Our final interview in Ruby Slippers is a conversation with Michael Rennie. There are so many labels I could use to describe Michael: former McKinsey Senior Partner who led both the Australia office and the Organization Practice, Board member, advisor to politicians, creator of extremely imaginative experiences. A partner to Anna, a father to three children, a son, brother, cousin, friend, teacher. But at his core, Michael is pure love, and he, more than anyone I know, embodies what it means to truly follow your heart’s desire.
Michael has been one of the biggest influences (perhaps the biggest influence) in my own spiritual journey. We first met in 2015 when I was drifting through life, unsure of my place in the world. Through some divine intervention, Michael took me under his wing and helped orient my journey inwards. Because of him, I know how to listen to my heart’s desire and how to manifest it. I feel a deeper sense of connection with life around me, and, increasingly, a sense of peace in the world.
Our conversation for this post ranged far and wide. Starting with the question “what is a meaningful life?”, we explored his own journey, teachers he met along the way, and ideas of abandoning social constructs, connecting with your heart, and embracing the cosmic joke, before circling back to what he’s learned from his current vantage point.
Michael is truly “ordinary beyond extraordinary” (another concept we covered in our discussion). When I asked him why he had invested time in me, he told me that he had the sense I could teach others, but that first, I had to go through this journey myself. While there are always new realms to explore, in some ways Ruby Slippers feels like the culmination of part one of the journey that Michael set me off on seven years ago, the lessons I had to write down and share so that my soul is free to move on to something new. I am so grateful to him for his mentorship, love, and support, and I am delighted to be able to share his wisdom with you all. May it bring you joy and inspiration as well.
Perhaps a good place to start would be laying out some of the main milestones of your journey.
I grew up in a very challenging, unstable family situation, emotionally and financially. My father was mostly a loving guy, but occasionally violent – and sometimes it was very dangerous. My brother was bipolar. We didn’t have a lot of money. Despite this, by the time I was a teenager, I realized that I was actually quite talented, bright, and capable. I got involved in student politics at university. I would walk into a lecture theatre where other student politicians were speaking, and no one would be listening – the other students would be heckling them. And then I would get up to say something, and the place would go quiet. I was elected president of the Student Union, and I remember thinking “What’s all this for? What’s the point of all this capacity?”
That’s when I first asked myself the question “what is a meaningful life?”, a question that has been important to me throughout my life. I remember meeting one of Dad’s friends who was around 50 years old. At the time, I would have thought of him as a guy who had been reasonably successful, but I remember him saying to me: “I’m not sure I’ve lived the right life.” I knew I didn’t want to get to that point – I had the capacity to do whatever I put my mind to, I just had to figure out what the right thing was. I loved learning, and I was interested in international relations and politics. I thought Henry Kissinger was the most impressive statesman of them all, and I thought maybe I should aspire to become one of those characters who helped craft the world order to become a better place.
In my mid-20s, I won a Rhodes Scholarship and went off to Oxford. At the time, I had a girlfriend here in Australia who’s now a life coach and a fabulously interesting woman. We broke up when I left for Oxford, because in those days, there was no point in having a long-distance relationship – we couldn’t call each other, we would have to write letters that would take two weeks to arrive, and another two to three weeks to receive a response. It was a long cycle time. When I left Australia, she gave me a book by Shirley MacLaine called Out on a Limb. It was all about Shirley’s experience with manifestation and other worlds, quite an outrageous, radical spiritual journey for the time. I opened it as I got on the plane from Sydney and finished it just as I was landing in Heathrow. It really opened me up. I thought, well, I kind of know what I think reality is, but what if it is something else instead? Are we looking at life too narrowly? Could this be just one life of many? And if you believe that – if you believe in reincarnation – then maybe the way to think about how to have a meaningful life is that we are here to learn and grow. Maybe we’re in a kind of sandpit having a learning experience here in this life.
I believe you’re referring to the idea of alternate realities, but it seems that could also mean life is not fixed – that whatever you’re experiencing in life doesn’t have to be this way.
There are so many ways to live. When I was 17, I went to live in Switzerland as an exchange student for a year. My Swiss father was a very conservative man. He was a professor of military history at the University of Zurich. While my father in Australia, who was also very conservative, was cutting down trees to clear farmland, my father in Switzerland was saving them because they lived in a village where a lot of trees had already been cut down. I remember thinking, “these two conservative men have totally different views about trees, and it’s all a matter of the social context in which they live.”
Beyond right and wrong is a field. I'll meet you there. - Rumi
When I was in Switzerland, I studied history from a European perspective, which was quite different from the Anglo-Saxon perspective I had learned in Australia. I thought it was amazing that you can have such a different perspective on the same thing, that people can live so differently. That’s where my whole interest in culture and perspectives came from. I thought “wow, if I lived in Switzerland, I could live a very different life than my life in Australia.” And I started to become fascinated by how we create our sense of reality, about what is real and what’s just social construct. It made me more open. I realized that most of what I took as real was actually just social construct, a sort of reality arising from a bunch of people in a group or community or country or culture agreeing what was right. Once I started noticing this, I became increasingly what I call 'field independent.' I wasn’t influenced by my environment – part of me was always on the balcony, watching what was happening. It's very, very freeing. Rumi has this wonderful saying that ‘beyond right and wrong, there is a field. I'll meet you there.’ It’s one of my favorites, because right and wrong is a social construct. Beyond the social construct is the real truth. And I'll meet you there. So what is the real truth? I became quite interested in the fundamental truth that sits below the social construct.
I realized that most of what I took as real was actually just social construct, a sort of reality arising from a bunch of people in a group or community or country or culture agreeing what was right. Once I started noticing this, I became increasingly what I call 'field independent'.
Do you think there’s one fundamental truth, or do you think it’s different for everyone?
There are two levels of being human. At one level there is our individual personality, which in its own way is a construct. But underneath that, there is an archetypal level that reflects shared experiences about being human, experiences that are true in every society, and in every place. From an evolutionary perspective, we all have a brain that is both fear-based and seeks happiness. We’re tribal and social animals. We are wired for biology (the species must continue) and for emotional and intellectual experience. We are also wired for purpose and meaning, for spiritual experiences. Being human means there are shared truths in each of these. I’ll talk some more about this in a moment.
When I asked the question “what is a meaningful life”, I reflected a lot about whether it’s a happy life, about being happy and helping others to be happy. It’s curious why it’s so hard to be happy. I’ve been involved in many workshops with senior people who are very successful, and yet, when you really get to know them, you learn they are constantly dealing with their own fear and uncertainty. I’ve met very few people who are truly happy. I had this realization in my 40s, as I learned more about neuroscience, that our brains are designed primarily for survival, not happiness. That the reason we’re here at all is because we’re at the end of a long lineage of thousands of people who survived long enough to procreate. And the way you survived was to be paranoid or anxious. As a result, our brains are designed for survival, which is through anxiousness and mild paranoia, in our reactive mind. We also have a layer that seeks pleasure, that craves relationship and social interaction, but that’s built on top of the reactive mind. So the challenge is to transcend the reactive mind so you can spend more of your time feeling at peace and enjoying the more positive aspects of being human.
I also found myself debating the idea of happiness vs. fulfilment. Some things you do are not always enjoyable, but they lead to a better place for you – they are fulfilling. I began to take fulfilment as a broader definition of happiness; happiness itself is fleeting, whereas fulfilment is deeper.
What role did this self-exploration play in your career decisions?
I always knew I had the capacity to help get people to do all sorts of crazy new things, but I wanted to clarify the goal – it was important to me that I was doing something that felt right to me, in service of living a meaningful life. But I also needed to go on the journey myself first – to be my own guinea pig.
I often say that my path into this whole world has been through feminine influence. I already mentioned my Australian girlfriend who gave me Shirley MacLaine’s book. When I was at Oxford, I had another girlfriend, Caroline Rhea, who is now a well-known comedy actress (the aunty on Sabrina the Teenage Witch) and is just extraordinary. We had a real connection. She lived in Arizona at the time, and when I went to visit her, she took me to a New Age church. There was a person on the stage who would take a person’s watch or ring and tell them about all the people in their lives who had passed over to the other side, and even their own past lives. I put my hand up to volunteer – this young guy in his 20s – and she selected me out of 20 people with their hands up to join her on stage. For most people, she would just go straight into the reading, but with me, she stopped and spent about thirty seconds just breathing. I was like “Um, what’s going on here?” and she replied, “Sorry, I’m just indulging myself.” She went on to say I had the energy of a bodhisattva [a person on the path towards bodhi or Buddhahood] who has come back to be of service. My job was to touch the lives of those that others can’t touch. And as she said this, a bolt went through my chest, and I had a sense of “Yes, that’s why I’m here. To touch the lives of those others can’t touch.” From that point on, I always felt that my journey was NOT to go and learn to meditate and sit on top of a hill. My journey was to bring it right back into the world, to the top of business and politics.
She went on to say I had the energy of a bodhisattva who has come back to be of service. My job was to touch the lives of those that others can't touch.
And how did you begin to bring your spiritual explorations into the business world?
Well, as you know, I joined McKinsey & Company, where I started to look at how we could bring personal transformation work to our clients. I went to a Spirituality in Business Conference in 1997, back in the early days of all of this, in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. There were about 2,000 people there, most of them spiritual, very few business people. The woman who did the opening address was an astrologer, a very famous one apparently. After the opening address, she came up to me and said “Look, I’ve come to this conference for three reasons. One of them is to talk to you.” I had no idea who she was and said “Why me?” and she said “Well, are you from Australia?” I said “Yeah…” and she said “Ok, can you come with me?” So I went, and we sat together, and she told me all this stuff about my early life that was ridiculously accurate, stuff that no one could ever know. And then she said “They’ve told me to say all this so that you’ll believe what I’m about to say now. And this is the message I’ve come to tell you. You’ve done this work before, in other lifetimes, where you’ve come to bring a message. And you were killed for that.” (And actually, I do have memories of other lifetimes where I was killed for bringing love to the world – those past life memories came later on, but at that point in my life, I didn’t know any of that.) And then she said, “What happened then is not going to happen this time. This time, you’re not alone. All the people that need to come will come, when they need to come, and all you need to do is be you. Whenever you don’t know what to do, just be you. Because that is your path. That’s why you’ve been put here. Just play your part, and others will come.”
And it always happened. It always happened. I felt that the best way to touch the lives others couldn’t touch was to be part of an organization like McKinsey. And it worked. I love seeing the stuff that comes out of the McKinsey People & Organization Practice now, everything about mindsets and behaviors and inner work. That didn’t exist when I joined.
She said all the people that need to come will come, when they need to come, and all you need to be is you. Whenever you don't know what to do, just be you.
It seems like you could have pursued many paths in life – even within the world of business and politics – yet you stayed at McKinsey for over thirty years. Why?
It’s true. I could have aspired to be the CEO of a big company, or a wealthy investor in private equity who then founded a charity. I could have written books. There's lots of ways to be of service in the world. But whenever I would go into myself, sit quietly, and ask myself “what is the best way to be of service?” the message I always received was to stay at McKinsey and plant seeds that would affect lots of people all over the world. And for whatever reason, that always felt right. That’s why I did it. Yes, I had the urge to live a meaningful life, but I also had this urge that, once I worked it out, I would share it with others. That was just my journey. And because I was focused on touching the lives that others couldn’t touch, and I was with McKinsey, I could turn up in places like the Middle East and get introduced to the top people in the top companies and do really transformational work. I just kept planting seeds.
I also moved around a lot. There was a point when I was running the Australia office for McKinsey, and I was successful and happy. I could have kept doing that for another three or four years. But I just felt like I had to go to the Middle East. I don’t know where that came from, but it did. Thoughts like that would come up because I spent time every day in that deep place, touching into what matters, who am I, what’s my service, what brings me joy?
It sounds like you recognized your potential early on and then actively pursued it. Not everyone can do that so well – I know many people who can sense their potential, and yet feel stuck in life. What would you say to them?
Two things. First, the field independence thing is really important. It opens up a whole new world of opportunities and allows you to live an unconventional life, which you have to do if you really want to make a difference. Making a difference means you’re breaking into something, so you have to break out of the energy of the field and find the deeper truth for yourself. The daily practice of coming back to yourself is really important, to be in the moment.
The second thing is that you have to be in your heart, rather than in your head. When I grew up as a man in a white Anglo-Saxon farming family in the outback of Western Australia, there wasn’t a lot of heart. It was pretty tough. In my mid-30s, I started working with the teacher Gita Bellin, and we talked about chakras, the seven energy centers within the body. Everything we experience in our body-mind is some combination of these seven energies and seven chakras. The idea of enlightenment is to have all seven chakras open and energized to experience the fullness of life.
One of those seven chakras is your heart chakra. She gave me these sound mantras to speak into my heart and imagine the energy moving in circles. The idea was to physically move energy with my mind, to allow my heart energy to flow more freely. I did that for weeks, and I began to get these rashes and welts on my heart, and I couldn’t stop coughing. Something was certainly shifting. I told her this, and she said “good, good, keep going, keep going.” So I did these practices every day for two or three months, until one day I just had this kind of explosion. I was walking down the street, and I saw a mother and a baby, and I just burst into tears. I didn’t cry easily, up to this point, but something in the beauty of their relationship just moved me.
Ever since then, I felt so much more. I learned to breathe through my heart and live in my body. I learned to use my feelings to feel into what is important to me, and to follow the path of my heart. I can walk into a boardroom and feel everybody in the room, and I learned to tune into how much heart to bring into the space. Gita used to say to me, there’s no place that isn’t able to hold your whole heart, so if I needed to, I could drop into my heart and drop the room more into its heart.
In my meditations and quiet space, I go into my heart and my body and sit in there. That's where I've learned to listen to the little voice in my heart and in my gut and live according to that little voice.
A big learning on my journey was just how important it is to be open-hearted. In my meditations and quiet space, I go into my heart and my body and sit in there. That’s where I’ve learned to listen to the little voice in my heart and in my gut and live according to that little voice.
You’ve mentioned a few times now about how you ‘go into yourself’. How do you do this in practice?
I have a practice of meditating every day, which I still do. There are many different types of meditation – meditations designed to open your third eye, Tibetan love meditations to open your heart. But the main one I do is to just sit quietly when I first wake up in the morning, for 15-20 minutes, and get to a very quiet place. I go as deep as I can into me, without my name, my role, or anything, breathing through my body and placing my awareness into my body. And I just ask myself “what is my truth?” The truth of who I am, without any of these constructs or labels.
At this point, I’ve done it for so long that it’s not so much that I meditate every day, but that I am almost always in a state of meditation, gratitude, and awareness. I am constantly aware of every tiny little constriction, fear, or hesitation in my body, and when I feel it, I can examine what I’m afraid of, or what I’m hoping for or expecting. It allows me to walk through life in a very, very peaceful way, because I’m in that state most of the time, regardless of what’s going on around me. And then there’s the cosmic joke, of course.
What’s the cosmic joke?
The cosmic joke is, don't take yourself too seriously, because it's not permanent anyway. Who knows? We don't know. Do I believe that energy continues? Absolutely. I believe that there are probably other lives. But the cosmic joke is that we can’t actually know that from our current state of being. You know, we all take this stuff so seriously. People take their work so seriously. People go on a spiritual journey and become so serious. You can’t really be seen to be laughing at it, but actually, I always laugh inside when I see others or myself taking things too seriously. When you get to the end, none of it matters. Perhaps I helped a client become richer or have a fantastic experience with something. None of it’s more important than anything else, actually. How can it be, if it’s all just a construct? Any labelling of more or less important is just my construct. I can show you somebody who has a different construct – none of that is universal. The only universal thing is the interconnection of all life. We are all just part of the vibration of all existence.
The cosmic joke is, don't take yourself too seriously, because it's not permanent anyway. The only universal thing is the interconnection of all life.
You seem to have really found a way to balance, on the one hand, a powerful sense of purpose and destiny, and on the other hand, the cosmic joke.
Two things on that. One, Gita always used to say to me, there’s ordinary, there’s extraordinary, and then there’s the ordinary beyond extraordinary. The ordinary beyond extraordinary is when you don’t need to be extraordinary, you’re just being yourself. And this is just who I was, and it’s an evolving thing. A lot of spiritual teachers get caught up in the greatness of themselves as teachers. Gita always used to say that the real teachers, you don’t know, because they’re ordinary beyond extraordinary.
The other thing Gita always used to say was that you might touch a few people a lot, or a lot of people a little bit. And in your lifetime, you tend to have a balance of that. A mother touches a few people a lot. That's a beautiful thing. And there's also the possibility of shifting the field by planting a seed of new possibility and touching a lot of people a little bit. And then a few people a lot through that. But is one of those better than the other? No.
I remember once, walking down the street in Darwin and this toddler – another mother and baby story – reached out of his pram and stopped his mother on the street to take my hand. So I knelt down and he held my hand in his hand, and he just laughed and laughed and laughed. His mother was completely freaked out. I could see she was very uneasy. It lasted for about thirty seconds and then I stepped back. And I remember thinking to myself, maybe that was the most important thing I did in my life. That that little guy will go on to do something or be something, and perhaps that interaction of my energy and his energy was meant to be an opening. Maybe that was the most important thing I did in my life. And I don't know, because you can't know. It’s too early to tell. But I can tell you that it feels meaningful to me.
While I was at McKinsey, I affected a lot of people a little bit. And then there was the piece that was very important to me, about affecting a few people a lot, because those people can go on to radiate. There’s a whole group of people around the world that I’ve touched in some way, who mean a lot to me. I can retire because others are out there radiating. I’ve played my part in that, and I’m very fulfilled. I don’t have any regrets. The point isn’t whether I would have done more or less of something – the point is, was I myself at each point?
If I was going to go back to your original question and sum up what I’ve learned on my journey, I would say there was this part of me which wanted to understand what a meaningful life is. To share that with others, I needed to experience an opening of the heart and understand that we’re a body-mind. Getting out of my head and into my body was really important. And once I could do that, I had to spend time there every day to know what my path was. And just making that choice every day, my path unfolded in space and time. And that led me to a place where I feel really fulfilled. I still have minor annoyances, but that’s all part of being human. But there’s just this deep sense of fulfillment, and no fear. It’s very peaceful. And the cosmic joke is alive in me. It’s a lovely place to get to.
And what advice would you have for others following in your footsteps?
Don’t sacrifice yourself to the work. Don’t try to do too much. Don’t try to do too little. Do what’s right for you at the time. Whether you’re helping a few people at a time, or a lot of people a little bit, there’s no bigger or better. There’s just you being you. Go on the journey and help others as you do. The people you help are the ones who are attracted to your energy and learning at the time. All your foibles are valuable in this work; by learning from your own challenges and mishaps, you’ll be able to help others.
Do what's right for you at the time. Whether you're helping a few people at a time, or a lot of people a little bit, there's no bigger or better. There's just being you.
Finally, with everything you have learned and experienced, what is your answer to the question “what is a meaningful life?”
It's still evolving. We live as humans at a biological level. We live at an intellectual level. We live at an emotional level. And we also live on a spiritual level. We are wired for all four. Living a meaningful life is learning how to live all of those in a very integrated way. In a way, it’s Gita’s thing about the seven chakras – a meaningful life is living with all of them open, so you’re able to live that whole experience of being human. And part of being human is to grow and learn, and part of it is to serve others. In the end, for me, being an enlightened being is about living all those energies. Imagine if the whole world was in a state where people were transcending their fear-based survival minds and connecting with their deepest selves, and from that place being of service. What a beautiful world that would be.