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#10 Erick Godsey - Do The Hard Thing
4 Plays3 years ago
Erick is dedicated to the path of growth, personal development, and understanding the deep layers of mankind and who he is. In return, what he learns through is exploration of philosophy, psychology, mythology, journaling, dreams coaching, and plant medicine. H then serves this back to other as lessons and teaching through his podcast “The Myths That Make Us”, the book he is writing and coaching in Aubrey Marcus’s mastermind “Fit For Service”.
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SEBASTIAN ENGSTROM
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Transcript
Introduction to Eric Godsey and His Background
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to episode number 10. I am your host Sebastian Engstrom. And today Eric Godsey joins us. He is just one phenomenal human being. He has the biggest heart of, yeah, he's up there of the people that I've met. He is deep in psychology, spiritual work, philosophy, anything that makes us tick. So if you're interested in up leveling and understanding
00:00:34
Speaker
who you are deep within personal development work, why we function the way we do going into the psyche mindset of really what makes us work the way we do. And this is the podcast for you. We go very deep in these topics and we explore
00:00:58
Speaker
Eric is a writer and he is the host of The Make Us and he is a coach.
00:01:10
Speaker
for the Fit for Service community, a mastermind led by Aubrey Marcus. So he has had a journey from on it and now he's here today, one incredible human being. So thank you for tuning in. And if you haven't done so, so far, please leave a review or click five stars. Give a follow, subscribe, takes you five seconds.
00:01:36
Speaker
And that will help us reach more people. And why I'm asking, because this is a healing message. So this in return will help other people too. So I appreciate you doing that. Thank you. So our performers, we get after it.
00:01:53
Speaker
This leaves our nervous system taxed. It can be run down because we're always on the go. This is to give you a break. This is the reset. It's to get you back into truly and fully being you and to give back to someone else.
Breathing Exercise and Self-Love
00:02:12
Speaker
gonna do a breathing exercise if you want to skip this three minutes and 30 seconds ahead please don't do this if you're in your car I'm gonna start with putting one hand on your heart when your stomach close your eyes and you're gonna breathe in
00:02:29
Speaker
And as you do this, you're going to say, I love you and your name. And do this as you breathe out, so you never gave one person love in life. So we're going to start with doing this in three, two, one. I love you and your name.
00:03:19
Speaker
Now I forgive you and your name.
00:03:29
Speaker
In Out In Out In Out In
00:04:00
Speaker
And now I'm going to focus on one person, anyone that comes to mind. This person is going to have the greatest day of their life. They have the biggest smile on their face and they are a beaming of joy. They are so happy because everything that has ever happened in their life
00:04:24
Speaker
is now in the past. And we think of the searches in the future. And they're right here, right now. And they feel the energy of being alive. Just the most beautiful gift that we all have. And they know it.
00:04:44
Speaker
they feel the love radiating from them and they're giving it to everything and everyone else around them and they're receiving it back because they know the greatest thing they can do is to be of service is to be in your truth is to be loved by doing so you will receive love
00:05:19
Speaker
Eric Godsey.
Eric's Early Influences and Psychology Interest
00:05:21
Speaker
Freaking phenomenal to have you on board. I've been reading deep in the ancient Greek philosophies and the names such as Socrates.
00:05:34
Speaker
Plato You have Aristotle diving deeper into stoicism and it all is some of the deeper roots of truly where your fascination ties in of psychology and absolutely and and and that's your part of my mind for quite a bit of it and The I think some of the similarities that we have are
00:06:01
Speaker
from, from how your fascination with psychology started. Um, but before diving into that, that is your story. That is not mine to tell. In short, thank you for being on and, uh, for being who you are and freaking love the new, the new look, the glasses, the hair, the beard fricking. Thank you, brother. Yeah, man. Thank you for having me on and thank you for seeing me, man. Yeah. Um,
00:06:30
Speaker
Speaking of, why do you think, at least from my point of view, I associate you with the master of human behavior, psychology, understanding, especially the Jungian psychology, but it has its roots somewhere. How did it all start? Yeah. So it started with my mother's depression when I was a kid.
00:06:55
Speaker
I had a relationship with her that when the light was behind her eyes, I felt like a prince, like the just abundant love that she poured into me. Freud has a quote and it's, a man can think he can change the world of his mother loved him. And there's this idea that if you have
00:07:20
Speaker
that deep connection with the very first human that you ever interact with, which is always the mother. It imbues something inside of you that really gives you a sense of self-love and confidence. And I had that, but there would also be times where she would be in her room for the entire weekend. There would be times where she would be crying at the kitchen table looking at bills and wouldn't cook dinner. And there was this part of me that was just like deeply curious as to what that even was. And my mom,
00:07:50
Speaker
kind of mythologizes my early life and tells me that I would come home from like first grade and I would ask her to sit down with me and I would explain the behaviors of all the kids throughout the day and I would ask why did they do that why did they do that and not from a place of like any emotionality just curiosity and I remember
00:08:13
Speaker
I always loved reading as a kid. And when I was in like third grade, these two kids started a Egyptian mythology club and they didn't let anyone else join. And I remember being like angry, like that's unfair. So I'm going to start a Greek mythology club.
00:08:30
Speaker
And it was a thing that we would meet in the library during recess and nobody showed up because it was third grade and there was recess time. But I started reading Greek mythology first in spite of these kids, but then I really got into it. And I remember I came home one day and I was telling my dad and he was like, you should check out these books. And he had a little library and he gave me like three or four books on Norse mythology.
00:08:56
Speaker
And like, I did not notice about you. I'm, I'm, I'm truly fascinated. Please keep going. Yeah. And as a third grader, my parents let me read about conquest and deep emotional, like psychological ideas. And like rape is a huge part of like Greek mythology and they just fucking, it's just out there. And, um, I remember even as a kid being like, Zeus kind of sucks.
00:09:23
Speaker
And then I learned about Odin. And I was like, Odin's a king. Like I remember really vibing with Odin. And then after reading, like I probably read like eight to nine books on mythology when I was in third and fourth grade. And then I eventually got into reading about the King Arthur myths. And I remember those being some of my like favorite experiences as a child, was reading like the myths of a Parsival, Sir Gawain,
00:09:52
Speaker
And the green knight like that's one of my favorite stories of all time i'm really excited that they're making it into a movie It's coming out soon. It looks amazing but um That set of groundwork that I totally forgot about once puberty started and once puberty started it was all about basketball and girls and then um, I tore my rotator cuff when I was a
00:10:15
Speaker
junior in high school. And I was good enough at basketball where if I hadn't have torn my rotator cuff, I could have played in college, I would have been a role player. I probably would have ended up playing like a shooting guard in the European league and making like $15,000 until I was in my mid thirties. And it just worked out that that didn't happen. But I remember the day I tore my rotator cuff,
00:10:37
Speaker
I came home and my mom was taking an online philosophy class and she told me the first thing I ever heard about philosophy was Plato's cave and she told me that story and I just remember being fascinated but I didn't let the dream of basketball die for like four more years and then it wasn't until my freshman year of college where I really let that dream die and I embraced like
00:11:03
Speaker
I was going to school for cognitive psychology. Really quick before we go too far away from basketball, when you say 15,000, I just want to clarify for the listeners, that's a year. That's not a month. That's not in a week. That's in a year. Yeah. Please go ahead. The top of my athletic ceiling was being a role player on a European league. And I just recognized that that's where that was at.
00:11:28
Speaker
I might have taken that, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, it was taken from me because it wasn't my Dharma. Right. So, I was always very intelligent and I didn't have to try hard in high school, so I had no study habits.
00:11:44
Speaker
And my life unfolded in a way where I had my own house when I was a senior in high school. And when I was in college, I lived alone. I didn't have any parental supervision. I didn't have roommates. And my first year of college, I just stopped going to all my classes because it got hard. And I just had no idea of how to even begin to try. And at the end of my freshman year of high school or of college,
00:12:11
Speaker
I started smoking weed and I was watching a Netflix standup special by Joe Rogan. And I didn't know who Joe Rogan was. I had never heard of a podcast yet. And Joe Rogan had a joke where he was basically saying, you know, we think we're smart. We think we're the smart people. But if the electricity went out, what would you do? You would do what I would do and you would sit here and you would fucking wait.
00:12:34
Speaker
And if the electricity didn't come back on in like five minutes, you'd be like these fucking idiots can't get the light on. But the truth is you don't know how electricity works. You don't know how to make a light bulb. You don't know how this microphone works. Where are the retards? You know, and he that was a word that could be said back then. But I had this epiphany.
00:12:54
Speaker
This like a truly life-changing epiphany on this ugly yellow couch in my room watching this stand up high alone. And I realized I don't know how to do anything.
00:13:08
Speaker
other than argue with my teachers. Like that was the only sense of control that I had ever really used in life outside of basketball. And something clicked in me that night. And the next day, my personality radically changed.
Academia and Life Transformations
00:13:24
Speaker
And I became completely obsessed with giving everything to my schoolwork, reading all the textbooks,
00:13:32
Speaker
making myself go back to class. I didn't tell my parents that my GPA was a 0.7 and that I had dropped out of all my classes. And for the next three years, I ended up graduating with like a 3.8. I had to retake all those classes. I got A's and I just completely became obsessed with studying, reading philosophy, watching lectures over anything that I could find.
00:13:58
Speaker
The following year I got into psychedelics for the first time and it was because I heard my first podcast ever, which was between Aubrey and Joe Rogan. It was the first time Aubrey was on Joe Rogan's podcast and they talked about this thing called Ayahuasca. And then I downloaded every episode that Joe Rogan ever recorded with Duncan Trussell because I Googled what are the best Joe Rogan episodes and that's the first thing that I saw.
00:14:18
Speaker
And I just, over the course of like three days, listened to like 36 hours of Jill Rogan and Duncan Trussell talking about everything. And then I did mushroom. And then they had probably recorded seven episodes of three hours each. So it was about 21 hours, you know? And
00:14:42
Speaker
When I was a sophomore, I had this like 10 week period where I did either mushrooms or LSD or DMT every weekend. I don't recommend that, but it really baptized me in the experiential knowing of psychology. Because at that point I was an atheist growing up and then by the end of that I was agnostic.
00:15:00
Speaker
And then I found the work of Carl Jung, and that is what changed my life. It was Carl Jung that gave me a rationalistic bridge to understanding spirituality. He allowed me to begin to understand what my dreams are doing, and that radically changed my life. And then I have basically been reading some type of psychology or philosophy book every day since then, and it's been about nine years.
00:15:31
Speaker
Wow. What are you reading today? Psychology, philosophy related. I'm actually reading, I'm rereading all of Steven Pressfield's work around like how to create, how to be a professional. Like this past year has actually been the year of me opening my heart.
00:15:55
Speaker
And by opening my heart and actually exposing myself to feelings, this is the most like unfocused I've been in my mind. And I was just talking to someone yesterday and she was like, that's not what it looks like from your Instagram and from your podcast. It seems that this is the most dialed in you've ever been. But the truth is, this is the most unfocused
00:16:20
Speaker
cognitively, I've ever felt towards my work and my Dharma, but it's because the call this year has been to really feel all the things in my heart that I've walled off since I was a child. And I'm just now at the end of the year starting to get back into bringing
00:16:40
Speaker
the level of focus I know that I'm capable of to my Dharma and to what I want to create in 2021.
Psychedelics and Spiritual Growth
00:16:49
Speaker
And so I've revisiting all of Steven Pressfield's works. And that's what I'm currently
00:16:55
Speaker
What was it that prompted you to start feeling your feelings? What was it that became so clear to you? Two years ago, I went down to Peru and I did Huachuma, which is a type of San Pedro. It's a type of cactus. It's a psychedelic.
00:17:11
Speaker
And I got to do it under the guidance of Don Howard, who is one of the greatest shamans, and he passed away last year. But on the second day of drinking Wachuma, he does this thing where he makes really intense eye contact with each person before he pours the amount that he feels that person needs.
00:17:34
Speaker
And we hadn't spoken, but he watched me on the first day of drinking Wachuma. And at the beginning of day two, and the way he looks at you, no human has ever looked at me the way that he looked at me. And it feels like there's a infinite line of shamans behind him, and they're all looking through his eyes directly at you. And it's one of the most
00:17:57
Speaker
intense experiences I've ever had. But he's making eye contact with me in front of 20 people. And I knew most of these people. And he slowly points to his head while he's making eye contact. And he slowly shakes his head no. And he slowly brings his finger down to his heart. And he shakes his head yes. And I just start crying. I felt so seen without any words by a man who felt like he embodied masculine grace more powerfully than anyone I'd ever met.
00:18:27
Speaker
And the end of that entire trip when I was coming home, I made a commitment to my God that I was ready to clear all the walls that I had built around my heart to keep me from connecting to the world. And I thought consciously what that meant is I was gonna start to do open relationships and I was gonna really challenge myself in the crucible and the fire of open relationships.
00:18:56
Speaker
And when I got back from Peru, I started doing open relationships like a student and not like an actual human. And I never, I did for about six months and I never allowed myself to truly be vulnerable with any of these women because the expectation from the beginning was that it was going to be open. And so it didn't challenge me. And then I got into my first monogamous relationship where I had the intention to feel fully and that
00:19:26
Speaker
lasted for a couple of months. It ended in a way where it was pretty painful. She cheated on me. It was the first time I'd ever been cheated on. And I felt that fully. And I was single for a while. And then at the beginning of this year, I ended up becoming romantic with someone who's been a really close friend of mine that like, I've never been romantic with someone that I fell in love with as a friend first. That just wasn't how I operated.
00:19:54
Speaker
And this year has been the culmination of that prayer that I've made two years ago, where I fell in love and her truth was that she was at a point where she couldn't commit. And I essentially experienced without me wanting to all the things I was seeking to experience from open relationship. And it's kicked my ass, but it's also completely upgraded me in like every sense of the word when it comes to how I relate to my truth,
00:20:23
Speaker
Um, my confidence with women and my confidence as a man. And so it's worked out perfectly, but it's been, you know, be careful what you wish for is the old adage. Usually.
Balancing Emotions and Professional Life
00:20:41
Speaker
I reflect upon what you're speaking to in terms of career. And when it comes to the, when you see behind me the feminine and the masculine, so the wave and the force and the peacock being the feminine. And I see the, well, turning off emotions as of course, the masculine is something I've practiced and I think so many of us do practice.
00:21:05
Speaker
I've used that in the way of emotions are distractions to getting things done and therefore being validated and therefore knowing my worth through what I do. Emotions are worthless and while fit for service was a significant part of truly allowing myself to be seen and what has been created by you and so many of the other coaches.
00:21:30
Speaker
Also, a significant part was, of course, was just staying curious, listening to what was truth. A significant book that came up for me was Rethinking Success that was released this year in April. I can remember, let's see, actually, J. Douglas Hawley. Holiday is his name. Holiday.
Redefining Success and COVID Reflections
00:21:52
Speaker
Not related to Ryan Holiday, but incredible food for thought and a lot of it is derived within philosophy. And he truly goes into what is the meaning behind success? What is the meaning of success? And so many of us define success by the results that we achieve, by the numbers that we achieve, by
00:22:13
Speaker
What is truly who we are when we look at a spreadsheet or who we are in our bank account or what we what it says on the on the business card and that is also one of the main reasons why this Athena codes Athena exists today is because of that because I got so lost in a masculine and there is and the Greek use the term hubris and and that is something so over confidence or thinking too highly of thyself
00:22:42
Speaker
And especially it's something very common here in Silicon Valley, very common. And it almost left me in.
00:22:53
Speaker
not having the relationships that truly fulfilled me. Sophia and Athena both are derived, I mean, wisdom in one form or a wave, and hence why the name is Safina. To me, the relationships, and that's interesting that you bring that up, that is a different, there are so many different paths of experiencing these truths. And
00:23:15
Speaker
What you shared with how you experienced that through relationships, I'm glad you got to experience in that way. For me, and that is one of the things that I want to share too, to not experience it through death. For me, I truly need to be beaten upside my head and experienced through death.
00:23:37
Speaker
And COVID was one of the accelerators now that truly hit home where feeling so much of what everyone else is going through. And that's something that I always try to push it aside and thought was, well, of course everyone else can feel this way and more embracing
00:23:57
Speaker
Okay. Me being able to connect and feel what others are feelings is not something delusional. It is not just a state of being that can be reasoned away, but it is something to be listened to and not always to measure my worth of who I am by what I can produce. And like you're saying too, which is interesting.
00:24:18
Speaker
when I listen to and when I connect, when I honor myself the most, that in turns reflects to other people and people give me that feedback as well. Wow, like you are truly tuned in right now. And I remember one moment specifically when we're in quarantine and it was complete lockdown here in California.
00:24:40
Speaker
And they were sharing that, okay, we're going to start opening things up. And part of me, I was so grateful. I found myself incredibly grateful that they had closed things down because it allowed me to just be at home. And it's something I...
Athena Codes and Stoicism
00:25:05
Speaker
It's seen as something very negative. Like, who are you? You're supposed to be this honorable man that you can look up to, and then you choose to, and it's better for you to stay at home. Like, what is that about? And it's just honoring that, okay, there are sides.
00:25:21
Speaker
and honoring the you can say the sensitive side and honoring the introspective part of myself and truly needing that space to generate the power to go when I do go without to generate that first within and realizing so many of the truth that I came to came during that period because of the silence because of this stillness
00:25:46
Speaker
It's a rather long winded response I'm coming up with here. But what came through me was it was with Above and Beyond, they have meditations, a album of meditations and just how it was spoken to by Elena Brower, which is an incredible meditation teacher and yoga teacher, how
00:26:10
Speaker
This is truly a time for inner reflection to go within, to feel the feelings. And it's something I'm coming out from, from a reason visit to Tulum here three weeks ago and coming out of it, understanding
00:26:28
Speaker
There is great power to feeling your feelings. But when, and this is going back to now, that led me back to philosophy and tying it full circle with your childhood studies of today as well, is the reasoning and the stoicism. There is a way to reason through your emotions sometimes as well, but it's so important to feel the extremes, I feel like going very deep into truly, truly feeling.
00:26:54
Speaker
And then truly just shutting it off. So you have a wide spectrum of understanding the world, but also yourself. And going into what I'm also curious about is the hierarchy of needs, massive hierarchy of needs. You have your own, what it looks like hierarchy of needs, you have your own pyramid behind you. But that truly goes into self actualization and one of the basic things of self actualization. If you don't have the basics, it's very hard to get up to the very top.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, but I'll stop right there. There's a lot of talking there and I'll let you the pyramid. I'd love to hear from them. What is that? Yeah, so one of the things that comes up when I listen to what you said that I want to articulate for people is I think the misconception and the misuse of stoicism is that you use your mind
00:27:45
Speaker
to not feel your emotions and that that's wisdom. And I don't think that that's wisdom, to be honest. I think what stoicism at its core, when it's used in a way that makes you the most effective is that you can feel your emotion fully and then act from a place of clarity. And so you're not behaving or acting from a place of reactivity
00:28:12
Speaker
But if you cut off feeling your emotions, you will make yourself sick. And my understanding of psychology makes that very, very, very clear. And so the gift of stoicism is to learn how to... There's a poem by Rumi and it's called The Guest House. And the essential point of the poem is whatever the universe or your unconscious sends to your conscious mind as a guest to the doorway of your house,
00:28:41
Speaker
invite them in and let them do whatever they want to your house. And when they're ready, invite them to sit down and have tea with you. And sometimes there's going to be sadness and sadness will steal a painting off of your wall. But don't be upset. The universe has sent sadness to your home. Sometimes it'll be anger and anger will smash the table. Don't be upset. Anger was sent by your unconscious, by the universe. And when they're ready, invite them to sit down and have tea with you.
00:29:10
Speaker
like feel and talk to your emotions, understand them, honor them, see them, and don't react to them. And so that's my invitation to people who are interested in stoicism is don't use it as a way to bypass your emotions because that will make you sick. But you can use it as a tool to invite them to sit down and have tea with you.
00:29:34
Speaker
Um, and so this thing behind me is what I call a goal pyramid.
Goal Setting and Personal Ethos
00:29:39
Speaker
Um, I have an article on my website that explains how to use it, but before I got the job it on it. Um, so the first job I got after I graduated high school or college with my fancy degree in cognitive psychology was I was wrapping burritos at Chipotle for $7 an hour. And so I was the first one in my family to graduate high school. And I was the first one in my family to go to college and I was the first one to graduate.
00:30:03
Speaker
And I had no idea about what the world was like after you graduate from college, because the story that most students are given is you go to college and you're going to be set up for life. And that was not the motherfucking case. And as the months were going by working at Chipotle, I realized I'm going to have to create my life that I want. And so I got Tim Ferriss's book, The 4-Hour Workweek.
00:30:26
Speaker
And I read it every Saturday and Sunday until, and I had to read it three times until I could get it because I'd never even been exposed to the word entrepreneur. Both of my parents were in, in the military. And so the entire structure of the world that I grew up in is you follow orders. There wasn't even the concept.
00:30:47
Speaker
of creating your own life. And so I had to read that book three times to even understand what the fuck he was saying. And the thing that he talks about is one of the most effective ways to free yourself to have the life that you want is to sell some type of online product.
00:31:07
Speaker
The way that you do that is you become an expert in something that's useful. And I thought about it for a couple of months and I decided that I wanted to be an expert on habit change. And he said that the way to become an expert is to buy the top five books ever written on a subject and read those five books. And if you really understand those five books, you will be in the top 5% of people in the world who understand that subject.
00:31:28
Speaker
So of course I bought 12. And over the course of two years, I read each of those books and I started my website. The first website I ever had is still on the internet. It's called godseasirony.blogspot.com. And it's terrible, but I will never get rid of it. And it serves as like an ode to where I started. And there's like a hundred articles on there and no one was reading my shit back then, but I was beginning to do the work of becoming an expert on habit change.
00:31:59
Speaker
I had a moment probably two or three years ago where I took some LSD. I went on a long walk and I just had this epiphany of the structure behind me. And the base of the pyramid are my fundamental habits, the daily habits that my highest potential would embody every day. And then the tier above that are, let me look quick.
00:32:22
Speaker
are like specific goals that I want to accomplish this year. And then the tier above that are the areas of expertise that I want to deepen my knowledge of. And then above that are what are the most important like Dharma activities in my life. And then the tier above that is what is my ethos?
00:32:46
Speaker
And then the tear above that is an eye and it represents my potential that's watching me every day. And I make a new one of these each year and it kind of sets the tone for what I aim to do that year. I love the
00:33:04
Speaker
self-creation of that. I spoke to a mentor of mine, someone who I work with today.
Philosophy and Personal Truths
00:33:12
Speaker
He was told by a friend, why do you keep on quoting these other people? You have such immense wisdom in yourself, like stop quoting people and just put out content that you formulated in your own way. And that is original. And when he said that, I'm like, wow,
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And this is a way of you are interpreting it too. And it's something that I keep on going back and forth between as well. When I was researching Greek philosophy, everything from the Spartans and then going into different themes of ancient Greece, of Spartans, Athenians, what it meant to be truly a Spartan and
00:33:58
Speaker
and reading a book on that and truly understanding what goes into the habits and there's a lot of darkness I was not aware of in the Spartan society but truly
00:34:09
Speaker
learning about and feeling into it and something I haven't really done before is feeling into when you're engaged into a topic, a person, a group of people, and something I completely blocked off before, but there are certain parts of that book I connected with, but the majority of the concept I felt a lot of resistance towards. I wanted to push it away and that made me feel
00:34:38
Speaker
uncomfortable and almost nauseous and maybe there's a time and place we go into the habits of that at a later point but the point of this is there's so much wisdom that you can derive intellectually in reading and learning
00:34:58
Speaker
but it's the, you can also refer to the Greek Gnosis, but when you know something and when you know it's so true in your body and when you can reflect and end on it from a emotional state and go into
00:35:14
Speaker
what you were saying before, truly feeling it, feeling your feelings. I think that is starting to feel like graduating to other levels where you're not just taking the truth of others have created in the past, but you are now creating your own truth. You're formulating what is true to you. One way of articulating three, like you're like the king, the magician, the mystic. There's a fourth one, right?
00:35:43
Speaker
King warrior magician lover and then the fifth one is the mystic. There we go. Yes the Stoicism has something similar or the the four virtues and Going into creating something on my own. I was unknown. I did not know necessarily what these specifics were and you just mentioned this comment that was made based on your shirt and
00:36:08
Speaker
And of a post, and I looked at what the topics were, and you discussed that book with Aubrey, with Aubrey Marcus. And of Stoicism, those four virtues, these are all virtues that I've come to in my own reflections and in my own, you could say, discovery and curiosity.
00:36:29
Speaker
And it's been incredibly very humbling to research philosophy and also psychology over the last few weeks specifically and not listen to podcasts. I completely shut that down.
00:36:47
Speaker
2500 years ago, people were having the exact same problems. We're feeling the exact same things and having the exact same epiphanies, but had a slightly different reality. And it's incredibly humbling just to realize how we're not so far apart. How even though we feel like we're making and having these advanced ideas that are so new to us by the latest and greatest podcasters, these are ideas that usually been around for such a long time.
00:37:16
Speaker
There are ways of modernizing it and applying it to a new society and a new way of being and thinking and a way to evolve. By doing so, and also one of the biggest things that I'm working on right now is truly feeling into the unknown and letting go and surrendering because there is knowledge out there. And how do you let that knowledge come to you? Not by learning, not by reading, not by the intellect, not by the mind, but something of a higher intelligence.
00:37:45
Speaker
Because there is that phenomenon of if someone runs the four-minute mile, like someone else in the world will now start crossing that threshold and if one song, one bird sings a specific song or cracks a nut in a specific way, the same species around the world will do the same exact thing and have never met.
00:38:04
Speaker
And exactly this is what comes to me when you're talking about an elaborate answer in response to your pyramid. Like you're applying something to me that's integrity and trust in yourself. And something that I admire you for is you have started to take action
00:38:25
Speaker
by that which you believe in and that you trust in yourself. Like you, even though you have doubts about yourself, you still take action. And it'd be very interesting to hearing your story with that. And even, I'm sure doubts still come up and there's a big task at hand right now with the book and a topic that, yeah, I'll let you get into
Art and Historical Wisdom
00:38:48
Speaker
it. How is that journey for you?
00:38:51
Speaker
Yeah, so one of the things that came up when I was listening was the function of the artist is to retell the wisdom of history in a way where the generation that they're a part of can understand it. Like Ryan Holiday is doing that with stoicism. It is the function of the artist to go find the wisdom from the past and then to remix it
00:39:15
Speaker
in a way where the people who won't go be drawn to the weird specific things that your artistic calling brings you to, but you can bring it to them. You know, and that's the last stage of the hero's journey is bring home the medicine.
00:39:29
Speaker
And each of us has an inner whisper, it's our Damon, that is going to call us to very specific and weird things that most other people won't be called to. And that one of your responsibilities as an artist to your generation is to retell the wisdom from the past to the people now who won't go and find it. And I think that that is good.
00:39:52
Speaker
And I love to quote people who inspire me, and then I riff off of their quotes, you know? So I think that there's a beautiful symbiosis there. But to answer your question, I've always had a strong connection to this feeling of divinity, even when I was an atheist. Like, even when I was an atheist in high school, I still prayed every night.
00:40:15
Speaker
And my prayer was never to ask for anything. It was simply to say thank you about my life and my family and my mind and the things that I was grateful for. By studying Jungian psychology, it really connected me to the truth that there is something else inside each of us that is way bigger than the ego.
00:40:40
Speaker
And that thing has a personality. That thing has desires. And that thing is watching you in a very real way. Like there's a thing inside of you that is watching you right now. There's a thing inside of me that's watching me right now. And that thing knows every thought I've ever had. That thing has experienced everything that I've ever experienced. That thing knows when I lie.
00:41:04
Speaker
That thing knows when I'm a coward. That thing knows when I'm brave. That thing knows when I do the right thing. That thing knows when I do the wrong thing. And that thing gives feedback on my actions every day through my intuition, through any type of chronic illness or any type of chronic pain. It talks to me through my dreams too. And it's been a journey for the last six to seven years
00:41:33
Speaker
to cultivate a relationship with that thing where I can look it in the eye and I have a tapestry in front of my bed above my altar that serves as my portal to this thing, but also the moon is a very forever reason. It's always served as a portal. But to cultivate a relationship where I can look that thing in the eye and I can say, I am showing up and I know that you see me and I'm gonna show up today and I love you, thank you. And the biggest thing for me
00:42:02
Speaker
has been two vows, and both of these vows I've made in the last three years. The first vow that I made after having the hardest psychedelic experience I've ever had, where I accidentally ate 180 milligrams of THC, and I had the most harrowing experience I've ever had, that when I came out of that, my first vow was, I will do what I am called to do even if I am afraid to do it, period.
00:42:30
Speaker
And I started, and it was after that experience that I went on my first Tinder date after being in a relationship for four years. And I'd been single for a while and I've been afraid of rejection. So I had avoided any type of opportunities like that. Ended up having an amazing like three week relationship with a super smart, beautiful woman. The sex was fucking phenomenal. And it came from me doing what I was afraid to do. And then two days after going on that first date, I applied to on it.
00:42:57
Speaker
And I got the job. And then like five days after that, I moved to Austin. And before going into my interview with Aubrey, I had this feeling of he is going to ask me at some point to go do ayahuasca. And I will say yes, even though I'll be terrified.
00:43:11
Speaker
And then I just showed up to work every day. I did what the fuck I was asked to do. And he eventually called me into his office and he was like, do you want to go to Peru? And I thought he was asking me to do ayahuasca and I was terrified and I said yes, but that invitation was actually when I did Wachuma. And the call after Wachuma was,
00:43:32
Speaker
Go open your heart." And I said, yes. The other vow that I made about three years ago, after studying Jordan Peterson's work, if his work was a whale, I ate every single piece of flesh on that whale. I read everything, I listened to everything. And my vow that I got from listening to his work is, I will speak and act the truth every day to the best of my ability, no matter what.
00:44:01
Speaker
doing what you're afraid to do and then committing to being in truth cultivates a sense of self-trust and self-love that brings so much grace into your life that once you feel it for even a couple of weeks, you can't go back. Like, I don't even have the free will, it feels like.
00:44:23
Speaker
to like, if I don't do what I'm asked to do by that whisper, it will haunt me so much that I can't not do it. And if I lie, if I tell even a white lie, it haunts me. And so those two things have called me to all the things that I've needed to do. And it's also generated this sense of self belief and self trust and self love that
00:44:54
Speaker
If I am asked by The Whisperer to do anything, I do it, period. And it has been the most useful belief that I've played with ever.
00:45:08
Speaker
You have two examples and one for each that you've experienced recently. Um, so talking about the mental illness lie, um, is something that I'm terrified to talk about because I know it's going to bring a lot of arrows to me, but I know that it's what I'm going to write in my first book and I'm afraid and I'm going to do it. Period.
00:45:33
Speaker
And then truth telling, like this happens almost every day. Like a romantic partner today asked me how I felt about her and the relationship feels like it's coming to an end and I told her the truth. And the true thing is truly a daily thing that I will, I for sure will not tell an outright lie. And where it gets more nuanced is, do you lie by omission?
00:46:02
Speaker
You know, like that's a hard one and it's a constant invitation to tell the truth. I'm trying to think of a specific example recently where it was hard to tell the truth and I did it.
00:46:20
Speaker
It happens on podcasts often. Like if someone asks me a question, like I'm either going to tell them exactly what it is, or I'll be honest that it's something that I'm not comfortable telling. But I actually can't recall a time recently where the truth had been hard, uh, because it's so like second nature now. It's something when I hear it, I listen to it in all.
00:46:50
Speaker
And something you say you have lifting partners when you go to your gym, this is truly something accountability, a lifting partner that I would have. Cause yeah, I would say goddamn, like this is, this is, this is hard stuff, but that is, I mean, Yeah. The thing that I want to offer that like what truly makes it not hard is faith. It's hard to start because you don't.
00:47:20
Speaker
know that it's the best possible way to be. The gifts that have come into my life from doing what I'm afraid to do if I'm called to do it because I've been doing it for a couple of years is so massive that it's clearly the most effective way to be.
00:47:41
Speaker
So what was hard was beginning, but because I had such a hard psychedelic experience on that 180 kilograms of THC edible, that it throttled me so badly that none of the fears in my three-dimensional life
00:47:58
Speaker
even compared and unconsciously I had to create that experience in my life to give me the courage to go do all these small things like apply to a job that I really wanted even though I was afraid to be rejected or go on a date with a woman who was interested in me, you know, like it was just these small fears. But once I did that for a couple of weeks, my life transformed so massively that it's just, it's like a duh now. And then the thing about the truth,
00:48:28
Speaker
is it's also a duh. Like once you feel, cause you know, I was like everyone else. And when I was in high school and college, I lied about how many people I slept with. I lied about like accolades and whatever. And the amount of cognitive resources you waste on a day to day basis, holding up any lie. And most people, if you tell one lie, you have to create a whole structure to support that lie of lies.
00:48:58
Speaker
But once you feel what it feels like to go to bed at night and truly know
Mental Health and Pharmaceutical Critique
00:49:04
Speaker
that there is not any relationship in your life where you're not in truth, the amount of peace that it gives you makes it such a fucking duh that it's not even brave. It's just like, it's good for me to drink water every day. I know how good my body feels if I drink a bunch of water.
00:49:26
Speaker
And so it's hard at the beginning, but once you feel the rewards of doing it, it's so viscerally better than to not do it, that it's almost effortless.
00:49:45
Speaker
How has this transferred into the writing of the book? And do you mind sharing what that will be about and your journey and what it's been like now to be a book writer all of a sudden? What is that like? What's interesting is I've been writing for like 10 years now and I've been publishing on my website. Like I know what it feels like to write and to be done and to publish.
00:50:12
Speaker
And what's been great is seeing the backend of how a book is made. And really it's just a, it's a long chain of blog articles and I know how to write a blog article. Um, so, but the journey of like the actual book process was, um, when I did my interview for Aubrey, when I started working at on it three years ago, uh, I told him that I wanted to help him write his next book.
00:50:42
Speaker
Like I told him that in the interview and he was like, okay, maybe. And once he started writing this book, like he told me that he wanted me to help and I helped him create the outline. He pitched the outline, fucking got a huge deal and we started. And so the book is called Master Your Mind, Master Your Life. And it's gonna be a companion book to own the day, own your life. And it's gonna be all about how to master your mind.
00:51:11
Speaker
And what's beautiful is I had thought for a long time that I was going to go get a PhD in clinical psychology. And I read a book during my Chipotle days called Sapiens. And the huge revelation was realizing that if I went and got a PhD,
00:51:31
Speaker
I would essentially be a cog in a machine where I would be dependent on getting funding from either the government or from large corporations and that the only research I would be able to do in most situations would be to beg for money from entities that have a bias. And I realized that if I wanted to do the type of psychology I wanted to do, I would have to create a company that generated its own revenue and then I could do the research that I wanted to do.
00:51:57
Speaker
But getting the chance to be the research writer for this book, I realized, oh my God, I get to write my PhD. I get to do the research I would have done in school, but be completely free to study whatever I want and to get paid for it, as opposed to paying someone else to study the thing that they want me to study, to advance their career.
00:52:18
Speaker
And so I was just on fire and the first chapter was over depression. And that's been something that I've been deeply interested in since I was a child because of my mom. And I just started going down the rabbit hole. And the first thing that I realized was that there's no evidence for the chemical imbalance theory of depression. I have studied psychology for a decade. I had never heard that.
00:52:41
Speaker
And once I saw that, I was like, it felt like I was in a real life mystery novel. And I was like, whoa, what? If you asked a hundred people what causes depression, a hundred people would say a chemical imbalance. And then I started doing the research and I started looking at the actual studies and I found that there is no scientific evidence that supports the chemical imbalance theory of depression or schizophrenia.
00:53:11
Speaker
I started going down the rabbit hole by reading all these books. And then I started to realize that the scientific research on the efficacy of antidepressants and antipsychotic medication is not good. And that it's publicly not good. And that if you just go look at the studies, it's clearly not good. And then I started reading some books about like, so if this is what the science shows, why is this what people believe?
00:53:40
Speaker
And then I found a book called Anatomy of an Epidemic written by Robert Whitaker, and it has over 800 citations. And he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for the research that he did on this subject. But he basically outlined super clearly the history that brought us to pharmaceutical interventions, the history of how they have not been affected,
00:54:05
Speaker
the history of how we have been lied to by specific organizations about their effectiveness, about how the pharmaceutical companies corrupted the institutions in our country that are supposed to oversee mental health. And then the long-term efficacy studies showing that almost all of these psychiatric medications, if you take them long-term, make you sicker. And that just completely
00:54:32
Speaker
blew my mind and I ended up writing like 14,000 words of research for Aubrey's first chapter and he read it and he was, and he called me and he was like, dude, we're playing chess and you just put Godzilla on the board and Godzilla needs to be on the board, but I don't think we can play chess anymore. And so he sat with what I wrote for a couple of days and he was like, okay,
00:54:58
Speaker
You spent 14,000 words talking about how it's fucked up. The focus of the book is going to be to give people solutions. This first chapter is already twice as long as what our chapters are gonna be, so it's not gonna fit. So I'm gonna get you a book deal after we're done with this book, and you can write this story, because it's super important. And we can make this 14,000-word article you wrote be like a article that we published like a month before the book comes out to like,
00:55:27
Speaker
get people interested. And so that has kind of been the path. And now we still have to write his book. But now I have this calling that will come after that book to write my book. And I'm going to share everything that I have found.
00:55:53
Speaker
And I commend you for that incredible bravery. And I think, well, I know myself, even though not having being diagnosed by a doctor, gone through my fair share of what one can call depression. And so many people out there experience it too. And so much of it is undiagnosed and you don't have to put a label on it, but
00:56:18
Speaker
being stuck in a certain state and there's solutions to it. I'm very intrigued by it. I know some of the things that have helped me and there's some of the things that you speak to and two of them being your truths is speak to truth. Like if you're not in truth, it will start to eat at you and it will start to bottle up and it'll make you sick in different ways.
00:56:46
Speaker
And that was one of the main things I'm hearing in the United States today because it felt like I was living by other standards and norms. My parents, but also society were, you were not, you were shunned if you were different than the norm or in acceptable way of being. And I want to be different. I wanted to take it to the extreme. I wanted to be extreme. I wanted to just try and do things as I wanted to do, not the Swedish way. And, um,
00:57:14
Speaker
If I would have continued that, I would have been miserable. And just listening to what you're supposed to do and what you should do. And the bravery of that, what you speak to, of doing something when you know it's right. And if I withhold and not doing it, it's the same thing. It eats at me from the inside and it shows up in so many different ways. And I've gotten to that point of
00:57:42
Speaker
letting go of the reasoning, letting go of the research and the science, because when I've been doing that for too long, and this showed up, especially last year, all these physical ailments starts to show up. And for some people, they don't. And for me, it really does.
00:58:00
Speaker
I have fine-tuned my eating more so than I ever have before. But even if there are certain things, if I don't do it, I get incredibly affected. Like the training, like the speaking and being in truth is having time for myself.
00:58:19
Speaker
And one of the things I think is the most interesting answer and thing that I've ever heard you said when you were asked a question, if you were to prioritize
Spiritual Health and Dharma
00:58:29
Speaker
and make one number one overall four of the elements of health, the emotional health, the physical health, the mental health, and the spiritual health, which one would you pick? Would you mind sharing your answer? A hundred percent. And why? Spiritual health.
00:58:45
Speaker
We are not, the fact that we call it mental health is a reflection of how disconnected we are from the totality of what we are. We are not mental beings. We are not only physical beings. We are not only emotional beings, but our spiritual essence takes care of everything else. And I truly believe that if you get your spiritual health right, in order to do so, we'll take care of everything else. And for me, spiritually,
00:59:16
Speaker
Having a connection with my inner God, where I act in a way where I feel it respects me and that it sees me and that it's proud of me. Like that is the, when you die, people say that we die alone, but we don't. We die with our Damon. And I truly believe that at the end of your life, you will have a moment
00:59:44
Speaker
where you are going to have to confront who you could have been. And if you live your life in spiritual health, I believe that you will get to that point at the end of your life where you look your potential in the eye and you see you because you manifested that shit. Because you did what you were asked to do. You were brave enough and you told the truth. You cultivated and produced the sacred task that your soul wanted you to.
01:00:13
Speaker
and that if you tell the truth, you do what you're afraid to do. You live your Dharma and are of service to the collective in the unique way that your demon is asking you to do it. It takes care of your health because you're going to want to eat well and work out and do the things that your biology needs so you can live your Dharma.
01:00:36
Speaker
It will take care of your mental health because you will feel in flow and you will feel meaning every single day. And it will take care of your emotional health because you will have faith that you are doing the right thing in every moment. So whatever the emotion is that come up,
01:00:53
Speaker
You have faith that this is a part of the texture of the song that I am meant to experience. And because I know what my Dharma is and I know what my craft is, whatever happens to me emotionally, I can turn it into art. And I just feel like it takes care of everything else if you prioritize your spiritual health.
01:01:13
Speaker
That is one of the things that I've been pondering the most, I would say over the last half of a year, a year. Because to me that answer was so profound. Because I've always thought, well okay, you can always start with physical health or you can start with mental health. And that will take care of everything else.
01:01:32
Speaker
And even looking at the Maslow of Higher Care of Needs, like you see, you know, just take care of the safety, the food, the shelter, and everything else comes in different degrees and going upward. And you're taking a very different approach from it. And one of the things that I've been, that comes up a lot, and even I know people who are not, you can say, as embracing of spirituality, as I know I was not before, and especially one would say masculine men, like, oh, that's a bunch of BS, like,
01:02:00
Speaker
If I can touch it, if I can feel it, if I can do something, yeah, that's real. Everything else is out the door. How, how did you come about? Well, you've gone into how you came about. I do have an answer. Yeah. Experiencing. Yeah. Okay. But also how would you recommend steps? And what does your practice look like today for yourself? So, um, when I was in college, I was all mental. Like I was not connected to my emotions.
01:02:28
Speaker
I didn't really know how to take care of my body. And I was a self-proclaimed atheist. I studied philosophy like a insane person. And I was to the point that if someone told me they were hungry, I would say, how do you know you're hungry?
01:02:46
Speaker
You know, like it got to the point where I could barely function. And then I found a type of metaphysics called pragmatism. And pragmatism is a type of philosophy that was born in America and the main proponents were William James and I believe someone named like John Stewart, but I don't know if that's actually his last name because that's also the host of The Daily Show in the 2000s.
01:03:11
Speaker
Pragmatism is an outgrowth of evolutionary biology and the core premise is humans are not designed to be able to know objective truth. Everything that we believe is essentially a tool and you act out what you believe through your actions. So everyone has a philosophy and you live it every day and your actions are a confession of your philosophy.
01:03:36
Speaker
Every idea is essentially a tool that you act out and then just pay attention. If you act out this belief, do you have more of the life that you want? Period. And my embodiment of spirituality comes from pragmatism, which is I've lived the life that comes from not believing in something spiritually. The life was not as effective as this life is now.
01:04:05
Speaker
And when I enact the belief that there is an entity inside of me that is watching my life, that whispers to me, my life is a little bit more effective than if I don't believe that thing. If I believe that, if I do what I am afraid to do, if the whisper asks me to do it, my life has gotten better than when I didn't believe that.
01:04:27
Speaker
If I believe that telling the truth, no matter what always produces the best possible outcome, every time I motherfucking do it, my life is better. And when I don't, my life is not as good. And so these spiritual beliefs began with pragmatism. And then the life that has unfolded from holding on to these tools pragmatically, not dogmatically, has given me a life that is more beautiful and more
01:04:56
Speaker
connected and loving and deep and inspiring, then I even had the ability to fantasize about when before I held these ideas. And so the invitation is be humble enough to believe, to experiment, that you can't know anything for sure, and that every idea is essentially a hypothesis. And then run the hypothesis for a month
01:05:25
Speaker
that there is a God inside of you watching you, and that it tries to speak to you through this whisper, which will come to you mainly as intuition. And that if you do what you're afraid to do, and you always tell the truth, that your life will become more beautiful than you can possibly imagine, run it for a month. And if you don't like the results, then believe something else. I think that's an incredible answer.
01:05:52
Speaker
I will take you off on that challenge too. I see it as self-belief or self-disbelief and the judge that is my biggest obstacle and following that way, mainly doing what you're afraid of and a courageous piece. When it comes to your own practices of today, what does that look like?
01:06:21
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, the core of my daily practice is I meditate and I journal basically every day. And I've had a, what I call my Dharma habit for the last probably about five or six years.
Self-Discovery Practices
01:06:37
Speaker
And it's the first two to three hours in the morning, every day, I serve my Dharma first. And what that looks like for me is I show up at my desk.
01:06:47
Speaker
This is after I've meditated. When I get to my desk, I journal and I'll write for like 15 or 20 minutes. And then I either read or write about whatever it is that I'm drawn to for two to three hours before I do anything else. And before I worked out on it, I would do this for like eight hours a day. And then once I got the job out on it and I was at the office before anybody and I stayed later than everybody, I still showed up two hours before
01:07:17
Speaker
Like I would show up at the office at 6 a.m. every day and I would still give an hour to two hours to my Dharma, which is me reading Carl Jung or me exploring some psychology book before I put in 10 hours.
01:07:31
Speaker
And it's like, I'm ferocious in my discipline in that way, but it's because I truly believe that there is a God inside of me that is watching me, that knows what I'm capable of, knows that I know what my calling is, knows what I'm able to do and the sacrifices I'm able to make.
01:07:52
Speaker
And I want to live a life where I look that thing in the face at night and I believe that it's proud of me. And so if I show up to those two to three or four hours in the morning every day, like the rest of the day could just be completely washed and I still feel like I crushed it. But my flow for most days is I do that the first three to four hours in the morning. And it's taken me seven years to get to being able to do it for four hours, like start as small as you need to start. And really the place that it began with me was
01:08:23
Speaker
journaling. It started at the end of my first major relationship. I was with this woman for three years. And then the day that she moved out, I had a back spasm so badly that I couldn't walk for four days. And I was at the fucking bottom. I was alone. I didn't trust my body. I felt weak and I felt lost. And I found the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.
01:08:45
Speaker
And I committed to writing three full pages a day in that journal, like it was sacred. And it was the first time in my life that I began to cultivate a relationship with myself where I told the truth. I had never given myself and even a window of time to have a conversation with myself about what I felt or what I believed or what I wanted. And I did it every day.
01:09:12
Speaker
for a couple of months until I filled up this thick journal. And the day that I filled that journal, I knew something had changed in me. And I've been journaling ever since, but that was the beginning of this whole thing. And slowly from journaling, I eventually, I got into habit change.
01:09:30
Speaker
And I learned how to begin to change my habits. And then I read the book, Mastery by Robert Greene. And I really became obsessed with the idea of I want to cultivate mastery in my craft, which is essentially researching and digesting huge amounts of information and then being able to articulate it or write it in a way that people get it that actually helps them improve their life. And I've been doing that, you know, basically every day since then.
01:10:00
Speaker
you blend together practical application of knowledge and spirituality in a degree that I'm coming to, touching small parts and areas of how to integrate that and actually make it into, you can say reality, as I was very dedicated to, you can say the basics, and you can
01:10:25
Speaker
what I've realized, you don't have to have a spiritual connotation to what you do. Anything that you do can be truly and highly connected. Like the Stoics say about the sage, it does not matter what you do, it's how you do it, an integrity by which you do it with. And that is truly what I'm realizing is the intention and how you do things and how you show up to the minute tasks. And that is how you can experience God or whatever you want to call it.
01:10:55
Speaker
and true, just deep connection and flow state. And whatever you want to connect to, that can be simple in how you show up to it. But that is a form of, I mean, the emptying process. You can say meditation or journaling.
Meditation and Flow States
01:11:12
Speaker
There are many different forms of it for me and what it sounds like to you too. Basketball was one of those for me. Being in complete emptiness and in flow and feeling in complete, just wow, one with it all.
01:11:26
Speaker
And that can be replicated, but it takes discipline. And that is what you're saying too is showing up and then truly running hypothesis is not accepting the norm. It's not accepting what should be and what everyone else is doing, but running your own.
01:11:40
Speaker
creating your own theories, running your own hypothesis and then testing it, seeing what it's actually like. And one of the things I'm coming to, I went so deep into the emotional and the spiritual journey this past six months that I've gotten to this state of where I started rejecting things that did not what I felt like truly resonated with me.
01:12:01
Speaker
And that is a distinction I'm still applying and I'm taking more of a stoic approach of trying to figure out, okay, what is my internal truth that I know is truth versus what are deceiving emotions and feelings that just want what is easiest and what is going to mean to survival is highest likelihood because this is easy.
01:12:26
Speaker
And that is, that is, it can be very deceiving. And I'd be very curious to how you make that distinction within yourself. What is your highest truth? And how do you know what to follow? If it's just, is it deceptive thought or emotion or is it truth? So what's interesting is what I mean by truth is I don't mean like an objective philosophic truth. What I mean by act and speak my truth is, can I discern what is alive in me right now?
01:12:55
Speaker
And can I articulate it or honor it fully? And so maybe my truth is that I'm fucking angry. And can I express that clearly and cleanly without projecting, without blaming, but simply owning what is happening in me? And what I find is the quickest way to move through an emotion is to accept it.
01:13:25
Speaker
And you accept it by being in truth with it. And this goes back to that idea of the guest house by Rumi. And it's like, maybe what's coming up in me is jealousy. And that a part of me recognizes if jealousy is in my house, it's because I'm in illusion.
01:13:42
Speaker
but he's still in the house. I will let him sit down. I will hear him out. And the beautiful thing about honoring your emotions, especially if you cultivate the technical ability to have a dialogue with your emotions, like literally write out jealousy in parentheses and then what jealousy is saying. And like really see it as like a character inside of you. If you allow yourself to hear what jealousy believes, it's really easy to see that it's bullshit.
01:14:11
Speaker
But if you don't sit and talk to it and you just feel the emotion, it can grab you. One of my favorite quotes of all time is the difference between a man and a king is that a king does not look away. And the thing about our emotions is that if you really look at them and you let them talk,
01:14:28
Speaker
And you almost imagine that like your consciousness is like a king inside of a throne room and you have a guest and the guest has a complaint. Let the guests talk and they will expose you or expose to you if they're bullshit. And what I have found is that if I genuinely listen to an emotion in the same way that if I genuinely listen to someone I don't agree with, there's always something.
01:14:54
Speaker
in there that is actually valuable and most of it's bullshit. And so maybe the reason jealousy is coming in is because I'm not doing something right in my life. And that jealousy is coming up to let me know that person is doing something that you're capable of and you're not doing it. Or if anger comes up, maybe I've been genuinely transgressed and it would actually be to the benefit of my being to articulate a new boundary.
01:15:21
Speaker
You know? And so the invitation about what it means to be in truth is honor what is alive in you, listen to it, practice discernment, and then choose how to act from it in the world in a way that produces more love.
01:15:43
Speaker
Spoken like a true philosopher, too. And this ties into what comes up for me as emotions. How do you even listen to what comes up within? Then how do you not go by what is instinct and what is habit and what is ritual and what you think you're supposed to do? When
01:16:07
Speaker
What do you recommend for people to start feeling their emotions? I know especially for men who have been in the military service or you've grown up in a military family. I grew up in a very emotionally, you can say,
01:16:22
Speaker
a rather suppressed household where my father's father, my grandfather, his mother died early and it was a house of men more or less and it was truly just very emotionally cold and my grandmother was that way too so my father was like that too for majority of my childhood my
01:16:43
Speaker
grandfather was part of World War II and saw some horrific things it was truly scarred from that on the German side and my mother grew up with that in Sweden and being called Nazis and so she was very emotionally shut down so coming from from both
01:17:01
Speaker
For me it's a shutdown household. It's a practice that I do daily. For example, for me that is something that is helping and I have almost been reliant on. Well, one is with my wife. Do you even feel love? I had a very hard time even feeling love for quite some time.
01:17:21
Speaker
My daughter but also more of a practical way is Joe dispenser. He has one that is called the reconditioning The mind and that is he goes into what does it feel like to feel let's say grace? Effortless elegance and that is helping me to retrain. Okay. I
01:17:40
Speaker
Where's the field of field and have a hard time many times feeling the feelings Like what what would you recommend for anyone? How do you how do you go about starting to feel your feelings? It's it's a it's a strange concept to discuss, but I think it's a very important one Right. So the thing to connect to first primarily is that You have evolved
01:18:01
Speaker
for thousands of generations to be completely in tune with your emotions. And so it's not something that you have to learn how to do, it's something that you have to get out of the way of blocking. And my path began with journaling. Because I was so cerebral, I was so mental, I was so linguistic, my first bridge was to learn how to write with the attempt to be in truth with myself.
01:18:28
Speaker
Once I did that for a while, then I really got into Vipassana meditation. And what Vipassana essentially teaches you how to do is to nonjudgmentally keep your awareness on whatever you choose to keep it on. And as I started to cultivate that practice, there's this thing called labeling or noting that is a more advanced stage of Vipassana, which as soon as you realize that your awareness has been brought away from your center of focus, which is normally the breath,
01:18:58
Speaker
you feel into with your inner eye, what was the thought that I had right before I became conscious that I wasn't paying attention to my breath? And it's always either a linguistic construct, it's an image, it's a combination of the two, or it's a body sensation. It's one of those three things or a combination of those. And once you start to work on that inner discernment about what pulls you,
01:19:25
Speaker
you start to shine the light on what is happening inside of you. And I cultivated this ability to discern what was happening inside of me. And then I turned up the volume of what was happening inside of me by experimenting with psychedelics. And psychedelics, specifically microdosing LSD, allowed me to begin to feel my feels more.
01:19:55
Speaker
And it's naturally unfolded over the last three years with a combination of journaling every day, meditating sporadically, and then feeling and heightened sense of emotionality from microdosing. And then the big thing is learning when you start to feel something to not block it, like men have learned to block it.
01:20:21
Speaker
Like if you didn't block it, you would probably cry every day. Like something moves me almost every day where I cry. And it's hard to articulate, but you can feel the like building up of energy in your body that wants to be released through your eyes. And most men have learned that as soon as they feel the very beginning of that, it's like, let me go do something to stop whatever that thing is.
01:20:49
Speaker
And it's just simply, it's kind of hard to articulate, but it's a felt sense of allowing whatever energy is starting to build to culminate. And then a big part of it is to heal and to release shame around whatever it is that you feel. Cause whatever it is that you feel is a part of the human experience and it's okay. And if you don't shame it, it's like a wave and it can pass through.
01:21:16
Speaker
And so that has kind of been my journey. It started with journaling and then it deepened with meditation, specifically Vipassana and learning how to do noting and then microdosing.
01:21:30
Speaker
I think that is for the next time to discuss and shame. Shame is an incredibly interesting topic.
Closing Reflections on Insights
01:21:41
Speaker
But Eric, it's been phenomenal to have you on the podcast today. You bring up concepts that make me truly ponder and the way you distill a message from so many different books.
01:22:00
Speaker
It's what we're talking about. It's it's it's modern day translation and your uniqueness that is coming forth that is That leaves me now. Okay. I need to ponder this I need to digest this that's a very positive thing and and what that is one of the greatest things too that I've started to accept is When I used to consume massive amount of content to podcast a day and then listening or reading a book on the train is I did not retain and I did not
01:22:31
Speaker
It did not sink in. I did not understand it truly. I just went through it. And this is one of those times I'm like, wow, I'm feeling that it's so much and I can't conceptualize it all, but I know it made sense. So I'm going to let this sink in. I'm working on the path of journaling. To me, orally speaking and talking it through helps me a lot. So I know there are different ways of going about it.
01:22:58
Speaker
But what you're bringing forth to this world is incredible and I can't wait to see the content being released about mental health and in honor of, yeah, to other respect out of his family and also this is going to be a dedication too.
01:23:15
Speaker
to a gentleman I worked with who passed away who committed suicide actually in Austin and was said due to suicide and this is part of why I'm starting and I've started what I'm doing is to really bring awareness to how do you bring awareness to your day-to-day and what you believe in and really that your mental health
01:23:40
Speaker
is you're not alone with it, and what are ways to go about it. So what you're serving to this world is true medicine. So thank you, Eric. Thank you, brother.
01:23:53
Speaker
Eric is doing some significant things in this world by presenting some deeply moving content, thoughts, insights, and not holding back fully and truly standing in his truth. I'm incredibly grateful to have done this podcast with Eric.
01:24:17
Speaker
And I'm so grateful that you got to listen to it. So thank you for tuning in. And if you haven't done so, please leave a review or even five stars, click subscribe, follow the minor gesture. It does something good as it helps other people be able to see this and listen to it as this is a healing message. So I appreciate you. Much love to you. Thank you.