Daway Chou-Ren
任大為
I am here to give people a new experience of what is possible about being human. There is a lot more love, dignity, power, authentic access to feeling, and energetic body awareness available to you than most people know.
When I was a teenager, I was afraid of becoming an adult. The insanity just didn’t make sense to me. Why did so many people in the world work jobs they didn’t care about, get into marriages where they didn’t love each other, and then secretly hide how much all of this was killing their soul? The inability of people to break out of the mold and their lack of bravery to reimagine what was possible for their lives confused me.
I didn’t yet have the ability to create my own path, so I followed the linear life plan that my parents gave me. I graduated from Princeton and made my way into a cool role conducting emotions and empathy research for the Human Understanding and Empathy team at Microsoft Research. But I couldn’t kick my feelings from childhood.
Is this it?
Eventually, the side searches I ran when I wasn’t at my day job bore fruit. I found true transformational artists who walked me again and again into extraordinary domains. Unbelievable things started happening that I could not explain. I began remembering forgotten body memories. I started noticing details in my mother’s face I had never bothered to look at before. I kept finding new definitions of Love in my relationships. “Ah, I thought that’s what it meant to be in love with my partner. But this, this is what is possible with Love.”
The shape of who I was as a human was changing. Not physically, but energetically and emotionally and archetypally. Where once I was an unfeeling, stoic, too-scared-to-show-any-vulnerability man, I now started crying when I was surrounded by beautiful trees. I became able to feel fear in the very tips of my feet — literally, in the skin on to front edge of my toes. I started being able to self-observe with my protective ego out of the way enough that I could see and thus confront the ways I was subtly abusing the people around me for my own gain.
All throughout this, I started being able to access a love for others that I had previously only felt through things like LSD or MDMA. I could not believe it. Was it really possible to consciously access this kind of archetypal wonder and love without the aid of substances?
It was.
Now I am committed to empowering other humans to transform, to feel more, and to no longer need the energetic violence, the subtle manipulations, or the seemingly fundamental greed, scarcity, and thirst for status that run the show for so many people.
What comes after that is elegance. Elegance in ways of loving, collaborating, feeling, and being with each other. What comes after that is the fullness of what is possible as a human. Reaching that with other people is what my life is about.
