the very next week they called me up and they said, We need a facilitator, we need someone that can hold a group. Are you interested? And I absolutely was not interested. The whole premise of the wellness world, the wisdom world, that whole sort of side of spirituality, self-awareness, all of that work. I was pretty good. I was able to hit the eject button when things didn't feel good in terms of self-awareness. But I went because both of them were kind of remarkable, admirable people that I thought were kind of amazing. And I volunteered. I did a couple of weeks volunteering. Which kind of ballooned into working together, thinking together, and sharing a vision together of building a regenerative community. So I built a 26-home regenerative community around a farm and building at the MEA. So that's what I've been up to the last eight years. And that's kind of what was sticky about Mexico. And then we grew here into New Mexico as well.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

And it sounds like your life has evolved in a in a very spirit-led way, even if those things felt like stress led us here, or feeling like you said, this pinch point. So often, what is next for us on our journeys is spurred by really getting that kick in the ass or that literal spur right in the side where you're like, ow, this hurts. I gotta do something else. Gotta do something different. Not everyone listens to that call. Some people just continue the suffering, but you've pushed on. It sounds like you and your wife both have continued to forge this path. And that's when all the beauty then unfolds. You get to see, right, that there's so much more to life than that question you held in your head in the Bay Area of like, is this it? Can this be all there is? And you seem like you've answered that question with a big heck no. Definitely not.

Jeff Hamaoui:

It's interesting. You you sort of get tied up in a version of reality, right? Wherever you live, you get tied up in the version of that reality. There are certain types of life models in a place like the Bay Area that make total sense when you live there. And then you go to a place like you were in San Miguel or I was in Baja, and you're like, oh my god, people have life models that are radically different to my own, and and it it stretches the bounds of possibility. There there were people we met who traveled nine months of the year and worked three months of the year. It was such an inversion on the the typical normal American life, right? Where most of my friends worked 364 days a year and even on holiday they were working and answering emails. And oh, you know, I didn't really take a holiday, I was on online. It's like, God, this is not a badge of honor, this is a disaster.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Talk about being unsustainable. You know, I know you worked in the sustainability field, and we don't often apply that sustainability on a personal level. It's so external and applied on a planetary level. But if we're not living a sustainable life personally, how can that ever ripple out into the rest of the world? So it's yeah, I've learned so much through not just living in other places, but just traveling, learning those models, experiencing them and seeing with new eyes when you come back. I guess probably my first experience of it was living in New Zealand when I was in university. I studied abroad and I lived there for a year. My own personal experience as a university student was one thing, but then it was meeting those people that were traveling the world. And they said, Oh, yeah, we're taking a year traveling the world, or you know, people who were adults, because at that time I still, you know, I felt like a kid. I was 20 years old. I was a kid in many respects. And meeting these adults who were living so radically different than what my path was at that time. Just going, you can do that, you can live this way, you can be a respectable person, be a raft instructor. And they were so happy and joyful and filled with life, so much aliveness about them. And that was the first taste that I got. And I'm so happy that I got that. I mean, and it's definitely been the undercurrent of my life. I didn't always live that way. I did the corporate thing and was doing the stressful, keeping up with the Joneses thing. Because I think even when we get exposed, get awakened, we don't always fully boop, everything transforms and that's it.

Jeff Hamaoui:

What you said when you're in New Zealand as a 20-year-old and you go, oh my gosh, I didn't know that was possible. I think in in those moments, in those crack points in our life where we're between one thing and another, and between purposes, places, people, significant people, that transitional moment, it is a moment to seek that experience of like, I had no idea this was possible. And in seeking that, that's where the transformation comes through, right? It's it's that moment of recognition that what you're leaving behind or what has changed in your life can be radically reimagined. And so travel is a wonderful way to do that. People are a wonderful way to do that. New people, different people, following anything that kind of gives you awe, right? Whether it's nature or music or whatever it happens to be, big ideas, those are the places I think where we can surprise ourselves and allow in that transformation.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

And you've certainly traveled a lot in your life, it sounds like, with all the places you were raised in. It sounds like it was normalized for you and built into your life. But is there a an inflection point or some point in your life where things opened up into that inner journey where you really felt like, okay, it's not all out here. This isn't all there is. Started to feel that that call from within or from something higher.

Jeff Hamaoui:

I don't think these things happen in a moment. I think they happen in sort of waves and stages. As a young man, even in my early teens, I I was very kind of aware spiritually and interested, engaged. I studied religious philosophy as a as a student at university. And then that all got put to bed, if you like, for more practical issues. I had a kind of a gentle framework of pantheism, and yep, that's good. I I got it. Check. And then the next wave was actually really being confronted in Baja by the by the work that I was being shown and by the work that I was seeing other people doing. Because I I thought it was silly, really candidly, shamans wearing sort of frocks and smocks, and people with hats and feathers and all the things, and it was it just felt self-indulgent. After years of analysis, it wasn't just that it felt self-indulgent, there was a language to it. There was a sort of an inside outside framing to these practices that made me at the time feel very othered by it. You turn up and people would look deeply in your eyes and say, tell me about your practices or tell me about your um your spiritual journey. And I didn't have that language, I didn't have those frameworks, and so I've I found myself often feeling outside of the discourse, and candidly, there's this language of advancement in this spiritual domain. I've done the work. If you use kind of gaming mentality, it's like I have leveled up, I have done the work. And there's this sort of leveling up and this kind of superiority, and it's often not necessarily stated that way, but it is felt, it's a felt sense, which made me very uncomfortable. So my first approaches to this work as an adult in my late 40s and then into my early 50s were coming from a place of deep resistance. I think I had some patient teachers, some people who were just willing to let me ride. Um MEA, we've got this head of mindfulness, is a guy called Teddy Dean. He knew my resistance and he just let me get on with it. Over the years, he every time I needed it, he just showed up for me whenever and however I needed it. The kind of the hilarious piece of it is as you sort of look back in the rear view mirror, how these how these practices, whether it's sort of meditative, contemplative practices or focusing practices, using sage and smudge sticks, I carry crystals around. I'm now that guy. I'm I'm I thought was a lunatic, you know what I mean? They've been helpful to sort of slow me down, focus me. I use them in my family, I use them in my friendships, I use them as practices to kind of connect to myself and to other human beings. There's a time to have sort of unshaped beliefs, right? It's like, you know, what's your faith? Oh, I'm pantheistic, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's some kind of energy. I don't know. I don't really care. Mortality has never really been an issue for me. If I could summarize my belief system for the first sort of 40 years of my life. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine, Zach, passed. He passed into his light body, and really it was the first passing in my life where I had to say, What do I actually actively believe? What do I believe? Is that it? Is Zach gone from not just his physical body, but from this realm? What what do I believe? And not just believe, because I think belief kind of drifts up into this part of the head. So what do I feel? What do I feel in my being? And without question and without a doubt, he is present on a an almost daily basis, um, moment by moment. He was young, Carissa, he was 31 when he left his body, or as his mum beautifully says when he graduated out school. Um he said to me, Jeff, you'll know me in yellow butterflies. And so, of course, since 18 months ago, since he passed, I see frigging yellow butterflies everywhere, all the time, painted on pavements, flying around at absolutely critical decision point moments. His passing sent me on an incredible journey exploring friendship, which is really my work right now, what I'm looking at, what I really care about and I'm interested in, because it sort of sent me exploring, God, what what just happened? I have all this incredible grief and I don't know what to do with it. I wrote his parents, who were also very dear friends of mine, a love letter essentially about our friendship. And that was my very first book. And that sent me down this sort of rabbit hole on friendship. And like anything, the deeper you go into friendship, the more I started to think of friendship as a practice, the more I started to realize, oh god, there's this transcendent element to friendship. There is something about friendship that's sat that's transcendent of space and time. I read John O'Donohue's gorgeous book, Anamkara, that is really an exploration of transcendent friendship. It's based on a Gaelic concept, these friendships that go beyond space and time. And really had to completely reconfigure my belief systems in partnership with his parents, who were also patient teachers, especially his mother. You know, the language you use, the words you use that matter materially. How do we stay in relationship with people in the flesh, beyond the flesh? How do we understand the energetics that we share with other human beings?

Corissa Saint Laurent:

And what it means to me is that your learnings of what you're experiencing of this life are being practically applied. And so many people's spiritual journeys and the work that they're doing can often just live in that ego realm. Like you said, I'm leveling up, I'm becoming more superior to all other humans, I'm I'm going to nirvana. Instead of it being a complete dissolution of self, to where we then can see that we're all connected in this beautiful fabric together, and then we're all one. And when we get to that level, which is is a leveling out versus a leveling up, is true connection, true connection to one another, to the earth, to everything here, even everything that we've created that sometimes seems like a destructive thing. It's like loving that, loving that thing that is a creation that seems so out of sync. But even being able to love that and see that as part of the whole. To me, you're living the experience in truly what an everyday mystic is, is taking our spiritual journeys and bringing it home, bringing it into the earth school, like literally living it rather than trying to ascend away to where you just do become the light body, because otherwise, why be here?

Jeff Hamaoui:

What was your journey? How did you get to all of this work, this this exploration?

Corissa Saint Laurent:

It was partly spurred by trauma and my early childhood. I was uh left in Korea by my birth mother and adopted into the United States when I was three. And I had a psychological emotional break, a dissociation that happened at that time. And because Of that was really out of my body. So I had the experience of living these out-of-body experiences because of that. I would astral travel, I would have lots of lucid dreams, and none of it made sense to me at the time. I then at 16 I had a traumatic brain injury. And at that moment, when I was in the intensive care unit, I actually had a awakening to my true self, my soul self, spoke through and just pulled me out of the path that I was currently on, which was a path of desperation and a path of dissociation. And I was going to leave my body. And it was like, no, you're here, you're here to do work, you're here to live this life. And this voice that I didn't know was me spoke through me and it advocated for me at the hospital and guided me on my healing journey. And I had this incredible relationship with self that was built at that time. Again, didn't know what was going on, but completely trusted it. And that was the beautiful thing about it is that I'm 16 years old, don't know what the hell is going on. But I felt held. I just, without question, trusted what was going on. That led to the opening of this path. But spent a lifetime veering off of that path. Absolutely. That's the thing I think about anyone's journey is that the pull of what we're here to experience in the contrast of Earth School is so powerful that the living of the journey, the living of this experience is the experience. It's okay, I'm gonna get pulled down into the gutter, have years of alcoholism, but then I'm gonna get put back on this beautiful path because of another angel that visited, another voice, another butterfly that came, whatever it is. And it's always that experience to me of we get the invitations all the time to be with our true self, to be with the source of all that is. We get that invitation constantly. And the journey is the experience of saying yes or no to that, and then going along this really, it's a ride. It's not just like this straight path. It's this crazy freaking ride that we're on. So that was the genesis, and then it led to lots of seeking, lots of teachers, lots of work that led me to all sorts of spiritual practices and philosophies. All of it, which I took bits from. It's like taking fruit from a tree, like the tree of knowledge, which I know has a bad connotation, but it's just like taking that fruit and going, oh, yeah, this is what's feeding me at this time, and now there's another tree over here. And it's been uh this beautiful constant state of that.

Jeff Hamaoui:

I like the idea of the sort of everyday mysticism. As you were sort of nudging at, when you put it into this super realm, I don't even have the right language, it becomes abstract. And then the question is, what are the things that make it everyday? What are the things that draw our attention to this sort of everyday, every moment, every experience mysticism? For me, I don't use the word mysticism, but the magic that surrounds us, right? Whether it's signs and signals, whether it's just the beauty of the world, it's also knitting it together on the days where you're just having a crappy day, right? You're shouting at your friend, partner, child, whatever, whatever is going on in your life, and realizing, oh, okay, how do I reconnect?

Corissa Saint Laurent:

I think that's the beauty of choosing this, whether we call it spirituality, mysticism, really what that term mysticism or the practice of mysticism encompasses for me is the remembrance that we are divine. Being in that remembrance is constant work because it's so easy to be pulled out of that remembrance. It's like, oh no, I'm just this human body with all these problems and the stress and this whatever feels so physical and material and so real. But to me, the realest experience of life is the experience of our divine being. Because I've experienced it, because I've actually felt that, that to me feels more real than the physical reality sometimes. But what I've come to know is that it is this beautiful merging of the two, that we are here to speak and live and be in that light of God, the light of all that is, here with each other and create from that. That's what we're here to do. And it's awesome and an honor to be doing it. So if anyone feels like they're struggling in life and having struggles with addiction or relationship problems or just so much stress because of how they live or whatever the struggle is, it's it's less to me about figuring out how to get rid of those things that aren't working. And it's more about how do I live into this beingness of myself as divine. And that's all about remembrance, which sounds like it's easy, it isn't, but it's it's the work.

Jeff Hamaoui:

I have about 50 million people I want to introduce you to, but we we will not do that on a podcast.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Um, so tell me more then about you and that resistance. What was it for you? I know it wasn't a moment, it's an unfolding, right? But just talk a little bit more about that, of how the resistance that I see it as that disillusion started to happen for you.

Jeff Hamaoui:

Well, I think that there's so many layers. Some of it's cultural. Um, a lot of my education happened when I was in the UK. The sort of the whole California We We Hippie bullshit thing was a strong meme in the UK. You've seen the the archetypes that that are very British, right? Keep calm and carry on. It's a meme and it's a joke, and it's a reflection of a deep cultural truth. And so part of it was cultural. It's like this is silly and self-indulgent, so don't do it. Part of it, I actually think is gendered. Most men we're we're taught to live neck up, and the emotional range is happy, angry. Happy, angry, horny, let's say that, right?

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Yeah.

Jeff Hamaoui:

Those are the three things, that's what's on the menu, you guys. And for me, really deeply personally, there were there are really important issues in the world. Catastrophic climate issues. Um, we're in the middle of a fifth extinction. Um, there are all these things that are going on that I was intimate with, aware of, part of my work, and the thought of unraveling my own things felt petty in the face of those things. There's this kind of hero thing going on in there as well, which is pretty ego-led, and that's fine. I think a lot of us in our first adulthood are in that work. Yeah, that that was my resistance. I'd studied formal philosophy, and I'm a strong believer in social science as well. And so for me, it was so much easier to engage with fact rather than with faith. There are some things that you are able to know in life. The tolerance of this glass, the pressure. Uh, we can work that out. Someone in the universe knows how this device works. It's not me. Someone actually could work that out. You know, to me, this is genuinely magic, but someone knows how it works. Where Zach is right now is a fa is an issue of faith. It is unknowable. And you can, you know, God, you can talk about an intermediate consciousness where everything is uploaded and then this journey into some sort of and you can use scientific sounding language, right? Talk about fractals, talk about emergence, talk about global consciousness, talk about universal consciousness. And ultimately where you end up is what do you believe? And that's kind of neck down business. And that was really hard for me. You know, that the whole thing of the the journey from the head to the heart is the longest one you're likely to take. I have a darling friend, she's a dance instructor, and she said, drop your head to your heart. Because I make literally physically make that journey shorter. Um, certainly below neck level these days, but there's a long way to go.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

It sounds like you had some beautiful friends around you that held that space for you, that were patient with you, as you said, as you explored all of this and were resistant, and they're just kind of patiently awaiting you. It sounds like that having those kinds of friends really helped to usher this in for you. Would you say that that's helped to reshape even how you view friendship?

Jeff Hamaoui:

That's such a good question. Okay, so eight years of working at MEA, eight years of working with all kinds of teachers, you know, meditation, spiritual business, poets, writers, all sorts of different types of people, dozens of teachers as sort of guideposts along the way. And as you said, maybe two or three really incredibly patient friends. Um, I mentioned Hannah, Zach's mom, I mentioned Teddy, bless him, and my business partner Christine, who just kind of let me arrive um at some of the stuff that she'd always known. Has it impacted my belief system around friendship? Yeah, fundamentally. It's funny, I I so a lot of my programming, a lot of the way I work is if you start with the social science, if you start with the facts and the figures, I can talk to you about friendship and I can talk to you about loneliness, and I can talk to you about the Vack Murphy's studies, you know, this the US Surgeon General, and I can talk to you, talk to you, talk to you. So if we stack start with facts, it kind of creates a cadence of comfort, right? People are like, okay, all right, this guy's not crazy. And then I start to nudge people into this idea that, gosh, maybe, maybe we're at the foothills of friendship. Maybe we are at the very beginnings of what's possible as friends. So if if you think of friendship as something that just happens to you, friends come, friends go, friends arrive. Sometimes you're lonely, sometimes you're not. If you accept that from the science side, and we could have that conversation, it's pretty amazingly well documented that friendship is literally the most important practice to a good and happy life, ranging from the Harvard study on. There's there's just tons of science and data to support that thought. I've never really started the conversation from the other side, which is the sort of the spiritual side. I usually kind of gently back people into that. But ending at the spiritual side, what I'm usually trying to point at is there is this energetic that we create with our friends. I don't necessarily need you to believe my cosmology. Whatever you believe, can you believe that there's a vibe? Most of us can, right? Yeah, sure. You go into a room, you feel a vibe, you meet someone, you get a vibe. It's like, oh no, I'm not sure about you. Oh, absolutely, you're you're yummy, let's go. So if we can agree that there's an energetic that we share with other human beings, um, there's an energetic that we play with for ourselves, um, how we refer to, engage with, attend to ourselves. There are wounds that we've had, things that we have to deal with. So friendship with yourself is an energetic, friendship with others is an energetic, friendship in a group is an energetic. Um, there is a field that we co-create with people. Where I see that is the practice of friendship is about how do we manage that field? How do we create an elevating or a generative field between us and our friends? Is that something that we can be explicit about? Is it something we can vocalize, share? This is what I'm trying to achieve in my practice with my group of friends. How do we actively pursue something that is elevating, not positive, but elevating, rather than something that is subtractive or negative or draining? You've been with those people. They're friends, but gosh, they drain you, right? Are there tweaks? Are there chiropractic things that we could do in those relationships to say how do we create an elevating field? So so far there's nothing spiritual in there. This is just a system, right? It's a it's a way of viewing the world, and it can all be within your head without having to believe anything external. There is a vibe that is created with me and my friends. I can help to sort of elevate that vibe through my actions, my words, my interactions with other people. I think where it gets super interesting is gosh, is there a transcendence to that? Or again, for me, there is a transcendence to that. There is something energetically transcendent that is not impacted by space or time. And and again, massive disclaimer. I'm just exploring it. I don't have answers, I don't have even anecdote beyond my relationship with Zach, my ongo ongoing relationship with Zach. I have a feel for it. I I hosted a group in Baja at the MEA campus. 45 people came for a friending week. We came to learn about friendship. And I just last week taught a friendship week here in Santa Fe. The whole goal of the week is not to give people tools and and tactics. That's great. And that's what people need neck up, right? They need to know am I gonna get the right ways to connect to people, to the strategies, the you know, the experiments. Sure. But I think where this work gets wonderfully fascinating is can we create an energetic together that is that is elevating and transcendent? And that's really where I think if I have a life's work moving forward, that's where it is.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Yeah. Yep. I would say absolutely, that is spiritual work. The energetic and the spiritual are synonymous. Our energy or any energy we feel could just be called spirit. It's that living ethereal energy. We can't see it, we can't touch it. We only experience it through our heart, through feeling. So feeling something that isn't there to me is that spirit that we all carry within us. We can call it energy. And then having that be a shared experience among each other. It's not a question to me of even does it exist for people? How do we make that connection? It does exist. People, like you said, people feel it. They walk into a room, they feel it. So it's it's it's like turning on that remembrance to use that word again of remember when you had that experience of when you walked into a room and you immediately felt what was going on there? Remember when you had an intuitive feeling about something and you it was right, it was correct. Remember when you thought about somebody and then they called you immediately. So it's like reminding people that all this stuff is going on, all this stuff is real, just belief in the realness of it. And the practices and tools are awesome because they do focus people on the things that they can do to stay open to all of that. But it's it's so beautiful to connect people in that way because truly to me it's all it's connecting them in in that frequency of love. Which it is to me the spiritual work. How do we get to this point of where we are guided, led, live in love, pure and simple.

Jeff Hamaoui:

I use the word elevation, I'm more comfortable there rather than love. But I of course it's love. Ultimately, it it is how we love each other into being, how we love each other into our best possible selves. What's stunning to me, especially as you get towards that side of the spectrum where it is magical, where it is spiritual, is how much we deny it, how much we are in a moment of like, nah. He just happened to call, or she just happened to call at that magical moment, or I you have these intuitions about people, and and how much either we deny it or we need science to verify what we already know. There's some fascinating research on how our neurobiology is very similar to the people that we quickly connect with. There's a let uh Professor Talia Wheatley does this fascinating research where they did brain scans of people and then predicted who would get along, and sure enough, people who share a similar neurobiology are more likely to make friends. So is that intuition? Is that what whatever the hell it is that's going on there, once the science drops in, people are like, oh, okay, cool, I I get that. But the truth is our lived experiences that we never needed the science to know that right away you can tell, you're like, oh, yeah, no, or yes. And and I think part of the practice is to stop paying attention to that stuff. You can't go into Professor Wheatley's lab and get, you know, brain scans done with everyone you meet. But you can pay attention to that gut and not deny. I've spent a lot of my life in denial of what I know full body.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

It is, I think, something that's programmed out of us. I think we know or we're more instinctual when we first come here. And and then we get fully siphoned up into the brain and to the mind and into that being the ultimate, right? The intellect being the ultimate source of all things. And it gets conditioned out of us to trust in this thing that maybe even the feminizing of it is a way of programming that out of us because, oh, well, if you're masculine, rational, intelligent person, you won't be feeling things. You will not be trusting something that we cannot prove through our scientific studies. And yeah, there's a lot of othering and a lot of division that goes on through, I believe, set of control mechanisms that have been going on through our millennia, through our humanity to keep these gifts suppressed. But they're gifts that we all have, that we're born with, they're not things special. I think we just have to again remember that we all have them and lean into them. So to connect in friendship, community, even we can talk about how that extrapolates out into work teams and in the work. Place. Friendship isn't just with you and your bestie, but we're talking about relationships, really, and relationships being the core of our humanity. Because we didn't come here to live in a bubble by ourselves. We came here to be social creatures. And we've learned, and I think evolved into who we are because of that. So if we can learn how to do that better, learn how to do that with even more humanity or more spirituality or these words, again, just kind of end up flubbing us up. There's no silo of human, spiritual, it's all one. So whatever we call that, our human being, which is all of that, gets to flourish more when we get to be in those genuine relationships, connections. So I love this work that you're doing. I love that it's your mission. I would say it's probably mine too, in a secret or quiet way. Connection is the ultimate thing. How do we truly be and feel most alive here? And it's when we get to see ourselves in reflection with someone else.

Jeff Hamaoui:

Loneliness sits in the same part of the brain as hunger. We hunger for each other. We hunger to connect together. And so these are feelings. There is a a need for this. I can't tell you the number of men I've I've talked to about this idea of if you know how you feel, then you can feel better. Sounds ridiculous and daft and dumb, right? But part of this work is like, God, work out how you feel so that you can feel better. There's not been on offer to men for millennia, if ever. So one of the things that's on offer now is, gosh, we can not only feel better ourselves, as you pointed out, this relational work, this friendship work is like we can feel better at work. Work doesn't have to be this cutthroat beast where we're all sort of trying to take each other down. Work could be the place where we have relations, friends, trust, growth, and possibility. It's funny because if you look up friendships at work, there's very little research. There's nothing about sort of how friendship works at work. Is it better or is it worse? If you look up pro-social leadership and pro social companies, there's tons of research. We're even scared of naming friendship and feeling good at work. It's I think it's old school taboo that has sort of floated like junk from this patriarchal kind of framework. But look up pro social companies, there's tons of research that shows that in a friendlier place where people are really willing to to kind of create safety for each other and allow themselves to show up, you get better connection. There's a massive disconnection at work. One in four Americans feels like they don't have a single friend at work. Just imagine, imagine how that feels. Pro social companies promote friendship in work between colleagues, and guess what? People perform better, they show up better, they're more innovative, they stay around longer, you retain them, they have a sense of purpose. Of course you do, right? So these are good things, these are emergencies that as one system breaks down in its weird and angry way, another system might be allowed to kind of take place and take root.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

The conversation today opened so much in my heart, and I'm so happy that we got this time together, Jeff, and happy that we're getting to start our friendship now from here forward. I really appreciate your insight and you sharing vulnerably your own story and all the beautiful work you're doing. How can people get involved in what you're doing?

Jeff Hamaoui:

The friendship stuff, I will be doing another course in March at meawisdom.com. So go check that out. And go and check out MEAWisdom.com generally if you're interested in those sort of purpose transitions. There's a bunch of really wonderful teachers that we have coming through MEA. Right now you find me in deep percolation mode. I'm working with a group of friends, literally running experiments on how might we put friendship at the center of business? And how might we put friendship at the center of people's lives as a practice? And how do we make that a business? Are there products, are there services, are there ways of taking this book that I've written that is yet to be published, but it is written on friendship and getting it out into the world. So I think the first place to start would be MEA. And then after that, I will promise to get a sub stack out or something around this friendship stuff, but I don't have it yet.

Corissa Saint Laurent:

Amazing. Well, yes, to be continued with you then. And I'm so glad again that we got this time together. Thank you so much, Jeff.

Jeff Hamaoui:

You too. Thank you, Krista.