This week I’ll be attending the Lisbon Web Summit for the first time. Seventy thousand people.
All doing extraordinary things with technology and AI.
And me — a self-confessed Summit newbie — walking into a sea of techno with just my body intelligence, wondering: what can I offer?
Then I remember: I have a kind of intelligence that no algorithm can imitate.
It’s not in my head.
It’s in my body — more precisely, in what I call my second brain.
Finding a Kindred Body
Recently, I got to talk with Philip Shepherd, whose work on embodiment I’ve admired for years. I was so relieved to find someone who sees what I see: that the body is more than a vehicle for thought. That there’s a “felt self” in the pelvis — a center of connection, creativity, and yes, sanity.
It’s easy to forget this when you’re running on the adrenaline of screens, emails, and back-to-back meetings. But grounding in your body — even for a few seconds — reconnects you to something larger than your own spinning mind.
The Experience of Consciousness
My understanding of consciousness doesn’t come from books, but from experience.
For two months a year, for sixteen years, I assisted a forerunner in the field of ethnogenic medicine who was a pioneer in the exploration of consciousness. This was over twenty years ago, when people had never heard of ayahuasca. This was a transformational period of my life, and the experience of working to help hundreds of people heal wounds, change lives, and shift consciousness forms the basis for my understanding.
Consciousness is everything. It’s the whole shebang. Not just your thoughts or your to-do list or the thing your brain is currently worried about. My experience of consciousness is that it is the formless, timeless, and peaceful ground of being for everything.
But we also live inside a smaller consciousness — your mind, ego, and personality — which thinks it’s the star of the show.
The real revelation comes when you realize: you are both. You are the “you” in your body, and you are the vast, interconnected field of everything that is.
It’s… a lot to take in. And yes, it can feel like discovering you’re the main character in every movie ever made, all at once. But it’s also exhilarating.
We Are Everything
Think about this: technology, in its earliest forms, began 60,000 years ago when humans discovered fire, created tools, and shared knowledge. Incredible.
But our bodies carry wisdom from billions of years — from our cells, our nervous systems, our ancestors across life itself. We are everything that has ever lived and all that is now.
When we remember that, we can approach technology not as something that outsmarts us, but as a tool we can use while rooted in the vast intelligence of our bodies and consciousness.
Feet on the Ground in a Sea of Brains
If you are attending this, or any conference filled with noise and hyper activity, try not to match their mental speed. Slow down.
Drop into your second brain for immediate insight, calm, and presence:
· Feel Your Feet: Truly notice the weight of your body pressing down through your soles. This simple connection to the ground instantly switches your nervous system from fight-or-flight (head-driven) to rest-and-digest (body-grounded).
· Notice Your Breath: Instead of controlling it, just observe the natural rhythm of your breath as it moves through your torso. This anchors you in the present moment, shifting attention away from racing thoughts and into the intelligence of your lower core.
· Access the Pelvis/Second Brain: This practice of feeling the ground and the breath allows you to gently place your awareness in your pelvis—your center of gravity and the seat of that “felt self.” It’s a move from the linear, analytical intelligence of the head to the holistic, intuitive intelligence of the body. This is where clarity, connection, and creative ‘Aha!’ moments actually arise.
Remember that innovation, insight, and calm come from connection — not frantic motion.AI is impressive. It’s like a brilliant librarian with access to every book ever written — but it doesn’t live in the story. We are the story, and the library lives inside us.