Sunni’s journey from a successful visual thinking consultant to a visionary leader in the realm of spiritual growth and personal transformation is a testament to the power of human potential.
In this blog post, Mystic Mag delves into the origins of Deep Self Design, a groundbreaking method that combines ancient wisdom with cutting-edge techniques to help individuals unlock their true selves. You’ll learn how Sunni’s early experiences in visual thinking and facilitation laid the foundation for this transformative approach.
How did your early work in visual thinking and founding Sunni Brown Ink shape your journey towards creating The Center for Deep Self Design?
My first business venture, like the second, was a labor of love. SB Ink was a global creative consultancy that advocated for visual literacy, game facilitation, and better thinking by design. I loved visual thinking and multi-sensory facilitation because of the potency. These techniques welcomed and accommodated anything embodied, sensory, and visual in order to learn. They make the learning process come to life. At the time, I didn’t know how much these tools could teach until I kept going, applying them in diverse industries, contexts, and with different goals in mind.
Eventually, they revealed their deeper metamorphic power and became a kind of catalyst, helping to initiate a searing and hallowed voyage into the workings of my mind and the unfinished business of my heart. In retrospect, the progression from experiential learning tools to a creative inner science was natural, perhaps inevitable, since these aren’t only tools for cognition and the intellect. When questions are turned inwardly, visual thinking and gamification become relational and spiritual teachers, facilitative tools for emotional literacy and the acquisition of self-knowledge.
They make self-authoring and self-re/design notably more accelerated. So I used these multi-sensory tools to rappel into my sacred but wounded consciousness and then reverse-engineered my way back, more stabilized, integrated, and healthy. That reverse-engineering planted seeds for architecting the method of Deep Self Design.
What inspired you to develop the Deep Self Design™ method, and how does it differ from traditional approaches to personal growth and inquiry?
By age 47, I experienced three seismic spiritual and psychological upheavals—one that could conceivably be categorized as satori, one that was an arduous slog through personal architectures of perception and belief that no longer served, and one that was shamanic, bridging ordinary and non-ordinary realities and bringing me into intimate, sustained contact with immaterial realms of spirit that are as real as the ground we walk on. Each of these experiences mandated treks into the inner world, distinct and challenging in their own way, and each had its own timeline and requirements to unlearn and rebuild.
Every time my world got tossed, I went into the golden shadow, sometimes by choice, sometimes beyond my volition. But I came home from these brinks by redesigning my perceptions of reality, surrendering views I may have cherished but could no longer hold onto, and befriending facets of my inner world that needed to be known and loved. I observed this process and obsessively logged what approaches to self-repair really worked—not on paper but in landscapes of confusion and pain. I sifted through those lessons and teachings and tried to find what was most elegant and most democratic to include in what ultimately became the method of Deep Self Design. To be clear, these were not solo missions.
Self-restoration and self-redesign were only possible in relationship with loving others, but I heavily researched and diligently applied ancient and modern techniques to return to the land of the thriving. Mysterious grace helped me surface time and again, and the only thing I know to do with that grace is to try and serve in the ways available to me, and what’s available to me are techniques for embodied learning. My career taught me collaboration, group facilitation, methods for inquiry and realization, so the method of Deep Self Design was born of these myriad, combined experiences.
Regarding Deep Self Design, you might call the method pragmatic or no-nonsense in the extreme. The human mind is infinitely creative in its capacity to avoid pain and self-delude, so I couldn’t responsibly design a technique that encouraged magical or delusional thinking, or any form of purposeful bypassing. For this reason, DSD isn’t the sexiest personal-development method out there. We ask people to do things many parts of them are uncomfortable with doing at first, like embracing principles of the mind’s design that can feel alien or strange, including multiplicity and porosity.
We also ask students to welcome and stay with emotional discomfort and be self-responsible and active in their efforts to discern where they might be upholding a narrative that’s self-serving but not necessarily life-affirming. A true inner science must be rigorous and perpetually dynamic, committed to mistake-making and experimentation, and that inherently involves vulnerability. Because we use multi-sensory techniques, DSD can be joyous and playful; but it can also be challenging and turbulent. The method is forever in motion, being tested by new experiences in daily life.
In terms of how DSD may differ from other personal-development practices:
- DSD is built on the premise that the majority of experiences we have are not happening out there but are, in fact, happening within us, which makes us incredibly powerful agents of our experiences.
- DSD is DIY. We intentionally empower individuals to do their own work and ultimately to not rely on us for insights. We set people up for success and then let them make themselves successful overtime.
- DSD emphasizes visual thinking and multi-sensory work as essential reflective and self-awareness techniques.
- DSD emphasizes curiosity and not-knowing as crucial places to return to when we are stuck or unable to see with clarity.
- DSD emphasizes the biological and neurological formation of assumptions and belief systems that hijack our perceptions and drive our behaviors.
- DSD brings in the Zen perspective of constructed identities and worldviews we cling to that, in themselves, cause suffering and therefore require examination.
- DSD emphasizes self-compassion as a basecamp for those times when our internal system is not available for any kind of shift or change. We do not muscle through; we deepen our curiosity and wonder.
How has your training in Zen Buddhism and Internal Family Systems influenced your approach to resolving internal challenges in both individuals and organizations?
Zen is a pragmatic approach to softening reality distortions in the mind with the aim of generating a more wise and compassionate way of life. Internal Family Systems is an evidence-based psychotherapeutic method to address unmet pain with the aim of dissolving barriers to connection. Both have profound respect for what I refer to as our “Little Minds”—those tiny frictions in our neurological landscapes and our energetic fields that disrupt the harmonious flow of everything. Both are also powerful beyond description—one must have direct experience to understand the value they can bring to your life.
And both profoundly informed the method of Deep Self Design. DSD would not exist without long, deep dives into those rivers. If I attempted to summarize how they function, I would say that Zen helps students build an internal container spacious enough to hold our messy humanity with benevolence while IFS leverages that spaciousness by inviting in any Little Mind that needs to be seen, heard, loved and ultimately liberated. Zen and IFS are exquisite partners; together they’re a force for profound awakening. I credit those disciplines with much of my well-being today. The innovation of Deep Self Design pays homage to their wisdom and efficacy.
Can you share the personal crises that led to your spiritual awakening in 2007 and how they shaped your work in inner science?
Relatively speaking, my life has been a tough school but also a generous and kind one. The conditions of that journey are laced with many types of trauma—acute, chronic, complex, developmental, medical, intergenerational, relational—including moral and spiritual injury—so it would require a few memoirs to describe my personal crises with respectful context. To give you a sense of the flavor, one working title of my first memoir is All the Special Hells.
I’ve written some about my experience online but very little in the grand scheme of things. I know how powerful writing and publishing can be and the impact they can have on your public and private life, so I’m in no hurry to wrap language around my origin story. In due time. Perhaps it will suffice to say that, at age 47, those three spiritual and psychological collapses I referenced earlier have been portals to my inner-science devotion. Akin to how Oliver Sacks knew the brain’s hardware through his patients whose faculties malfunctioned, I, too, gained intimate access to the design of the mind when I saw it open up and break down. Joy, equanimity, and psychological stability, for me, were hard won so I don’t take them for granted.
I’m committed to facilitating useful techniques for others who find themselves unexpectedly grappling for vitality but unable to find tools that make a real difference.
What role does visual thinking play in your current work, and how do you integrate it with your Deep Self Design™ practices?
A sizable percent of the global population are predominantly visual thinkers, which means that a significant part of our brain is devoted to processing visual information as a way of navigating the world. Because of this default, visual language in all its permutations is a powerful medium for exploration, memory, engagement, insight, creativity, meditation, reflection, communication, on and on. It’s an extraordinary ally in any effort to learn, grow, and awaken.
At the Center for Deep Self Design, we work with people in the inner world and that information—stories we have about reality, limiting beliefs, assumptions, perceptions—is invisible. We can see the outcomes of those operating systems in our words and deeds, but we struggle to see the upstream causes. In service to that, we use visual thinking techniques to make the invisible visible so that it becomes significantly more workable.
This can be as simple as doodling in a journal with a prompt or as sophisticated as mapping your internal system, atomizing architectures of perceptions and ideas around a topic, then dismantling, innovating, or improvising around them to find what’s receptive to change.
How do you balance your roles as an author, entrepreneur, and Zen chaplain-in-formation, and what insights have you gained from navigating these diverse paths?
I’m not sure I balance them inasmuch as holding and weaving them together. Sometimes, one of these roles moves into the foreground while the others temporarily recede. In a creative life, it’s difficult—if not impossible—to predict what will arise in work or collaborative projects, so I consistently sense and respond to what’s needed and what might serve. For me, being ‘entrepreneurial’ doesn’t singularly point to business-building, which I do enjoy; it points more broadly to being cognitively agile and emotionally flexible. It points to resourcefulness and adaptation, to a capacity to embrace uncertainty rather than perpetually running from it. As to being an author and chaplain-in-formation, I don’t think I could navigate the world any other way.
I sense-make, communicate, and use my voice through both writing and visual language (what I affectionately call ‘doodling’) and being an author has given me the opportunity to reach people I might otherwise not have been able to find. I think of publishing as sending a signal flare into the world, hoping those who can use my words and messages will find them. In terms of chaplaincy, no matter what environment I’m in and for reasons that elude me, I find myself frequently holding space for people in pain, those walking sometimes very thin lines between okay-ness and collapse, or life and death. This is one of the more profound aspects of chaplaincy work and it’s something I do naturally, although the degree of skillfulness is debatable and can always improve. Even with my clumsiness, people, sometimes complete strangers, come to me with their deepest sorrow.
When I have enough spaciousness (outside of those portals that come for me), I’m available to come alongside them, to hold even the bleakest of experiences so they may feel less alone. I have not completed my formal chaplaincy training with Upaya Zen Center—perhaps in a couple of years—but my informal chaplaining has been a part of my life since the earliest days. And I’ve been the beneficiary of warm hands extended during my own times of suffering so mindful, active care—formal, informal, spontaneous, or planned—is the only thing that makes any sense.
