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Feb. 6, 2021

103 Eamon Armstrong: How an Entrepreneur Journeyed Through Loneliness to Create a Lifestyle On His Own Terms

Eamon is the creator and host of Life is a Festival, a podcast promoting a lifestyle of adventure and personal development through the lens of festival culture and beyond. He serves as VP of Communications at Maya Health, a psychedelic medicine...

Eamon is the creator and host of Life is a Festival, a podcast promoting a lifestyle of adventure and personal development through the lens of festival culture and beyond.

He serves as VP of Communications at Maya Health, a psychedelic medicine software company where he also hosts the weekly interview series, The Psychedelic Therapy Podcast.

An enthusiast of personal growth and psychedelic healing her has personally experienced many rituals and ceremonies around the world including a traditional initiation with the plant Iboga with the Bwiti people in Gabon, Africa. His commitment to the healing power of psychedelics also led him to become a trained psychedelic peer support sitter with MAP’s Zendo Project.

Prior to joining Maya, he was the Creative Director of Chip Conley’s industry-leading online festival guide and community Fest300.

Eamon is a passionate advocate for men's work and offers public talks and workshops from mythopoetic men’s work to stand-up comedy on integrating masculinity.

 

We Talked About

  • How a journey of vulnerability led him to a moment of “naked” courage on stage at Burning Man.
  • Using loneliness to bear and uncover life’s richest treasures.
  • Leveling up through beating the game of life’s final bosses.
  • Airheads (candy) as a gateway drug to entrepreneurship.
  • Love as a currency.
  • How to beat loneliness and raise your self-esteem through the architecture of community.
  • The journey to becoming the oracle of festivals and transcendent experiences.
  • How to harness the genius of others to create your own abundance.
  • and many more

 

Links

 

Wisdom Quotes

"Whether it's a plant medicine thing or Vipassana or an ashram or whatever it is the experience because you're on a continuum and an unfolding that is continuing to occur. So if I now tell you this happened and that happened, and this is what is now going to happen, and this is what I learned, and this is what I'm taking with it. I may potentially rob myself of something deeper and richer."

 

"Hafiz about the matter of loneliness: don't surrender your loneliness so quick. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can, something is missing in my heart tonight as my eyes. So soft. My voice is so tender. My need for God absolute."

 

"If I'm able to sit in the desert long enough and by the desert, what I mean is without grabbing on to some form of partnership that validates and reflects me back to myself. If I'm able to sit in the desert long enough I believe that the desert will bloom."

 

"There's something that happens when that grabbing can't grab anything and gives up."

 

"Community building is a weird term. Cause you're not really building anything. You're more just like facilitating connections between people and, associating those connections with a, brand or a entity that then benefits from the stewardship of those connections and those connections benefit from that stewardship. So it's not, you're not building the community so much as you're like building the architecture that supports it. But I love it "

 

"Not only is it possible to actually have the community that you wanted. But you yourself can actually facilitate it, which is going to put you right at the center of it. And here we go with the loneliness thing, it's like, why am I community building? Because I'm lonely. So I put myself at the center of people you yourself can create community. And the way that you do so is by helping people strengthen bonds with each other, and the best way to help people to strengthen bonds with each other. Is to give people cool things to do. Yeah. Elevate them in the eyes of each other so that they associate with each others kind of self-esteem or esteem."

 

"We don't want to be like constantly going and creating bonds. We want to be an environment where bonds can actually strengthen In the context of shared experience. So create the context of shared experience."

 

"But the podcast can't be perfect because it has to come out every week. So the podcast is by its very nature, iterative, and it's not about me and it, is with other people. So all of these qualities made it so much more fun and so much easier to do. If, you've got entrepreneurs listening, okay. Dear entrepreneur listening. Find something iterative, just get, do something that you can iterate on when you have that big, perfect thing, trying to make the perfect book. You're trying to make the perfect course offering whatever it is. That is a prison trying to make a perfect thing as an awful prison, better to find something that you can iterate over time and you can get something out, get feedback, tweak it, get feedback, tweak it."

 

"Other people actually makes me look better, which is really cool. Like I always thought you need to have a brilliant idea, get up on stage and you'll share your brilliant idea. And everyone will be like, wow, this person is so brilliant. Great idea, actually. When you interview people and you're extremely interested and you're having a really good time, they can deliver all the brilliant ideas. You don't have to have any brilliant ideas and you'll still look amazing. And you'll see your building life as a festival, as a brand, entirely on knowledge of the people who come on my show. Of course my story and my personality is, interwoven in that, but I don't have to be smart. I don't have to be right. I don't have to be anything. I just have to be interested."

 

"My goal as a host is to give enough. Without making it about myself, that my guest feels safe giving of themselves."

 

"What I feel like is if I can model to my guests that I'm trying to go deeper, that I'm trying to find something in myself that may be challenging to reveal. And I encourage them to do the same."

 

"podcasting as good medicine for self-involved people. and me being self-involved is part of why I'm so damn lonely. And then the podcast I don't feel lonely right now."

 

"People want you to listen. They want you to join them in their problem. They don't want to be alone with their problem, but they don't want you to hand them a solution."

 

"You have an emotional bank account in all your relationships. You never withdraw from it. You just invest in it. And then you live off the dividends."

 

"You can start creating the energy of gifting and abundance. And when you are creating more abundance around you, the type of people who want to be around you are the type of people who are also creating abundance."

 

"As I moved through my life, my primary goal is to release limitations and to expand the potential for myself and those around me."

 

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing the impossible obstacles, dream, the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted really touched the alchemical gold. This is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is made by hurling yourself into the abyss. And discovering gets a feather bed."

 

"can I take you out to lunch once a month and learn to be more like you?"

 

"The number one value of a good mentor is, that they show you. That you are worth the time of someone who you admire and in doing so, they show you that you can be like them"

 

"Openness, isn't the same as courageous vulnerability. If you know that you are going to be rewarded for what you say, even if what you say is very appears, very vulnerable, it's actually not vulnerable."

 

"When we're more courageous and more vulnerable in a real way, we actually can really support people around us "

 

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