2554: Unshakeable Peace with Holly Copeland

LifeBlood: We talked about how to find unshakeable peace in a chaotic world, the perspective shift that could pay huge dividends in your life, how to start placing greater value on internal peace, and how to get started, with Holly Copeland, former Conservation Scientist, Meditation teacher, and author. Listen to learn how to stop letting the tail wag the dog! You can learn more about Holly at HollyCopeland. Co, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn. George’s newest book is available! Get your copy of The Meaningful Few here: https://amzn.to/4qA26X9 Feeling busy but unfulfilled? The Meaningful Few helps you identify what truly matters, eliminate distractions, and live with intention and clarity. Learn more here: https://www.mymeaningfulfew.com/ Thanks, as always for listening! If you got some value and enjoyed the show, please leave us a review here:​​https://ratethispodcast.com/lifebloodpodcastYou can learn more about us at LifeBlood. Live, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook or you’d like to be a guest on the show, contact us at contact@LifeBlood. Live. Stay up to date by getting our monthly updates. Want to say “Thanks!” You can buy us a cup of coffee.https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lifebloodCopyright LifeBlood 2026.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 01

  Holly Copeland is a former conservation scientist who spent 25 years trying to save wild landscapes. She is a meditation coach and she is the author of Inner Rewilding: A Scientist's Journey Into Being. Welcome to the show, Holly.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Thanks, George. I really appreciate the invitation. Excited to be here.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. Tell us a little bit about your personal life, some more about your work, and what motivated you to write the book?

• 1:08Speaker 02

  That is a big question. You know, when I started this journey about eight years ago, I really was trying to get out of my head and into my heart. I was trying to stop this chaos mess of a thing that felt like a number of things descended, including who am I and why am I here? Like, some very simple questions. Or, we could say the most basic question a human can really ask is, what are we even doing here? And then, how do I reconcile with this, with all the voices in my head and really come into my heart into a place of grounded presence and happiness?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  You know, I'd been somebody who, for example, had tried to meditate and had been on the spiritual path for decades, but it was always really difficult and I didn't know if I was doing it right. And I had this just feeling of like, you know, I'd look at it, you know, I tell this story in my book, I'd look at a candle, you know, for 20 minutes and be like, you know, Bree, or focusing on my breath and like, is this what it's supposed to feel like? I don't know that it's working, you know? And I'd give up. I don't know if anybody can relate to that. And, you know, finally came to a point where, one, I was done with the voices in my head. Just doing a lot of biohacking at the time, and I had this idea, like, I want to rewire my brain. I just want, like, peace and calm.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  I also felt really saddened by the state of the planet as an ecologist, and very disheartened and disillusioned with that any of the work that I'd done really mattered in the end. You know, because it just felt like humans were just a shit show that continued to go on, and I didn't really see into it. So I was really approaching it from trying to get out of all of that and find a way forward to, you know, at the beginning, both get out of my head, but also, you know, awakening or enlightenment, or whatever the hell that is, sounded like a really good thing, and I wanted it. Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Let's totally do that, that enlightenment, awakening thing, meditation. I'm here for all of it. I don't know how to do it.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I'm trying.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was all of that. So I went on a deep dive. I took the red pill, as it were, and met some incredible teachers who changed my life. And I did get out of the mess in my head, and I did learn, you know, to find, you know, I would never say enlightened, because that, that doesn't, yeah, because nobody that's enlightened would ever say that. It's not, it's not a head thing. You know, your mind can't know that. But what I will say is that I found the kind of Unshakeable peace and a place of grounded, happy presence that feels like I have the capacity to weather whatever life brings at

• 4:00Speaker 02

  me. Not, you know, who knows in the future, but the life I live now is dramatically different from where I was. And now I help people find that place for themselves, because it's all for everyone. That place is available to each and every one of us, and we don't need to sit in a cave and meditate for 10 years to find it. And I just want everybody to feel and know that.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Are there a lot of people, do you feel that fall into that camp of feeling like it's chaos and I'm not necessarily having the impact or doing what I want? Seems like it's kind of a waste of time.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  I see that all the time. Yeah, it seems like I run into people all the time who are confused about their life, confused about the world, or can't find happiness. You know, they're just being run around in circles by whatever circumstance is, you know, the circumstance du jour. Because of course, life is constantly throwing, you know, spaghetti at the wall, constantly, right? But if we focus on the spaghetti, we're just gonna get messy. But if we actually focus on the ground of being, as I like to call it, in the Tibetan traditions I studied, if we actually go to the source to find that deep still water

• 5:25Speaker 02

  of peace within us, it is there. And, you know, it's like the eye of the hurricane, really.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  I love Unshakeable peace. That's an awesome term. And I find myself thinking that I'm the the dog that's being wagged by the tail a lot of the time. And I feel like that's what you just described.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  So you spent 25 years kind of in the woods?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  What does a conservation scientist do?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  The the truth in modern techn- days is that the conservation scientist spends most of their time behind a computer. But I did have the benefit of doing a lot of travel. I sat through a lot of meetings. And I did get out in the woods some, for sure. It was was a part of my life. At the end of my career, probably the most sort of sexy, cool thing I was doing was I was tracking mule deer. And so we would go out in the woods and we would put collars, GPS collars on mule deer and elk, so that we could map their migration corridors and then use conservation tools to, you know, do things like Press for bridges over highway crossings where deer or elk would have a migration path

• 6:41Speaker 02

  or, you know, prevent development from happening in those places, that kind of thing.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Got it. So the name of the book is rewilding, what's inner, it's inner rewilding. What is, does that suggest that I was at one point wild and I need to do that again?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Kind of, but what I, the way I tell it is that in ecology, we use the term rewilding, referring to kind of like bring, bring nature back, right? Return her to her natural state.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  So what I, the, the play that I, that I'm, the analogy I'm using here is that inner rewilding is about returning you to your natural state, that your natural state is peace and calm. And so we're bringing back your natural state, that we've forgotten that. That's the essence of inner rewilding.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I love it. Return me to my natural state. So I just need to turn the internet off.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Chapter one.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  A chapter one, turn off your computer. Well, being in nature certainly helps, but actually, I will say that most of the work that I did was on, it was during COVID, a lot of it. And it was behind a computer, you know, and a Zoom session with the different meditation groups that I was in. So no, the answer is we don't actually have to turn off our computers. Because it's, it's not about what's happening on the outside. It's about what's happening on the inside.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So

• 8:21Speaker 01

  the problem is that we have lost touch with who we actually are. And it's trying to figure out and get the shovel out or whatever term you want to use to try to dig out from underneath it. Am I talking about that sort of close to right?

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• 9:40Speaker 02

  It's a great question because I actually think there's a lot of confusion in the spiritual world about what true self is. And I know that for myself, I spent a lot of time like coming in circles around, what is this true self thing? That like, and how am I going to find it? Right? And what I learned in the practices is that you can't find your true self. It's already here. So it isn't so much something to find or uncover or dig out. As much as it is a shift in perspective. And the analogy that I would use here is it's like being in a movie theater and seeing the screen instead of seeing the movie. You sit in the same theater.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  You can either watch the movie and there can be a horror show going on, but you can actually shift your perspective, see the screen and realize you're perfectly safe. Right? I would use the analogy that most of our lives, most people are, we're in the theater, but we're watching the movie and it's a horror show and we're actually letting ourselves be, you know, absolutely.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  You know, upended by the horror movie we're watching, when in fact, if we shift our perspective, we recognize that we're perfectly safe in the movie theater. Not as to say that there aren't immediate situations sometimes that we need to get out of, for sure, but let's face it, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of the time, people are actually perfectly safe, but they feel like they're in a horror movie, right? So it's that, it's actually get, it's, I'm talking about, I'm talking to the ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of the time, when you actually are perfectly safe and well, but you think you're not.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Well, I love everything about that.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  I love everything about that. I just wrote down prisoner of the moment. Is that sort of like I'm a prisoner of, I'm seeing a movie, but I'm not actually gonna get killed by the serial killer guy, I'm just enjoying it, I'm just enjoying some fiction.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And so, we can, through the practices I teach, I teach people to make that shift for themselves. It was the single most important thing I learned in everything I learned. I teach lots of things now, but if I had to name the thing, I would say it was that. It was being shown how to shift out of the movie into the screen, and live from that place where there is unshakable calm. The screen is actually, you know, in that sense, what the Tibetans say is that your pure nature is clarity, is clear, is pure, is pristine.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  That's how they talk about our true nature. And so, that, which is so powerful, because when we recognize that our true nature, that is here, that I'm speaking to, is pristine and pure, we recognize that our pure nature is not tainted by the mountains of experiences that we've had. So that, that feeling that we bring the past into every moment, and it kind of, we wear certain glasses because we're bringing all of the past into the present moment. But if we can see the clear, pure nature of our true being, then we find the kind of clarity that resources.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  That gives us the resources to handle whatever's happening in the present moment in a different way. So we, we have an ex, what I, my experience is that I have so much more capacity to handle whatever's here. Again, it doesn't mean that sadness won't happen, or a bad thing won't happen. Um, that, you know, a bad quote unquote, bad thing, like things happen. So of course, I'm not, I'm not, this isn't spiritual bypassing. This is spiritual resourcing of getting the capacity to resource ourselves so fully that we can handle whatever's here in a different way.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Love that too. Everything's going great. So I am a clean, pure glass of water and oil is falling towards me. And if I am doing this improperly, if I'm not taking the Tibetan approach, that oil is going to fall into my glass of water and F everything up. But if I take the Tibetan approach, it's, it can maybe hit the water, but it's not going to absorb. It's just gonna, it's, it's, it's, it's going to miss. It's not going to actually taint the water, which is me. And so therefore I can have an unlimited number of experiences and walk away the same version of me that I was before, except calm.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's right.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's not easy.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  That's not easy?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I actually find it much easier than living the way that I lived the previous 45 years of my life.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I think once you get there, but that's, the clumsy term is that's the work.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  That's the work. Yeah. Um, and it's well worth it because, you know, how, how many more days do you want to spend suffering in your life? Right? When is there a better moment than right now to begin?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  There isn't one. And I really feel like we're all on the knife's edge right now and everybody's so heightened and you just observe that in traffic and, you know, everybody just seems so amped up. So this, I couldn't agree more is, is the better way.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And what I discovered too, is that from, coming from the background in ecology and, and conservation science was that,

• 15:34Speaker 02

  That it's also the best solution for the environment that we're worried about. Right? That in order to, in order to fix or shift this external world that we all want to see, you know, taken better care of, I think that's pretty universal. Most people want that, want that thing, right? We want to take better care. Well, in order to do that, we need to start taking care of ourselves. We need to learn how to shift ourselves before we're going to change the world. So that flip and that recognition that, which is why I left my career, you know, I left my salaried job. And yes, it was walking off a cliff in a sense.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  And my 401k and all those things and left them behind in order to do the thing that I actually felt would change the world for the better in the most important way. Quicker. Like, and God bless all the people still doing the conservation work. I'm glad they're doing it. I just realized that my path was actually to help shift the mindset because I believe that that's actually the way that we will change the world.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Um, I, well, I'm sure there's lots of ways. If I'm, if I'm very, very, very running on a very low battery and extremely burned out and freaked out and pissed off and everything, I can certainly have an impact. However, if I were very, very calm and I let things fall off me versus absorb into me, I'm going to be much more available and able to have a greater and more outsized impact.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. You know, and the analogy I like to use there is, you know, when the house is on fire, you certainly don't want the firefighters to show up and expect them to go, oh, my God, the house is on fire. Somebody do something, right? Like if our firefighters showed up that way, we'd be like, wow, that's not helpful. Right? We expect them to show up and they do, bless their hearts, calm, collected with the tools to fight the fire. So this is the same. Thing in a this, this is exactly the same thing in your life, right? If you approach your life like, God, the house is on fire and every and you feel like everything is always on fire. That's the, that's the same thing.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  But what would happen if you showed up to your life with, you know, calm, collected, I trust life, I've got this, you know, I am resourced, I know what to do. It completely changes what then will happen. You know, I'm sure anybody listening and other previous guests you've had, you know, how we, how we approach what's here and the mindset dramatically changes the outcome because we're in an energetic universe where, you know, as above, so below. All right. Whatever we is happening on the inside is actually what we create on the outside. So, you know.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I am resourced.

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• 19:37Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I'm well-resourced or I'm, I'm, I'm.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  What, what does it mean to be well-resourced? Yeah, so to me, to mean to be well-resourced is actually an inner state, not an outer state of normally we would talk about that as like having things. Um, but here I'm actually talking about having the inner tools. So knowing how to meet whatever's happening from a place of love, compassion, forgiveness. You know, I've got the inner tools to handle whatever comes up in my life.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  So if I start a fire in my kitchen, I can handle that. If I spill, my kid spills milk everywhere, I'm not going to freak out and lose my mind over it. If somebody cuts me off in traffic, I have the ability to handle this and not allow it to tail wag dog.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's exactly right. Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  So the first step in, in this is making the decision that I'm interested in changing the way that I'm approaching life, how I do things.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  That is the first step. I think you're absolutely right. You have to decide that you want to do things differently. You want that, um, you have to decide that peace and well being is your birthright and that it's possible for everybody and it's not situational.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  But it's in fact, as I said, our birthright.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Well, that's another really powerful one right there. Peace is your birthright.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  How many people do you think believe that? It's just, and it's maybe it's not that. They've just never thought about it.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, you know, our culture certainly doesn't, you know, as Americans certainly doesn't teach us that. We don't, that's not a kind of mindset that most people have indoctrinated. And in fact, because of our strange kind of convolution of spirituality and religion and everything, I think, you know, it starts to wade into the waters of, of religious and people go dogma and then they kind of have a negative connotation. But, um, I sure wish it was a fundamental recognition. I think if, if that was a, if that was a shared understanding, even that would dramatically change the world, right?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  If there were a hierarchy of, and I'm a proud American, I love America, I couldn't have been happier that we won the gold medal the other day. If I were to put a hierarchy together of values, I don't know if that's the right term or not, because success, hard work, success, where is peace on that continuum? Because it's obviously not one that's talked about or valued or maybe understood in things that are worthy of pursuit and attention, but with you, it ought to be a lot higher.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  That's such an interesting question. Okay, I'll take it this way. I think, so I did all the things that society told me to do to be successful, and at 45, you would argue that I was dramatically successful. I had, I checked every box. Like, I had a beautiful log home, I had a meaningful job, not even just a job, but like, I worked for a conservation organization, you know, working with great people. My kids were doing well in school, they were high school soccer stars, and I had a loving relationship, you know. And so, I had done all the things that you would say warranted that I was successful.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  I was living in a cool, small town in the West, right? But I actually wasn't happy. And so, what the hell is success anyway if we're not happy? I mean, that's what I came to confront, was like, wait, how is it that I've checked every box that society said I should be happy and I'm not? Now what? Right? That's where the existential crisis kicks in, where you actually decide, where you actually realize what true success is, which isn't having material things or any of the things I mentioned, although they were all nice things to have, for sure, and I'm not saying they're not, but...

• 24:26Speaker 02

  In the end, right, we all want really one thing, which is peace and happiness. Like, we all, that's actually what we want. So, and, and, and, and because of our, and I love America too, but because we have built America on a story of, um, materialism, material goods equals success, we, we're going after the wrong thing. Right? If we decided that peace and well-being was how we built our national,

• 25:06Speaker 02

  you know, uh, index, right? Which, as they do, I think, in Baton, like, that is actually how their national index is built. So if we built it on peace and well-being, then we would very soon realize that that is not built on just material goods. And there's, this, there've been lots of studies about this, right? That like, yes, there's a certain level of, of, um, you know, food and shelter that needs to be taken care of, but after that, like, then, then the whole thing breaks down because, once you have that, the rest of it is just about peace and well-being. You know, when you're not fighting for a, you know, roof over your head and, and food. So we're, you know, we're talking about that level, once we get past there, right?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  And, and if you have that, and you're still not happy, then you, you can't look to get the next thing. You need to look to the internal, what's going on, right? Inside. And that's where meditation, that's where the inner path comes in. And newsflash, it's not religious, it has nothing, I love religion in a, in a, in a sense, I grew up in a kind of mixed Christian-Jewish household, so I'm not, I'm just saying, this, this is not a dogmatic thing. This is like, a- You know, the Tibetans actually call it like it's it's really the science of the mind. That's what Buddhism is. It's really the science of the mind. So it's about how do

• 26:35Speaker 02

  we understand our experience that we're having right now in the mind and how do we shift it to to our fundamental state of peace and well being that's already here and available? And it's not about money. It's not about needing to get anything. It's about, again, it's about a shift. It's about these skills to see that we're in the theater watching a screen that is perfectly peaceful. And how do we make that shift to see the inner state that is actually fundamentally well? So that's, that's what I'm going for in who I work with and what I teach and what I focus on in my own life.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Well, I'm grateful for it. Thank you so much for coming on, Holly. How can people engage with you? How can they learn more? How can they get involved in working in their copy of Inner Rewilding: Scientist's Journey into Being?

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for asking. You can go to my website, which has links to pretty much everything, hollycopeland.co. I'm also quite active on Substack. And so you can find Holly Aaron Copeland. And yeah, I have a like just a basic membership where you can start to work with these practices with me and meditations and learn about how to make this shift, which is my most favorite thing I love doing with people. So I have one on one coaching, you know, if you want to really go deep with me, get that personal, you know, hand, hand in hand, I do that, too. So yeah, I have a number of tools at different entry levels for depending on what people, where they want to come in at.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  I love it. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, show Holly your appreciation, share today's show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, go to Holly Copeland, it's H-O-L-L-Y-C-O-P-E-L-A-N-D.co, so dot C-O, and check out everything that Holly and I have been talking about. And I know that so many of these things intellectually make sense, but putting it into practice in your life can be difficult. And so that's the reason Holly structured her program the way that she has. So if you are a self-paced learner, that's great. But if you want to actually have the one-on-one experience, then you can do that as well. And obviously, pick up your copy of Inner Rewilding as well. Thanks, Ken and Holly. Thanks, George.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best.

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