🌿 The Wonder Land — Episode 134: This Little Thing
⸻
✨ In This Episode
What does it mean to “close the book” on the little encapsulated self-idea?
In this episode, Alex and Amanda explore what lies beyond the identity we habitually defend—the “little thing” we mistake for who we are. Together, they unpack the subtle tension between liberation and the mind’s resistance, the Yes, but… that keeps us circling back into old frameworks.
This isn’t about denying the self. It’s about seeing through its edges into something vaster—an awareness unconfined by story or definition.
They explore:
🌿 What it means to close the book on the self-story without rejecting it
🔥 The familiar “Yes, but…” defenses that arise when freedom feels too spacious
🌊 How identity contracts around safety and control
💫 The felt sense of dissolving beyond This Little Thing into wholeness
⸻
🌕 This Conversation Is for You If
You feel ready to stop rehearsing the same self-narratives.
You sense there’s more of you than the roles, fears, and names you’ve worn.
You’re curious about what remains when the little self grows quiet.
⸻
🌀 Playful Invitation
When you notice the mind narrating your experience—“I’m this,” “I always,” “I never”—pause.
Close the book for a moment.
What’s here when the story stops mid-sentence?
Can you sense the vastness that holds even this little thing with tenderness?
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🌙 Closing Reflection
Liberation is not the destruction of the self—it’s the freedom to no longer confuse it for all that you are.
The book of you can rest, its pages complete, even as new chapters arise and fade.
Because the vastness you are has never been contained within its cover.
Close the book gently.
You are already written in everything.
⸻
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⸻
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⸻
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🌿 The Wonder Land — Episode 133: The Opposite of Peace
“The ego is a kind of flip, a knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It’s a curlicue, an extra jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering of consciousness which is the same as anxiety.”
— The Joyous Cosmology
⸻
✨ In This Episode
Alex and Amanda explore the subtle texture of doubt—not as conflict, but as the quiet opposite of peace.
It isn’t war or resistance that fractures our inner stillness, but the mind’s habit of doubling—of layering story upon story until presence becomes noise.
This conversation unfolds through:
🌿 The etymology of doubt—from the Latin dubitāre, “to be in two.”
🌊 The difference between uncertainty and doubt, and why one is creative while the other is restless.
🪄 The Magus archetype in tarot as a symbol of weaving multiplicity into coherence.
💫 How peace emerges when we stop multiplying stories and allow uncertainty to simply be.
Doubt, they suggest, is not a failure of faith but an invitation—to return to the stillness that holds all possibilities at once.
⸻
🌕 This Conversation Is for You If
You find yourself caught in mental loops of what-ifs and maybes.
You long for peace that doesn’t depend on answers.
You’re ready to see uncertainty as creative energy instead of threat.
⸻
🌀 Playful Invitation
When you notice doubt arising, pause and name the stories that are multiplying.
Can you feel the moment when uncertainty turns into agitation?
Then try standing in that space—as The Magus does—
not to choose, but to weave.
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🌙 Closing Reflection
Uncertainty is not the opposite of peace; it’s the ground of it.
Peace is not the absence of movement—it’s the stillness wide enough to hold every possible direction.
Doubt is only the echo of our resistance to that stillness.
When we stop trying to choose one story to be final, we find ourselves resting again in the creative hum of the unknown.
Doubt, even here, is not an ending.
It’s an invitation back to peace.
⸻
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⸻
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⸻
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🌿 The Wonder Land — Episode 132: Control Collapse
⸻
✨ In This Episode
Alex and Amanda explore the strange beauty that unfolds when control begins to dissolve.
What if realizing that control is an illusion isn’t a loss—but an initiation?
This conversation travels through the tender, disorienting space that opens when the structures we’ve built to feel safe begin to collapse. In the absence of control, something else appears: presence, participation, and a deeper form of belonging to what is.
They explore:
🌊 What happens to the self when control dissolves
🔥 Why the mind clings to control as a survival language
🌿 How surrender is not passivity, but intimacy with life
💫 The wonder-filled terrain that reveals itself when nothing needs to be managed
⸻
🌕 This Conversation Is for You If
You’re exhausted from trying to hold everything together.
You feel the quiet ache of wanting life to soften around you.
You sense that freedom might live on the other side of control.
Come with us—
to the edge where collapse becomes creation,
and where what falls apart reveals what’s always been whole.
⸻
🌀 Playful Invitation
Notice one small thing you usually try to control—your schedule, your words, your emotions—and experiment with letting it unfold differently.
Watch what happens when you stop steering and start witnessing.
Where does the current carry you?
⸻
🌙 Closing Reflection
Control promises safety, but what it really offers is tension.
When it collapses, what’s left is not chaos—it’s coherence without command.
To release control is to remember you were never separate from the movement of life.
You were the wave mistaking itself for the ocean’s edge.
⸻
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⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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⸻
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🌿 The Wonder Land — Episode 131: The Lingering Mystery
“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
— Terence McKenna
⸻
✨ In This Episode
Alex and Amanda linger in the soft, sensual pulse of not knowing. They explore curiosity as something alive and playful, not a problem to be solved but a space to be entered.
This conversation invites you to savor the mystery—the magic trick you never want to ruin by explanation. It’s about the pleasure of asking why just to feel wonder ripple through you, not to find closure.
They explore:
🌸 Curiosity without conclusion — whispering “I wonder why…” not to be right, but to taste possibility.
🌀 Maslow’s two types of curiosity — deficiency-based vs. being-oriented, or curiosity born from lack vs. curiosity born from awe.
🌿 The role of language — how words can both reveal and limit the vastness of what we sense.
🔥 The imaginative “why” — freeing curiosity from the need to tether itself to truth.
Through stories, laughter, and philosophical play, Alex and Amanda remind us that mystery is not an obstacle—it’s the playground of wonder.
⸻
🌊 This conversation is for you if:
You’ve grown weary of needing answers.
You’re ready to feel the beauty of unknowing.
You long to meet life not with certainty, but with delight.
Come linger with us—
in the shimmer between sense and surrender,
where curiosity itself becomes connection.
⸻
✨ Playful Invitation
Try it yourself:
Ask “why” ten times and answer each one with nonsense.
Why is the sky blue? Because whales keep painting it each morning.
Because the sun borrowed the ocean’s clothes.
Because blue hides better from giants than green.
Let your imagination be the teacher.
Let not knowing be the gift.
⸻
💫 Closing Reflection
Mystery was never meant to be solved.
It was meant to be lived—like a poem that changes each time you read it.
The next time you feel the tug to figure it out, pause.
Ask a gentler kind of why—one that doesn’t need solving.
One that lets you linger.
⸻
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.
Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.
And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be.
And what it wouldn’t be, it would.”
— Lewis Carroll
⸻
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⸻
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Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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⸻
🌙 Work With Us
Explore deeper through our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
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----------------------
🌿 Show Notes
Today we explore the veil of self-identification and how to watch it drop. What is going on when it is apparent and how can we play with its movement? Listen in to find out how direct contact is automatic when the veil drops, and recognize the dynamics at play.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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_______
🌿 Show Notes — The Wonder Land, Episode 126: River & Wave
In this conversation, Alex and Amanda explore the many forms of flow—how it shows up in seasons of creativity, and how we can trust its different shapes. Sometimes flow feels steady and inevitable, like a river reshaping everything in its path. Other times it feels cyclical and rhythmic, like a wave transmitting energy without having to carry it all.
We also reflect on the “frozen” seasons, when flow feels absent or delayed, and how these pauses are not failures but holding spaces—waiting rooms where life gathers itself before returning as inspiration.
✨ Key threads you’ll hear:
What We Mean by Flow — the difference between creating from pressure and creating from inspiration.
The River — matter in motion, a current that embodies direction, inevitability, and momentum.
The Wave — energy in motion, a rhythm that moves through us without needing to be carried.
Metaphors for Creative Seasons — how both river and wave are natural forms of flow.
Frozen Seasons — honoring the stillness that holds hidden life.
We close with an invitation:
When do you feel like the river, pulled into your inevitable course?
When do you feel like the wave, transmitting energy without moving yourself?
And how might noticing the difference help you trust your own rhythm of flow?
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
📧 Reach us at: podcast.thewonderland@gmail.com
🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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🌿 Show Notes — The Wonder Land, Episode 128: The Subtle Violence of Self-Improvement
Today we reflect on an evocative statement that captures the mind’s endless drive for self-improvement. At first glance, this pursuit looks reasonable—even admirable. But when we look closely, we see how habituated we are to its subtle violence: the never-ending, never-satisfied belief that who we are right now is not enough.
In this conversation, Alex and Amanda explore what happens when we uncover this restless pattern and recognize it for what it is. Beneath the pressure to keep improving lies a surprising freedom—an ease that arises when we no longer mistake endless striving for life itself.
✨ Key threads you’ll hear:
The continuous self-improvement activity of the mind.
How subtle resistance disguises itself as “reasonable” growth.
The never-ending loop of “not enough” and its hidden violence.
The relief and freedom that emerge when the pattern is seen clearly.
This episode invites you to notice: what shifts when the pressure to be better dissolves, and life is allowed to be enough—just as it is?
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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🌿 Show Notes — The Wonder Land, Episode 127: As Far as the “I” Can See
This conversation traces the ripple effect of self—how our identities are shaped by memory and conditioned responses, and what unfolds when we move past those ripples into the unmapped.
We explore the edges of recognition: how experience changes when it’s no longer mediated by habit, memory, or the need to name. What lies beyond the familiar “I” isn’t emptiness, but intimacy—a field where perception is direct, unfiltered, and strangely close.
✨ Key threads you’ll hear:
The Ripple Effect of Self — how memory and reflexes shape concentric rings of identity.
Beyond Recognition — the intimacy and disorientation of encountering what isn’t anchored in memory.
Seeing Without the “I” — perception unmediated by story or selfhood.
The Edges of Knowing — moving from “I know this” to “I don’t know, but I can stay.”
Practical Reflections — experiments to notice the edges of “I” and linger in unreferenced presence.
We close by returning to the phrase: as far as the I can see. What lies beyond that edge may not be ours to grasp—but perhaps it is ours to dwell in.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
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Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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✨ In This Episode:
What is it that breaches the loop of the painful self-stories? What can we see about the rupture of the beliefs that seem invisible? What happens when the Me-sense glimpse the discomfort of being groundless? Join us for a conversation with the whisper from beyond that seems to play at the edges of the mind, tickling the questioner with prompts and guidance to drop out of the abstractions and into The Wonder.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
📧 Reach us at: podcast.thewonderland@gmail.com
🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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🌿 Show Notes — The Wonder Land, Episode 125: Edgeless Selfhood
In this episode, Alex and Amanda explore the way identity forms not from what we embrace, but from what we resist. What if the self isn’t a fixed thing, but a series of friction points—moments where we quietly say “no” to reality?
Together we trace the edges of personality as habitual preference, the commentary we mistake for selfhood, and the subtle ways we protest the unfolding of life. Through McKenna’s reminder that “half the time you think you are thinking you are actually listening,” we ask: what if presence, not preference, is who we really are?
✨ Key threads you’ll hear:
The Self as Resistance — how friction and tension shape identity.
Edges as Reaction Points — why each “not this, not now, not enough” reinforces boundaries.
Personality as Habit — commentary mistaken for a stable “I.”
Edgelessness — what dissolves when we stop insisting on shaping the moment.
Practices of Dissolving — pausing before labeling, releasing the need to “have a take,” and living into awe.
At its heart, this is a conversation about becoming edgeless: moving through life not defined by what we push against, but shaped by what we love.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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✨ In This Episode:
Join us as today to find out how we wake up to the futility of echo maintenance and what that means. What is constantly being echoed and chased? What happens when you try to move closer to thought? What else is here all the time that is luminous and alive? We also explore freedom from the abstraction reflex and how the space or presence underlying all activity can be recognized.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
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🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
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✨ In This Episode:
Alex and Amanda explore the profound simplicity of what it means to be fully connected to the present moment—not as a practice or performance, but as a lived *yes*. This isn't the "right now" that comes with urgency or productivity, nor is it about moral correctness. Instead, it's about the deep, unshakable alignment that arises when we land fully in the moment as it is—free from the stories of our past and the expectations of our future.
This kind of *right, now* doesn’t seek validation. It doesn’t need to be familiar, understood, or secured. It just *is*—a quiet, undeniable signal of completion, a subtle fullness that doesn’t ask for more.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
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Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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✨ In This Episode:
Join us for another episode that may sound like bad news, but is actually freedom. Today we explore the attempts to belong, and how the feeling of not belonging is actually deeply intuitive. What is going on when we feel heavy and dense, and what is this unease with a physical form and a reality that seems off? Listen in to find out!
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
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✨ In This Episode:
Alex and Amanda dive into the seductive promise of The One Thought—the fantasy that a single realization, insight, or answer will finally make us feel whole, happy, or safe. But what happens when even the most profound thoughts can’t quiet the longing?
This episode explores:
🌊 This conversation is for you if:
You’re tired of self-help loops, spiritual promises that never land, or the pressure to figure it all out. Come sit with us in the stillness between thoughts.
⸻
🌀 Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
📧 Reach us at: podcast.thewonderland@gmail.com
🌿 Work With Us
Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
Alex → canaimacoaching.com
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Today in The Wonder Land we explore the loom, the weave, the threads, and how much relief and freedom from burden that can arise when we open up to the whole phenomena, rather than threads that seem isolated and out of place. The threads of experience are vast, so what happens when we get tangled with certain threads, and how can we see the whole tapestry more deeply?
Get in touch!
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Let’s Connect
Have thoughts or questions? Want to share how the episode landed for you?
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Explore deeper with our coaching, courses, and creative containers:
Amanda → uncoveryspace.com
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Hello Wonderlings,
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Get in touch!
Interested in becoming our Patreon?
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In this episode Alex and Amanda explore how words can move us away from the fullness of experiencing. Naming it may tame it, but feelings are not to be tamed. They are what experience and aliveness are made of.
What is hiding in the depths of the wordless experience of feeling?
Get in touch!
podcast.thewonderland@gmail.com
Interested in working with us? Check out our websites:
Amanda's website: https://www.uncoveryspace.com/
Alex's website: https://canaimacoaching.com/
Listen in as we explore the pointer of paradox as a doorway, not a puzzle to solve. With the help of a story of a Zen teacher from The One Who Vanished into Silence (807–869 CE), we look at how the mind can get frustrated in these conversations and how that frustration is actually a call to walk through the portal of words into the space they are pointing to. The space of the freedom we long for.
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Get in touch!
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Interested in working with us? Check out our websites:
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Alex's website: https://canaimacoaching.com/
In this episode Alex and Amanda explore how by claiming the small incremental perception of reality we may miss the Wonder of all that is available to us beyond what we think we know about the world.
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Get in touch!
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Interested in working with us? Check out our websites:
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Listen in as we take another look at Useful Fictions, and how vital it can be to realize how much experience is spent in the abstract. We don’t discount the usefulness and practicality of the abstract, but when it is believed to be actual, known, reality we suffer. The grasping, pushing, and pulling of abstractions in and as thought can point us back to The Wonder Land.