Originally published at: https://integrallife.com/inhabit-your-life-purpose/
Ryan and Corey explore the many ways we can create meaning for ourselves, introducing the concept of “Integral Ikigai” to help us find and fulfill our deepest life purpose.
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Cool show guys. Very relevant to the meaning crisis we are experiencing.
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I have been enjoying your talks together as they relate very closely to what I am working on at the moment. One thing that tends to disempower what you are saying is that your speaking is filled with so many fillers: “sort of”, “kind of”, “like”, “you know”, etc. that it seems to me that your message becomes a bit diluted. I wonder, have you had an opportunity to work at deleting these from your speaking? What you have to say is vitally important and could be delivered more powerfully without these “killer fillers.”
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It reminds me of when I started drug and alcohol counseling and I used to start by saying “I don’t know what I’m doing…” and then proceed to do my best. Someone told me to stop saying it basically. It brought it to my attention. I stopped saying it.
But I still think it- lol.
I was being genuine. Being transparent. I didn’t see it as weakness. I thought it as being authentic and showing up. But I respected his feedback.
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Hi,
what a great talk and topic. A lot of the mentioned thoughts and especially the personal (hero´s) journeys are really good starting points of a discussion of meaning in live. I have a few people in mind that desperatly need some form of meaning.
Ryan mentioned that you were going to add a link to a guided meditation to prepare for some of the questions mentioned, just to be able to answer them not only from the top (head).
Maybe it´s there and I did not find it, if not please put it on the website.
keep up the great work Corey and Ryan.
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Thanks for the feedback Susan! And yes, as I mentioned in the talk, I usually walk away from these things cringing for one reason or the other. And sometimes the source of that cringe is watching me repeat phrases like “you know” a dozen times in a minute. It’s something I try to be mindful of, but can be difficult whenever performance anxiety begins to kick in. Which is part of the reason I’m doing these in the first place — to get over those damn anxieties 
Plus, as I’ve heard Stephen Colbert day, as soon as you turn on the camera, people’s IQ drops 40 points. That seems like a understatement at times, especially for me!
Thanks again, and I am glad you are enjoying the series!
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Thanks Marcus!
Here is a link to the episode with the practice. This content is listed on the Your Life Purpose page, but you’re right that I didn’t mark it as Ryan suggested I do.
https://integrallife.com/inhabit-your-spiritual-life/
Glad you are enjoying the series! Hopefully y’all can join us next time and have some back and forth with us.
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Hey Everyone, @Marcus Here is a link to a more polished guided audio meditation that stands alone in case you want to come back to it more than once, might a bit easier than queuing up the version I gave in the second episode:
https://www.awakeninginlife.guide/practice/foundational-embodiment-meditation
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A quick thought on the topic of public speaking and fillers, after doing shows and recording video and audio for 10 years+, including hosting Buddhist Geeks:
Having a sound engineering and musical background, I’ll always have an artistic preference for polished video/audio production…BUT…
My experience is that focusing on what you’re saying, trying to curate and edit your speech is counter productive and simply makes one either more self-conscious in speaking or too constrained in dialogue, both of which limit the breadth, depth, and organic impact of what one is trying to say.
Better is to focus on from where we speak, from where our words arise. For example, the more at ease I am in my body, in my environment, and in relationships, the more easily words will flow out without self-conscious censoring, fillers, etc. This includes working with unconscious narratives and relational wounds that might be operating that our speech arise out of. Work with these things, our speaking changes.
In the end, what we noticed over at Buddhist Geeks is that, while we use to edit the shit out of everything to make it polished, that very act also sterilizes some of the organic, relational, conversational magic that we normally experience every day. I also decided personally to switch from using a teleprompter and scripts in my monologue video recordings to instead simply having basic talking points and rolling with what arose spontaneously inside that structure. There will always be pros/cons to taking a more intentional, polished, edited approach to speaking vs. more free form, organic speaking. Monologues lend themselves more to polishing, conversations to free form.
Now, while I recommend focusing on the inner/relational work to free up our speaking, secondarily obviously how informed we are on a topic will impact how articulate we are. Along with that we can focus on cultivating a larger vocabulary which will give us access to more nuances and words, which fillers are a stand in for. However, more often to not, these two secondary fillers are just that: secondary. People usually experience significantly more progress in how they sound in a video/podcast conversation by working with the inner/relational bits than focusing on more exterior aspects or knowledge acquisition, which when done on top of a lot of unconscious constrictions happening, only make the challenge at hand harder.
A couple final notes:
-The focus of content greatly dictates how articulate and sharp one needs to be. If you’re presenting detailed instructions on how to do brain surgery, you’d better not have a bunch of f’n fillers in your speaking lol. On the other hand, in guided meditation, it’s often missed that, if you are trying to help guide others in feeling more at ease with whatever is arising, a too polished, contrived audio recording implicitly does the opposite. Instead, the specific words are not what is transmitting, it is from where the words are spoken. If a teacher is incredibly present, I don’t care of they use less articulate language and let out a huge fart - transmission happens. But dear lord, I have heard many a recorded meditations that are so polished they sound autogenerated. In any case: context matters on how much we need to focus on improving our speech.
-Last: people are way more forgiving than we think 
As long as we are genuine, enthusiastic, and caring, we forgive each other tremendously in our imperfections. But be contrived and a giant dick, no matter how perfect you are, you’ll be told to fuck off in way or another lol.
Just my thoughts from my experience, and of course, I imagine I will always have a perfectionist in me that wants to improve how articulate I am, with a desire to achieve eloquence of angelic order, and a vocabulary that would make JRR Tolkien rise from the dead and invent a new language. But alas, I’ll have to continue being ok with some fillers in my speech taco meat
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Hey guys,
I’ve really enjoyed your conversations and your honesty has made me feel more connected to Integral community and has been very helpful to my own plight. So many of the things you’ve talked about were exactly what I needed to hear! I look forward to more shows from you both! Thank you! 
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I just joined from Japan, been meaning to do so for a year or so now. Anyway, happy to be hear and looking forward to listening to this conversation as my food for thought before I go to bed.
Just wanted to let you know, Corey, that your mispronunciation was actually closer…just about right…let’s see how to type this phonetically, but the “i” in Japanese is always pronouced like the letter “e” (as in the sound of “tree”), so it is ee-kee-guy… that last part “gai” is like how you say “guy” or “Gai-a”. Anyway, yes, it’s a VERY useful concept and I think a great way to frame this issue.
I’m in the middle of a life transition, so look forward to garnering some wisdom from this discussion and other content on Integral Life (been loving the Daily Evolver podcast for about a year and a half now) that’ll help me find my new path.
Okay, much thanks and hope that was a useful first contribution! (personally, I actually sort of shy away from pronunciation correction, but since you brought up how to pronounce it, figured I’d let you know!)
-Bryan
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Hahaha why does this not surprise me in the least?
I googled “how to pronounce Ikigai” before the show and got this result:
So thank you for setting me straight And I am glad you enjoyed the episode!
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Ha ha…well, much as I’ve marveled at the rapid improvement in AI in terms of language translation and such, it seems it still has some work to do! I’ll see if I can ask a native Japanese speaker such as my wife or daughter to record a proper pronunciation because they often poke fun or flat out insult my butchered attempts.
If you are familiar with the vowel sounds in Spanish, Japanese is very similar. And, unlike complex English, they never change and have almost no subtle nuances. So think of how we say “sushi” in English and that “i” sounds like the letter “e”…that is how the i always sounds!
Anyway, keep up the great work both behind the curtain, in front of the curtain and BEING the curtain. I’ll do my best to contribute!
I discovered Integral through Ken’s great e-book on “Trump and a Post Truth World.” Invaluable in helping my personal development so I wrote a blog post about it last year…not much new for people here, and forgive the font formatting, but it’s a fun post and introduces myself and why I am here:
-Bryan
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for anyone wanting to nerd out on language pronunciation, a go-to resource is Forvo.com, where you can hear recordings of native speakers pronouncing damn near any word you come across, for example, Ikigai: https://forvo.com/word/ikigai/#ja