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“IST gets back to that root of your beliefs, so you can open up that belief that was formed in your life.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Welcome back to ONKEN RADIO, the podcast where we explore the body, mind, and soul of the creative entrepreneur. It’s my goal to help you take your creativity, business, and life to the next level. I’m so glad you’re joining me on this journey.
My guest for today is a powerful facilitator of higher consciousness, transformation, and liberation from self-limiting patterns of behavior. He believes that when you tap into the deepest layers of your being, you have the potential to thoroughly and completely resolve long standing patterns, troublesome behaviors, and unhealthy ways of living.
His name is Bryce Kennedy and he’s a guide for deep transformatioal work via the healing modality Inner Space Techniques (IST). After undergoing his own awakening, Bryce committed to helping others make life-affirming and powerful changes that bring them greater vitality, creativity, and joy.
“I’m holding the space open so you essentially get to be a part of who you truly are, a part of your true, highest nature. … Some people have called it spiritual surgery. Essentially I’m opening up the space and then the person goes to where they need to go.”
– Bryce Kennedy
If you’re ready to learn more about tapping into your deepest being, stick around. We’re going to learn Inner Space Techniques, how it drove his decision to pursue spiritual development, how you can convert anger into power, and much more.
Bryce Kennedy is a Feng Shui master, meditation instructor, coach, and one of 50 Inner Space Techniques (IST) healers in the country. A self-described former badass lawyer, Bryce serves as a spiritual luminary and facilitates deep transformation for clients across a range of industries and lifestyles. He and his wife Katie Tyson also run an executive coaching business called The Other 50.
What causes a corporate lawyer to completely change their life and pursue a life dedicated to inner healing? For Bryce, it was a growing dissatisfaction with a life that had no deeper purpose and that drained him emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
As a corporate lawyer, Bryce lived for happy hours and the weekends, struggled with anger issues, and was extremely unsatisfied and stressed.
His first IST experience revealed to him that his life path was based on an early childhood wound. He’d failed kindergarten and was in for a second year when his teacher humiliated him for not being able to cut out paper shapes of bats.
“My teacher in front of everyone goes, ‘Boy Bryce, for failing kindergarten, you think you’d be better at cutting bats.’ And it just shattered me. At that moment, I realized two things: One, I was stupid, and two, I would never let anyone think I was stupid again.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Bryce referred to those early wounds as “Samskara,” which is a word from ancient yogic philosophy. Samskaras are psychological impressions that form the seeds of future behaviors, actions, thoughts, and feelings. They initiate a direction that may last for years or even for a lifetime.
Bryce said that even when we think we’re making conscious life decisions, most of us are still fueled by Samskara — unconscious patterns of thoughts, reactions, and so on.
In Bryce’s case, his Samskara led to his overachieving and eventually his decision to be a lawyer. He then adopted the lifestyle of a lawyer — work hard, play hard, and a mindset of competition and aggression. But once he connected to that deep place of wounding where it all began, he quickly gave up being an attorney and chose to become an IST facilitator instead.
Bryce’s work now centers around getting to the root of our problems, the circumstances, and situations that hurt us and then dictated our life path. When we go beyond the conscious mind and access the unconscious, we confront parts of ourselves that are stuck in wounding. These injuries then caused us to pursue life paths that may or may not be aligned with our true purpose.
There are many approaches to becoming aware of and changing these underlying patterns, among them Bryce’s modality Inner Space Techniques (IST). Bryce described how his work helps people drop into the deeper layers where unconscious patterns live.
“Imagine you were in a pool, and you had a brick on your chest, and you just let that weight carry you down. … It’s beneath the thinking mind because that’s where the good stuff is. IST, at its core, is about transformation. It’s about unlocking these parts of ourselves that we haven’t been able to access before because of traumas or beliefs. It’s sinking down into this area.”
– Bryce Kennedy
IST is composed of energetic healing and clearing, meditation and awakening, plus relaxation and recuperation. Facilitators like Bryce will sit with and hold space for clients while asking them questions that take them deep into their inner world.
The client then connects to their own inner resources in a supportive, heart-centered space. For many, including Bryce, there is a specific moment or moments, that first caused an injury. Oftentimes, confronting these pivotal moments gives us life-changing insight that can take us in a completely new direction.
Anger tends to be stored in our lower chakras, the root, and sacral centers. And according to Bryce, we first need to understand how those chakras are related, to understand how to transform our anger into power and creativity.
The lower chakra area starts in the sexual organs and extends up to the belly button. The root (1st) chakra is related to survival, so things like safety and stability on the earth — housing, money, and social belonging. We also have emotions like fear, anger, and rage stored here.
The sacral (2nd) chakra is a creative center as well as a pleasure center. It relates to sensuality, emotions, sexuality, and creativity. It can also relate to emotional volatility, insecurity, fear of others’ opinions, and low libido.
This juicy area (composed of both chakras) is the seat of power and creativity but also anger and rage. Sometimes, when we have a block in this area, it affects us in multiple ways. We might have both unhealthy aggression and creative blocks.
To see if you’re blocked in this area, check in with yourself and ask these questions.
“The simplest way is asking where you are stuck in life. How’s your sex life? How is income flowing? How are your projects?”
– Bryce Kennedy
How about you? Where are you flowing and where are you finding resistance, persistent obstacles, and blocks? Sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint exactly how we’re feeling. If you’re having difficulty identifying what being blocked feels like, you can look to Bryce’s description of being blocked:
“There are two locomotives, and they’re just head to head pushing against each other. One’s trying to go north. One’s trying to go south. You’re in that in-between [state] with this pressure, and you don’t know how to move it.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Sometimes blocked energy also feels like you’re just sort of going through the motions. Maybe you’re low-key dissatisfied, in a job you don’t like, with people you don’t like, doing what’s expected but not really feeling any passion for life. You’re just existing, almost like you’re in a bit of a coma.
You also want to get honest with yourself about problematic feelings. Maybe you’re always yelling at your partner. Maybe you have a short fuse. Why is that? Where are you unhappy in your life? Where are you feeling powerless?
What’s the story behind your emotions? Continue going down this thread deeper and deeper until you can actually tap into and feel that emotion and go beyond it. That’s where you have breakthroughs.
Unfortunately, most people stop before they get to that point of deeply feeling and merging with that trapped emotion. They stay on a surface or intellectual level. But going deep into the experience is how you liberate yourself from it. Bryce demonstrated the process by talking about his own anger and how he works through it:
“I was a really angry guy. Okay, great. Why? Well, because I wasn’t doing what I wanted in life, and I was projecting that onto my wife. So let’s feel it. So the more and more I went into the anger, I [thought] ‘I’m never gonna be able to control this anger.’ Okay, cool. Let’s keep going deeper. … It’s a dark pit down there. It’s fiery. I feel like I’m going to rape, pillage, and murder an entire village. Okay, cool. Let’s go deeper. Sometimes you can go into a past life [and see] why you were angry or something in this life, and then you really see why you were angry. And it’s like, Oh. I’m angry because I was hurt or because someone betrayed me.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Getting to the root and the feeling behind the feeling (like the hurt behind the anger), and actually merging with it, you take away its hold over you. It liberates the trapped energy and releases a powerful creative force.
“The minute you pierce through that layer and open to it, you open to this fucking force of creativity. It’s like this pull. It’s another state of consciousness. It’s funny because if people could just get through those first layers and into [this] one, it would change people’s lives.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Just think about how much energy it takes to hold onto something. How much creative force is being used to cocoon an experience or a feeling of rage? When you penetrate this bubble, the energy that was being used to hold on to a past experience can flow again.
“Anger is just a force. If we take the stories away from it [and] you use it as a force, it has an energy, and [you] start to penetrate it and start to spread into it. Then it becomes fuel. When it’s trying to be stuffed into a little thing, it can explode. When you go into a space where you can totally let it go and then get to the other side … the creativity… is massive.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Wouldn’t it be amazing if every time you had a healing breakthrough, you unleashed more power, creativity, vitality, and energy in your life? If you freed up you’re being from old, solidified energy and let it circulate in your being and in your life? According to Bryce, you can expect to have that experience when you commit to doing this deep work.
As you liberate yourself from deeply ingrained habits and thought patterns, locked up anger or rage, and blocked creative energy, life begins to take on a completely different tone.
You need to go with whatever feels natural and real to you. So if you’re a lawyer and do self-work and realize you still want to be a lawyer, go for it. It’s real. If in the process of self-discovery, you decide that you want to meditate and be spiritual but also drive a Ferrari? Again, if it’s a genuine desire, go for it.
On the other hand, if you realize that you want to go down a completely different path and that path feels amazing, healthy, creative, and empowering, props to you!
There’s no judgment either way. There’s no law that says you need to sit in the lotus position meditating for the rest of your life when you have an awakening. A spiritual awakening should make you more engaged, present, and joyful in the world you live in, not separate from it.
“It’s not that you separate from the world; you become more of it. You enjoy things on this plane more. You enjoy the material life more. You’re just not chasing them because you think, at an unconscious level, that you need them.”
– Bryce Kennedy
One of the best benefits of the path of self-liberation is through achieving more emotional balance. But Bryce didn’t say that the balance comes as a result of self-control. When the triggers are gone, you no longer need to restrain your reaction to them. You can live freely without them.
That doesn’t mean he’s perfect and feels great all the time. Bryce is a big believer in authenticity. He admits that he still has ups and downs but that the big triggers that were fueling anger, fights with his wife, and an unhealthy life path has been dissolved.
“When you start opening up the Samskara and releasing those reactions, there’s nothing there to react from anymore. It’s wild for me. … There’s no more energy for me to react from. What used to trigger me doesn’t trigger me anymore. It’s not like I’m this Buddhist that just meditates all day, and nothing bothers me. … [The trigger] just doesn’t exist.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Doing deep work isn’t about being fake-enlightened and spiritually bypassing difficult emotions. It’s about connecting to all parts of you and approaching the various aspects of your being with a compassionate and non-judgmental attitude.
We all have a variety of parts to us, with none of them being bad or wrong. We have light and shadow, and when we access those parts of us, life gets really magical. Bryce described finding these parts of himself during his work.
“[I accessed this] deep vulnerability that loves people. … Then there’s the shadow side or this other side [that’s like] a primal beast. When you really, really meditate, you start uncovering these parts of yourselves that were forbidden or judged, [and] all these other things that are the true gamut of what a human being is, and it’s fucking phenomenal.”
– Bryce Kennedy
How liberating. The way I see it, Bryce is another alchemist like myself who is committed to the practice of self-realization.
Alchemy is defined as the process of taking something ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary, sometimes in a way that cannot be explained.
With that being said, I define Identity Alchemy as the process of deconstructing who you don’t want to be in order to realize who you want to become.
Through it, you’ll be able to identify your shadows or the things you don’t want to be true about you and shed them slowly. I believe that the deconstruction process of life and your inner world is such a huge piece of understanding who you are so that you can curate who you want to become. In general, I noticed for myself that the more inner work that I do — the deeper shadow work that I do to understand myself — the better life becomes towards the path of wholeness.”
One could easily say that Bryce is an identity alchemist in his own right. Life is his canvas and his alchemy results from deep psychological and transformational work. He dives deep into his innermost self and transforms pain, trauma, and emotional injury into awareness, potency, and creativity.
Thank you so much for joining me today, guys. I loved this episode so much — Bryce is such a wonderful inspiration, and I’m so grateful to have him on the show.
If you loved this episode and are looking for even more inspiration, don’t forget to follow Bryce on Instagram!
Don’t forget to check out my website too. You can find out more about my philosophy and see my work on the site.
I’ll catch you guys next time — now go live the creative lives you were meant for.
Nick Onken
“I want to see what I’m capable of, where I thought I was X and all of a sudden I’m the entire alphabet.”
– Bryce Kennedy
Connect with Bryce Kennedy on BryceKennedy.co | BryceKennedy.co/blog