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The Power of SPACE
The Power of SPACE is a reflection of the total human experience from the lens of creators, leaders, visionaries, and other extraordinary people.
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This episode is a powerful and vulnerable conversation around healing. Mike shares insights and experiences around understanding trauma, giving up alcohol, the pursuit of personal growth, plant based medicine, and much more. We discuss Mike’s journey into healing and the amazing path it’s led him down.
Mike also shares some very real perspective around emotional intelligence and it’s relationship to our nervous system. His story is a masterclass on how to recognize trauma, become more in tune with our emotions, and then heal holistically. This is the real stuff from a man who’s walked the path.
I appreciate Mike for his many things, but above all, it’s courage. He’s chosen to do the harder inner work over the last few years and I’ve witnessed it first hand. Now he’s sharing what he’s learned in service of others.
I’m grateful and honored to do life with Mike Wagner.
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bool(false) ["episode_insights"]=> bool(false) ["episode_quotes"]=> bool(false) ["episode_transcript"]=> string(52886) "[00:00:00] Ali: Welcome back, folks. Today, I have a great friend, Mr. Mike Wagner, been in my life for about five years, almost five years now. You're also the second repeat guest on The Power Space. Eric Turnnessen was the other one, and the three of us have had some magical convos recently that will reveal themselves in due time.
But today, dude, I'm excited to have you here for another conversation. What I would share about you, Mike, is that you are definitely one of my favorite humans to muse and explore thoughts with amongst other things. And the reason I described that is because you've also inspired me to muse more. I'm musing now for myself a lot.
I'm publishing these things called musings because I just love getting lost in deep meaningful thought. And we do that a lot. In fact, I think it's almost inevitable when we hang out, like we don't talk about sports. We don't talk about the things that are easy to fall into, we get right into it. And that's just the thought.
I love being around you. I dig your energy. So again, you've become a great friend in my life. I will digress though. Who is Mike Wagner today?
[00:01:23] Mike: Well, first, let me say, Ali, thank you for having me, man. I got to tell you very quickly before I tell you who I am today, that I thought of you just this morning, even before I remembered we had this call this afternoon. I was listening to a podcast and the speaker mentioned the word synchrony.
And how there are just some people in our life when you get together and start talking with one another or being with one another , there's not only a synergy between the individuals, but also a synchrony that forms between their respiration, their heart rates, their vibration, et cetera. And you are the first person I thought of when they said the word synchrony. So I wanted to share that with you.
To directly answer your question. Who am I?
Well, most recently I'm a father again. We just welcomed our fourth child Jack into the world as we're recording this two and a half weeks ago. So we are adjusting to all that it means to welcome a new family member into an already full house of five. So now we're we're capped out at six. At least that's what my wife tells me.
And dude, I'm just embracing every minute of it. It is awesome. Hmm.
[00:02:31] Ali: I love that. Yeah. So two and a half weeks. Congratulations. I also want to honor that I happen to know that it's been a journey to get to this one. And so it's amazing that you use the word synchrony, dude.
First off, thank you. That was a gift I receive. And I know that without getting into a lot of details that you guys had some challenges with this fourth child and Gabrielle and I a couple years ago also had challenges. What's interesting is that, and no one knows this, I'm speaking this for the first time. We had a pretty intimate convo the other day where I showed her a picture of Jack and she later shared with me that, "Oh, maybe I am open to going for the third." Maybe not necessarily the whole birthing process, but even adoption.
And so it's an inspiration. The persistence, the love you all had to continue that journey. So I love that. And I see the courage behind it.
[00:03:29] Mike: Yeah, well, thank you for sharing that, man. I look forward to sharing that with Melanie because that's one of the things that's very important to her is kind of shining a light on this battle that so many people fight behind closed doors, right?
For whatever reason, pregnancy lost and those kinds of challenges are, like many things that are hard to talk about end up not getting talked about in our society. And so, she will love to hear that our story is affecting other people, especially people that both she and I care about, you guys.
So, thank you for sharing that, man.
[00:03:59] Ali: A hundred percent. Yeah, man.
So, we could spend the whole time talking about fatherhood. Maybe we will do that one day. But one of the things that's presented itself recently has been part of your journey and also something that the world is waking up to is healing.
You and I had a transformational experience a year ago at an event called FRD Live. And I'm going to let you talk about when the healing started, how you approached it, all the good stuff that I'm very curious about some things I probably don't even know yet. But what I do know is that part of what was, was so transformational during that experience for me and being with you was watching you and observing you and seeing how courageous you were to embrace the path.
And I'm emphasizing this because, like I said, I think whether it's trauma or patterns or whatever it is that's holding you back in life, the world is really coming around to understanding that, yo, a lot of us have major healing to do.
Would you agree with that?
[00:05:14] Mike: Yeah, 100%. I think the world is coming around to the idea, and I would suggest far too late and still far too slowly.
And I say that not from a place of judgment, but from a place of compassion and sadness for how long I personally suffered beneath trauma. Because I didn't have a safe place to heal from it. And without being hyperbolic, I will assert humbly that I believe trauma, in many ways, is the root of just about all of the problems that we experience in this world.
And that the solutions to these problems that we experience not a quick fix. There's no magic bullet. I don't have some, you know, I'm not, not pretending that I have some, some magic fix. But I, I have gained an understanding at least personally. And I think some of that will have value for others. At least that's my hope. And like I said, I think it's, it's coming too slowly still to this day.
I am very much optimistic and energized by the trend and the momentum toward what seems to be a healthier relationship with trauma and healing and those sorts of things. So yeah, I'm excited. And at the same time, I don't think I could get to a place where I was like, well, we're moving too fast now. Right?
This can't come fast enough if you ask me.
[00:06:42] Ali: Yeah, I feel that. So let's go back then. When do you think you realized that there was healing that needed to happen.
[00:06:49] Mike: Yeah. So that's, that's a really interesting question. Because every time I think I have a handle on it, I recognize that there's more healing that needs to happen that I wasn't aware of just 24 hours ago. Right.
So it's definitely this, this layers of an onion kind of thing. But for simplicity and I think it's helpful to chunk our lives into chapters or seasons or, you know, view it through the lens of inflection points, these big moments that change. And so, for me, one of those big inflection points where the healing really started to happen was a little over five years ago when I decided to stop drinking.
Obviously that decision was a decision that emerged out of love for myself and a desire for healing. Now it wasn't conscious because at the time I would be like, I don't have anything to heal from. The alcohol is just not doing me any good anymore. And I want to make sure I paint the picture accurately.
Like when I told my wife I was going to stop drinking, she's like, "But why? You don't have a problem." And that was critically important because it was the first time in my life where I admitted to a problem that other people didn't know about.
And I said, I don't have a problem that you can see. Outwardly, I don't have a drinking problem. I'm high achieving and to most, you know, just handle a drink or two a couple times a week. Not a big deal. But whether I woke up in the morning, having had a couple of drinks or abstaining one half of my brain hated the other half.
It was like each got a vote on if I was going to drink at night and no matter which way I went, half my brain was pissed off at the other half. It's like, that's a shitty way to wake up every day. Like you're always losing.
And so there was a very big energetic cost to maintaining that relationship with alcohol. And so I just decided to stop. And that for me was probably the start of the conscious healing journey that I've been on.
I could argue that we're always surviving. And surviving is a form of healing. It's just the lowest form of healing. It's self preservation rather than self realization. But they're on the same spectrum of wellness. So yeah, I guess I'll leave it there and let you follow up with whatever you'd like.
[00:09:05] Ali: Yeah. I like that entry point and I'm just going to reflect back to. I think my question, "when did you know you needed to start healing?" I don't think we know. Or at least what I've seen in you, what I've seen myself, what I see in people is that there's a realization later, like, Oh, okay.
Either this is healing. Or like you said, peeling back the onion metaphor. It's just this endless game of being like, well, there's always something. And, you know, that's an interesting thing in itself, Mike.
Because what I've given some thought to is that, I haven't met anyone where I'm like, you're perfect. Or like, you've got everything you need. And I just use that term because a lot of like, emotional stability, happiness, even content, peace, is like, "do I need anything right now?"
And as you use the alcohol example, yes, it's one of those things that can mess with your messes with me. You know, sometimes like, "Oh, do I have a beer today or not?"
And relieving yourself of that is a part of kind of letting go of the grip, the control, whatever the game. And like you said, I like you said, energetic cost.
So that's, that's a very interesting place to be if you're even trying to answer that initial question, I had like, do I need to heal? It's like, well, what is your day like? Do you wake up with that energetic cost? And are you slower? Is it harder to get into the day? Or do you have peace? Do you have clarity? Do you have focus?
So to take this further, as you became aware , what were some of the insights that presented themselves as you stopped drinking? And did you have more clarity? Did you have more focus and then have an evolution of the healing?
[00:10:56] Mike: Yeah. So I'm really glad for that redirection because, yes, a hundred percent. When I stopped drinking, I didn't know I needed to heal. I wasn't trying to heal from anything. I was trying to stop drinking.
And so I was in many ways rejecting the Mike Wagner that drank and initially white knuckling my way. And it was easier then I might've guessed after, you know, 20 years of essentially self medicating. But what I needed to do was stop drinking for long enough to recognize that, Oh, I actually never had a drinking problem. I had other issues and alcohol was my best attempt at solving them.
And so it was after deciding to stop drinking, and then pursuing with intentionality, what I would describe as personal growth, right? You know, I always used to say, if you're not growing, you're dying. I'm not sure I fully agree with that statement I believe that it's got some truth embedded in it. I also believe there's a little bit of trauma rooted in a statement like that.
And so, kind of fast forward a couple of years, I found Front Row Dads four or five years ago. That's where I met you and I'm forever grateful for the resources and relationships that I've been introduced to through that organization.
And one of them, as you alluded to was Front Row Dads LIVE last year. And I would point to that event as the confirmation that I needed to heal from something. And it was the weeks and months after that event and I'm happy to share the details of the very profound experience that I had during a breathwork session at that event. Truly psychedelic experience without ingesting an ounce of psychedelic anything other than my own breath. And it was quite literally life changing.
But what happened in the weeks after that is for the first time in my life I came to recognize how affected I was by anxiety and depression. Which I now, a year later, understand those just to be symptoms of unfelt emotions from traumatic experiences of my youth.
So there's a tendency in our culture to want to fix the problem. And so If you have a drinking problem, stop drinking. Well, no, the drinking was a symptom to a problem.
The problem was some anxiety and depression that I was using alcohol to numb or medicate around. And it worked. It worked well enough for long enough that it took me 20 years to figure out that the costs eventually eclipsed the benefits, right?
And the reason is because, again, I was addressing anxiety and depression, these moods, as opposed to the root cause, the traumatic experiences and the trapped emotions. The emotional, baggage, if you will, that needed to be unpacked and released in order for me to truly heal. Right?
I've never viewed it as trying to solve for anxiety or solve for depression. Because those are just the sequelae of the internal experience, my nervous system, my body, etc. And those are actually gifts. The depression and anxiety are actually the gifts that point me toward the healing journey that I've been on and that I'll be on for the rest of my life.
And I think that all of us, if we choose to, have as an opportunity to pursue.
[00:14:27] Ali: Yes, that's so profound because what you're pointing out is that it's really easy to have these symptoms or this way of feeling in your life. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. I'm tired. And to your point, we go off to the doctor and ask them to fix that.
Solve this. I don't want to be depressed anymore. I don't want to be. And what do they normally do? They give us pills. Which I'm very anti, and I'm not going to go all up in that world. What I want to point out is what your presenting here. Those are just an effect of a much deeper root cause, right?
Whether that's some variation of trauma or it's a past memory, like you said, suppressed and trapped emotions, which are real. And this is hard to talk about because it's not the easiest thing to prove with science. Like We have an understanding of emotions, at least a consensus reality, right? As we talked about with our buddy Eric. Like most humans agree that we've got these emotions and these are the things we can learn from them.
But I can't tell you with certainty what my trauma looks like, feels like. That's mine. And so is yours. And so what I think is really, really important for people to hear in your message is that when you're feeling off, when you're feeling depressed, anxious, some of these common things, it's usually not that that you have to solve for. It's usually something much deeper that is cultivating those things, right?
[00:16:01] Mike: Yeah, absolutely. And what I've come to learn and I'm not even an expert of one, right? I'm making it up as I go as I try to heal myself, but I have learned a good bit that has been helpful for me. And so my hope is that in sharing my story, it's helpful to others.
One of the things I recognize, a huge aspect of my healing, as it relates to these emotions, is, you know, as a young boy, my father passed away, and I became, quote unquote, "the man of the house." That was told to me by good hearted people who were just saying what they thought needed to be said or would be helpful or whatever.
But in retrospect, despite their good intentions, what that told me was, well, men don't cry, men don't get afraid, and men don't ask for help. It left anger open to me. So that's been part of my journey. And that's actually one of the symptoms that I sought out to heal from or to resolve expression of anger that was out of alignment with who I knew my true self to be.
And so these emotions were kind of made off limits to me for lack of a better way to describe it. And then I lived the next 30 plus years suppressing those emotions and resisting them.
And the thing that I've learned is I resisted them because back then I couldn't handle them for as big as they were, and I was told I shouldn't have them, and so I pushed them down and buried them. And after doing that for long enough, you start to almost be afraid of fear the pain associated with sadness or fear or whatnot. And so you deny and suppress and repress.
Well, what I ultimately realized was that the suffering that I ultimately experienced was a result of the resistance to the emotions, and the effort and energetic costs of keeping them at bay rather than the emotion itself.
So if there was sadness, the suffering that came with sadness that I might experience, you know, a year or two or three ago was in trying to hold that sadness deep inside of me, as opposed to letting it roll through me. And I'm sure many of our listeners have experienced like the relief that comes when sadness does break through. When we get to the point where we're willing to have that ugly cry, whether it's alone or with somebody we love.
And it's like, If we pay attention, there's a hugely valuable lesson. Where it's like, holy shit, if I had known it'd feel so good to cry, I would have done it a long time ago. Right? And that's the sandbox that I've been playing in for the last couple of years is getting back in touch with my various emotions and learning about them and how I relate to them in a way that's healthier.
Because ultimately what happened is all of what I experienced happened so slowly. I like to equate it to like kind of sliding down a slope. It was only a 1 percent grade going in the wrong direction. But after 30 years, 1 percent down creates a really big hole.
And to circle back to your original question, like when did you know you had some healing to do?
It was in that moment after Front Row Dads LIVE when I turned around, stopped resisting the fear and grief and anger because of some things that happened to me when I was a kid, and I instead started to accept and approach them. That gave me the clarity to look around and go, holy shit. I have been anxious and depressed and unwilling to admit it.
[00:19:47] Mike: Not to anybody else, but even to myself for 30 plus years. And the net result is now I feel like I'm 10 feet underground. And I got to figure out a way to get out. Right.
[00:20:00] Ali: Hmm. That is big, dude. Yes. You mentioned a word that I want to explore further, accept. I heard you say when I was willing to accept and then embrace. I think this is a the part that again, gets blurry or fuzzy for people. Like, okay great, maybe we have an understanding of emotions and what they mean, but it's a whole different thing to be with them, allow them, accept them.
Use these strong words. Integrate them, which is a part of the healing process, right? And this is my journey until I got deep into emotional intelligence and really got curious and started practicing in my home and started crying a lot more, dude.
It's that they're scary. It's that simple, is that being open is scary because emotions come and they can be powerful, dude. And you know what's so fascinating? I love going back to young children, probably because they're in my life, I see them every day, and they just continue to teach me things over and over again.
So, I've already talked about tantrums, they're such a beautiful example of how emotion just moves through a child and then they're done. The funny thing is it scares adults. It's one thing if you're the parent, who has to be and witness your child throwing a tantrum in public, that scares the shit out of people.
It even scares other people. Like if you notice you're at a grocery store, like you'll see a kid, and then other people are like, uneasy. And so bringing this back to embracing the emotion, even crying, I believe it's literally the body's way of being like, "Yo, something needs to come out." It's not good or bad, it's not right or wrong, it just needs to come through me.
And if you block it, if you suppress it, you repress it, guess what? It's going to stay there, and it's going to keep nagging you, and fucking with you, and doing things that ultimately affect your day.
I want to come back to the three things you said, to kind of tie this thought together. Men don't cry. Men don't get afraid. Men don't ask for help.
These are three of the things I have tried to focus on more than ever in the last several years. And not to a place where like I'm trying to cry. I just cry more naturally because I'm trying to allow emotions and accept them.
I didn't used to get afraid. I definitely didn't, uh, Admit it. I get scared a lot now. And I recognize it, I name it, it's one of my most common tools with my children. They do something that like misaligns with some of our core values or literally just like is a threat. I'm like, Ooh, that scares me. Instead of, I don't like that. Don't do that. You shouldn't do that. Say, Hey, that really scares me.
And the last one is so big, men don't ask for help. Dude, life is lonely if you don't ask for help. That's the word. It's just lonely.
Is that part of kind of how you, you've experienced it?
[00:23:02] Mike: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, loneliness is a whole nother chapter we could spend a full episode on. But I think even above that layer of loneliness before I could even tap into that aspect, I had to play with the worthiness aspect that's almost I don't want to say above it, but like intermixed into it. And that is men don't ask for help because Well, asking for help means you're not good enough to do it on your own.
And a lot of this is cultural, right? Especially, you know, big boys don't cry. The truth is a lot of us do that to our daughters too. Oh, you're okay. Just get up. Right. And I'm not faulting any of the adults who might have contributed to these belief systems that I lived with for so long. All they were doing was the best that they could do.
And if they didn't have emotional intelligence, or an emotional awareness, or if they weren't comfortable with their emotions, of course they're not going to be able to be comfortable with mine as a little boy. And if I'm not comfortable with mine, of course, I can't be comfortable with my own children's.
And that's what you were describing. Everybody is scared of toddlers having tantrums in the grocery store. It's like, that's true for the vast majority of us. And for those of us that decide they want to explore why that might be. We can allow ourselves to feel the fear instead of the protective aspect, which would be, and this relates to what you talked about with acceptance, the judgment.
I see Ali's kids freaking out in the grocery store and he's just standing there allowing them to have their tantrum. My old self would look at you and go, dude, that guy's got to get his kids in line. What the hell's wrong with him? That's me projecting onto you a judgment. Every judgment in my estimation is protective in nature.
And so all I'm doing when I say, "wow, Ali's a bad parent cause he's letting his kids tantrum" is protecting myself from having to do the work to get comfortable enough to not be scared of your kid tantruming, right?
And I don't want to discount or make it sound cheap, because this isn't a flipping comment, but it is how I approach it. And it's the only way I can approach such serious work and not get overwhelmed by it. It's like, it's just a fascinating game. And sometimes I forget that it's a game, and I get caught in the spiral going the wrong direction, but when I can remember, okay, this feeling, this sensation, this emotion, is here to teach me something. And I can pause, take a deep breath, accept the emotion and then seek the gift in it.
I think that's where we access the healing that you talked about. Right. Because I know you mentioned earlier, it's hard to find scientific evidence for some of this stuff because scientists don't even agree on what emotions exactly are. That said, there is a lot of really strong evidence, and I geek out on some of this stuff, around trauma and the effects of it.
So if we're going to look at maybe going all the way back to the beginning, where do these, what I'll describe as faulty responses to stimulus, something happens and we have a response that, for whatever reason, we're not able to process and release and let go of. We're not able to accept it. We start to get protective and we judge or we suppress and deny.
Where does that come from?
And my belief is that it comes from a traumatic experience from our past. That traumatic experience, whether big or little, like a lot of times people hear trauma and they cringe and they're like, Ooh, yeah, don't talk about that in public because you know, it's kind of for you and your therapist to talk about and nobody else.
But the truth is they're big trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, emotional distance from parents. Like all of these things are very real and create changes in one's nervous system. Now, they don't always, just in some circumstances, they do.
Other very small things. Accidental trauma, I describe it as. One example I use is, you know, If I'm a little kid, four years old, and I want to change my shirt for the fourth time before we go to the photo shoot that we're late for. And I'm pestering my mom to change my shirt one more time, and eventually she says, "fine, I'll do it," and she goes to pull my shirt over my head and accidentally pops me in the chin, and this is a made up example, by the way.
What she didn't mean to do that. It was totally an accident. She was just frustrated because I was being a little pain in the neck changing my shirt the fourth time. But from my three or four year old perspective, I just got punched in the face, for all I know, by the woman who I rely on to keep me alive.
Now if that's not going to alter your nervous system, I don't know what is. And so what happens is the nervous system gets altered, parts of the brain get turned on, and then left on, until we do the intentional healing work that you and I are talking about to turn those parts of our nervous system back off.
Now I don't know that my amygdala, the fight or flight portion of my brain, is fired up necessarily. I didn't know that it was basically on high alert for 30 years. Alcohol allowed me to slow it down a little bit. It's a depressant. It allowed me to find a little bit of soothing until, you know, we got to the point we were discussing earlier.
I got to the point where it's like, "Whoa, I've been living in fear for 35 years." Even though, I will tell you, if you're in a car accident Ali, you want me in the car behind you. Because, up until a year ago, I actually said this to my therapist, fear is pointless. I don't get it. It doesn't serve anybody.
You want me there in the crisis because I am not going to freeze in the face of fear. I'm going to pull you out of that car before the wheels stop spinning. And that's happened on multiple occasions where I've stepped into that kind of heroic avatar and saved.
Well, the irony being, the only reason I could do that is not cause I'm, don't feel fear, but I'm really, really good at repressing and suppressing it, which is a benefit. This isn't a judgment against myself for doing those things. That's a survival strategy that actually works really well. If I need to save us in, in a crisis situation.
It stops working well when you can't ever turn that mode off. And then there's that energetic and metabolic cost that just depletes your system to the point where you end up anxious and depressed because it's your body's way of saying, "yo, dude, we got to change something."
We got to figure out how to turn this fear circuit off or else. And the or else can be a very scary and permanent or else for a lot of people.
[00:29:43] Ali: Man, that's big. So thank you for sharing some of the stuff around the nervous system, because that really broke it down in a way, like you said, where there is enough science to be like, Hey, this is just how our systems work.
And dude, as you're sharing that, I love it because there's holding space on both sides. Which is why I like to reiterate, not labeling emotions. When I ask people about, "Oh, does that feel like fear? Or does that feel like anger?"
There's usually an initial resistance, because they're like, wait a minute, what are you saying, I get angry? I'm like, yeah, it's an emotion, we all do. It's part of being human. And fear is really special for the reason you described. We actually need a certain amount of fear to snap into action, to protect ourselves, our loved ones. To have the built in nature based animal instincts on what to do when we are under serious threat.
To your point, though, if you never turn that off, your nervous system constantly needs something, needs something, needs something. Because that's one of the things that has become very clear to me recently, is that emotions activate us. They're literally just a need for something and different ones mean different things.
When we don't need anything, we're at peace. And our systems need peace. Like, that's the whole thing.
You look at animals like sometimes they're grazing, sometimes they're hunting, sometimes they're resting. They're not thinking about trauma. Because they shake it out of their system and then they get back to peace. Whereas humans, we're really good at storing trauma and not getting it out.
Right. We're really good at holding on to like, no, it's my trauma. I'm going to keep it and I'm going to let this shit just consume me. So thank you dude. That's such a great way to just share that like, yo, do you want to give your nervous system a break or do you want to constantly tax it right, that it needs needs needs.
Thanks.
[00:31:40] Mike: Yeah, and you know, it's crazy. I can go in two directions here. One of them is, and I'll just very briefly touch on this idea. This is something that's become very real for me over the last year, is the connection between our nervous system and our immune system. And so it's become very apparent to me that my overactive nervous system, the fight or flight mode that I was in, brought with it an overactive immune system.
And I don't know if that's true. Maybe the immune system is a component of bringing forward the overactive nervous system, but they're interrelated I think it's safe to say.
This is anecdotal, but it is the most impressive anecdote that I've ever experienced myself. For my entire childhood, up until a couple of years ago, I was disabled by allergies twice a year, spring and fall. Seasonal allergies. Hay fever, you know, lots of people suffer from it. But to the point where like, if I went outside after the lawn was mowed, I would sneeze 30 times in a row.
And then I'd get settled enough. And then when I went back inside, same thing would happen again. And for weeks at a time, every fall and every spring.
Since I've partaken on this healing journey over the course of the last year, quite literally, one of my favorite smells on the planet has become the smell of fresh cut grass, to the point where I'll go do yoga in my backyard and literally put my face in the grass and smell it.
And I haven't sneezed in a year, man. It doesn't make any sense other than all I can tell you is what I've experienced. Which is as I've healed from the trauma, I have also experienced the physical healing of my body and how I walk through the world.
I don't sneeze 30 times every time I go outside. My back pain and hip pain that used to flare up during my most stressful parts of the year or coming up to big events are no longer an issue. And it's to me, a fascinating example of how as much as we as humans like to say, "well, yeah, I've got my brain and I've got my body and I've got my emotions and here's the three different parts of me." Like it's all one. We're just one being, and these parts affect the other parts of us.
And so if we can do the integrative work to use your word to restore balance between the three and use each part in support of the healing of the other parts, it becomes that much more efficient of a journey, if that makes sense.
[00:34:01] Ali: It totally makes sense. I believe that they are very interrelated.
Your nervous system, your immune system, heart, mind, gut, like, I feel like you have to take a total perspective. You have to look at all the moving parts. Because if we tie this to holistic health, we've had a lot of clarity as a family going to a holistic provider. Or even Sachin Patel, who I record an episode with, opened my eyes to this, opened the FRD community to this, like, yo, you gotta look at everything.
You don't just go in and say this hurts or, Oh, I can't sleep. Like, what does your life look like? And so to your point, dude, the nervous system, the immune system, they have to work together. Otherwise one's going to be pulling from the other or dependent, like, yo, I need some resources. You know, things aren't looking good over here.
So I think that's a huge awareness. The other thing I want to have you share as part of your healing journey is that, the more recent phase you decided to embrace MDMA. Guided sessions, which I'll let you speak to.
But as I look at the different tools and resources available, our mutual friend Tucker Max, shared a book with me. I know he gave you some insight into this world. But this is becoming a more proven reliable tool, and the dogma, the stigma of, "oh, it's a drug, it's dangerous." I feel needs to be rethought.
Because how do I say this? I don't think most humans, even including myself, I don't think we're strong enough to get into some of these really deep trauma and heal them naturally by ourselves. Going back to asking for help, right? I think our minds, especially good, deep thinkers, they're too strong. The ego kicks in. It's like, no fucking thanks. I'm not going back there.
Whereas sometimes breath work, which we both experienced, or MDMA or whatever other plant based medicines. I know they're trendy, but I do think they have purpose if they're used intentionally. So how would you share that part of your healing journey?
[00:36:08] Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So first, I want to be very careful here in how we talk about this, because part of me agrees with you when you say some of us just aren't strong enough to do it without the medicine. Part of me wants to say that's true. And the other part wants to say it's not true.
And the bigger part of me wants to say it's not necessarily true. I don't think. And I think it actually becomes very dangerous, and sadly is happening a lot as these things trend, the way you described them. Where the medicine itself becomes the thing responsible for the healing.
The medicine is just a tool and it's a tool that we use in support of our healing journey. And the bottom line is if one does decide, yes, I want to experience the support that this medicine offers in my healing journey. In that decision, that choice, the individual is demonstrating the strength required to heal.
It is a courageous act, right?
And I'll speak specifically to MDMA because that's the route I went, but psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, all of these others fall into the same general category. Although there are nuances that, that need to be understood if somebody does decide to pursue them.
But what I think is most important for people to understand is that the medicine is not healing you. The medicine is restoring your system temporarily. During the effects, whether it's in your system for three, four, five, six hours, it is turning off those overactive parts of your brain. It is allowing you to feel the safety and security that maybe you haven't felt in a very long time.
And essentially reminding you, Hey, your body was designed with this infinite wisdom that it can heal itself. You just haven't participated in that process in a really long time because of the disconnection from your body or your emotions. And when I say you in all of these comments, I mean, me, right?
That's what I'm saying. I was so disconnected from my body and from my emotions. The emotions are the words, right? Anger, sadness that we use to describe feelings, which are sensations in or on our body. Well, for somebody who's undergone trauma, what I did was I disconnected from my body and I lived in my brain. I hid from my emotions in my intellect.
The beautiful part about that was I created a pretty strong intellect. I also created a gigantic ego, and not an ego in the I'm better than you realm, although that was part of it, especially in adolescence, and that is a protective response, which is completely human. But an ego is just the protective aspect of me.
So it's the me who tries to convince myself that emotions are for sissies. That's just an egoic protection because I'm not sure that I can really handle whatever that trauma and the emotions that it's going to bring up might have. So what the medicine did for me, and just to give quick context, I have done three guided MDMA sessions with psychotherapy as an integrative process along with yoga, meditation, breath work, et cetera.
Because, again, the medicine itself is, you know, a critical component for those that choose to partake in it for re learning what your body's capable of. But I have a saying and it's, I think you align with this Ali, you said you're anti medicine in some ways before. If the medicine's not temporary, it's not the right medicine.
Right? The reason alcohol became a problem for me, because it was the wrong medicine. It became a need. Every time I drank some, I needed to drink a little more the next time. MDMA works differently in that, it shows you what you're capable of, what your body's capable of.
The way it's been described to me, and I would echo this statement because it was what I experienced. It's like being wrapped in a warm blanket of God's love. Like, you feel so safe that you can then choose to approach the emotions that you'd been scared to approach in the past.
And you do that in the session itself. But then afterwards, it's almost like a cascade starts and then afterwards you start to experience those even outside the direct effects, the direct psychopharmacological effects. Like the medicine itself is no longer in your system, yet you're still benefiting from the experience that you had.
And so, what I think I'll also share is that, like I said, I did three sessions, one in January, March, and then June, and I haven't done one since. Everyone said, hey, Mike, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
And after those first two, I just thought to myself, maybe a little egoically, well, y'all must be doing it wrong because this is just awesome. I'm crying. I'm laughing. I'm reconnected to my body in a way that I didn't know was possible. And it was pure bliss. Like for months afterward.
And then I did my third session. And I think the first two sessions prepared me for the third session, which produced quite frankly, weeks of ongoing panic and fear.
So all of that fear I alluded to earlier in the episode where I said it didn't affect me. Well, I found the courage, with the support of the medicine, to stop suppressing it and feeling it. And so, for weeks and even more than that, months on end, most dramatically for a couple days, I literally had a 48 hour panic attack.
Only internally, no one on the outside knew, except I told my wife. I was still living life in a Quasi normal way. I was surviving, getting by, but I was a physiologic mess on the inside. My heart was beating too fast. I was sweating for days, two days. And then a couple weeks at like eight out of 10 scale, and then a couple months at a five out of 10 scale.
And, you know, now I'm to the point where it kind of comes and goes. But the important part is, most importantly, I'm to the point now where I don't resist whatever comes and goes. Whether it's anger, whether it's fear, whether it's sadness, whether it's joy and bliss. Because you can't selectively numb, as has been said, I think Brene Brown was the one who said you can't selectively numb.
So when you do something to numb the anxiety, you also lower the ceiling of joy that you can experience. So what I found to be true in this healing journey, as hard as it is to access these very suppressed and therefore scary emotions because the longer they've been suppressed, they got suppressed because they were painful in the moment.
And the longer they've been suppressed in many instances, the more painful they'll be when we finally decide to mobilize them and release them out of our system. And there is truly an energetic release. Like you mentioned before, you see a dog after it gets in a fight, it does this weird shake thing and the hair on the back of it next stands up. And then it goes and lies down and takes a nap. Like that's what regulation is supposed to be like.
And if you're regulating something that got put inside of you 30 years ago, as opposed to 30 seconds ago, there's going to be some pain that comes with that.
But I'm not sure I fully answered your question. I want to end with one last note here. And hopefully this is well received.
Ultimately, the highest praise I can give to the medicine that I've partaken in so far is its ability to show me that I can't think my way through feeling problems. And specifically, a lot of my journey has been one of self worth.
And I don't mean like an insecurity from like, "Oh, they might not like me" kind of thing. I've dealt with a lot of that insecurity over the last several decades. Most of us have, especially as in adolescence, right, where we're very attuned to fitting in. I got through that part. But it wasn't until recently I recognized that, I started to embrace my God given intrinsic self worth.
I knew that as much as I love Ali, my worth as an individual isn't dependent on whether or not he likes me. I got to that point, fully understood it. No doubt in my mind. And I say that very intentionally, no doubt in my mind. Because where there was doubt that I wasn't aware of was everywhere, but my mind. Consciously, I knew it, but my conscious understanding wasn't enough to overcome the subconscious nervous system level belief that I'm not good enough.
And what I now understand is that, that subconscious belief that I'm only good enough if X, Y, Z, that was a survival mechanism in response to trauma in my youth that served me very well for a very long time. When I couldn't process the emotions, there was no other choice but to develop that survival strategy.
Now that I've matured enough and healed to the point where I'm capable of processing these emotions, though it's not easy and it's very scary at times, the cost benefit equation no longer makes sense, right?
Back then it was either don't survive or come up with this subconscious strategy where you think you're not good enough. And that will allow you to survive. Well, listen, survival is enough benefit to endure almost any cost.
Hmm. Fast forward 40 years, that subconscious belief that I'm not good enough wasn't bringing me any benefit because there's no threat anymore. The threat, the trauma was 30 years ago, was 40 years ago, whatever it was. And so I was expending the cost, the subconscious belief, with no actual benefit because there was no actual threat. My nervous system just didn't understand it.
So what the medicine allowed me to do again, in conjunction with the therapy, was start to know subconsciously in the depths of my being, that I am lovable, that I am worthy, and that I don't have to fear the things that I feared up until now, if that makes sense.
[00:46:10] Ali: Dude, as you were saying that, I couldn't help but come back to self love.
There's self worth, there's self love, they're tightly coupled. And I appreciate that story, that example, and even the reframe, thank you, of thinking like, yeah, we are strong enough. It's not about not being strong enough. It's just, what's our intention? What's our approach? Do we use the medicine as a tool so that we know we can embody and heal the way that we need to?
But dude, it all comes back to self love. Like, so many well, this is going to sound like a prescription. But when I look at the pain in the world, I can almost always make an argument that the creator of the pain doesn't have self love.
Because imagine a world where we all walked around loving ourselves, which is incredibly hard, as sad as that is to say. Like, we're born that way, right? We're born into this world with nothing but self love, we undo it or, you know, we have our different journeys and experiences, we have trauma, we have all these things we've discussed. But it all comes back to that, dude.
And again, I'm not trying to say that that's the answer for everything, but it kind of is. If you don't have self love, then shit's just gonna happen, and you're gonna deal with it.
[00:47:34] Mike: Yeah. And that's where it gets so tricky because it's very easy, like I've been guilty of trying to judge or criticize the critic out of me, right? Mike, why can't you just love yourself? You're so stupid.
Like, just love yourself, you idiot. Right? It's like, well, it should be easy. You can't judge judgment out of yourself. You can't criticize yourself. Critic to go away. And so it is tricky, but I think your point is spot on dude. And it's probably could have summed up what I was trying to say in a very long winded way with just that.
And that is the trauma that we experience is contagious. And it is up to each of us to decide what impact we want to have on the people that we love the most and the people that we just happen to interact with living in this world, even if it's a stranger walking down the street.
One of two things is going to happen. Whether we're conscious of it or not, we are going to infect them with either our trauma or our healing. Yeah. And prior to this journey, I mentioned earlier the thing that caused me to seek out very intentionally a resolution was anger.
If we don't feel our feelings, you mentioned this before, they get bigger until they find their way out. So my sadness found its way out as anger. And I didn't know it as anything other than anger that didn't feel like it was quite right because I'm not an angry guy, right.
And I'm very happy and proud to say that over the last year, I've I am so much more in line with who I want to be and how I want to feel, both in relationship to myself and in relationship to other people.
By no means am I perfect. I still, inadvertently, despite my best attempts, create trauma for other people. But instead of creating trauma most of the time and healing every once in a while, I believe truly now that I am spreading healing most of the time and slipping up every once in a while.
[00:49:40] Ali: I would agree with that, brother.
You are a different Mike today than when I met you. You were fun back then. You're cool. You're awesome. But the Mike I see today shows up, faces more fear, and shares things like this that are impactful. So thank you.
Thank you for all of this. It's been a gift. I knew it would be, we covered a lot.
I'm going to respect the time, but I do want to see if we do a few funfire questions before we rest. Let's do it.
The first one, brother, what is your favorite movie?
[00:50:10] Mike: Oh, favorite movie. There's a couple, but I'm going to go with stand by me. Oh, okay, cool. Coming of age story, adolescent boys walking down the train tracks, there's a lot of good in that.
[00:50:23] Ali: I like it, I like it, dude. Yeah, I feel like that blends with the convo today. So, great answer.
Number two, what animal would you be if not human?
[00:50:35] Mike: Hawk.
[00:50:36] Ali: That was fast.
[00:50:37] Mike: That was very fast. And, you know, I don't know why I've always been drawn to them. I think they're super cool. I think there's something about I don't know if there's something about them. And I did have a recent experience that I shared with you where, I had a close encounter with a wild hawk where I literally was allowed to approach within five feet and spend time being with it.
And there were some very profound life lessons that came in that moment. So, Hawk and I are now one forever.
[00:51:04] Ali: That's cool, dude. I can see you as a hawk. And yeah, yeah, your experience seemed pretty awesome.
Last one, brother. What's one of your favorite childhood memories?
[00:51:14] Mike: Hmm. I know it's supposed to be a rapid fire answer.
If you had asked me this two years ago, I would have said I don't remember my childhood. I could have literally, um, counted five to ten memories from my childhood. I now recognize that because of this journey that we just explored so deeply, all of those memories were just hidden behind a curtain of shame.
They were back there. I just couldn't go because there were emotions tied to them.
But one of my best memories.
Wow, man, I'm gonna leave this because I don't want to make up a memory. I'm gonna leave you with the true answer, which is I'm not in a place where any jump out to me right now.
[00:51:59] Ali: So in that case, let's shift because the intention of this question is to evoke a quick memory of joy. So let's move it to today.
What's one of your favorite fatherhood memories?
[00:52:13] Mike: Now there's too many to choose from brother. It's the opposite problem. But two and a half weeks ago, my son Jack was born, and I think it's pertinent to say, I love all of my children equally and always have, and always will. And my son who was born two and a half weeks ago, because of the healing journey that I've been on, it is the first child that I'm not asking to fill a void that they were never going to be capable of filling to begin with.
And that to me brings the highest levels of peace and bliss into my heart.
[00:52:49] Ali: 100 percent man. He has a gift of a father and the awareness there, dude, just to answer it that way is massive. You know, it brings some nostalgia, but even some sadness that just honoring the emotion that if I had a child today, there'd be a part of me, that would be very excited and perhaps a little bit more proud than the type of father I was when Everest was born, even Sepia was born.
So I appreciate that answer because it's so real.
[00:53:25] Mike: And I think it's only appropriate to end by saying, I'm also at a place right now where I forgive and love the version of me who did ask his other three kids and his wife and friends and all sorts of other people to fill a void that they were never capable of filling.
And that is again, because of all this healing work. And when we find the place where our mind, body, and heart come into balance with one another, I believe that's where we draw closest to God and can get in touch with our spirituality, whatever that is for each of us.
And to me, that's what it's all about is finding that place. And doing the dance that brings us into and out of alignment with that place. So, that's what it's all about, brother.
[00:54:11] Ali: Indeed, it is man. Beautiful words to end on. Mike, I appreciate you. You already know that, but I just have to keep saying it. So thank you for being here, creating space for this.
I hope to see you soon. Until the next time.
[00:54:24] Mike: Thank you, brother. Appreciate it, man.
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He’s a family man, entrepreneur, spiritual seeker, drummer, and many other things in the world. He also guides humans on extraordinary adventures through his company, Wayfinders.
This episode explores the depths of human wayfinding and connection. The path back to who we are at our core. Mike shares his thoughts and experiences around self discovery, identity transition, impactful experiences, entrepreneurship, scaling, and much more. We discuss Mike’s 5 C’s of and how they led him to design amazing experiences rooted in community, culture and connection.
Mike also shares some details around his latest adventure to Western Mongolia. He guided a group into one of the most remote and special places in the world. The unique landscape and culture of that area is something you’d generally learn about in National Geographic. This was one of many experiences rooted in Mike’s mission to restore connection in the world.
I appreciate Mike for his humility, wisdom and curiosity. He’s a seeker, like me, who’s passionate about helping people discover their truth. I share a lot of common alignment with Mike, so this episode was like catching up with an old buddy over coffee.
I’m also excited to join him on a future Wayfinder adventure!
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object(stdClass)#2307 (2) { ["title"]=> string(21) "The Wayfinders (book)" ["url"]=> string(36) "https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887848427" } [2]=> object(stdClass)#2308 (2) { ["title"]=> string(16) "One River (book)" ["url"]=> string(45) "https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684834960/" } } ["episode_insights"]=> bool(false) ["episode_quotes"]=> bool(false) ["episode_transcript"]=> string(60973) "[00:00:00] Ali: Welcome back, folks. Today, I have Mr. Mike Brcic, a friend, a fellow FRD, we have similar friends and connections in the world. So the few but fun chats I've had with Mike in person have just been awesome. They've been inspiring.
And, um, Mike leads people. He has a lot of similar core values as me, especially in the adventure world, which I know we're going to talk about.
And you're just the type of human Mike that I was, I was just telling you before we hit record, I feel like I could just talk to for hours and like trade stories. And a big part of having you on the show today is I'm curious about the work you're doing in the world, the energy you're bringing to the world, which I've already felt from some of our discussions.
And I'm just excited to learn a little bit more about what's in focus for you. So, how would you like to introduce yourself today? Who is Mike Brcic?
[00:00:59] Mike: Well, first off, I'll say feeling is mutual. I'm excited for a chat. I'm always happy to connect.
As for who I am, you know, it's a work in progress, always evolving. I think that's essentially the core work of a human being is discover who you are and move more and more towards some deeper truth about who you are at your core.
And it's like unraveling, you know, peeling back the onion, unraveling all those messages and mantras and all those things you've been told over your life by other, you know, well meaning people for the most part, about who you are, who you should be... and carrying those into adult life and believing those stories.
And then our work is to unravel those stories and find out what's beneath all of that and what's at the core and who are we? And, uh, that to me is, that's a worthwhile journey, discovering who you are and discovering your truth.
And so who I am is I guess you could say a seeker, somebody who's trying to discover every day who he is. I could give you a few labels like father, entrepreneur, adventurer, guitar player, drummer, mountain biker, psychonaut, all sorts of different things.
But at the core, I'm just a human being trying to walk the journey, figure out who the heck I am. And the more I do that, the more I like who I discover at the core and the more I like showing that to other people. And the better it feels to just live the life that's more my own and not, you know, You know, I don't want to live somebody else's life.
[00:02:24] Ali: Man. See that, that is why we're so aligned. And again, it's why it's been so easy for me to have conversations with you, even though there haven't been a lot of them yet. And because you just use some words, some phrases about getting back to who we are at our core, finding our truth. I wrote down seeker.
It's really interesting you said that because seeker is something that came up for me. Yeah. Years ago when I did an archetypes exercise. And so that word, that archetype, that persona is something I've also found valuable as it relates to learning and curiosity, which is one of my core values. And so I love that you said that.
I have a soft spot for seekers and I think I'm biased that we are a special breed that in a healthy way, we're not really content until we find our truth. At least that's the way I've found it.
And it's also just cool how you navigated that. I use that question intentionally, cause it forces you to do a bit of humble identity revealing. And it's cool how you navigated that.
It's easy for people to go into work or go right into their family, but you gave a really beautiful explanation that you're still on this journey, as am I.
And so... how did that start? I imagine you didn't always think this way. How did you start thinking about the world and your life in this way?
[00:03:52] Mike: I came right out of the womb this way, I'll tell you. Ah...
[00:03:55] Ali: Yeah!
[00:03:56] Mike: I came into this like most people do, by getting punched in the face by life. And, in my early thirties, I had an experience, I call that, it was a two year experience with depression that I call my long dark night of the soul.
And the person that went into that experience and the person that emerged on the other side were radically different. And I went into that still carrying those vestiges of my twenties of just like, partying and, you know, skiing and I was playing in a band and I was just like really living life hard.
But it was, it was a life lived for me. It was for my own pleasure. I didn't really put too much thought into the people around me. And, uh, you know, I had friends and I love my friends and we had fun and stuff, but it was really just about me and my needs.
And that experience really brought me to my knees and forced me to a greater level of awareness that there's a world around me and that there's a world within me as well. And forced me to look inside and confront a lot of things. Forced me to develop a level of empathy and compassion for people around me. And kind of started me on this journey of seeking.
And that journey is kind of come and gone and in bits and waves. And you know, it's a lot easier to commit to that journey when you don't have three kids. Three kids will eat up a lot of your time. But my kids are a little bit older now and I have more bandwidth and I've really in the last couple of years, I really tried to commit to that work.
Just like, you know, understanding myself. Really understanding my patterns, my stories, my beliefs, you know, where did all this come from? Do I need to believe these stories and do I need to have these beliefs? And, um, I was thinking about it the other day, like part of it is like committing to this work in this kind of hope that like, okay, maybe if I just commit to this work, the universe won't have to punch me in the face again to get me to wake up.
And I can stay ahead of it. But I know it doesn't really work that way. I expect, I will get, take a few more uppercuts, but I feel much more ready to take them. And I have a different bias towards these experiences now, because I've had some big challenges over the course of my life.
And now I can look back in the rear view mirror at these challenges with deep gratitude for what they brought me. Because every single one of them brought me to another level of awareness, another level of growth that called me to something else.
And so now when I go through those experiences, as hard as they may be, I can remind myself, this is calling me. This is calling me forward to something. And that's comforting. It doesn't really take away the pain and the suffering, but it gives meaning to that pain and suffering. And it's somewhat comforting, right?
Because for me, my ultimate commitment and priority is to myself and my own journey. Because if I know I commit to that, I will show up better for the people around me. I will show up better in the world. I will be of more service. So I just try to commit to that. Now it's become more of a daily or a weekly practice rather than, "Oh, shit is getting tough." I better like go see my therapist or, you know, whatever.
Now it's just like, shit is always going to be tough. Let's just keep doing the work. Let's commit to the journey and whether it's tough or whether it's easy, that work is going to propel me forward better and better versions of myself.
[00:07:09] Ali: Hmm, man. Wow. There's a lot in there.
And I'm curious, is this what shaped the name Wayfinders? So part of the work that you're doing in the world today.
[00:07:24] Mike: Yeah, for sure. There was a few things that went into that name. And I'll give you a little bit of, um, a little bit of context.
With my previous company, I was running this company that did high end mountain bike trips all over the world. And we were expanding rapidly. And I was bringing on investors and building up the team and all that kind of stuff that one does as an entrepreneur. And um, encountering lots of problems that I hadn't encountered before.
So I started joining these different communities and going to different entrepreneur conferences to try and uplevel my game and connect with people. And, um, lot of these conferences were great, lots of useful information, some great connections. The format was typically set up in a way where lots of speakers, lots of workshops, and it wasn't really optimized for connecting with other people.
Because, you know, you can't connect with other people while somebody's talking on stage. And so I wanted to do something where the focus was on connection. And I knew that from my experience with my company, that when you take people outside and they're doing fun and challenging things together, they tend to bond pretty quickly. More so than listening to a speaker, of course.
[00:08:32] Mike: And so I put together an event in the Canadian Rockies. I sent an invite to a bunch of friends and said, Hey, I'm doing this five day event, we're going to mountain bike. We're going to hike, we're going to explore. We're also going to do some workshops in the evening and stuff like that, and hang out in the hot tub and connect and, you know, it filled up very quickly. People loved it, asked me to do more.
And at the very beginning it was called Mastermind Adventures, because it was a little bit of a mastermind, it was a little bit of an adventure. But within a couple years I really got sick of that mastermind term, because it just got used so often, like, if you and I go for a piss in the bathroom, we're having a mastermind, right?
Yeah. And, so I was looking for a new name for the company. And I just happened to be rereading a book, one of my favorite books. And it's written by one of my mentors, a guy named Wade Davis, who's a world renowned anthropologist, ethnobotanist, National Geographic explorer in residence photographer.
He's written like 10 books. He is, I call him Canada's Indiana Jones because he's just done some crazy badass shit. Like he lived in the deepest reaches of the Amazon for five years with these tribes and, and did like, you know, every psychedelic plant you can, you know, find on earth and um, wild guy.
He has a book. It's a book called The Wayfinders. And the subtitle of the book is Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. And he visits all these different cultures around the world. These Indigenous cultures and traditional cultures, and talks a little bit about their way of life, and these cultures that have survived for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
And outlines a pretty compelling case for why this wisdom that we tend to write off, you know, we look at these cultures as primitive or whatever and we write them off and in some cases try to exterminate them entirely, and why this wisdom is actually so crucial to the modern world. And the reason that it's endured for so long, despite all these efforts to exterminate is because this wisdom is so valuable.
And the actual, the wayfinders that it, that it points to in the book are these Polynesians in the South Pacific and these islands that are separated by like, you know, 500, 600 miles and how these people managed to populate all these tiny little islands all over the South Pacific, which without modern navigation, it's completely unfathomable. It'd be like a suicide mission to try and go explore these islands.
And he spent time with these people, these wayfinders, these people that occupied a particular position in the community, their role was navigation. But they did it through these methods that, uh, are pretty much imperceptible to the modern human or even to instruments and reading things like these imperceptible motions of waves and of birds and of wind and stuff like that and having like this incredible ancient GPS.
And so that was a beautiful metaphor to me of like this process of seeking that every human is on whether they know it or not. How do we tune into these like subtle, very subtle symbols and very subtle clues about how to find our path and how to find our life.
And essentially, I look at my work as I'm not there to lead them on the journey. I'm not there to teach them about the journey. I'm certainly not a guru or anything like that. I'm just a guide and say, "Hey, it's, it's your journey. You've got to figure out what it is, but I'm going to get you started on that."
And I'm not going to show you the way, but I will show you that there is a journey to be had and how you might be able to go on it. So that's a little bit about the name there.
[00:11:53] Ali: Wow. Okay. I'm glad I asked that because now I'm going to come back to some of the things that you said, as it relates to, let's just say the earlier part of your journey. When there's a lot of things I could say, but some of the things that I just want to reflect back to you are that...
I think it's really interesting how not only did you realize that life kind of punched you in the face because not everybody sees that or feels that or realizes that. I, I think that many people get these signs that you mentioned, get these cues and they just ignore them or they don't even see them or they don't feel them and so they keep going.
And how I would describe that, Mike, is that then they start just operating more asleep or under stress. I see a lot of humans who are just in my world asleep or they're operating under stress. Whereas boom, you got hit. I got hit too. And it's funny. It happened right in my early thirties. And I'd say I got knocked out twice just to play with your metaphor and was like, What happened?
Like, how did this happen? And then that's when my seeker path started where I need answers now. And to bring it back to some of the things that you're doing through this, that that beautiful wayfinder story and now, you know, sort of your mission, your community that you're building around it.
So much of it, for me, is paying attention to what's being shown or what I'm able to feel, which I couldn't do before. So it's almost like you said, you had to get punched in the mouth. You had to start, you know, kind of hitting a lower or a darker place to be more aware, which is one of the most important words in my world.
So much of what you said, not only lands with me, but aligns with my story. And I am definitely going to read this book, dude. Like you picked an...
[00:13:49] Mike: Amazing book. Yeah.
[00:13:50] Ali: Just the fact that ancient wisdom, which was also, I just love being an advocate for it. It's like, it's so easy to get distracted by the new and shiny things.
Even right now, like we're in this cyclone of AI. And while I understand its implication, was just telling my wife, like, yeah, this is going to change things. I'm also a little bit like, yeah, but what about all the cool Ancient stuff that we know we've just forgotten and we're just so far away from, you know. So thank you for the book recommendation. That's a gift.
And as it relates to that, you just got back from an epic adventure and not just this happened months ago, but Mongolia, correct? How would you describe that for people who don't know much about the adventures that you lead? Like what was unique or special about that experience?
[00:14:46] Mike: Well, for starters, it was cold as fuck. And we knew that going in. So I took a group of 27 entrepreneurs to Western Mongolia. This is far Western Mongolia just a few miles from the Kazakh border. And in that region, the people there are ethnic Kazakhs and they're nomads and they've been nomads for thousands of years.
So they keep these giant herds typically a thousand animals or more sheep, horses, buffalo, camels. It's a strange thing to see a camel in that environment, and see these camels surrounded by snow, and you're so used to seeing camels with a backdrop of desert, and these camels, like in the frigid cold, it seems out of place.
These people have been migrating with the seasons for thousands of years. And I went there about a year and a half ago for the first time to just go scout it out and spend time with these people. And it's such a captivating way of life of just completely living in tune with the land, living in tune with the rhythm of the seasons. Days are simple, but very rich.
And so I knew that there was something valuable to be learned from this area and from this culture. And I'm intentional about the places I take people to, and I take people to places where I think there's something valuable to be learned from the culture. And the reason for that is we exist within this dominant narrative, the Western sort of Cartesian narrative of what it means to live a human, human life.
And there's a lot of value to that. There are aspects of that story that are very valuable, but there are so many other interpretations of how to live a human life, right? And that's the Wade Davis talks about this idea of culture. Culture is just shorthand for how different people, you know, their codified way of thinking living life and how to approach life and what makes a meaningful and fulfilling human life.
And so because I've traveled so much all over the world and spent time with all kinds of different people, you see, there are so many interpretations of how to live a human life. And I take a little, little something from each one of those cultures, right?
And, you know, I spent time in late 2022 with the monks of Bhutan, living up in this remote monastery and learning the value of stillness and contemplation. And I spent time with the hunters of Greenland learning the value of listening to the land. And spending time with the Batwa of Uganda and learning something from them as well.
And so I always let the context and the culture of a place inform how I design the experience. And every event, every adventure has a theme. And the theme for this adventure going in, I have a co facilitator and we talked about it and the theme was transitions and transformation.
Because as humans, we're always going through various transitions in life and various transformations. Some of them minor, some of them major, some of them we're aware of, some of them we're not even aware of until they're done. And learning how to navigate those transitions with a little bit of grace and awareness generally makes it a smoother ride.
Because if you're not aware, then it tends to be bumpier. It tends to be harder. It tends to be more like an experience of getting punched in the face. And that this backdrop of this beautiful place with these people who have been in transition, constant transition for thousands of years felt like the perfect place to do it.
And it's also one of the most remote and vast and quiet and still places I've ever been. Just for reference, over the course of those nine days, I don't think we ran into more than five people.
And so what we did was we met this family, we went up to their summer grounds. This was in October of 2023, and we accompanied them on their fall migration down to their winter grounds. So, you know, every spring they go back up to the summer grounds, and every fall they come back down. They have to move because they have these giant flocks that if they keep them in one place too long, they graze it out, and obviously, you can't stay up in the highlands in the winter because it goes down to like minus 40.
And we accompanied their fall migration. So over the course, we were there for three days at the summer camp, and then the migration was three days and then three days at the winter camp. And that experience of moving on foot and then on horseback through this vast landscape was like so opening. You have these huge mountains all around you. And you crest a hill and you see this valley that stretches on for dozens of miles. And it was such an opening experience.
And so, there's the outer journey that we're moving through this place, but I'm also trying to facilitate for people this inner journey. How can we mirror this movement in this outer journey with our own journey within?
And so, you know, I do that through various exercises through various things we take them through. One of my favorite things to do usually I do this towards the end of an event. I take people out into the wilderness and I get everybody to just find their own spot in the wilderness where they can't see or hear anybody else. And then I just leave them there for an unspecified amount of time.
Usually it's like two, three hours. I'm going to start pushing that even longer. But an amazing thing happens when you put somebody in a remote place where it's completely quiet and they don't have phones, they don't have journals, they don't have anything, but just themselves and their thoughts and the surrounding.
And people have had you know, mystical experiences that they would describe as like a psychedelic experience. Just from the process of sitting still in a quiet and remote place.
And so all of that informs the experience. And if I do my job well, they've come in contact with some deeper truths about themselves and hopefully have some information that they can come home with about how they can stay connected to that and stay committed to that inner place where there's more truth inside there.
[00:20:24] Ali: Totally. Yeah. That sounds beautiful. For a minute I was envisioning and kind of feeling into that, like, ah, just walking or riding on horseback and seeing valleys, man. And then yes, the ability for us to be with ourselves in a new environment, particularly in nature. Because I find that like being in buildings and man made things brings its own energy. But when you're in nature, especially a place very remote like you described, like, there's nothing to do but be with yourself.
There's no distractions. There's nothing to take you out of the moment, which has all this amazing insight and potential new awareness, new learnings. So I love that. I love that you're intentional about where you take people in that theme, transitions, transformation.
These are some of the most powerful things that I think we can experience. It's also why I do this show. So thank you for supporting that. And it sounded like Mongolia was cold, but amazing and awesome. And so literally besides the people that you were with only five humans.
[00:21:36] Mike: We, we had our camp crew.
Mm-Hmm. . So we had a pretty big camp crew. There's about 2020 locals, Uhhuh, , uh, you know, the drivers. We had these Russian military vehicles that were there when we needed them. We had the cooking crew, we had the camp crew who was building the fires and setting up the toilets and all that kind of stuff.
So there's about 20 of those people. But in terms of running into other people, it was very, very few and far between. There's not a lot of people that live in that area and that's what makes it so special. Yes. And it was also, the snows had come early, the winter snows had come early.
So most of the nomads in that area had already hightailed it down to their winter grounds. But we, you know, we had a schedule. I couldn't just call everybody up and say, actually, we're going to fly over a week early. We had, we had a, we had a set schedule and we had, you know, our flights to West from Mongolia booked or whatever.
So we had to stick with that. And the family was up there just getting snowed in going, waiting around, like, when are they going to get here? So we were one of the last people to come from that high ground.
So that was also part of it too. If we'd been there a week or two earlier, it would have been a lot more people. You know, it's wild to see just these massive caravans of like a thousand animals all moving through this landscape. And every time you crest a hill, it looks like you're looking at the cover of national geographic. You know, you can just sort of picture these pictures there.
It's one of the wildest and most amazing places I've been to. And I'm going back in October, 2025. And I'm bringing you with me just so you know.
[00:23:01] Ali: Indeed you are. Yeah. I remember seeing those pictures when you shared some on social media and I agree, I was like, whoa, this is National Geographic caliber. So yes, as we were talking about before, I'm already in. Thank you for putting me on the 2025 roster.
Something I want to also talk about, Mike, is that I realize there's these five C's that I'll share with our audience that are part of the wayfinder, let's just say ethos or the culture, the mission.
Self, others.
[00:23:36] Mike: Connection. Connection to self. Yeah. That's the C part. It's the connection.
[00:23:40] Ali: Great. Thank you for, I'm sorry. So thank you for correcting me early on. So connection to self, connection to others, connection to nature, connection to calling, connection to mystery. And we've already talked about a lot of these.
So I want to give you some space to go in and out of anything that we haven't talked about, especially mystery, because I don't think we've talked about that. And that was the one it kind of popped out to me that I was like, "Oh, I want to learn more about this."
But feel free to take the five C's anywhere you want.
[00:24:09] Mike: Well, let's start there with mystery. It's a good place to start. We humans, us 8 billion or whatever, we're plunked down on this tiny little marble floating in space. And if you take the astronomical view of it we're just a tiny pinhead in this vast universe.
We have no idea if there's other life out there. We have no idea what the hell we're doing on this planet. It's a big mystery, right? And we can get freaked out by that. But we can also get curious about that, and we can explore that. And we humans have been doing that for thousands and thousands of years.
And we have words for that mystery, like God, and various other words, like some sense of something. Something behind, you know, all this, illusion, you want to call it.
And I've been blessed to have experiences, both assisted with medication, or without. You know, I've had psychedelic experiences that have connected me with that sense of mystery and that sense of oneness with everything that had been powerful and mystical. I've also had experiences like that through breathwork.
I've had them, you know, from sitting in the jungle by myself in the Amazon jungle where I felt that sense of connection to everything. And it's a really powerful experience. You know, we go through life with this absolute conviction that we are discrete, separate beings that exist separate from everything around us. I can point to my arms and I can point to my skin, it's like, this is me, and then there's the rest of the world.
But then you have these experiences that kind of reach a little bit more into the quantum field or whatever you want to call it. And you start to realize that you are actually connected to everything. And we could detangle that in very literal terms and talk about the exchange of. You know, how our, our body is constantly changing and whatnot, but in a more spiritual sense, I've had very powerful experiences that have convinced me that I'm not quite as separate and discreet as I would like to believe. And that I'm actually interconnected with everything, and that's a beautiful feeling, and it's a beautiful appreciation of it what life might actually be, as opposed to just this one aspect of the story.
And when I know that, when I know that I'm connected to you, when I know that I'm connected to a tree in the Amazon jungle, when I know that I'm connected to a child suffering in Gaza or in Israel, whatever, I, I move through life, a little bit differently. And a little bit less concerned with my discrete borders where I begin and end.
And I think that's a better way to go through human life with that understanding. And so, you know, you don't have to take ayahuasca to do it. Sometimes you just have to sit still long enough, ideally sit still in a quiet, natural place. And you will start to have inklings of what that is.
You sit there long enough, a day, two days, and you're probably going to experience that very powerfully.
[00:27:05] Ali: Love that. Wow. I love, I love all of that. Yeah, I don't think I have anything to share other than, yes, I'm with that. So, that's mystery. You talked a little about calling. We've talked about nature.
Do you feel you want to give extra context to any of the other five Cs?
[00:27:24] Mike: Well, let's talk about connection to self. We sort of started talking about this, about this process of discovering who you are. And, really the whole five C's model is really just about restoring connection.
That's, that's my personal mission is to restore connection in the world for as many people as want to embark on that journey. And through these different ways in. Ideally, through all of them, but, you can choose any door to start with.
Connection to self is a great one because the more you understand yourself, the easier it is to connect with others. You can have more authentic and fulfilling relationships when you have a deeper understanding of who you are and you know what's valuable to you and you know the types of people that you want to spend time with and all these things.
And I'm not going to be prescriptive about that. There's so many ways into that. It could be psychedelics, it could be journaling, it could be meditation, it could be, you know, you name it. Just sitting quietly in a room for 10 minutes.
But I know what it isn't. And it's not constantly being on the move, constantly going, constantly hustling, and grinding. Because what that is for most people is a very compelling avoidance strategy.
And especially workaholism is the most socially acceptable form of avoidance that we have. The other ones like, you know, snorting a pile of cocaine or sex addiction or whatever that may be those are all the same thing. We're trying to avoid pain.
We're trying to avoid sitting with ourselves. But work is, it's a badge of honor to hustle and grind. And yeah, I worked 90 hours last week. But a lot of that is just, I'm not comfortable dealing with these emotions inside myself, so I'm going to do something else. And in order to actually really get ground in a deeper understanding of ourselves, we have to be able to sit with that, and we have to be able to endure the discomfort.
And you don't have to do that all day, but just making a little bit of space for it, it's going to give you a deeper understanding of self. And I'll give you an example of just how useful that work can be.
This weekend I was taking a breathwork facilitator training program. And I don't know if you, I mean you experienced breathwork at FRD Live, you know, how powerful it can be, and it can bring up a lot of stuff.
And so it brought up a lot of stuff for me, and it brought up a lot of sadness. And on Sunday when the second session was done, I was sitting with all this emotion, all these sad feelings. And it would have been very easy to just open up my laptop and start banging out some work or throw on Netflix or whatever, but I knew that there was something that wanted to express itself through me.
So instead I put on some headphones and I just put on some music that would drown out the outside noise. And I just laid down and I went within and I allowed that emotion to just express itself through my body, however it wanted to. I know you resonate with this because you talked a lot about emotional intelligence and this process.
And I rode that wave for about an hour. It wasn't comfortable. There's a lot of, you know, stuff and grief and whatever that was for whatever reason coming up. But then I moved through it. And then I went to bed soon after and had a great sleep. I woke up the next day, just completely supercharged, full of energy, full of vitality, had an amazing day.
And it wasn't a coincidence. It's because I allowed those emotions to express themselves. And I often think about it as the bandwidth of our emotional experience. Most of us exist in this narrow band where we won't allow ourselves really to feel too much pain. And as a result, we also are unable to feel that much joy on the other end of the spectrum.
And my personal experience and my belief is that the deeper we can go into an experience and allow that pain and that sadness and anger and suffering and whatever that may be, the greater our capacity for joy just expands the entire bandwidth of the human experience and increases your understanding of self and your connection to yourself.
And it just makes the experience of life that much richer. So to me, that's a valuable practice. It's added so much to my life
[00:31:22] Ali: Man, I couldn't agree more. Yeah. Breath work in particular has been one of the most amazing tools that I've been able to experience. It's, and then again, it goes back to this ancient wisdom that like this has been around for a long long time. And we're reminding ourselves because more people are stepping into it and practicing it and sharing it that "oh my goodness." Like we can do this virtually anytime we want.
It's just a matter of what you said, Is it am I willing to sit and be with this? Am I willing to face this? Am I willing to feel this?
Because dude I agree with you literally just the other day as I was doing my new year's practice and I was walking on this nice nature walk and also did a little bit of experimentation with some mushrooms. Not enough to have an extraordinary psychedelic experience, but enough that I intentionally just wanted to reconnect.
So use your word, like really connect with myself and connect with the land, connect with nature with my environment. I had more awareness around how important I think it is that we do feel what we need to feel and all of it. So exactly what you did, where it's like, you knew your internal guidance system knew you could avoid this and you could go run and work or play or do something, but you chose to sit and play the music and be with it.
And, this is the work. This is the hardest part when it comes to being with your emotions, because like you said, if you're willing to face it, and move through it, and then integrate it, then we have this beautiful range. Because that's what being human is. Like that's what I've been telling people more and more, and reminding myself is that, It's not about becoming more aware.
So you're like, "Oh, I know what that is. And I can just kind of avoid it and not have it happen more." Where it's being with all of it. And my children often remind me of that because they're still young, where my daughter, at least in particular, she's young enough that she will literally show and be with her emotions in just the most authentic way.
And I feel like that's how we're designed. And so I honor you for doing the work. Because it's funny, sometimes I create this story, Mike where I'm like, "Oh, it's so simple. Like, why don't people just wake up and be with their emotions?" But it's actually arguably the hardest thing because yeah, said we've trained ourself. We've become conditioned to avoid them.
It segues into the, one of the last things I want to talk to you about, which is this new business coaching program that you've developed called the entrepreneur's compass. We talked a little bit about it for jumping on today, and it definitely has piqued my curiosity.
So I want to give some space for that, because I think it maps back to what you described where it's like, "Oh, it's easy to work a lot. It's easy to grind. It's easy to scale." When in reality, those can also be defense mechanisms for reconnecting with ourselves. Right?
So what would you share in terms of like why it's important to find this compass with the work that you're doing in the world?
[00:34:31] Mike: It really just comes back to that idea of connection with self.
And there's nothing wrong with just approaching work as a means to make a living and maybe make a really comfortable living. But ultimately, over the span of a human lifetime, if we're going to work 40, 50 years, to spend all that time doing work, whose only purpose is to put food on the table and, you know, the odd vacation, whatnot. The longer you do that, the greater psychic psychological costs there is to that.
And I can say from my experience, doing work that feels aligned with yourself at your core, at your soul level, that feels to me, my work feels like a very natural and full expression of who I am and who I want to be in the world. The people that I want to serve.
And it's it's extremely motivating. I wake up with, you know, energy and excitement to do my work every single day. And, you know, one of the biggest things I learned is that your success as as an entrepreneur depends in large part on your energy and your energy management. And there's all kinds of things that go into that.
And I talked about that in the program. Some of it is the habits that we develop that are going to support energy or they're going to drain our energy. Some of it is the actual, the core of the work that we're doing, that what is our company doing in the world? And some of it is the tasks that we're doing.
You can have a company that feels deeply aligned, but you still end up doing a bunch of crappy stuff that you hate doing. Right? There's four core aspects of the program. Aligned, easy, appealing and profitable.
So the aligned part I just talked about , it's doing work that feels aligned with who you are. And my experience is that there are some people who should probably just look in the mirror and finally recognize that they're just not really into the work that they're doing or not into the company that they're running . And they should figure out how to gracefully, sooner rather than later get out, whether it's selling or whether it's exiting or quitting their job or whatever.
But I also recognize that, you know, that's not easy. You don't just make that decision overnight. You need to do it with grace. But my experience is that there are far more people who got into the work that they're doing or the company that they're running because there's something about it that genuinely jazzed them.
And then over time, and I find this happens often with scaling a company, you start out and you're serving your customers directly and you're working one on one with them and you love doing the work with your customers. And then you have a small team and you love working with your small team and you see them every day.
And then you scale the company and all of a sudden you've got 40 employees and then 100 employees and then 400, you don't even know half their names. You haven't talked to a customer in two years and you're spending most of your time in meetings or talking to shareholders or whatever.
And it doesn't have to be like a 400 person company. It could be a five person company, but there's probably a core of work within that company that you enjoy doing that really energizes you, that jazzes you, creates a lot of value. And so how do we get back to that and how do we clear off all the other stuff, right? And there's all kinds of tools and techniques and whatever to do that.
And that's the easy part. How do we make a company that's easy to manage and where we can focus on time on where we're getting energy, where we're delivering great value.
The appealing part is really honing down on who are the people that I really love serving that I really want to serve and how can I speak directly to them rather than trying to speak to everybody all at once? And how can I hone my my products and services?
My experience has been most people, their companies get a little bit bloated over time and they end up offering so many different products and services and they feel like they need to keep launching new things or whatever. But when you actually focus and you focus on the core customer, that ideal customer and just solving their number one problem, that's when you get the big margins. That's when your marketing becomes so much more effective. It just becomes so much easier to land customers.
And then the final part of it is profitable. Which is just focusing on profit and cashflow over revenue growth. Sometimes you have to grow your revenue to get to a certain point where you can keep the lights on, whatever.
But beyond that, my experience has been people tend to push the revenue growth at the expense of other things like profit and cashflow, right? And so revenue is going up, you know, 40 percent a year, but your operating expenses are going up 60 percent a year and your cost of goods sold keeps going up and all this stuff and your cashflow is in the toilet.
And that's stressful. Right. So it's like, let's pick that apart. How can we take what you've got and make it more profitable, have your cashflow be more consistent. And that's just the way less stressful way to run a business. Right.
And for me personally, I can look at my cashflow 12 months ahead. I can see where my business is going to be. I know I have 18 months of operating capital in my bank account. So I could not have another customer for 18 months and I'd be fine. And that is an incredibly comforting thing, particularly in light of my previous business, where I made all of those mistakes and like every day was waking up stressed out, like, am I going to make payroll next week? You know, all that kind of stuff. That's just too stressful.
And so trying to teach people a different way to run a business that is ultimately more fulfilling and it's more aligned and you can sleep better, and all that kind of stuff.
[00:39:39] Ali: I love that man. I feel it. I feel your energy, your aura.
Like you said, I don't know or talk to a lot of people who say they wake up with energy and vitality to work on their business. And I, you know, I have friends that have amazing, extraordinary businesses that, as you and I talked about that are actually changing the world.
That's a term that people throw around in the business world. Where like you said, you're not fucking changing the world. You're building a SAAS tool that just makes it easy to do X, Y, and Z. Like, so I love that you called that out, called that up. Cause I aligned with that. I'm like, Hey, if you're going to say you're changing the world, let's be clear. Like, are you truly driving humanity forward in meaningful ways?
And coming back to what you were sharing, I have a lot of friends and I know people that are doing extraordinary things, but they're not waking up with energy and vitality. They don't have 18 months of cashflow in the bank to really honor that profitable approach, which is important.
It's funny, Mike, one of my early mentors gave me that gift early on. He's like, I don't care about revenue. He's like, how profitable is your business? Because you could have this large enterprise and brag about all your revenue. But like you said, if the profit doesn't look good, then who cares how big it is.
[00:41:03] Mike: The other part of it, it's just as important or maybe more important as the cash flow, right?
Because you can have a profitable business, but if you don't understand your cash flow cycles, particularly if you're manufacturing a product, you can be super profitable. But if you can't manage that cash flow, like when you're paying out , you know, a hundred thousand dollars for product before you can ship it, if you don't understand how to manage that, you can go out of business.
So profit is a starting point, but then you also have to manage the cashflow as well. You know, my old business, we would track all kinds of different metrics, but the conversation was always about revenue and revenue growth. And I was bringing on investors and I was bringing on debt and all this kind of stuff. And there's lots of money in the bank account because of all this outside money coming in. But I wasn't even paying attention to my P and L statement.
And I was just watching the revenue go. And then the money started drying up and I'd already tapped the investor well three times. And it was like, A, I don't think I can go back to my network where I'm pulling in money from and B, I don't have the strength to do it because I hate raising money.
And then I started looking at the business model and it's like, "Oh my God, this is a mess." Our gross margins are like 15%. You can't run a business on 15% gross margins. But it was easy to tell myself I'm a great success because our revenue was going up like 50, 60, 70% a year. It's like I'm crushing it. And it's like I'm crushing my business into the ground, is what I'm doing.
And so that's just one example of like, we've got to counter the dominant narrative.
People think like, I'm speaking out against scale. Like I have something against scale. I don't. A, you gotta know why you're scaling. My experience was I'd set these crazy goals and I wanted to be on the cover of entrepreneur magazine and all this stuff. It was really just an ego play. I wanted validation. That's a stupid reason to run a business.
So you got to know why you're chasing the goals, and you have to understand how to scale properly. If you haven't figured out how to deliver your product at a super high level consistently, then don't throw a whole bunch of gas on the fire.
Because you're just going to create a whole bunch of problems. So figure out how to deliver that product service consistently to every single customer at a high level, and then figure out the operations that are going to help you scale and then scale all you want.
But that's not my experience. Most people don't do it that way.
[00:43:06] Ali: I agree. In fact, dude this it's so funny how much we have in common. Just the other day. This is like very, very fresh. I do this from time to time where like, I look at a topic that either I've talked about or discussed with people or given serious thought, let's say. And then I try to really see both sides.
And scale came up. And I was thinking, I was like, what is my resistance to this? Because early on in my entrepreneurial journey, I was blindsided by it too. And I thought it was important. So aligned with what you're sharing. And now I really, really pause when that word comes up.
And I don't want to pause and be like, "nope, scaling's not for me." But like you said intentionally, what is the scaling about? What's underneath it? What's the why?
And then is there validation to actually say that this is something to scale? But dude, you know, it was interesting Mike, I was like, how does nature scale?
[00:44:06] Mike: Yeah, good question.
[00:44:08] Ali: You know, and I was trying to come up with a way to show that. And not everything always goes back to, well, how does nature do it? But I do value nature as my primary mentor. And I often look to it when I'm stuck with like human problems or challenges. I'm like, wait a second. Let's just see, like, how would nature solve this?
And that was something that I sat with and I'm like, huh, I don't know that I have a lot of great examples of it without really digging into let's just say microbiology.
But, it's an interesting thing to sit with because more and more of what I'm aligning with and what I I'm hearing and filtering in your awesome compass program is like organic growth is what nature promotes. Organic growth is what is out in my garden. Organic growth is where I have alignment. Starting with that alignment, that's the hard part.
I think people can teach and learn some of the other things, not to discount their value. But like profitability and doing something that's appealing, like there's different ways and systems to navigate that. But to find work that you're truly aligned with, I think is one of the incredibly harder things to do because of all the stuff we've discussed earlier today.
Like it's easy to get blindsided or easy to just work and easy to, you know, just distract yourself, neglect these things.
So coming back to this, I'm with you. I think that if you're gonna scale, go scale, you know, do what you need to do, but really pause and questioning that in a healthy way. Like, what's this about?
Because most of the scaling I see in the world is human manufactured. And I mean that like from all different angles, not just like manufacturing. But like even software companies hit scale like that's not organic. It's very formulaic and it often involves rounds and rounds of fundraising. And was in that world earlier in my career and it was kind of toxic.
It was not kind of toxic. There were very toxic elements of it. And it just I saw it https: otter. ai
[00:46:21] Mike: Yeah, totally. You know, like VC money is concerned with one thing, getting a return, right? And it wants a fast return and it wants a big return. And scaling a company as rapidly as VC money demands or as rapidly as, you know, you want to get on the Inc 5, 000 or something like that.
You have to be willing to pay a price for that if you're the founder or one of the founders, right. You're expected to sacrifice a lot of things, your friendships, your health, your marriage, whatever that may be. And that's great. You know, if you're 23 and that's what you want.
Chances are, you probably want that because you want some validation. You want to feel a sense of self worth through that.
And there's funny, you know, somebody posted recently it was like four recent covers of entrepreneur magazine. The people that they're venerating on their cover. And it was like Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos, Sam Bankman, freed, you know, all these people who have just like crashed and burned spectacularly.
And if you look at like the Inc. 5000, they're celebrating these companies that have like , 4, 000 percent year over year growth. And that is our metric of success. And we're like, "Oh my God, this is amazing." You know?
I mean, it's impressive. I don't know if it's amazing. I'm sure if you were to take the Inc. 5000 from five years ago and go through every one of those companies, which of these companies are still in business? I'll bet you that the failure rate is spectacularly high of those companies. Right?
Because if that's your goal to keep growing like that, every company a different stage of its growth will fall apart in some significant way. And if the leaders haven't upleveled themselves to be able to handle that, which most people don't, then it's going to crash and burn.
And, and in my experience, it's far more fulfilling on a soul level to just do work that you love, that resonates with you. Do it at a patient process. And I also want to be clear, this idea of purpose and fulfillment or whatever, it doesn't have to always be the goal that that is your means of earning a living.
That's a beautiful long term goal, and for me, I'm super blessed. The way I earn a living, and I earn a very good living, is my means of authentic expression. But, a good starting point is just find some time outside of that, you know? If you love playing the drums, that's fine. You know, make 20 minutes a day to play the drums. If that feels like a really good means of self expression, that's great.
And just keep creating more and more time for that and develop that like a muscle. It's like, Hey, this is me. This is my expression. This is how I want to express myself. This is how I want to contribute to the world. Make that a regular part of your practice.
And then eventually you will probably find your way to work that is a more direct expression of who you want to be in the world.
[00:48:56] Ali: I love that. Yes, that is a great tip because that's all it
[00:48:58] Mike: takes. It takes some of the pressure off, right? It's like people get so worked up on this like "I've got to find my purpose." And they think you know, "my career and my whole life has to be wrapped up in my purpose."
You're setting a pretty high bar. It's like you're not going to discover that overnight. Just experiment and play and try different things on the side. Find 20 minutes on the weekend, whatever, just play an experiment. And eventually, if you keep that experimenting enough, you will probably find your way to making a living from living your purpose.
[00:49:24] Ali: I'm so with that. Dude, I'm so with that because what I found is that the number one blocker for like getting behind your passion, your purpose and making that the work you do in the world, are these real constraints. Like financial challenges, like have a family. And some of it you could say, well, Oh, do you really need that? Do you know?
But there's some real challenges to go from the lifestyle you have to, "Oh, I just want to pursue my passion." So I love that you're sharing that. And to come back to something that you said earlier, I think it starts with knowing what really helps you come alive and starting to put that into the world, which is what you're saying.
Like start drumming 100 percent going on adventures. Because if you do that, then gradually that transition will sort of present itself. But it is incredibly difficult to do it overnight. I can tell you that from experience. It's not a snap your fingers like, "Oh, I figured it out. Now I can just leave this previous thing."
[00:50:27] Mike: Yeah, yeah. 100%. And you said it, you said an important thing, which is what makes you come alive, right? And if you know, puppetry makes you come alive, find a way to like, get a half an hour of that into your week. And if you think you don't have time to do it, that half an hour that you spend on puppetry is going to give you the energy that's going to create at least another half hour, probably several hours in your schedule, because you'll feel energized from the act of expressing yourself in the world.
So just find the time and it becomes like a snowball rolling down a hill and it just gets bigger and bigger.
[00:50:57] Ali: It will help you find your way. Pun intended.
Yeah.
[00:51:01] Mike: Yeah, nice.
[00:51:02] Ali: Mike, this has been a gift. I knew it would be. I usually like to wrap with a few just fun, rapid fire questions. Are you game?
[00:51:10] Mike: Awesome. I am.
[00:51:11] Ali: Alright, sweet. The first one. What's your favorite book? And you cannot use the one from Wade Davis that we talked about earlier.
[00:51:20] Mike: Oh, shit. So many books. So many books. Um, wow, damn it.
[00:51:26] Ali: Or you could use that. I'm not going to give you that rule. You could use that book.
[00:51:30] Mike: Well, I'm gonna go back to Wade Davis because he's just been such an influence in my life.
And the first book of his that I encountered and read was a book called One River. And it was this big 600 or 700 page tome and it was all about his experiences in the Amazon. But also bringing his mentor in and his mentor, you know, went into the Amazon back in the forties, I think, or something like that. And it's just a gripping tale and it really turned me on to this life of adventure that I'm living.
[00:51:56] Ali: Very cool. All right. Two books I have to check out now.
Second question, Mike, what animal would you be if not human?
[00:52:08] Mike: In the past, I've been tempted to say grizzly bear cause I really resonate with grizzlies. But, uh, it's going to sound funny, but the three toed sloth, not because I want to be lazy, but I just, I love how just slow and deliberate it is with how it moves through the world.
And it's like, Hey, There's a leaf over there. I'm going to go, I'm going to go get to that leaf, but I'm going to get there in 10 minutes. And I'm going to take my time and I'm going to enjoy myself along the way. Enjoy the view. I mean, I don't know anything about three toed sloths.
They probably get taken out pretty quickly, but they're still alive. So they must have some sort of self defense mechanism.
[00:52:47] Ali: I love that answer, man. Cause yeah, I'm just envisioning being a sloth. Like everything would be such a total experience as a sloth, cause there is nothing fast. Ah, that's a great it is.
[00:52:59] Mike: It is crazy how slow those animals are. They look like they're in slow motion. It's like surely you have the muscles that can make you move faster, but they don't. They're just like, no, I'm not. I'm in no hurry, but it's fucking rushing me.
[00:53:13] Ali: I'm with you. And so yeah, someone actually used a bear on a previous episode and there are advantages of being a bear, but man, a sloth.
Yes. The advantage there is just absorbing and just like the total human experience. Wow.
All right. Last question. What's one of your favorite childhood memories?
This one takes you back.
[00:53:41] Mike: Yeah, my background is, is Croatian. My parents are Croatian. I was born in Canada, but still very much resonate with that culture. And growing up, we would go to Croatia almost every summer. And we would meet my parents families and we would just get a, like a big apartment on some seaside town on the Croatian coast.
And this was back when it was part of Yugoslavia and it became like the big hot European destination it was now. It was mostly Croatians, a few Eastern Europeans, and then me, this Canadian kid. And like people there, you know, had never seen Canadians there. And so I was like this exotic creature there.
But besides that, it was just like, you know, go hang out on the beach all day. And then we'd have dinner together as a family. You know, they practice a very European style of parenting, which is like, let the kids wander and explore and we'd go to these like beautiful medieval towns on the coast and I'd connect with all these local kids. You know, even as a 10 year old, I'd be staying out to like 10 11 at night and just wandering the streets and playing hide and go seek.
And it was amazing. It was just this beautiful experience of connection with my extended family and with my culture and with whoever happened to be in town that we knew at the time. And still to this day, like most of the country in August just packs up and heads to the coast and we'll spend most of the month there.
So it was a beautiful experience growing up to spend time there. And I don't spend enough time there now and I should. But all these other people have discovered it and made it so crowded and expensive. Move on to the next thing.
[00:55:11] Ali: What a beautiful answer, man. That's it. Yeah. As I was listening to you, I just felt magical and it's perfect.
It aligns with who you are and what you're doing. So it's a beautiful place to end, man.
Mike, thank you. This was a gift like I said, just to learn a little bit more about your story, your path, and then some of the amazing work that I think you're doing in the world. Is there anything left unsaid before we wrap?
[00:55:37] Mike: Man, I'm just gonna leave it at that. I've enjoyed this conversation a lot. I like spending time with you and looking forward to many more conversations. And, you know, love what you're doing as well. So keep it up.
[00:55:48] Ali: Thank you, brother. Likewise. Yes. So I'm gonna hold you accountable to allowing me or inviting me to join you on one of your Wayfinder adventures.
And yes, I hope that this is one of many conversations, Mike.
[00:56:02] Mike: Awesome, brother. Thank you.
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This episode offers some insight into awakening, conscious choices, and the power of prioritizing love. We start with David’s experience of overwhelming love at age 14. Then we explore some of David’s realizations as he entered adulthood and found true freedom on an epic road trip.
We also dive into David’s 5-stage process for living a soul centered life, which he’s modeled after work with his clients. David explains the importance of creating a vision, discovering your soul’s mission, developing unshakable focus, experiencing miraculous flow, and then ultimately prioritizing love.
I appreciate David for his heart and passion. He’s dedicated to a noble mission of helping others find true purpose, fulfillment and authenticity. It doesn’t get much better than that.
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"https://soulcenteredfounder.com/" } [1]=> object(stdClass)#2352 (2) { ["title"]=> string(36) "The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (book)" ["url"]=> string(80) "https://www.amazon.com/Art-Hearing-Heartbeats-Jan-Philipp-Sendker/dp/1590514637/" } } ["episode_insights"]=> bool(false) ["episode_quotes"]=> bool(false) ["episode_transcript"]=> string(50614) "[00:00:00] Ali: Welcome back, folks. Today, I have a new friend, a guest, Mr. David Peralta, who I met through another friend named Hector. And we had a recent conversation a couple weeks ago. It was what I would consider quick alignment, David. Just lots of smiles, empathy, knowledge transfer. And that's not always the case.
So I'm grateful to have had a nice fluid conversation and I'm excited for today to learn more about your story, learn more about the work you're doing in the world, which sounds fascinating. And with that said, who is David Peralta?
[00:00:40] David: Uh, I always struggle with questions like that and I'll tell you why. When someone asks me, "how are you doing?" I am instantly filled with like the fullness of like the whole picture and I know most people are expecting a very Standard answer or a very standard story, right?
But if you ask me who I am Right. That is the entire process that I have been through. That's my story. It has been the process of discovering who I am, not even who is David Peralta. That's my personality, right? That's who I am in this world, but who I really am, that's been the process that I've been on the last 20 plus years.
And that's the journey that I now share with other people to help them discover who they are. And so , if I could put it in a nutshell, I'm here to help awaken others.
I've been on a process of awakening to my soul and now my journey is to help awaken others to their soul. And then to embody that so that that soul, that spark of who we are, that creative energy, the essence of who we are expresses itself authentically through every single particle of our being. Through every single aspect of our life and allows us to live a life of purpose, of meaning, and the life that we're meant to live.
[00:02:04] Ali: Wow, not the answer we've heard traditionally.
Beautifully embraced. I love how you just dropped into that. You didn't hold back. I sense that when we connected is that you show up in a very authentic fashion, which is something that I have a lot of appreciation for. It's part of how I want to be in the world right now.
You mentioned all these things. We could end there. There you go, guys and gals. That's what you need to know. But let's start with a powerful word you used around awakening. I understand you felt a sense of awakening at an early age and I would like you to expand upon that.
[00:02:49] David: Yeah, sure. So, awakening is a process.
Awakening from what we think we are, who we think we are. Right. And so that process started for me when I was 14 years old. And I say it was a process because it didn't happen in an instant. For some people it does, but for me it was a very gradual process and it took quite a while.
It started when I was 14. I was a freshman in high school and I had a profound experience of divine love emanating from everything and everybody. That was my first taste that there was something beyond what I had experienced before. Because day before that happened, I was just a normal high school student, right? With all my normal high school insecurities and struggles and everything.
And then on that day when it happened, I was shown that what I had been experiencing was only the surface. And that underneath there was a profundity that I had never seen before. I had never known before. I had hoped existed, but I had never had a direct experience of. And so once I had that direct experience, it still wasn't like I suddenly had the answers.
I don't know, probably within a few days or a few weeks, I went right back to being a high school student. Like I went right back into the insecurities and I never forgot about that experience. I never forgot what it felt like to feel that connected to everything around me and to feel that love for and from everything around me.
And it definitely impacted me, but I wasn't conscious of it. Yeah, but it was always kind of there, like something else is there. And so when I continued basically doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing, checking all the boxes, getting good grades, going through high school, doing good on the SAT, getting into a good school, a good university.
By the time I was 20 years old, by the time I was a sophomore in university, I realized that following that script was not working for me. In other words, following the expectations that were being put on me by society, by my parents, by myself. Right. This was not leading to any sort of fulfillment whatsoever.
In fact, it was leading to the opposite. It was leading to depression. It was leading to heavy usage of marijuana to numb and basically to have some experience outside of my normal kind of struggling state. And so it was clear, like, this is not working. This is not what I want, but I don't know what it is that I want.
Like nobody around me is talking about this. Nobody around me is having any answers, in terms of how I'm supposed to be. And so my friends and I decided, all right, let's just get out of here. Let's just take a road trip. Cause we all felt there were three of us and we all felt like something's off and we don't know what to do. So let's just try something different.
So we took this road trip and had an amazing time, visited national parks all across the U S and he was really just beautiful. So we go from California to New York. And in New York, one of my friends flies back home to California. The other friend stays in New York because that's where he's from.
And it leaves me completely by myself in New York at 20 years old to make the drive all the way back West to California. And this was a terrifying prospect to me. I was still pretty insecure and I didn't know what to do. And that feeling of, I don't know what to do. Right?
This feeling lost, right, that this moment embodied. That was how I felt all the time, but I was always distracted by life. I was always distracted by, okay, well, I don't know what to do, but I'm being told that I need to do this assignment. So I'm going to do this assignment. I don't know what I really want to be doing, but I'm told that there's a party tonight. So let's go smoke a lot of weed. Right? Like.
There's always this feeling of lostness, and now I couldn't escape from it because I had to find my way, literally and figuratively. And so, as I'm gonna start this journey back west, I have this insight that, number one, I don't have to follow a schedule.
Like I'm not on anybody's timeline here. And so why don't I just take it step by step and not even plan anything out? And so I start to do that and I start to visit some friends. And anyways, long story short, I'm starting to drive West and I'm in the green mountains of Vermont.
And when I'm there, there's this moment where all of the expectations start to weigh on me. Where all of the feelings of I have to go back to school. I have to finish university. I have to get a job. I have to do all these things and I'm supposed to be happy, right? Like that's also the expectation that somehow doing these things is supposed to lead to happiness and then as I'm driving I suddenly realized that I don't have to do anything.
I've never had to do anything. That I have and always have been completely free to make any decision that I've ever wanted to. And I had been deciding this whole time, I had just been deciding unconsciously. I had been deciding without awareness, and without even the awareness of choice.
And once I realized that, It was like a weight lifted. All these expectations got removed and suddenly I felt free. I felt light. And that's when I started to feel for the first time an inner voice, an inner sense, an inner guidance, an intuition. And I realized that that was going to be my guiding light, that if I learned how to follow that quiet feeling that was inside of me, that was going to be my compass for life.
That was going to be what would take me from one step to the next and lead me from where I was to where I wanted to go. Even if I consciously didn't know where that was, that intuition already knew. And I just had to trust it. And so that was another major moment in this process of awakening.
And later on, I came to recognize like, Oh, that was my soul. Yeah. That was my soul talking to me. When I'm finally in this place where I'm quiet, where I finally remove the burdens, where I finally remove enough of the shadows. Because this is still beginning stages of this process of awakening.
But once I remove enough of these mental blocks that had been keeping me from hearing that voice, it was there. And so I started listening to it. And I started letting it guide me. And I started following what do I actually feel like I want to do, not what do I think I want to do, right? What do I feel inspired to do? And what was clear is I actually don't feel like going back to school at all.
At least not right now. Eventually I did go back and finish, but what was clear to me in that moment is I wasn't doing that because I wanted to do it. I wasn't doing that because I felt guided to do it. I was doing it because I was expected to do it and because I didn't know what else I could do.
And so I made a conscious decision. I'm going to commit to following this feeling as best as I can. Following this intuition. And so it led me to a Zen Buddhist monastery. And I ended up living there for about six months. And then eventually, it led me to India. And there I discovered a teacher named Sri Kaleshwar.
And this teacher finally was a person that I had not known that I was looking for because I was never interested in having a guru. I was never interested in having a master, but I was always interested in finding somebody who was connected to the source that I had felt when I was 14. Who was not separate from that source and it could help me learn how to connect directly to that source.
And that's what I found in Sri Kaleshwar. And that was the catalyst that finally helped my soul to awaken and start still beginning middle stages of this process of awakening. Right. But to start to let my soul come up. And start to take the dominant position in my life as opposed to kind of passive and covered and in the background.
[00:11:39] Ali: Man, wow, so much to explore there.
The first thing I have to ask, which is rooted in curiosity. And I'm also just going to project that anyone listening to that with awareness and presence has to also be curious.
Can you give more of a description of what happened at 14, whatever you're comfortable with. And the reason I'm asking beyond my own curiosity is that I feel like these signs are what people need. Because they come, at least in my experience, David, they've presented themselves. And in retrospect now, same where I'm a bit more aware, I didn't see them all the time, but sometimes I did.
And I was like, what is this right now? Now I'm almost looking for them. I'm like, Ooh, how can I create more presence awareness so that if they just flow through me instead of.
So I'm going back to the question. Can you give more context to what happened at 14 or is that a personal moment?
[00:12:45] David: Oh, no, I can definitely give more context.
So I was sitting in my history class and my history teacher was a former police officer. And he was sharing a story with us about a time that he got a call for a hit and run. And he was the first responder on the scene. And it was a five year old girl who had been hit and she was lying on the ground.
And so he went to her and he picked her up and he realized that she wasn't going to make it. So he stayed there with her as she died in his arms. And then he had to be the one who then went to that girl's mother and told her what had happened and that her daughter had died.
And I don't know why, and I don't know exactly what it was that happened, but for some reason that story tore open my heart in a way that it had never been. And Suddenly I was experiencing that story I was sitting there in my class and suddenly I am reliving that experience... out of my control. I'm not choosing to do this. I'm suddenly reliving that experience from every single perspective.
So I'm reliving that experience from the girl's perspective. I've just been hit and I'm dying. And then here comes this complete stranger, but who in that moment is there to comfort me in my last moments before I transition and that feeling of love and connection that I felt for him. And then suddenly the perspective switches.
And I'm now the police officer holding this little girl in her final moments. And as tragic as it is also feeling this connection and this gratitude that at least somebody, I can be there for her in her final moments. And then experiencing from the mother's perspective, the devastation and the grief and the sorrow of learning that I had just lost my daughter and I felt it all first person as if it was happening to me.
And it was so overwhelming that tears just started flowing. The bell rang just in time, I thought, and I get out of class and the tears are just pouring down my face because I've never felt anything like this before.
And it's break time and so I go out into the quad and my friends see me just sobbing and one friend asks me, "what's wrong?" And in that moment when he asks me, I feel so much love from him, right? Just a normal friend. I never felt this before, but this concern that he had in this moment, I could feel the profundity of the love from his heart and his care for me.
And again, it was just so overwhelming that I knew like, okay, I'm useless right now. Like I cannot go to my next class. I can't just stand here crying. So I better go to the nurse's office. And so I went to the nurse's office and she saw the state that I was in. She's like, just go lie down on that couch.
So I lied down on the couch, I curled up into a ball and then that's when it really started. And then that's when I started to see and experience suffering on a global scale that I had never experienced before. I started to be taken through different experiences throughout history of intense suffering and experiencing all of it, like as if it happened to me firsthand.
And so I experienced suddenly being in the Holocaust and being put into a gas chamber with dozens of other people and the horror and the fear of what was happening as you know, we were collectively being killed. And then again, the perspective switches and I'm on the other side of the chamber and now I'm experiencing it as a Nazi officer.
And in that moment, what I realized was that it was the Nazi who was suffering more. Because he was inflicting suffering. So not only is he inflicting the suffering on another, but he's suffering so much and his heart is so closed that he's not able to feel his own suffering. This is what allows him to do something like that because there's no openness to feeling.
And the pain of that was so overwhelming and it just kept jumping from perspective to perspective to perspective to perspective. And I just felt suffering over and over and over and over and over again and I could not stop crying until at some point it just stopped.
I felt this suffering on a global scale and then there was only peace. Then there was only silence. And then there was only love. A profound love that infused all of that, that blanketed and embraced all of that.
And then that's when I got up and that's when I came out and the world was brighter than I'd ever seen it before. Just emanating light. And another friend came up to me and I could barely even speak to her because I could not believe how much love was coming from inside of her and how much love was coming from inside of me.
And so that level of oneness, that love, that was the experience that I had when I was 14.
[00:18:01] Ali: Holy moly. Yeah, as I was here with you, which you're a great storyteller by the way, I was thinking words of openness, oneness, human connection. Empathy on a level that I don't think many of us can describe or experience.
So that is profound. Holy cow.
The other thing that I kind of want to reflect back to you, David, is that I couldn't help but think death and rebirth at the beginning of your story and how much this continues to present itself in my world. That life is constant change and a lot of things are just a model of death and rebirth. Sometimes short lifespans, sometimes long lifespans, and that is essentially the cycle.
You just gave a beautiful overview of emotions and the pain, the suffering, and then underneath there, there's always that love. Which part of me wants to, I want to like see a visual now of like David stepping out of the nurse's office, like glowing and your friend coming up. I mean, that just, it's just sounds majestic.
But... does that land with you? Cause I want to transition a little bit into something else you've shared, which soul centered work. Like inspiring people to wake up and operate from that true self, that inner core, that a lot of what you described. And so take this where you want, but where my curiosity was going was, Oh, there's all this death and rebirth.
And there's just awareness around it.
[00:19:50] David: Yes. That's right. Life and death, life and death, life and death, death and life. Yeah. This is a cycle of everything. It's a cycle of creation. Every single thing in creation arises, it exists for a period of time, and then it decays and goes back to its source.
Right. And then when it goes back to its source, something new can be created. And this happens on every single scale imaginable, right? It happens on a cosmic scale in terms of galaxies. And it happens on a micro scale, you know, in terms of our individual lives. And then even within our individual lives, everything is a cycle of creation, operation and destruction.
Actually, generation, operation and destruction. This is one of the things that when my teacher in India, Sri Kaleshwar, he said, God, that's what it is. It is this cycle of generating, operating, and then destroying. Constantly happening inside of the creation. And so everything is an aspect of that, right?
Like every part of our life is constantly being generated. We experience it for some time and then it goes back to where it came from.
And there's two ways that we can experience this. One is unconsciously. And when it's unconscious, then we're completely at the mercy of the waves of creation. So, in other words, if we are experiencing a season of hardship and then we suffer because of it, right? Or we lose somebody or we lose something or our business is failing, right?
Or things just aren't working out in our life the way we thought it would. Or whatever it is, or we've experienced some kind of heartbreak. These are all these aspects of creation. It's all just a cycling of creation. But because we're unconscious, then we are suffering because we are very much attached to what it is that we feel that we are losing, what it is that is changing.
Everything changes. Everything is in a constant state of change. And when we're in, excuse me, when we're in it attachment to our expectations or how something appears in the moment instead of to the essence of what it actually is, we are going to suffer. So that's the unconscious way of experiencing it.
And then there's the conscious way of experiencing it. And the conscious way of experiencing it is the soul is at the center. The soul is awakened, our consciousness is awakened, and so we are able to experience the fullness of this cycle. We are a part of this cycle and we are an active participant in this cycle.
And so we can surrender to this cycle. We can surrender to the changes that are happening in our life because we are aware that this is the process of life. Like, we don't normally cry when a tree crashes, decomposes , and then a new tree emerges. That's just part of life. We're not attached to that happening, right?
But if we lose our house, if we're going through a foreclosure, and we lose something very dear to us, oh man, that's going to create a lot of suffering. But if we can open to the experience from our soul. What happens then? Then we are engaging with life. The entirety of life, not just the part that engages through our mind, the entirety, the holistic picture.
The whole of the process, we become a part of that. And when we learn to surrender to that, we are able to step into an incredible power. Because now as an active participant in that, not only are we a participant in this cycle of life and death, we're a participant in the cycle of creation.
We've always been a participant in what is being created, but when it's unconscious, we're not aware of what it is that is being created with us, through us, through our unconscious thoughts, blocks, patterns, traumas, whatever it is. Once that stuff starts to get cleared up and cleared out, then we can start to take a more conscious role.
And what it is that we're creating and what is our purpose? What is it that we are here to do? How do we engage in that? And that's living a soul centered life.
[00:24:25] Ali: Wow. You're saying all my favorite words, David. I wrote them down and if they come up, you beautifully blend them where you introduce and then expand and then let them flow.
Creation, awareness, surrender, attachment. This has become common vocabulary for me. And what I love about your message right now is that it's so simple. I think it's easy to start talking about this or get into deeper literature around consciousness.
And I picked up books where I'm like, this is way too complicated. It's no judgment or criticism. The author just chose to create very complex words and mental models. Whereas what you just said in 10 minutes or less was like, beautiful, simple separation of unconscious choice versus conscious choice, and then the involvement in, in everything. The cycle, the constant change, which I love.
What I want to do now is I want to map that to what I interpreted and did some basic research from your website on your five stage process.
At a high level I saw it as vision, step one. Soul's mission, step two. Unshakable focus, step three. Miraculous flow, step four. And then prioritize love, step five.
You've already talked a little bit about most of these, if not all of them. And I feel like this is going to answer a bunch of questions I would have. And also give, give you some freedom to be like, great, you've now we have this foundational unconscious versus conscious operating system, awareness, way of being in the world.
So give us a sense of how you use these five steps with the people that you do work with in the world.
[00:26:28] David: Sure. So that five step framework, that was just, that's, that is a way to simplify, right? And put into action like as much as I've learned about this process of, I don't know what you'd want to call it, co-creation.
You know, I don't love the term manifestation, even though it's accurate because I feel like it's kind of been co opted and a little bit misunderstood, but it is accurate. And so essentially, for us to live consciously, we, we have to make conscious choices, right? And so the first thing that we need to do is we need to have a clear vision in our life. We need to have a clear aim.
And most people are so wrapped up in the problems that are surrounding them that the moment they plug one hole and solve one problem, another one has popped up. Right. And so they're basically just constantly, and I should say we, cause I'm a part of this also.
And I was definitely a part of this before where I'm just struggling with what's around me. And this still happens. This is the nature of illusion. This is the nature of living in the world. There's constantly going to be things trying to grab our attention and keep us from awakening to the reality of who we are.
That is part of what it means to be alive as a human being. So most people are stuck at that level, right? Problem with kids, problems with health, problem with finances, right? You know, whatever it is. It's usually health, wealth, and relationships. Those are like the three main problems that people have. And then there's just a cycling through these things. And so we just stay stuck there.
A few people are able to see a little bit further than that. You know, serial entrepreneurs, right? People who create really successful companies, they're able to have a vision that goes outside. It steps outside of that immediate range of problems.
And once they start to create that vision, then they're able to follow up on that vision and they're able to create something pretty amazing.
What I'm encouraging people to do and what I help guide people to do is to take that vision as far as possible and as encompassing as possible. So not just a vision for your business. Not just a vision for your relationship, but a vision for your entire life and a vision for what is the mountaintop that you want to reach in this lifetime.
And so the first thing that I do is something called a deathbed meditation, where I guide people to a very relaxed state and imagine themselves that they're in the moments before death, before they transition.
And to imagine that they have achieved everything that they're here to achieve. They've become the highest version of themselves possible in every single area of their life. And when people do that, that's when they start to have incredible experiences.
Things become very self evident. If there's no limitation and you're able to reach, right? You don't need to worry about how you're going to get there right now. You just need to crystallize and create that vision of what is it that you want to create? What is it that you want to reach? What is that aim?
Then again in all areas of your life. So what is the highest in your relationship with your spouse with your kids. The level of love and open heartedness that you want to feel. What are the qualities that you want to embody? In your relationships with them and with the entire world.
What do you want your relationship to spirituality to be? To God, the divine, whatever you call it, the universe, right? The sense of oneness with everything.
Connection to everything. The sense of fulfillment that comes with that satisfaction and happiness that comes from that. And then what is the impact that you've made in the world?
It's not about what exactly did you do, but it's about at what level did you help uplift others? What impact did you make in the world? And the most important thing is not imagining how it looks and what actually happened. It is the inner feeling. It is the inner state of all of these things that people get in touch with.
And that's the aim, that becomes the destination. So the moment they have that already just with that all kinds of things in their life start to fall into place.
So that vision becomes the very first step. That vision is the guiding light. And that vision, basically when we create, inner visions, this is like the blueprint that we are asking life to create.
Most of us don't take the time to do this. Most none of it.
[00:31:11] Ali: Yeah, this is not to interrupt you, but I just want to please, please do any point. I want to support you that I love that you start there. I do a similar exercise around having your best friend give your eulogy, but you write it. And the idea is the exact same.
It's that if you don't have a vision for what you want to create and help co create, then how could you possibly be conscious in your choices? Exactly. So please keep going, as this perhaps connects to the soul's mission, I think you were starting to talk about.
[00:31:44] David: Yeah, exactly. So purpose, soul's purpose, soul's mission, this is something that a lot of people get hung up on.
What is my purpose in life? What am I supposed to be doing? Right? In the Eastern traditions, in India, there's this concept of Dharma. The Dharma is what you're here to do. And so people often get caught up on the externality of it.
Like, what am I supposed to be doing? What am I supposed to be creating? What kind of business am I supposed to be having? How am I supposed to be helping people?
But that's the expression of Dharma. That's the expression of purpose. In my experience, in my understanding, purpose is the same for every single soul on earth, and it is to become a vehicle for love.
Creative love. My experience is that love is what creates everything. And because of that, that is the oneness. And so when we have an experience of oneness, we feel it as what we call love. Right? When we love somebody else, we are experiencing oneness with them. And so we feel all of the emotions that come along with love, all the rewards, all the feelings, all the good, bubbly, everything, all the uplifting.
Because that's how we feel when we're in a state of oneness. That's our natural state. And our purpose on earth is to become a vehicle. Our soul is naturally all the time emanating love. And love is emanating from every single soul. And so our job is to live from that state where we are all the time loving everything, everything, right?
Everything. A to Z. Going back to that cycle of life and death, our job is to love the entire cycle. Our job is to be open to the love and the creative energy that is inside every single part of that cycle, including the loss, including the suffering, including the struggle and not just being open to the positive things.
And then to love others in this way. That's our purpose. When we do that, that is going to express itself in very unique ways for every single one of us. The goal is not to initially discover what that unique way is. The goal is to start to live in that state and that unique way is going to become clear.
[00:33:53] Ali: Dude. I love that because you just gave a really nice, and I'll go back to simple answer around realizing purpose, which is a question that it's haunted me in the past. I've had a lot more peace with it, similar variation of what you're describing today. But I have buddies and friends and peers that like that question is just weighing on them.
And I love that if you embrace love from source from yourself, like that's about as good as life can get. Or that's about as, as alive, as awake as we can become without this burden, this weight of being like, what's my purpose?
What was I meant to do? Cause I think that's how a lot of people go after it. Like, well, I got to find it. I got to figure out all these things, you know.
[00:34:44] David: That's right. And what that also does is that it limits purpose. Because then we limit it to what we're supposed to be doing as opposed to who we're supposed to be being.
Actually, not even who we're supposed to be being, it's who we are. And that expresses itself in every single moment. And so, that will express itself through everything that you need to do.
So this also, what often happens is that people create this conflict between what I'm supposed to be doing, what I think I'm supposed to be doing.
And what's in front of me right now. Because what's in front of me right now is not what I think I'm supposed to be doing. So now there's this conflict, right? Like, I'm right now I need to change these diapers or I need to go shopping. But this seems to be getting in the way of what I'm supposed to be doing.
But no, no, no. No, this is equally the purpose. What needs to be done now, what is being asked of you now and to be done with your whole heart and presence. That's as much as you can. Surrender. Exactly. Surrender to your circumstances. Surrender to what life is presenting to you at the moment. The surrender is the key because the surrender is the way to discover what you thought you were supposed to be doing.
But at that point, it doesn't come as a thought. It doesn't come as what I think I'm supposed to be doing. It's not from the outside. It emerges from the inside. It emerges as clarity. It emerges as inspiration, and it emerges as just such a strong sense of This is what I want to do, and this is how I want to do it.
And that's the third step, the unshakable focus. Because now what starts to develop is clarity and a clear sense of what it is that we are supposed to be focusing on. And what I often see happening for people who aren't necessarily partaking in this process.
Most people, when I start to work with them, they are pulled in a million different directions. There's so many things that they could be doing. And so there's so many things that they are doing that their energy is just scattered. And for men, especially, I work primarily with entrepreneurs, that shows up as like I'm doing a million things for my business and none of them is particularly working. And so I'm struggling.
Again, it's not about what you're supposed to be doing. It's not even about what you're doing. It's about alignment is what you're doing aligned with who you are? Is it aligned with your soul?
And it comes from the inside out? So eventually we get to the point where this is just clear, it emerges from us. But on the way there the way that we can recognize it is if we do this visioning exercise, then we have a felt sense of what our vision feels like. We have a felt sense of what it feels like to be in this highest version of ourselves.
We already start to feel it. We already start to live it. We actually start to vibrate from that place. That felt sense becomes our guide because then we can start to look at all the million different things that I could be doing. Let me look at them one by one. Let me imagine myself doing them. And how do I feel?
Most of them are going to make us feel drained and kind of shitty. Don't do that. Right. But some of them are going to fill us with that same sense of inspiration, that same sense of aliveness. And fullness that we have in that vision and bingo. That's the alignment. That's what we're supposed to be doing.
And now the miraculous flow, the fourth step.
What we do does not matter to an extent. What matters is living in that alignment and then taking action from that alignment. The moment we take action from that alignment, we are pouring energy into the creation that is in alignment, both with who we are and what that vision is.
And so that creative energy goes into the creation. We are pouring creative energy into the creation through our action and through our effort. And that is what creates. That is what creates our vision. It is not what we are doing. The doing is the vehicle for the energy. And the more aligned our action is, the more energy is pouring through. And going back to our purpose, our purpose is to be of service.
That love, that expansion of love is through service to other human beings. So whatever we're doing in our life, whether we have a business or we're part of a company, or whatever our job is, our job is to show up and uplift other people through our love and through engaging with the love that is emerging from them.
So when our effort is in alignment with who we are, it's in alignment with the vision that we've created, and it's in alignment with uplifting other people and helping them rise up, and awaken in whatever way. Just basically pouring that energy. That energy is going into the creation and then life, God, the divine can take all of that and create whatever it is that we're asking for in ways that we cannot imagine.
[00:40:16] Ali: And that's the last step. That's what prioritizes love.
[00:40:21] David: So the key to all of this, right? What wraps everything together is the prioritization of love, not business. This is the one of the biggest traps that people fall into is the thinking that I have to prioritize my business. I have to prioritize my work.
I'm under all this pressure and stress to provide. And so I have to work. I don't have time. You know, some people do it consciously. They're workaholics. Some people do it unconsciously. They feel like they don't have a choice. I don't have time for my family. I have to provide.
At some point when I reach a certain level, then I will be able to be there for my family. But guess what? That moment doesn't really come because exactly, exactly. That moment doesn't come because there's always something new, right? We reach a new level in our job. We reach a new position. We reach a new level of income and bam, we're hit with a new illusion that just sucks the money right back out again. And we're just stuck in this cycle.
But when we prioritize love and especially in our closest relationships, our spouses, our children, our family, and then our friends, and then our co workers. When we prioritize love, when we prioritize relationships, and when we prioritize connection about everything else, all these things open the door to our soul and to other people's soul.
And so more energy is able to pour through into the creation. And when we take that aligned action, more is able to be created with less effort.
So if we close all those doors and we close our heart, there's not a lot of energy coming in. So we're going to be spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, struggling, and suffering, and seeing very little results.
And when we start to act in this aligned way, and the doors to our soul are open to the doors and other souls, and we take that aligned action, so much energy pours through. And when we do work that then uplifts others, the uplifting of those souls is now allowing even more energy to pour through them back to us.
And that expresses itself in our life as prosperity, abundance, happiness, fulfillment, connection, all these things. And so we're just able to , step by step, go even higher and higher and be shown the way the entire time because we are in partnership with life now. We are not struggling against life. We are working with life, with the creative force of the universe to be.
[00:42:55] Ali: So whoever's listening, just go do that. Go, go do it david just shared and then well, that's sarcasm, but there's a lot of truth in there. There's truth in there for me, David. So thank you for sharing that. I sense your passion. I sense your energy.
If nothing else, just to come back to your message, the key I think is actually the last step. Yeah. At awareness. Not that the other steps aren't important because I know you have a methodical way and how you've designed this and I'm sure it is impactful for the humans that you work with.
But a huge message that I'm taking from this conversation, you know, that's overarching is prioritizing love. That's right. Stepping out and you're stepping in however you want to design your framework for it and embracing it.
I mean, it's part of your story, obviously. As you were sharing miraculous flow and prioritizing love, David, I caught myself in moments of my entrepreneurial journey where I'm like, I was so out of alignment and I was not prioritizing love.
I was, you know, embracing the shoulds and just operating under stress. And so I think that there's so much power in that if you just really take that to heart. And remember it on a daily basis. Like, am I prioritizing love? That's a question I'm going to ask myself after this conversation
[00:44:28] David: I'd love to give a concrete example of this, to show what it looks like in action. Because I'll tell you what prioritizing love puts you in. It puts your mind in uncertainty. It puts your mind in a state of near constant uncertainty because the mind doesn't know how things are going to work out.
And the mind desperately wants to know that mind desperately wants to be in control all the time. And if we give control to the mind, the mind is not supposed to be the driver. The mind is supposed to be the car. Yeah. Yeah. The soul is supposed to be the driver. Our consciousness, our conscious choices are supposed to be the driver.
And then the mind is the implementer, takes us from A to B to C all the way to Z, right? And so the mind is going to be in a constant state of uncertainty. When we do this enough though, we are in a constant state of faith. I don't know how, but I have so much faith that things are going to work out as long as I keep doing this.
So concrete example, years ago, before I transitioned to coaching, we were in a financial struggle. I was in a job that was clearly not earning enough to provide for all the needs that we had. And I was working full time at that time, my wife had just given birth to our second child. The burden was falling on her to take care of both of our kids cause I was working, right.
And so when it became clear that this job is not going to cut it, and one thing led to another and I, and I left this company, I knew that the next step, number one, we need more income. We need a higher source of income. But the intention that I set, the desire that I had in my heart, again, it's coming from the inside.
I don't know how it's going to happen, but it was, I want to be able to earn enough to provide for my family without having to put the burden on my wife. Isn't it possible for me to do this in a part time job and earn as much as I was earning before or more so that I can be there for my wife? So that I can be there and be present for my children and be active at the stage of their life where it's the most formative and I can have the most relationship with them.
That was the intent. It wasn't just a selfish desire. Like I want to make more money in less time so I can go to the Bahamas. I mean, nothing wrong with that. But it was really prioritizing the relationship, prioritizing the needs of those around me and the love that I have in those relationships.
So one of the first things that I do when I have this intention is I go and I talk to a mentor, a very close friend of mine. And he says to me, well, David, you know, you're asking with your current skillset to be making two to three times more money in less time. Is that realistic?
And when I thought about it, I realized, no, this is not realistic at all. Because at my current skill set, I don't know what else I can be doing. I can go to another company. Maybe I can get a slight raise, but I'm not yet ready to jump to the next level. So I don't know, I guess it's not realistic. I don't know what I'm going to do. I just let it go.
I just let this desire go, but I'd already put it out there. I'd already set this intention for my heart, already given it over to life, already given it over to the divine. So I'm just like, well, I'll do whatever it takes. I'll do whatever I need to do to provide for my family. And even if it means that I can't earn that much money, I'm going to do what I can. I'm going to open whatever doors that I can.
So I started applying for jobs all over the place, full time jobs. Knowing that none of these are going to be able to meet that request that I had, but I'm doing it heartfully. I've surrendered to the circumstances. And I'm doing whatever I need to to provide.
And I applied to job after job and nobody bites. Like I get a call back or two, nothing is happening. And I'm now getting to the deadline where it's like, we're now going into debt. We're living off of zero interest credit cards. And this is not what I was hoping for.
And then on New Year's Eve, I get a call. So I was working as a content marketer, with a specialty in search engine optimization. That's what I did back then.
I got a call from a marketing agency and they said, we found your resume on LinkedIn. We're looking for people with your kind of experience to hire out to our clients. And I said, okay, great. Yeah. I'm not doing anything right now, so I'll take it. So it turns out that now I'm doing the same thing that I was doing before, but now instead of being in house, I'm now a consultant.
And because I'm a consultant, I am now making almost three times as much as I was before. And so that means that I can cut my hours in half. And so everything that I asked for, because I prioritized love and didn't stop making an effort towards providing for my family, but with that heartfelt intention.
It came into my life. It was given to me in a way. I said, again, I poured my energy into the creation and creation was able to take that energy and provide me with what I had asked for. It wasn't about what I was doing. It wasn't even about, you know, moving towards that goal consciously.
I set that intention. I poured the energy in and then the divine is able to take that and create what I asked for because of that alignment that it had. And yeah, I was able to triple my wage and it was such a profound experience of this process. That this is what eventually led me to discover like, ah, okay, these are the steps that I can help other people through how to set that vision, right?
How to discover what we're here to do. Like all these things, it came through these personal experiences that I had. And so that's why it's, it's such a joy for me to help other people through that as well now.
[00:50:14] Ali: Dude, totally. I love that. I love that example because it's so realistic. That can land with anyone. And one of the nuggets in there is patience. Is that when you send these signals out to the universe, it's not always instant. I just published this micro blog post this morning about speed, urgency and survival. And there's a relationship here that even though we want to go fast, we want things to happen. Boom, boom, boom.
To your point, to your story, sometimes you gotta wait and you have to have faith. You have to surrender, you know, however you want to look at it. I can tie this back to nature as well because that's my message is that doesn't just speed up and create things, but love will take its course. Love is folded right into nature.
All the life and death, all the beautiful things we've discussed today, man. This was a gift. I'm going to pause because otherwise this will be a four hour episode firing questions and you'll just keep sharing all this beautiful wisdom. But what I would love to do is wrap on a few rapid fire questions.
[00:51:26] David: Sure.
[00:51:27] Ali: Okay. The first, what is your favorite book?
[00:51:32] David: Ah so, I will share a book that I recently read. And it's a novel called The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. Ooh. And it's a profoundly beautiful novel about love and the depth of true love. That is one of the most heart touching books that I have read in a really long time.
[00:51:54] Ali: Number two, David, what animal would you be if not human?
[00:51:59] David: Oh, what animal would I be if not human? I mean, I have to go with my answer when I was a kid. I just loved chimpanzees. I just loved how they played around trees.
I loved how happy they could be. You know Maybe I would say a bonobo now that I'm older because apparently chimps can be pretty aggressive. Not apparently. They can be very aggressive and bonobos are much more peaceful and a lot more mellow and laid back, but they still have that playfulness. And so yeah a bonobo.
[00:52:26] Ali: Ah, it's a great animal.
Last question, David. What's one of your favorite childhood memories? And it cannot be your awakening at 14 years old.
[00:52:34] David: My favorite childhood memories. Um, gotta give me a moment to think about that. One of my favorite childhood memories was...
[00:52:44] Ali: This is usually the hardest question. Yeah. Especially when people give it space.
[00:52:50] David: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm going to do right now.
What comes to me right now is this memory of being embraced by my father and just feeling his love. I don't remember what we were doing, but there was a moment where I was so close to him, and we had such a deep embrace that I felt such a warmth, and I felt such a love.
And, I know now that that love was trans, actually it wasn't transformational. It was essential. Feeling that love at that age, and I didn't always feel it, right? But that gave me the felt experience, right? It provided my entire being with the knowledge that that love, that underlying love, that's always there no matter what. And even if I forgot that later on, there was always that full bodied knowing on some level, on some cellular level that that love was always there.
[00:53:55] Ali: I fully believe that is part of your message, your presence, why you're here. It's embodies the whole prioritization of love. I think there's a beautiful message in there as well for fathers, because that's something that I've felt both ways, Dad and with my son, my daughter. There's a connection if we're open to it, that's very real and it's not something you can really explain.
So I felt what you just said as one father and son to another, and I really appreciate that. I feel like that'll land with a lot of parents.
[00:54:34] David: Oh, great.
[00:54:35] Ali: David, this is a gift.
[00:54:37] David: For me as well.
[00:54:38] Ali: I think it will be one of many future conversations. I don't foresee not talking to you again. So thank you for being here.
Thank you for being so open with your message and bringing such a profound but simple message that I will be very excited to share with the world.
[00:54:58] David: Thank you so much for the opportunity, Ali. I've really appreciated it.
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She’s a woman of many talents with a deep range of fascinating life experiences. She’s also a lot of fun to talk to!
This episode offers some perspective and insight into the spiritual realm. We start by discussing what it means to be spiritual, not religious. Then we explore some of Heather’s experience with healing, teaching, witnessing others and being an advocate.
We also discuss the impact of generational trauma, which has become a powerful realization in my own life. Heather shares some notions and experiences from navigating different forms of generational trauma with her family and clients.
I appreciate Heather for her spark and service. She’s full of life, which is clear as soon as you meet her. She’s also served humanity in profound ways. I’m grateful to have shared some time with Heather.
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string(71) "https://www.amazon.com/Drama-Gifted-Child-Search-Revised/dp/0465016901/" } } ["episode_insights"]=> bool(false) ["episode_quotes"]=> bool(false) ["episode_transcript"]=> string(43387) "[00:00:00] Ali: Welcome back, folks. Today, I have a special guest, Mrs. Heather Hannam, who I met at Companion Camp about a month ago now, Heather? About that, MmHmm. So still pretty fresh, and it was a great experience. We could have a whole conversation about that, but today, we're interested in Heather. Particularly whatever, you feel like sharing, and on this show, you get the honor of introducing yourself. So how would you like to introduce yourself today, Heather?
[00:00:37] Heather: Well, first of all, I have been on the planet, I say heavenly years instead of 70. I just had my 70th birthday. So I'm now heavenly. As opposed to tricksty. I would say I'm a lifelong seeker. I have my fingers in lots of spiritual pies. Although I had one teacher say, Heather, it's all the same pie, which I really, really loved. I've studied with Dr Joe, I've done some Wim Hof, The Way of The Heart, Disciple of Jesus and Mary, so I'm modestly eclectic, even in my spirituality. I decided years ago I didn't want to be religious. I wanted to be spiritual because spirituality transcended all religions.
So even though I'm a practicing Catholic, I can tell you that I can go into any church, any synagogue, any mosque, any sweat lodge, any what's what's left temple and take what helps me to be a better woman of God and leave behind what doesn't.
I am by trade a holistic manual physical therapist. I'm still practicing. I retired from clinic work two years ago and reinspired into a home practice. So I've been a therapist forty-five and a half years now. My specialty is the jaw and the pelvic floor for women and men, which is incredible. My tagline is, "I work the orifices above the neck and below the waist that either starts conversation or ends it," but it rarely, it rarely ends it. And I do distance healing and then I also write poetry, spiritual poetry usually. So those are a few of the things. You know, I'm a mom of five and a grand of seven and a great grand of one. I stay plenty busy.
[00:02:25] Ali: Well first, that's exactly why I let you introduce yourself. I could have never recited all that. I feel like that's just a chunk of your life, a chunk of your experience. It's amazing. Precisely why I just wanted to have fun, exploratory convo with you. And a lot of stuff is in there.
Where I think I'd like to start, even though I have a feeling we're going to just bounce around in a graceful way, is a little bit about how you sort of said, and at least in my brain, I felt emphasis that you decided to become spiritual, not religious.
That's cool, that's powerful, that's flexible, it's malleable, and I say that with my own filter in that I grew up in a Christian church, and now I would also consider myself spiritual, not religious. So what does that mean? What would you want people to know about that?
[00:03:23] Heather: Yes. I feel that we're all called to be saints and I teasingly say I'm not an uppercase, a capital S saint, but we are called to be saints. And so that colors my thought process on that. And I had a teacher, a spiritual teacher tell me that the word religion is re-legion. And so a legion is a lot of people, right?
And so if you consider a legion like a big ocean going cruise line, at some point you're going to go up the tributaries. And have to get off that boat and climb into your own little boat and go up the small tributary to the source. And that was spirituality. That was not religion. That was what transcends what you've been taught.
[00:04:22] Ali: That is fascinating. It's also like a really nice metaphor for just exactly what you described, kind of having the source and then being guided and needing to find your own path. You know what this also kind of segues into, which I'm very curious about, and you shared a little bit with me at Companion Camp, is your trip to Ireland, your recent trip to Ireland, right?
[00:04:45] Heather: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
[00:04:48] Ali: Let's start with why you went there because that's fun.
[00:04:51] Heather: Well, it was as simple as our local priest was leading a pilgrimage to Ireland. And up until now, I've worked and hadn't been able to go. So, you know, I called out to Gary, "Gary, you want to go on pilgrimage"? And he says, sure. So we signed up.
And as people would ask me, why did I want to go? I realized I wanted to get holier and I'm not sure where that came from, other than maybe a download. But being on pilgrimage, which I have done other pilgrimages was about exploring who I am in the, in the great creative force of the world. What are my gifts? What is my life mission? And how am I to use that in the world?
And so the idea of pilgrimage and to be on different holy sites was fascinating to me. I've been in Mexico in 2011 and I met Mother Mary in a way at Guadalupe that I could never have expected. And I, I didn't know what kind of experience I would have in Ireland, but I just put out the intention to get holier and see what that would be. So that was my intention in going, to get holier.
[00:06:04] Ali: And I remember you telling me that when you got, this is the fun part for me, when you got to the Dublin airport and they asked why you were there. The customs, right? He said...
[00:06:16] Heather: Yes, that was fun. Yeah. The customs agent said, so how long will you be here? And I said about 11 days. And what will you be doing? And I said, I've come to get holier. And he stepped back and he said, "I've never had anybody tell me that before." Stamped my ticket and off I went.
[00:06:35] Ali: Oh, I love it. That is so cool. So what would be just a few highlights of that experience if you feel like sharing.
[00:06:42] Heather: Sure. Um, our 1st holy site was Knock our Lady, uh, brought Joseph and Saint John and Christ in the form of a lamb to a visitation there at Knock, in the early 19's. I'm not going to tell you the dates, and, uh, stayed there without saying anything, which is not common with usually those kind of visions are a message is brought.
There was no overt message, but she stayed there long enough with all with Joseph and John and and the lamb that I think 17 different people came and saw them from young children all the way up into their 70s and they all told the same story, which gives it tremendous credibility.
Anyway, so when I was there and I put my hand on the wall of the church, I just get a wash in energy. What it feels like to me is that my body has become an atom and I might be the, the nucleus, but the electrons are just spinning around me. Excuse the pun, a very electrifying experience and it's one of the ways I know I'm in a deep spiritual place is because I feel that level of energy. So that was one.
And then, you know, we went to lots of castles and I was most intrigued by the cemeteries, quite frankly. The graveyards outside and reading, uh, headstones. And trying to see which, what was the oldest headstone I could find that I could still read it and it would make sense to me. And there was this beautiful one from like 1789 and they spoke of this man, the bereft wife, was missing her husband, who was like a friend to the orphan, a helper of the widowed. I mean, they just listed the beautiful things that I think were called to do to give into the world. That was a really, really sweet time.
And then, when I put my hand on several of the, the Celtic crosses and some of them are like 12, I think the, the largest, maybe 14 feet high, and I would put my hand on them and the vibration was compelling and visceral. There was times I had to look up because it felt like my hand was rocking like three to four inches side to side.
But when I opened my eyes, it was just my hand was just solid against this Celtic cross and my whole body resonated with the resonance and the energy beneath that. So those were probably highlights. And then I come to find out the Taggart, which is my surname, my grandmother's surname means son of the priest. Mm hmm. There's got to be a story there. And it wasn't it wasn't until the last day that I even saw a establishment that had the word Taggart on it, you know, I certainly took a picture of that.
[00:09:55] Ali: Totally. Oh, my goodness. Wow. That's a lot. Those are three extraordinary experiences. And one of the things we talked about when you first shared this with me, Heather, is the energetic power of Ireland.
And this might not be true for everyone, but like you, I've had a few experiences there, not quite the same, but where my body, mind, my heart and my soul were very at peace and it's hard to describe. But it's a place that really cultivates energy out of me that I don't feel in other parts of the world, and I've traveled quite a bit, so I can say that with some degree of certainty.
What's also interesting about Ireland is, I shared with you, after the second trip there, I did a DNA test and realized that I was over half Irish British, which shocked me. I would have thought it was a lot more European mix and then my Iranian heritage, but it was the majority. And so that kind of gave me some assurance. And I feel like you too have quite a bit of Irish lineage, correct?
[00:11:10] Heather: I do. My Grandmother and grandfather were full Irish. I have English as well. And as I shared with you, it had always been a more of a joke than a, um, a coming home to that had my sister, my older sister and younger sister and had any of us been a boy, our names would have been Taggart Patrick.
And I could never understand that because we named our dogs Tag and Tag was a dog's name. And that's what I, you know, when I thought of Taggart, I said, gosh, you're going to call me a dog's name. So it always became a joke. Ah, you know, every March 17th that I've been a boy, my name would have been Taggart Patrick.
But being on that soil, I came home in a way I could not have told you. I ended up grieving. I spent a day just in tears and sobbing at what was done to the Irish people, what they lived through in the famines. And I read Trinity and a few other books, to have some background as well.
But there was, there was just a homecoming. I have British as well. And I felt badly being British, being a descendant of people that wreaked havoc on my other people and then to settle in so well and feel that vibration. And old rocks that just, it just spoke to me in a way.
I just came home in a way that I could never have expected, which is, I think the paradox of, of even going on some of these trips. I expected something to happen. I just didn't know what it was. And so the beauty of that was I came home in a way I could never have guessed.
The country just spoke to me, the colors, the heather, the amount of heather on the hills. You know, I always thought of heather as scotch, but oh my gosh, the hills and hills of that beautiful red heather. So I have lots of pictures of me standing in front of that.
[00:13:08] Ali: Yeah, it's a beautiful place. That's another thing is that it's a beautiful place. It's alive. It's, it's surrounded by the ocean, which makes it interesting. Just the volatility of the weather. So, yes, I feel you. I feel that there is a part of me when I go there, it feels like being home. That's a great way to describe it.
Is that enough pilgrimage for now? Or is there another pilgrimage in the future?
[00:13:37] Heather: Well, we're thinking of going to the Holy Land next year, but I'm not sure that's going to happen. Okay, right, not right now. But absolutely, absolutely, I want to do more pilgrimage.
[00:13:47] Ali: Very cool. Yeah, a buddy of mine is walking the, the...
[00:13:52] Heather: El Camino Trail.
[00:13:53] Ali: El Camino. Yeah, uh huh. He's walking that and it looks like such an epic experience. So I love tying this back. I love the curiosity to go somewhere to get holier. To go on a pilgrimage for whatever spiritual desires fulfill you. Like we talked about earlier, it doesn't necessarily have to be mapped to a specific faith, but rather to just invest in your spirituality. I think that's beautiful.
It lends into something else you shared with me that I'm curious about. So when we had a nice chat previously, you shared that your life mission is to be a healer, teacher, advocate, and witness. Those are four powerful words. What do you want to start with?
[00:14:36] Heather: Well, healer certainly comes first as a physical therapist. I knew age 8, 9, 10 that I wanted medicine. My dad would bring home time magazine and I would always go to medicine and science. So I have that appreciation that I was to do something in that and my grandmother probably fed into that. I didn't like it at the time because while all my other cousins were out playing, grandma would ask me to rub her legs because I had the nicest hands. I had the best hands.
So I missed cousin time. And, you know, I've decided based on Dr Kelly's, I've given up regret, but it still saddens me that I. Yeah. Well, I was young and ignorant. I didn't know, but I was resentful at times. And yet I was obedient and I always did the best I could on her legs.
So I have those two strong advocacies that got me into healer and as a physical therapist. What I now know is it's holistic. I see body, mind, spirit. I can't separate them. I've heard too many stories in dark rooms where people are somaticizing their grief. Their woundedness. And I get to be the first one to witness to them.
And that's part of that witness piece. Not only learning to witness to my own woundedness, but to sit in presence and be a witness to someone else. Whether it be joy filled or grief work or anger or anything else. And I think it's best done by people who have done a lot of their own personal work, which I have.
So it's easier to do, and just hold space for space. Have a container big enough. There was a, I don't know, 17th century monk who said something about turning the river of compassion inward. So I often tell my clients, get a big bowl of compassion and make sure you're sitting in the middle of it. And sometimes I'll say, I'll sit there with you because I have the same woundedness. So, that's a piece of the witness.
Teacher as a physical therapist. I teach people how to take good care of themselves. I teach them how to stay away from the behaviors, the body mechanics that produced the pain that brought them to me. I love teaching how to do physiologic quieting. How do you get quiet within yourself? I think there's a ton of stress out there. I would say so many people are on fight or flight. They're not even aware of it. You know, I had a East Indian pediatrician as a client. And one of the things that was sweet is he would come in and sit in my, you know, you know, the little round stools that physicians and therapists sit in.
I would come into the room and he'd be sitting on my stool. I'd have to go sit in the chair. It's kind of sweet. But we were doing physiologic quieting breath work and watching it on screen, biofeedback. And he was breathing 28 times a minute. That is incredibly fast. That's the fastest that I've had many people in their 20s, high 20s, 28 breaths per minute.
And yet outwardly, very calm, very, very calm. And he came back the next week, he says, Heather, you are right. I'm breathing 28 times a minute. So teaching people how to come home to themselves, how to drop in, get out of their head and drop into their bodies so they can access their wisdom, their ability to take good care of themselves.
I call it hauling people off the edge because things they've done in their past that helped them get through hard times are no longer serving them. And so teaching the esoterics there, and I loved teaching physiologic quieting to sophomores. I did that for about 15 years while my kids were in school. And kids are hungry. They are hungry to know about themselves, to recognize stress in themselves and others and have tools with which to deal with that. And so that was incredibly rewarding.
One day every semester I'd teach like four sophomore health classes. And I would teach them not only about stress. How do you recognize stress in yourself? How do you recognize stress in your parents and your siblings and your friends? How do you know when Ms. Kentz comes in and it's not a good day for her, you know? And then what can you do? And it was incredibly gratifying because people would stop me in the hallway and tell me, Mrs. Hannam, Mrs. Hannam, I'm doing that thing. I recognize this. They're hungry.
And I was 34 ready to walk away from a marriage and four children before I really had to take care and realize how I'd been living my life and how things that had helped me survive my childhood were, were drowning me. And so to be able to give that back to younger people.
And I told that story because that was my truth. So that I said, you don't have to wait till you're 34 with four children underneath your belt to look around and go, life is not working for me.
So the teaching and then advocate. I'm a one on the Enneagram. You're probably familiar with the Enneagram. And I'm a one and I have a really strong justice wing. Every day I say generosity, kindness, faith, hope, strength, truth, justice, love. So I want to stand up for those people who don't have a voice, who are being taken advantage of in the moment, to teach them how to self advocate. So, there.
[00:20:29] Ali: That is awesome. Wow. I think I'm just going to keep saying, wow, as I listen, because those four simple, but powerful words have this beautiful blend and integration of the work you've done in the world, the life you've lived. I imagine we could have a whole conversation about each of those, but some of the things that popped up for me just to start with, like the healer.
And how you actually brought some of the teaching into this is that. It seems to me, Heather, that we're in an era of people waking up to a different type of healing. And let's just say for common language and to use some of your words, like getting back into their body. Learning to feel their feelings, learning to navigate previous trauma, and then to the, what you shared is proactively looking for ways to reduce stress.
Because if nothing else, I feel like part of our need to heal as humans is a response to the massive amounts of stress that is created in our world that we absorb. And one of the things that I see in my home that I want to share with you and then see if it spark something for you is that I've been educated on generational trauma, which I think is real.
And for people who don't have an understanding of that, it's just a concept that if your parent had trauma, then that could be passed on to you via the cellular level or, the body, however, you believe science and and source and some of these things can coexist.
But where it gets interesting, Heather, is that, back to the stress, like I see some things in my children's, particularly my son, my beautiful son, Everest, where he's just, he's go, go, go, just do what's next. What's next? And even to present peace and calmness with him is, is a battle. It's not in a way where he's defiant, but he just isn't interested in that. He wants to go.
And instead of scratching my head and being like, well, where did this come from? It's pretty clear to me that it's the same concept of generational trauma. Because when he was conceived, that's how I was. Go, go, go, go. I couldn't sit still and I was so stressed. I couldn't even see it.
So years later, I've done some healing. I've done a lot of inner work. Started to wake up to these things, but it's interesting because as I look around and go back to the healing, it doesn't seem like it's getting any better. In fact, our youth is susceptible to have even more of this. Because so many adults, so many humans right now are just inundated by stress. Does that land with you, just from the work you've done, the people you've held space for? Or what do you think about that?
[00:23:39] Heather: Oh, yeah. You know, scripturally, they talk about the sins of the parents being visited on the next three generations.
[00:23:45] Ali: Okay. Right. Right.
[00:23:47] Heather: There's that and the Native Americans will tell you it's like 5 to 12 things that are happening here are going to go down the line 5 to 12 or sorry, 7 to 12 generations. Epigenetically, we know that genes can turn on and off. Here's an interesting concept. Your grandmother, when she was pregnant with your mother, in which whose ovary you were an egg, there's three generations in the same field.
Hmm. Right there. Right. So what happened to grandmother and the energy that she's bathing her baby and future grandson in all in the same place. And, you know, we're just a few generations off of the farm, you know, where it was survival. You had as many kids as you could, because you needed them all to survive. Right.
Totally. And we now know that genes can be turned on and off. We know that, people will, I got a lot of this from the German new medicine that I studied as well, it's like, why is this kid afraid of drowning? We don't understand it. Maybe a young adult. And then we come to find out that two generations ago, somebody drowned, you know. How does that get passed on? Epigenetics I think is a good way to explain that.
I had a spiritual teacher who had had lymphoma. She was up on a roof with another of the spiritual teachers that I was with. It was early in her spiritual teaching career and she got hit by lightning. Now, the interesting thing on the other side, lymphoma gone. She was seeking, she was seeking help at the time. Lymphoma gone, her straight hair - curly, brown eyes - blue.
[00:25:36] Ali: All after the lightning, huh?
[00:25:38] Heather: After the lightning. Now we don't all have to get hit by lightning to have those moments where something different is happening. And I think about, when I was working with this counselor, Lorenzo, I realized I needed to ask God what God wanted for me.
And the scary thing about asking God, what God wants from you is that you may get an answer. You will get an answer. So I'm in the arms of my sister not far from my childhood home, sobbing, asking God what you want from me. And what God told me was, I want you to stop perpetuating the evil at 18681 South Redland Road.
Now that meant the shame that had been passed on from generation to generation. I grew up in a home that had all the abuses. We had sexual abuse. We had emotional abuse. We had physical abuse. We had alcoholism. We had it all. Um, and that I was to stop perpetuating the shame that it was the base of that.
Now, at that time, I held Mother Teresa and Billy Graham in high esteem. I thought they were walking their talk. They were doing their work on earth. And what God told me was that their life mission is worldwide and God would give them every grace and blessing they would need in order to do that.
And that even though mine was local, more local, I would be given every grace and blessing I needed to do it. That was very comforting. Here's the kicker though. God said, takes the same amount of courage to say yes, and that I never needed to put anybody else on a pedestal. If someone else is doing their life mission, that's the most important thing.
So I quit putting people like you're better than I am, you know more than I, I mean, there's a lot of people who know more than I am. I don't hold them better. You know, I think we're all called to do our life mission. One of my other spiritual teachers said, if we do not do our life mission, 10, 000 other people can't do theirs because we haven't done ours. We are so intertwined.
And I think there are a lot of people who in the stress of survival, don't have either the wherewithal, the support. I don't know if it's additional gumption. You know, sometimes I look around, go, why me? Except I have three sisters who have all done their work.
That's really uncommon in a family. Usually one person will say all these happened and they get blackball. They get black sheep. They move away. You know, I had sisters that were nodding their head. So that's incredible. But, you know, why is that? I don't know. A lot of times it's the first person who says what happened to my family was not okay. And they're the only one who's saying it and nobody's going to shut him up.
So, when it comes to kids and the amount of stress they're under, I think of all the ADD um, and ADHD I think about pregnant women who are under stress and are bathing those babies from day one in high adrenaline, right? Is that part of that?
And then we just have the stress of the world. How do we live in the moment? I did a lot of personal work. I think you have to do that. We have to grieve what we needed, what we didn't get. And then learn to give it to ourselves. And a lot of people have it in their head. They know they should forgive. They know they should live in peace. They know that they should be kind, but they don't know how to manifest. They can't get it from their head to their heart. So it's not in their day to day walk.
And then parents pass it on to their kids. You know, I passed a crapload on to my kids, that I needed to make amends for and to share with them why they saw me the way they did with their dad. What was that dynamic about? And I was grateful that all my kids were open to hearing that. And I said, you know, daddy's got his own story. This is my story. And then out of that, ask forgiveness on a regular basis. Are there things I say or do that are still hurtful to you and make amends for that and to stop trying to do that?
No, because we're all works in progress, right? Or process. So, that's the witness when I go to schools and I see kids stressed, I make sure I get eyeball to eyeball with them. I make sure I know their names. Even adults classes, I TA, healing the pelvic floor at Esalen every year with Suzanne Skurlock, and I want to know their names by the end of the night.
I want them to know that they've been seen, heard, respected, and supported. Those are the narcissistic needs of children. Alice Miller's work, phenomenal work. If you've. Yeah, Drama of the Gifted Child. If I could have everybody read one book, that would be the book I would have people read. But to be seen, heard, respected and supported. And that comes with the witness and advocate.
[00:30:47] Ali: Wow. So yeah, I was actually going to talk a little bit to the witness piece because one of the things I've noticed is, I think we've known for a while that witnessing in a one in one environment can be powerful, can be healing.
And that's where traditional methods of therapy come from. And not to just to make that simple, not to say that there's anything wrong. I think that one on one therapy is still great. It's a powerful tool, but being witnessed in a group is a whole different dynamic.
And whether you're at a retreat, or whether you're at Companion Camp, or even if you're at a larger environment. Even most people go to church, I think, because they want to be witnessed. And for a variety of other reasons. I'm not saying that's the only reason. Church is a place to be witnessed amongst people with, with high energy and intentions to give, to heal, to feel.
And so this is something again that I think is becoming more prevalent is that yes, there's always space for the one on one witnessing. And I love what you said, looking people in the eyes, cause it's so easy in our distracted world to just like, not actually make eye contact. I always ask my children, we're talking about something of depth, like, hey, let's please look at each other. It's a basic form of body language.
But back to the witnessing, I've experienced some pretty profound things in group environments. And back to something you said, it usually just takes courage. So when you say, why me? I think it's because you're courageous. I think most people are like, no, thanks, nope, I'm not going to go first. But if a Heather goes first, if Ali goes first, then other people are like, oh, cool. I can do that too. Right.
[00:32:38] Heather: I hear you. I decided years ago, if the opportunity to share was there, I would always take it. If I could offer something from my own experience that might be helpful. That I would absolutely take it in groups, powerful groups. I've been in groups of 800 and Dr. Joe Dispenza's, you know, meditation workshops. That was the largest I was ever in, but now he's doing, you know, 18 and 2500 people because the group energy is so powerful, is so powerful.
[00:33:14] Ali: That is cool. Yeah. That piqued my interest too. So it sounds like you participated in a large group meditation. That is awesome.
Back to these words because you've sparked something. You said children want to be seen, heard, respected, and supported. Just the other day, I was toying with something I had been sitting with and writing and sharing with friends where I posted something along the lines of all children or most children want to be seen, heard, and loved.
So very close to what you just described and in some ways I remember when I was like really musing. I like to muse. When I was really musing with this, I was thinking like, loved, connected, but respected and supported are right in that same vicinity of words, of meaning. And so, I am already pretty familiar with why I think children want this. I also think adults want these same four words.
[00:34:19] Heather: Absolutely. We're just grown up little kids.
[00:34:21] Ali: Right. And so an interesting topic is we have this perspective that children want and need these things. And then logically we know that we do too, but then what happens?
How do we lose that? Because most adults hide. I'm going to do the inverse. Instead of being seen, they hide. Instead of being heard, they don't speak their truth. Instead of owning respect, they just kind of dance around and fight and create conflict and all the emotional drama that we create as humans and support it is another one.
It's easy to not step in, to not ask or receive. I have so many friends and even including myself, that have trouble asking for help. So the question becomes, why do adults lose all this?
[00:35:10] Heather: You know, we come into this world, sweet and innocent. And by the time we're like four to six, it gets beat out of us. When I was doing biofeedback with clients, you know, babies come into this world, big, soft belly breathers. Unless they're ill, but generally speaking. But by the time they're 4 to 6, they are upper chest breathers. They are under the stress of the environment. The majority, not all as you know, and so I think parents can only give what they can give.
A powerful piece in recovery is being able to look back and say, I needed this, didn't get it. Learning how to give it to yourself. And then being able to pass it on. My kids were young when I really started. I just had my fourth child and I was a controller by nature.
That was my drug of choice. All my siblings did some alcohol and/or drugs. I did control. I was a collegiate volleyball official, high level. You know, I had my control places and I realized that was five new relationships I had to control and I couldn't do it and that's what put me over an edge.
So that's how I met my edge. I was no longer happy at work. Work was not fulfilling to me. Life was not good. The things that I could, like I mentioned before, wasn't satisfying. So learning to give that to myself and then reflecting it back and having children, a nine year old and a baby. And quite frankly, I think you'll probably be amused at this.
I remember I was two years into group counseling and I'm on Lorenzo's couch going I don't know anything. Oh, my God. I don't know anything here.
We can do some work because we had to dismantle all the limiting belief systems that I had that said when and where I was worthy when I could judge other people to be worthy or not. And it's a process. I don't know that there's a single moment. We just keep having to say yes every day. We've all had that.
I just remember my little 18 month old sitting on the floor and me just being present for him. I'd never done that with my other three children. He called something out in me. He's an old soul. He called something out in me and was my teacher. I think once we understand it, we can see it more easily in ourselves and others.
And once we do that, it's hard to unsee. I think there are people who will work so long and then go back to sleep because it gets too painful. But if you're willing to keep going, I mean, the rewards are incredible. I don't longer fear the future. I know I have every gift and blessing I ever need to handle anything. And we've had ugly stuff in my family. People said, how'd you do it? I said, you know, God said everything would be okay. I don't fear. I know I've got what it takes to do it.
And part of that in my life mission is to share that. In my treatment rooms and with my family. I'm the first one that said what happened in my generation was wrong. I'm the first one who then went to my children and said, what I taught you was wrong. They still have to do their own work because otherwise they'll pass it on. And there's nothing that says they'll pick up the baton and run with it. Gratefully they have, but, you know, it was at different stages. So, I don't know where that fits in, but...
[00:38:47] Ali: It all fits in. It all, it all flows. I feel like there's so much depth, that your stories could just run in a beautiful way. And one of the things you said that really stuck out to me. There is a message I've received and want to continue passing on to other parents in particular is when you describe seeing you're 18 month old and really being with them in a way where they were teaching you.
I think more often than not in this season of life where my children are still pretty young, seven and five at the moment, they truly are teaching me way more than I'm teaching them. And we're practicing life together and failing and I'm owning it more and being like, ah. And I'm telling them, and this is just part of me being more expressive, telling them how I feel and going back on specific things like, you know what daddy apologizes for that because he was really, really sad and didn't even realize it. And so in so many ways, Heather, I balance or dance with this whole (I laugh) because I, I balance and dance with this notion of being like, I need to be more like them.
I need to move through the world, even more curious, even more adventurous with just the ability to just show up and express myself and feel everything. The entirety. I tell people a lot, like if you see a child throwing a tantrum, pay attention. Instead of closing off and getting all scared and projecting about if you were the parent and all the fear and the closeness that comes with like just watch what's happening. It's just this expression, this volcanic eruption of emotion and it's gone.
Whereas we do the opposite. We get extremely scared or angry and just suppress, suppress, suppress. And it stays in us. And then back to what we were talking about, we pass that shit on. We give that to somebody else. And then the cycle continues. So I think it's such a gift if you can truly commit to learning from your children.
[00:40:58] Heather: Oh, absolutely. You know, I was fortunate enough to have grandchildren that I could babysit and get to know. And one of the things I did that I didn't know to do with my own children is to give them an emotional language because they are just one big ball of emotion.
Right? You know, so we did the big four - mad, sad, glad, and afraid. Um, what number is it? Zero to ten. And sometimes we do fingers. How many fingers is it? You know, where is it in your body? Where do you feel it in your body? What color is it? And then I would model that to them as well. And when my grandson said, it's in my heel, I accepted that it was in his heel when they said it was all colors. I accepted that it was all colors. Yeah.
And I think that was helpful. Really, really helpful. In talking with them and, you know, I'd bring up scenarios and say, how you feeling about this? What's this about? And I would, you know, share, as you said, my own in ways that they could hear and hopefully model as they got older.
[00:42:03] Ali: I love that. I'm going to use the colors because we do the same thing. You said mad, sad, glad and afraid. Okay, cool. We focus on anger, fear, sadness and joy, which is the exact same emotions with slightly. It is mine. Just mine. Just rhymes. I like that. I like that. I like that kids like that. And the colors are so good because not only do I love to see the world in shapes and colors and feelings now, but it's just our natural way of being.
Just literally this morning, I'm making breakfast for my kiddos and my five year old Sepia. She's like, Dad, do you want to sit down and color with me? And of course, my serious, task oriented adult brain is like, no girl, I gotta go do this thing. Like there's a lot going on today. I just, I just made them breakfast, but I literally paused today of all days and turned around and said, yeah, let's color.
And so I sit down and again, just like being with her, observing her, like she's so in her element, she's just coloring and she's drawing. And like, I'm sitting there just being still because I'm enjoying this moment and she looks up and she's like sensing I need directions. So she's like dad if you need some colors here, take these and if you if you want me I can help you write the story I just start smiling and laughing. She is so in her element of just being with the colors, being with the art. And then this is the best part, this is the part I love about watching my daughter and young children, is that when she's done, she's done.
She doesn't carry any of that with her, she goes off to the next thing. She might be dancing, she might be brushing her teeth for school. But it's just this way of moving through the world, and not carrying things, because I think that's what gets us into trouble. I think that's, a huge correlation to the stress, to the healing, it's just how much we carry with us.
[00:43:57] Heather: Mm hmm. I would agree.
[00:44:00] Ali: I feel like we could continue this forever. I want to be responsible with the clock since we're getting close to the hour. And if you're up for it, I would love to finish with a few rapid funfire questions.
[00:44:14] Heather: Okay.
[00:44:16] Ali: First, Easy. What's your favorite food?
[00:44:20] Heather: Um, cinnamon rolls. Really good cream cheese frosting and butter in the microwave.
[00:44:26] Ali: Wow. Those are my wife's definitely in her top three favorite foods. For Mother's Day, we make my wife Gabrielle cinnamon rolls. So awesome answer.
Next question. What animal would you be if not human?
[00:44:42] Heather: I think a panther. We did a movement class 1 time where we were big cats and I came right up against this other woman and we each held our own. We looked at each other and then felt within us that there was no competition. There was just our own personal presence and authority. And we turned our back on each other and walked away.
And I still carry that. Who you are is enough. I don't have to defend you and you don't have to defend me. You know what I mean? It's like, we don't have to fight. We can just be present. So that reminds me of the Panther.
[00:45:20] Ali: That is cool. I dig that. Great choice. Wow.
Okay. And final question. What is one of your favorite childhood memories?
[00:45:29] Heather: That's not hard. Camping, family camping. Just the whole experience of it. But I was given a freedom back then. You know, kids don't have nowadays, we don't have cell phones, but I would be gone for hours exploring, walking along the lake, reaching under rocks, looking for salamanders for frogs, not afraid walking into the woods, I remember even playing with fire.
Could, could firework in a jar? Fortunately, I didn't light a big fire. I was thinking, could firework in a jar? Can I put enough matches in a jar? But just the freedom that I remember having those days. You know, s'mores, family camping songs around the campfire.
[00:46:11] Ali: I love that. Camping has so much opportunity beyond nature, which is the one of the most obvious benefits for me for the things you just described to just energize us. We actually just took my kids on their first true camping trip, me and a buddy and his son so their was five of us.
And we drove out pretty far up to this beautiful remote lake. And same thing that you described, like, we're all running around, looking for rocks. Me and my buddy Tim were doing some fishing. The kids are playing, they're exploring, they're so curious about the fire. And it's like, because we don't have these big campfires in our lives every day, but it's such a magnificent form of energy. And I'm sitting there and explaining them. I'm like, guys, this is what people did before TV.
And they're like, what? I'm like, yes. And I'm like, just watch it. And of course it'll entertain you if you just watch a fire, if you're really there with it. I love that answer. Yeah. Camping. It's like one of those things that I hope comes back. I hope people give it more prioritization.
It's easy not to camp these days or to what I say, glamping and make it, you know, where you're not even really away or or with nature. But I truly believe camping, especially in a group of family dynamic offers great. Yes.
Well, that's a perfect place to end. This was a gift. I knew it would be. I think this might be one of future conversations, Heather. You, you are a wealth of wisdom. You're also really fun to talk to.
[00:47:51] Heather: Oh, thank you. This has been a delight.
[00:47:53] Ali: Yeah, I enjoy your energy. You're very spirited. And I feel like we just got the tip of the iceberg with this conversation.
[00:48:02] Heather: Yeah, you know, when I retired, I realized I know a ton. I know a lot.
[00:48:06] Ali: I believe that. So thank you.
[00:48:09] Heather: Thank you Ali, for this beautiful, this beautiful space. And us holding space together. It's all about the space about the space. It's all about the space.
[00:48:21] Ali: Well said that is a beautiful place to end.
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He’s an accomplished human and one of the smartest people I know, but that’s not why I value his friendship, or why I had him on my podcast. I enjoy Tucker’s presence because he’s REAL. And he brought a very real conversation to this episode.
We dive deep into why Tucker chooses a sovereign lifestyle. We discuss his journey into homesteading, his perspective on learning vs decision making, the power of living on land, and what it means to be an avatar.
Being an avatar is not a basic subject. In fact, it’s something that very few humans have the capacity for being. I think Tucker is one of those rare humans. I’ve witnessed him change lives, wake people up, and spark more awareness in the world. He’s also been an impactful part of my own journey, which I’m grateful for.
I appreciate Tucker for his authenticity, conviction and dedication to speaking his truth. He doesn’t hold back in a world that makes it easy to hide and stay asleep. I’m excited to see him walk his path.
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Today I have a friend, a special guest, Mr. Tucker Max. Tucker and I met through way of FRD, Front Row Dads, and one of the things that's interesting that I sort of share about Tucker is that I've had very few but potent conversations with him, some of which we'll probably talk about today.
But I appreciate those conversations, Tucker, if I haven't told you before. They've been inspirational and helpful, among other words I could use. And my thing on this show is to allow guests to introduce themselves. So, who is Tucker Max?
[00:00:43] Tucker: Oh man, well, right now, I spend my time, I have a 50 acre homestead in Dripping Springs, Texas. And so, you know, we got sheep, chickens, bees, all that kind of stuff. Planting, all kinds of stuff, so, I work on that, and I have four kids. All under nine, nine or under the oldest is nine.
And so two are in the school that I helped found. There's a Waldorf in Dripping Springs. And then one is being homeschooled cause there weren't enough kids for a class at the Waldorf. And then one, is just like little, she's a year and a half.
And so, yeah, so homeschooling one of my kids and building my homestead, man. That's pretty much it for right now.
[00:01:23] Ali: That's exactly why I wanted to record this is that you're doing some things in the world around homesteading that are inspiring.
I also think that parts of them are courageous and that's my interpretation because I want to do similar things. And so as I learn and explore this with you, let's start with the homesteading. So what sparked this?
[00:01:49] Tucker: Well, I mean, my wife and I had always wanted to be on land. We wanted it to buy land and kind of live on it and whatever. And it was one of those things where, you know, most people for most things, they want like, oh, one day or we're going to, you know, we're thinking about it or, or this is what we want to do.
And we were definitely in that space about land. And then 2020 came along and lockdowns and the massive expansion of, you know, governmental authoritarian power, and all the riots and all of the other nonsense.
And we were like, okay, like, I thought I was awake and understood the world and I did in a lot of ways. But, there was a depth to it that I did not understand and that, that really woke me up in. The moment where I really was like, "oh, shit, we have to get on land" was January 6th of 2021 when I watched a news feed of a bunch of drunken doofuses being led into the Capitol. And then in real time, the American media tried to tell me that that was a dangerous insurrection.
I was like, no, that's just not true at all. And it's funny because I spent 20 years in media. I know they lie about everything. But to watch that and then like all the subsequent stuff, like, I mean, there's what, 30 or 40 people in jail now, like who literally were let into a building. In what amounts to, a little bit of a ruckus, but what amounts to an America, at least a peaceful process.
And, um, I was like, all right, that day, I realized that, that I don't know when the American Republic fell, but it was over. And we were not just, we were long past the American Republic falling, we were now in the empire collapse stage. And I was like, "Oh shit." Like I missed this Most people have, but nonetheless I like to think I'm smarting ahead and I wasn't at that moment. I was like, oh we need to get our shit together.
And so we'd always wanted to get on land and it was like let's go. So I took us a little off on the right place, but we did. And so now I went from being like most people, I lived in a city, you know, I bought all my food at a grocery store. I was absolutely, completely dependent on other people for everything.
And now I own my own water supply. I have two water supplies, both of which are fully owned and contained. I own my own meat supply. Like, I make all my own chicken, I make all my own lamb, and when I say I make, I mean, my sheep are born here, they live here. I kill them here, I gut them here, I hang them here, and I butcher them here. They never leave my land.
Same with chickens. Uh, we do meat chickens as well as eggs. So, I mean, I have 90 something meat birds in my freezer right now that I raised this year here. And so like, meat, uh, I don't do Cows on my land. I decided to not, we had cows for a while, but I decided not to.
But I get my meat from a rancher who is about an hour away who I know personally. Who literally puts nothing in his cows, except grass and water. No anti parasitics, no vaccines. He's way beyond organic, like he's. He's religious about like. And so all of my meat is either an owned supply or it's from someone who sees the world I do and lives right by me.
Most of my vegetables, we get farmer's markets or whatever. And like, power supply, I have multiple supplies. I'm on grid for power because I'm not a fool or Amish, right? So of course the grid's working. I'm going to use it, but I have multiple backup supplies.
And so we live a life that is in most ways normal. But last winter in Texas, in central Texas, we had a massive ice storm. An inch of ice was on everything. And in Austin power was down for three days where I live, power down five days. Literally, we did nothing change. You know, we have generators propane, like we have everything.
And so it was like nothing changed in our life. Right. And so, I've created a life where not only am I not dependent on other people for a lot of things? I, of course, I don't make my own Mac books. Like, I mean, obviously I'm still in the world.
But for the very important inputs, water, food, et cetera, I'm not dependent on others. And more importantly than not just dependent on them, I think most of what passes as food and water and other things are poison. And I'm not involved in that system anymore. And like, I don't have to check all my labels at Whole Foods anymore or worry about whether they're being honest about where they're sourcing stuff because I either do it myself or I know who makes it and I know them and they're my friend. And I can just go to their farm anytime and see what they're doing.
Right. And so, you know.
[00:07:01] Ali: Like, you went back to how things were before we became so complex and...
[00:07:06] Tucker: In certain ways. In certain ways. Like, you know, when people talk about living off grid, that's such a fallacy. Even the Amish are not off grid. Seriously, no one is off grid anymore. And I mean... almost literally no one. Because people are like, how are the Amish not off grid? They don't use electricity.
I'm like, "okay, where do they get their tools?" They use iron tools, right? They use steel. So where do they get those? They're not mining the ore. They're not smelting it. Like they are on the petrochemical grid. Everyone basically on Earth now is, right. So there's no such thing as off grid or on grid.
You're on grid. The only question is how reliant are you on other people for all your inputs? And how insulated from grid shocks are you? Like I'm not fully insulated from all grid shocks if someone nuked Houston, I'm gonna be effected.
But like, just as an example, if all of a sudden the U. S. government decided to cancel all currency and roll out central bank digital currency and try and, you know, all this nonsense. Like the two main, what three main ways they're going to get people to do that is food, water, power, right?
I can't withstand forever. No one can, but I'm not reliant on any governmental entity for those systems. Right. And so, like, I can live in a different way. My goal is, is to be as sovereign as possible. There's no such, it's not an on off switch, right? You're not either sovereign or not sovereign. There are degrees of sovereignty. And not everyone wants to be sovereign.
I do. Not free. Free is a different thing. I want to be sovereign, meaning I decide. I get to have full choice over my life. Or as much as possible. I'm a human, I still live in this world. I don't get to decide which laws of physics I obey. Right. But, um... sovereign among men. I want to be a sovereign man, meaning like I get to decide what I do and what I don't freely.
[00:09:18] Ali: Totally. That is a very comprehensive answer to the why. You even kind of noted on some of the things that I was follow up curious about around some of the challenges, but I think it's really again, I'll just use the word inspiring, because I make up a story that what you're doing is not easy.
[00:09:38] Tucker: Yeah, it's not. No, sovereignty is not easy, man. Sovereignty is almost always the harder path. Because if someone else is willing to do the hard work for you, yeah, that's easier, dude. There's a price for that, right? And I like to say that any responsibility you have that you abdicate will be taken up by a tyrant and used against you.
I think, I think Jordan told me that. Uh, Peterson, like he's a good friend of mine and like, we were talking about something and he said that I was like, that's exactly what I was saying, but way, way better. And it's true, you know.
Now here's the reality, man. Most people are okay with accepting at least some level of tyranny in their lives if it's more convenient and easier. And you know what? Fine. That's their decision. And I used to, even though I didn't think I was, I used to be that way. And you can probably point out areas in my life where I'm still doing it now that I don't really realize I'm making a cost benefit analysis or et cetera, et cetera, but like, that's whatever, man.
Like, if other people want to be slaves or be half slaves or quasi slaves or wear golden handcuffs or whatever, that's their decision, not mine. I it's fine. I'm not going to do that though. I've decided it's not going to happen.
[00:11:02] Ali: I've sensed that. Like I said, in the few conversations I've had with you, I sense that you're very with your decisions. You don't necessarily preach or tell people what to do, but here's the thing that I've also observed with you, which I think is one of your gifts, at least that's how I filter it.
Is that sometimes you share or speak with such conviction that it's like, I told you this before, I'm like, "holy shit, has Tucker changed my mind on this?" Like, I used to think this, but like what he said makes a lot of sense. And the way he said it, I'm like, I don't feel like he's making this up. Like, I'm observing your body language and I'm like, he's so grounded in what he just said.
So where this goes to. Um, the question I don't think I've asked before is. What's your process for learning? Because I sense that you have your own way of being in the world and then being curious and then learning something and then back to this component of sharing it.
So I have to go all the way back, like, how do you learn?
[00:12:07] Tucker: What's my process for learning or for deciding? Because what you just talked about leading up to that was not about learning, which is, both are great questions. They're just very different things.
[00:12:17] Ali: Answer the one that speaks to you.
[00:12:20] Tucker: Um, well, the one that's more in line with what you're talking about is not learning, right?
Like a lot of people focus, you know, like smart internet people focus on learning. How do I learn more? They think it's about information. And there are definitely times where that's true. Like when I got out here and got on land, like I knew I didn't know a lot about various aspects of homesteading. But I think I severely underestimated how little I knew.
Like I didn't know what an impact driver was as opposed to a screwdriver. Right. Um, or, uh, or a drill. Sorry. And like, I had no concept of any of this stuff, some of the most basic things I'm like, "Oh, I didn't know that."
Right. So there was definitely an information gap for me. But filling an information gap, nowadays is trivially easy. Like, honestly, it's breathtaking to me to think about if I had moved on and tried to homestead, let's say, what is it 2023? Let's say 20 years ago, how fucked I would have been. Where the hell in 2003 would I have learned all this?
Like, I would have had to hire somebody who, you know, someone who's been doing this for a while, but, you know, lives in the country, whatever, to teach me all of these things. The things that are, you are right, that would be basic skills for a 12 year old 70 years ago, I don't know anything about. But today, bro, YouTube.
YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. And it was like, simple, and like, So funny, like a lot of my friends who come out here from like, city are like, "Wow, how'd you learn all this? You must be so smart." I'm like, you have YouTube too. Like, there's nothing, how'd you do that? I'm like, I watched a video and literally just did exactly what he did.
And so it's funny, we were processing meat birds and someone came out and they're like, How did you learn all this? I'm like, there's thousands of videos online that literally show people doing this exact thing.
Which actually brings me to kind of back to the point. If there's a scarcity now, it's not on information. It used to be. Like almost all of our institutions and all of the common wisdom that humans operate on is based on the idea of a scarcity of information. That is gone. At least right now.
What there is a scarcity of... I think, are things like courage, decision making, wisdom, effective judgment. Things like that, right?
Like I can go on YouTube and find a video to tell me literally how to do anything on this homestead. And I mean that like almost totally literally. But like, what should I be doing? What do I need to focus on? In what order? What's the most important thing? Like that's judgment and wisdom, right?
And there's a scarcity of that. And then the level above that is what I would call self awareness, right? Like, what do I even want? Like, why am I on a goddamn homestead, like, making things with my hands? Why? What's my ultimate goal? Like, where am I trying to get to? What's my goal?
And so understanding, which you can call self awareness or values or whatever, which actually brings back to your original question, why did we get on land? And I gave you a very sort of a good answer, but it was sort of like, what's the trigger that, that woke me up that made us actually go get land.
We wanted to be on land before and why? I'll tell you why, because, I think this gets to what, the core of what you were asking. I think. We had a belief before we came out here that being on land would enable us to connect better with ourselves by connecting with nature. And it was in certain ways, the pretty naive belief.
I can just say like the way I thought about it then was naive. Now I can tell you having two years out here, I was right. But I was right for reasons I didn't really understand. I was a lot more right than I realized for reasons I didn't really understand.
But being on land has been... let's say I'm totally wrong about the way I see the world and everything. Yeah, there's, you know, some stuff going on, but let's say everything's basically safe. I don't need to have my own water supply. Let's just say for safety reasons, I'm way off base.
Okay, cool. Like, let's say I knew that to be a fact. I would still want to be here. And I would still be very happy with being here. I would just have spent too much money on things like, you know, a big rainwater catch catchment system and like, and two generators, and I got way too many fucking bullets. Like I would have wasted a quarter million dollars on various security things or half a million, whatever on what I did, I just, I don't need it.
But I'm still super, super happy I'm here. Because what land does, especially if you're working land, land animals. It forces you... um, force you, it enables you in some ways it does force you, but it enables you to really reflect on yourself and get honest with yourself. Yes.
Like if you live in a city and you want to lie to yourself, it's really easy. In fact, all the skids are greased for living in someone else's reality and buying into their world and not actually having to think about who am I and what do I want and what would that cost me. And I don't just mean money. And what are my values and all that.
Like it's so easy to just to live in Austin and vote Democrats and believe what everyone else believes and whatever, right? But land forces you to test your beliefs. Being out here does. Being in nature in a lot of ways.
And like, I mean, I can have all the ideas in my head and the world about sheep. And about coyotes and about dogs, but their interaction is independent of my beliefs, right? Like, I may think coyotes shouldn't kill sheep. Coyotes don't care. They get a vote too, right?
And so, like it, it forces you to really look at yourself. Especially if you're in a, a mind space, like where I think you are, and I, I have definitely been the last 10 years. And when I met you, you already were of true, honest self reflection and self awareness.
That's been the greatest gift of this land is that it has not just tested me. Cause you can find tests. I mean, I can go to a CrossFit gym and test myself until I die. It's not just about testing yourself. It's about forcing you to face yourself and your truths. And then your interaction with the world. Right?
Because like I said, out here, I can't live in this world where I'm the only thing that exists. You know, everything else out here gets a vote too.
Does that all make sense?
[00:19:41] Ali: Beyond making sense, I mean, it's very real what you're sharing. And thank you, I appreciate the note. Because self reflection, awareness, is arguably the most important word in my life in the last several years.
Just owning it, like you said, facing it. And that feels like the gravity that pulls me, that makes me really fascinated and intrigued by what you're doing. And it's such a, I'll go back to it's such a real answer because if there's anything, I also love to speak up about its nature.
My version of what you're doing is getting into the mountains as much as I can. And I come back and I'm like this different version of like, wait a second. There's all these people and they want things, and they've got all these crazy ideas that don't land with me like they used to.
Whereas there's something very, very pure and like almost brutal, acute to face in nature. It just kind of guides you back to yourself, and that's how I would describe that, so it's beautiful.
What it makes me curious about, Tucker, is that, what do you see in your children now? Because they're with you, they're with themselves in this experience.
[00:20:52] Tucker: So, I think my wife and I already did a pretty good job raising our kids, but it's been way better since we got out here. Because what land has enabled, now the kids have all their own space that they want, right?
And also like they live in reality. Like, they don't live on screens. So, for example, we just processed a bunch of meat birds. And one of the other FRDs actually came out and helped us with his daughter. Chris Bartik. I don't know if you know him. But he came with his daughter, and they're great, man. They're like, kind of in this world, too.
And like, when I say process meat birds, we take birds that are alive. And we kill them and then do a bunch of stuff to them. So they are now a whole bird that goes into the freezer that we then eat. Right. And so like, my kids had kind of like done it a little bit with me, but they'd never really gone through the whole process.
We have like 40 to process. It's like a lot of work, dude. This is hard physical labor. And these are pretty big six, seven, eight pound birds, right? I mean, they're not huge, but these are living things that don't really, you know, don't really, I don't know, like, oh, yeah, let me just go die, right?
I mean, chickens kill themselves all the time. They're idiots, but they wanted to live. And so, I kind of did the first few. I showed Chris and his daughter and my kids, and my wife, like, okay, here's exactly how we do it. And then we kind of set up an assembly line. And what ended up happening is my nine year old, Bishop and then Chris's nine year old, he's got a nine year old girl, and they were really into killing the birds, right?
So we'd assemble them into these small cages so we don't have to chase them everywhere. And so they would go in, they'd open the cage, they'd get one of the birds. They'd put it in like a kill cone, like it's this cone, upside down cone, you put it in, you pull its head out. And then this is actually really, honestly, the safest, most humane way to kill the birds is you just cut their throat and they bleed out, doesn't hurt really much at all.
And it's a pretty calm death, right? And it's actually way better for the meat. When they take them to processors, what they'll do is stun them first with like a little stun gun, you know. And so the birds kind of like unconscious. The problem is it doesn't drain a lot of the blood out. And there's other issues that are kind of weird.
We do it just straight to wall style. Like we cut their throats. And so like at first the kids were obviously like a little, you know, uh, even my kids who've been around a lot of death, cause that's what homesteading, that's what meat is. Is at its core is death. But like they kind of got into it, not in a morose way. Because you know the first couple ones we said a prayer over we understood like, okay, this is you know, we can't contextualize fully everything. But bro by the end my nine year old his nine year old were like totally into this right.
And like they wanted to do a good job. They wanted to make sure the birds weren't suffering. Like, they're not just sticking the knife in. Oh no, it's bleeding everywhere. We don't know what's going on. Like, they were doing it right. And they, like, were really into it. And so, like, death is a part of life for them now.
Yeah, it's important and it's impactful, but it's not some traumatic thing. And they understand when it's appropriate, how it fits in, how to do it the right way, all those sorts of things. So these sorts of things that can be really sort of weird and traumatic for kids now are just like a part of their life.
And, and they, they really love it. They like it. You know, we go hunting all the time and like, I'll shoot a deer and then we say a prayer over it. We think it's for sacrifice and whatever. And so like when my kids eat chicken or deer, you know, like they're like, "Oh, this was when I was hunting."
Like food is not a thing that comes from the store to them. Right. And death is not an abstraction that we don't talk about. Food comes from their land that they raised and death is a part of life. Because it is, so it's actually a part of their life. They're now so mature and so connected to themselves, because they're connected to the land. Because they understand this is all one big system and we are a part of it and here's how we connect to it.
And like my emotions are part of me and that's part of the system. If I'm angry trying to kill chickens, things things aren't going to go well. If I'm centered and focused, things go well for me and the bird. You know, I don't cut myself, et cetera, et cetera. So my kids just have a... they have such a self possession that honestly, I don't really even think about until like, we'll go, let's say into town and then we'll like maybe go to a park or something.
And then I'll see them around kids who like are on their screens all the time, eating sugary crap and totally disconnected from reality. And I'm like. Oh my god, those mongrels, like, ugh, like, I don't even think of my kids as being that great or different until I see them around an average kid.
In a city, and I'm like, "Oh, wow, dude." It's, you know, we feel, yeah, I know. And it's not like a kid can't be healthy in the city. Of course it can't like, they have friends who live in Austin who parents do a pretty good job and they're like, whatever. But like, I'm talking about the average kid. It's shocking to me, dude.
How, I mean, obviously we did this. I know we're outliers but I don't think about it that way until I'm looking at some kid who's the same age as mine, who seems developmentally three years behind, who has serious behavioral issues, who, you know, I'm just like, oh, man. And then I see their parent, who's really, honestly, head in the phone, not really that different.
I'm like, oh, well, this is the opposite of sovereignty. This is what happens, you know, if you make different choices.
[00:26:32] Ali: Well, I love so much of that. And I would share that even here where we live in Denver and the suburbs currently, my children go to a nice public school that should probably be a private school with how well it's funded.
And there's this shock that I feel and even sometimes absorb when I take them or bring them home from school and their environment. And while it's hard to not judge, I'm in agreeance that there's a part of me just like, wow, this is, It's a very different experience what we do in our home, and then what my good friend just recently described as "consensus reality," the way everyone else wants to be.
And again, I'm not trying to judge, because that's not the intention here. It's just like, whoa, it's so clear to me what's going on, and these kids have no idea, the parents aren't even present. And so back to your point, what's missing from the equation? Amongst several things, land, connectedness.
Yeah,
Then this segues into the last big thing that I was curious about because we've talked about this and this is where I have a lot of energy and it's a place where when you speak to this, I feel that there's parts of you that know this is perhaps a way for you to inspire or even a calling. And I'm going to use a word and I'm actually going to give you the freedom to go wherever you want with this. It's the word avatar because you've taught me things about that word and...
[00:28:08] Tucker: You can tell the story if you want. I have no problem or I will. Like that it's a. It's a funny story. Because like you guys looked at me like I was fucking nuts that I remember and I don't blame you, bro. I don't blame you. Someone had said that to me when I was at a lower level of consciousness or you know different. Different evolution time might have been like the fuck are you talking about you weirdo?
Totally like that's why I wasn't even upset. I'm like, yeah, dude, I get it Like it's fucking weird. Yeah
[00:28:37] Ali: I love well, this is the context i'll give. And then again, I would actually, I want you to share what.
[00:28:43] Tucker: Okay. Yeah.
[00:28:45] Ali: Is that I think there's a lot of people in the world that perform. And at the basic level, I think they're performing for external validation, right?
So we're talking about land and finding yourself and really aware. And so that's not an avatar to me, especially when I heard you say it a few years ago. An avatar seems like someone who answers a call to be a beacon in maybe...
[00:29:16] Tucker: No, no, no, hold on. They answer a call for themselves. They don't answer a call for any reason outside of themselves. Ever.
So the way I would define an avatar is someone who Answers a call is a good way to put it. Someone who, let's say, lives the true vision of their life. Right? They don't necessarily have to be enlightened in the Buddhist sense. But someone who does the hard work of their life... and comes to some realizations or lives or embodies a certain life or idea.
And then, through living their truest self, they become an example for others. That's it. So like the famous avatars in history are people like Jesus or Buddha or Krishna, or, you know, go down the list.
But you don't being avatar doesn't mean you're famous, right? Like, I think my godfather was one. And he's not famous at all. If I told you his name, you wouldn't know. I mean, he was very, very well known in his little town that he lived in and very influential and impactful, but like, it's not about fame.
Some of them just happened to become well known for various reasons. I mean, the only reason Jesus is super well known is probably because of Paul. Right? And the efforts of Paul and the people after after Paul. And which is not a knock on Jesus. Just Jesus didn't care if he was famous. Paul did.
So, so that's just kind of how it works. Right? Same with Buddha. Buddha didn't care, but his disciples did.
And so, there's actually, it's craziest thing, bro. If you study Jewish history, the Jews have a name for avatars. They call them charismatics. And there've been hundreds in Jewish history that like are very, very similar to Jesus in a sense.
Not necessarily preaching the same message, but, are like very good. Very persuasive. Not all of them are what I would consider avatars, but they're close enough. Cause like the charismatic can range from what I think are basically con men to people to Jesus being one, like he's considered one of the great ones.
Anyway, so the point is, in this group, there's like four of us were talking and forget what the question was, it was something like, what are you focused on? And I had just, like, two days before, had a meeting with someone who... it was very unnerving, man. Like, you ever meet with someone who I don't want to use the word psychic, because that brings up a lot of different associates, but someone who just knows shit about you that they shouldn't know, that doesn't make sense?
Not like. Like, I can talk to you and read stuff really well, but I don't meet people and I'm like, "Oh, your dad's middle name is Sam." And like, I don't like that... it's not right. But if you ever met someone like that and you're just like, the fuck is going on?
I had two days before that FRD, I had met a woman who basically was like, confronted me about...
She didn't know me. She didn't know nothing. And she's like, "Wow. I've. In my whole life, I've only met two of you." And I'm like, you met two people named Tucker max. No, no, I've never met anyone. She's like two avatars. The fuck are you talking about?
Without going even further into, like, crazy lunatic weirdness... basically, this woman called me out on this. She's like, "look, you know why you're here." You're here to live the most truest self, most authentic self you can. And you have the skills to talk about this and be an example to a lot of people. And she's like, "you've already done this. Right?"
And no, she wasn't like a fan who read my book. She didn't know who I was at all in any way, shape or form. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I kind of have. And she goes, yeah, no, you haven't, you haven't really done it the way you're supposed to yet. Like that was just practice. And I was like, who are you? You fucking witch what's going on.
[00:33:12] Ali: But there's a part of that that you knew is true for you, right?
[00:33:14] Tucker: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. Like, it's not like she came up to me like "you should be in the NBA" or some nonsense. " There's so much more to you than people realize," like you can say that to anybody. Or no, no, she was like, very specific with some weird stuff.
And like, I don't know what fully was going on. I'm not going to pretend like, Oh, here's... but I do know that I had that in my head a lot at that point and I was thinking about that. And so like I just brought that up because even then and right now, in certain ways I still haven't stepped up man, like, I think the next major step for me is finishing my next book, right? My memoir. My next memoir.
And uh... man, I still haven't done it. Like, that's a concept so hard, dude. This one's rough. I don't mean to sound like arrogant, it's just true. I know everything there is to know about writing memoirs. Like, you're talking about information?
Not only could I, but I probably should write the definitive book on how to write a memoir. Like, there are great memoir writers in the world, and there are people who know as much, as I do, probably. No one knows more. No one knows more than I do on how to write a memoir, how to tell your story.
That is maybe the thing, if we're talking about specific skills, that I'm the best at in the world. If I'm not the best, there's like five or six of us and we're all right there together, right? You know, it's like an all star team. Like who's the best person? Oh, whatever. We're all on the all star team. It doesn't matter anymore.
But dude, this one's kicking my ass because it's not about information. It's not about skills, right? You can't information your way into courage. You can't information your way into self awareness. You can't information your way into feeling painful emotions.
None of that's about information, man. None of it. Information might help if you're stuck at certain levels or whatever. But like I said, like there's no, there, there doesn't exist any more information about writing memoirs that I could definitely that I need. And even if I like, uh, it just, there's nothing left.
I know it all. Right. And knowing it all is not getting the book written. Because telling your story is ultimately a therapeutic process that involves a lot of self awareness and reflection and emotional work and feeling and courage and love and all these higher difficult emotions. And so it's... if I could information my way there, I'd be done.
[00:35:46] Ali: Wow. I mean, that's powerful because... well, thank you. Thank you for first sharing that beautiful definition of an avatar. Cause I was about to butcher it. So you got right back on track. And then thank you for right here and now being open and just expressing the challenge.
Because like we didn't even talk about that. And it's such a cool part of your history. It's not why I wanted to talk to you today about supporting people writing books, but yes, you've done that, you know that game better than anyone else. And that's cool for you to have the awareness to be like, well, now I gotta do this.
And there's no way to just like fake it, make it. Like you gotta, you gotta own it. You gotta face it. Mm. That's real.
[00:36:33] Tucker: I mean, that, I don't know what else, like, that's it...
It's one of those things, man, where it's actually, it's pretty simple. It's pretty simple to figure out. It's just not easy to do... you know.
Courage is not complicated. It almost never is complicated, like very rarely. They exist. There are situations where it's like.
Like it's a moral dilemma, like a true moral dilemma where you really don't know which path to take. That definitely exists. I don't want to pretend like it doesn't, it does. But, it's pretty rare. And almost every time, whenever someone tells me, "Ah, I got a huge moral dilemma," I just start asking questions.
It's not a fucking moral dilemma. They know exactly what the right thing to do is. But there's a lot of con... what they'll say next is, "It's complicated." It's not fucking complicated. We make it because complicated is almost always, not always, but like 95 to 99 percent of the time, it's complicated is a defense against a difficult hard decision that you know is right that you don't want to make always. Virtually always.
[00:37:56] Ali: What's coming to me, it's such a simple and arguably cliched term, but we say it a lot in this house when we really own our decisions. And it's "Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life." And that's the underlying theme here, which is so real. It's so easy to bypass that, but you just gave example .
And I step back and pause on that a lot. "Can I break this? Can I prove this false?" But most of the time it's true. It's like, Oh, the real decision is the harder decision, which leads to the truth, the awareness, the freedom, man.
Well, that's a lot. Thank you. I have a few quick funfire questions if you're up for it.
[00:38:37] Tucker: Do it.
[00:38:39] Ali: The first, what is your favorite book?
[00:38:45] Tucker: Oh, man. Yeah. All right. If I have to pick one, With no, like, no limitation, fiction, non fiction, no, no, no, like without, cause like, my, the better way that I prefer to answer this question is, you know, what's my favorite book, and give me a really niche category, cause there's so many. But if I could only pick one, I would probably have to pick Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole.
In my opinion, it is the best novel, ever written, at least in English. People who speak other languages heavily disagree with me in certain ways. And that's fine. They might be right, but in English, I think that's the greatest novel ever written. That's probably the book I've re read the most in my life. I'm not counting my own, but that's different.
[00:39:34] Ali: Very cool, dude. That has not been shared, so awesome.
Question number two, what animal would you be if not human?
Don't say sheep.
[00:39:47] Tucker: Fuck no. Sheep are idiots. And they're food. No. Man...
That's a tough question, man.
Um...
[00:40:00] Ali: What's your decision process right now? Are you, are you envisioning?
[00:40:02] Tucker: I'm thinking, I think about what life do I want as any, right? Like, like what experiences do I want? And then the other thing is I like being really highly conscious, right? And I mean, that more of like as in intellectual way, rather than a spiritual way. Although, the two things are not directly connected, but they're often interrelated.
And, so I'm trying to think what's a highly conscious... like, high cognitive ability animal that has a life I would like. Man, I want to say dolphins, but I know a lot about dolphins and they have pretty, like, brutal social structures, man. It's not an easy thing to be a dolphin, dude.
Maybe orcas, although they're pretty fucking mean, man. Like, orcas are, like, kind of like little sociopaths, dude. And I'm not like, uh, you know, trying to, I'm not even killing stuff for fun necessarily. But they're very smart, very, well, I told you a dog. Awesome. Bear. Yeah, um...
I was thinking about dogs, but dogs are too servile, man. That's not my style. Um, if I have to pick, I'll pick dolphin. Okay. But that's one I would actually have to really think about.
[00:41:11] Ali: Cool. Alright, I dig it. Yeah, dolphin's a great answer. And what about elephants? Are they conscious enough for you or no?
[00:41:21] Tucker: Elephants are very smart, man. Very, very smart.
But, again, I'm thinking about, my assumption is you mean right now? Yeah, right now. Elephants are not in a good spot now, man. Ah, okay. In terms of where they can live, their environment, they're quite subject to human intervention. Whereas dolphins are not, no animal is, uh, immune to it right now.
But, dolphins have a lot more potential sovereignty than elephants.
[00:41:50] Ali: That's fair. I dig it. Last question, Tugger. What's one of your favorite childhood memories?
[00:41:57] Tucker: The first thing that comes to mind is it's a very simple thing. Um, it reminds me so much of my third kid, Deacon. Um, my parents weren't really very good parents. And for the most part, the people that really loved me and weren't like parents in my life were my godparents, Jane and Bill. Like the guy I said, Bill, I think Bill is an example of an average common man avatar.
But like, one of the happiest memories... is happy is the wrong word, more content. One of the most content, like almost all my memories with Jane and Bill are like this, but there's one very specific. It's so weird.
I used to love as a little kid, like about the age Deacon is now like four. I would sit in front of the TV like Bill would be behind me and he's a kind of lazy boy.
And I had like this little chair thing that was on the floor, and it was super comfortable. And they had these Wooden parquet bowls, you know, like parquet, the Bossa Garden parquet floor. And, um, Jane would feed me Doritos and give me Cranberry juice. This is back, like, before Doritos were super unhealthy.
I think they still fried them in tallow then. And so I would literally just eat bowls and bowls of Doritos and drink cranberry juice. And it wasn't as sweet then. Like, people don't realize, young people now, don't realize how fundamentally different food was 40 years ago, 45 years ago. Even like quote, junk food was not that junkie and not that bad, before seed oils infected everything. And sugar.
And so it was like the sourness of it. And I can just remember like, I was so content and so happy, with them then. And it just reminds me of my four year old son, Deacon. Like he, he had just sit with me and mommy on the sofa and eat pretzels and drinky, like still sparkling water.
And like, he loves his little pretzels and like, he just happy as a pig and shit, man, like all day, just like I was at that age, with that. So that's probably my happiest kid memory.
[00:44:00] Ali: I love that, dude. I love that not just because I felt it as you're sharing it and I was trying to like envision this, uh, Tucker enjoying his Doritos, but dude, I fucking love Doritos as well.
And so it's amazing the nostalgia, whereas even today, like, occasionally, I buy Doritos and I know how bad they are. I even tell my kids, I'm like, yo, there's a reason we don't have these a lot. But there's something about eating them and I still lick my damn fingers because that's what I did as a kid, dude.
[00:44:30] Tucker: Oh yeah, oh yeah. I remember.
[00:44:35] Ali: Great answer. Tucker, thank you, brother. This was a pleasure. It always is. I appreciate you for creating some space for this. I appreciate for how you show up. Anything left unsaid before we wrap.
[00:44:47] Tucker: I don't think so. Thank you my man.
[00:44:50] Ali: All right. I will say this then. I have aspiration at some point to visit the Max ranch, if possible.
[00:44:58] Tucker: Dude. I mean the doors are open. We have a guest house. Like come come bring your family. You have two kids or one kid Yeah, right exactly. And what are their ages again? Five. Right? Let's say six and three or six and four is probably about when last time we talked, dude, like my kids are 9, 7, 4, and a year and a half.
It's a perfect fit. Anytime you wanna come, we can slaughter a sheep if you want or not. We, you can just eat the stuff that's already dead and butcher. Now, dude, we do, I do like, I, I was already a good cook. I grew up in a restaurant family. But over the last two years, I've become a really fucking good cook.
You know, I sold my company and like, my wife is working on scaling her business. So like I do all, I already did most of the cooking cause I was just a better cook than she was, but like now, not only do we have badass ingredients, but I've gotten like, you know, like I didn't grow up making tzatziki sauce, right.
But I'm like, we have lamb now. So it's like, yeah. And so I've gotten like. badass at like things like taziki or caesar dressing. Or i make all these vietnamese sauces that go amazing with lamb. And so like bro i'm a pretty fucking good cook dude like we do like a lot of badass stuff so anytime you want to come.
[00:46:11] Ali: Believe it and i appreciate that invitation.
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I’m excited to experience 2024 with new energy, focus and commitments. As we turn the corner into a new year I thought I’d share my end of year practice with you. This is a practice I’ve been doing for a few years now, and as it evolves I’m finding more value and structure with the work.
This episode covers my approach in four phases – rest, reflect, reset and refocus. I offer some insight into each phase, some questions to guide you, and some things I’ve learned from my experience.
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So this is a practice I've been doing for a few years now. I've been experimenting with things and testing them. And as it evolves, I'm finding more value and structure to the point where I feel like it's share worthy. Like something that could help people. It may be something small, it might be the practice at large, but I want to share the work.
And in essence, for me, the new year presents opportunity for us to be intentional about how we look at our lives. Here is a nice little excerpt I wrote and shared recently as it relates to opportunity.
The new year offers an opportunity to rest.
Step back from your normal routine and demands. Break your discipline. Sleep in, take naps, and play more than you normally do. Go back to your wild child self. Get out into nature, away from all the distractions. Give yourself the gift of space.
The New Year offers an opportunity to reflect.
Celebrate the experiences that gave you energy. Learn from the experiences that were out of alignment. Honor the people that made a difference. Amplify the things that helped you feel more alive. Sit with these memories. Be with them until you realize everything they've given you.
The New Year offers an opportunity to reset.
Restart your life with a fresh perspective. Face your truth with courage. Let go of anything that no longer serves you. Accept the things that have been waiting. Clean up your beautiful messes. Integrate everything.
The new year offers an opportunity to refocus.
Clarify your intentions and priorities. Reimagine a future that lights you up. Create the map. Rebuild your engine. Bring focus to what really matters in your life. Drive forward with purpose.
Every new year is an opportunity to create space.
So, that's a little excerpt. It just kind of flowed through me while I was resting over the holidays and really reflecting. And what I want to do now is dig into these four different opportunities. So first, let's start with rest.
And I'm going to share my experience with this. Again, take what's useful. Let go of anything that's not.
So I prioritize rest during the turning of the new year and this includes avoiding normal work. So, disconnect from email, I disconnect from Slack, I basically disconnect from normal communication with people that requires work.
This does not mean friends and family, I actually make time for them. But I stay off devices as much as possible and I get away from my normal work. I sleep more, I take naps. I try to stay bored and that's important because I actually want my mind to wander in beautiful ways. I want it to have the space to not be under stress or pressure of the normal demands of life.
And I remind myself to get outside a lot. I try to hike, I try to walk, I try to explore. I do those things rigorously, daily. And I play more than usual. So I play with my kids, my wife, my dogs, anyone else who wants to be more silly or competitive than usual. Just playing, sport, activities, games. And finally, I try to avoid things that are going to distract or numb me, like lots of alcohol, lots of sugar, other stimulants.
This is the hard part. You know, the holidays is a time often spent with family and everyone's to cook and create these amazing treats, which I do still indulge in. But I remind myself to give my whole system rest, which is giving my whole system a break.
So next is reflect. This one is big for me. I take intentional time, multiple days, to look back on the following year and really dig in to meaningful things, meaningful questions.
For example, what gave me energy? What drained my energy? Where did I feel challenged and most alive? Where did I feel out of integrity and more asleep? What surprised me? What were my biggest failures in the last year? What did I learn from them? What were my biggest accomplishments in the last year? And what did I learn from them?
So this is an opportunity for me to challenge myself to ask deeper questions and really answer them honestly. You know, don't bullshit them. Don't sidetrack them. Like answer the questions with intention with integrity.
And I want to note that deep reflection is not done quickly. It requires time and space So again, give yourself the gift of space when you're taking time to reflect. You cannot rush through it.
The last thing with reflection is time with no demands. So in this sense, our normal lives are filled with lots of demands, requests, tasks, responsibilities. And so if you're going to reflect, try to create an environment where you can do it with yourself with way less tasks, requests. Basically, alleviate yourself of having external needs from other things that don't come from you.
And of course, spend more time in nature. I do my best reflection in nature. Hands down, it's just the best environment where I can really sit. Whether it's with a journal or just myself, my thoughts and reflect on all the beautiful things that happened in the past.
Next is reset, and this is all about integration. This is arguably the messiest part. The reset and integration phase is where we learn to let go and accept things. So this is where we've got things that we just have to let go. And we start to get clarity around that from the reflection phase. So after reflecting, we have all these beautiful experiences, all these learnings, all these failures, and now as we reset, we start to identify what's no longer serving me. What do I need to let go of?
And this one, aside from being kind of messy and a little bit more challenging, even painful, you got to be brutally honest with yourself. At least that's how I approach it. I really face these questions with more courage, with more integrity, so I'm not bullshitting myself. And really look at the things that have been lingering around the things that I've been like, said... not accepting, that have been waiting.
And I speak these things out into the world or write them down so they don't get stuck in my head. That's a pattern that humans are really good at doing. We think things, especially challenges, the messier parts of life, and we don't often speak them out into the world, whether it's to ourselves or to others, or we write them down. And so they just stay trapped and they consume so much energy.
So this is the opportunity to reset, to let these things out, to feel them with your full being, all the emotion, all the energy. And then really let go of things or integrate things that you just need to accept. And I found that looking at pictures, journal notes, old videos really helped me dig back into some of these experiences.
Even different cues like songs or words that were set in specific moments. This is a really cool way to kind of identify some of these things that just need to be reset or integrated before you can move forward. And again, the point of the reset phase is to clean up the mess. It's just like spring cleaning.
So throw things away, move things into new places, give things to others. A reset is a powerful way to cleanse before we move forward.
And finally we have the refocus. So this for me is the fun part. This is where we get to plan and create the vision for the future. Refocusing involves looking at what you want to prioritize and create in the next 12 months.
I use a lot of mental models, templates, blueprints for creating a sense of things and experiences that map to my vision. So for example, I often start with What? Clarifying the priorities for the next 12 months and naming them.
Some quick examples to help you get creative here. Give my body and mind a cleanse, invest in my personal growth, decrease my stress and anxiety, start a new passion project, right?
So we're just getting the things out that are important to us that we want to create in the future. And then we have to establish the how. So this is where we specify how we're going to achieve them with tangible targets. For example, using those same what's, the how's behind them: 30 days without alcohol, a five day personal growth retreat, 90 day meditation or breath work challenge where we do 10 minutes every morning. Create a website and an email list for your new passion project.
So you see how we're bringing specifics and details to the what so that we have a way to track against them and realize them.
And finally is the when. So now we need to establish the dates and the seasons to align with these priorities. And my suggestion here is to put these in a doc so you can look. I like to do it monthly. Just to see all 12 months coming up. And that way you can say, Ooh, I got two things in March. That's full. I don't have space for anything else.
And you can really lay out whether it's in a doc or a spreadsheet or just a nice little drawing of sorts, you can get a sense of what the vision looks like. And what months feel full, what months feel don't. Like I love to travel in the summer, the spring and leading into the summer. So I'm not going to put a bunch of big projects there because I know I'm going to be out exploring, leading retreats, doing things where I'm away from my normal environment.
The last thing too, with the when is really blocking time for this. So you don't need to put every single detail, but I do block off time on my calendar. That way I know that this time is reserved. Because if you don't block it, someone else is going to create a priority for you. And your time is just going to slip away. So, it's a really nice practice to look at your calendar and just block these dates off.
Even if you don't have all the details, block the week off, block the long weekend off, block the couple days. Give yourself that time so that when your priorities show up, boom! You're ready for them.
I Wanted to create a few questions to again, to spark some curiosity, some creativity that could help you craft your vision.
So I'll use some of the space principles and we'll start with self. So what is one thing that could change your life for the better in meaningful ways this year? What scary thing or trauma have you been avoiding? Where do you want to grow the most? Physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually?
Next, a few questions around purpose. What important mission or calling have you been ignoring? What has God or the universe been trying to tell you? Where do you feel you have the most opportunity to help others?
Next is art. What kind of project or work inspires you right now? What hobby or side project would you love to pursue? What did you create as a kid that you haven't done in years?
Next is connection. Who are the people in relationships you want to prioritize? What existing community do you want to further invest and pour into? What new community do you want to explore?
And finally, environment. Are you living in an environment that lights you up? If not, what's really stopping you from moving? What travel or trips do you want to experience with yourself, your family, or loved ones? What home improvements could you make that align with your values?
So again, just some questions, you know, create your own questions. It's all about great questions.
And last, I'm going to wrap with a few key things that I've learned from doing this process for several years now.
So first, spend as much time as you need. Some people might blow through this in a day or two, and that's fine if that's your process. But I take over a week. You know, I start this process as we're entering the holidays, which is like Christmas. I'm with this process the full week until New Year's, and I'm still in it.
You know, we're a week past, a week after near at this point and I'm still finalizing my vision. So I give a solid two plus weeks to this. I create the time and space. And again, most of that is time disconnecting so that I really have the opportunity to realize clarity, right?
That leads into crafting your environment. So, again, be intentional about where and when you do this work. It won't be effective if you do it amidst all the holiday chaos and distractions. I actually this year had several days alone over the holidays when my family was traveling to be with our family in St. Louis. And this gave me the beautiful space I needed to really reflect reset and refocus.
Next is create targets and commitments. So crafting a vision can be tricky if you've never done it before. That's why I wanted to give you these examples, some questions. It's really easy to say things like be healthier, invest in personal growth, get outside more. And these are fine, but they have no targets. They have no commitments to be realized.
So to bring a little bit more precision here and accountability, just refine them, give them some more details. So instead of be healthier, exercise 30 minutes, four days per week for 90 days. That is concrete. That is actionable, right?
Instead of invest in personal growth. How about attend a personal growth retreat or event in the summer? So look at your schedule. Know that you have some time in the summer. And then do the research to find the retreat that speaks to you, right? Shameless plug, I will be doing a mountain summit retreat in the summer, and I would love to have you if that type of experience speaks to you.
And also, get outside more. It's easy to say. Instead, how about do at least one two hour hike every month? Or, walk every day for at least 15 minutes. You see? So just bring some precision. Bring something to this so you can stay accountable and you can track it.
And that leads into another point, find accountability. If you really want to hit these targets, share them with a friend or loved one. The power of accountability is real. We know this as humans. It's very easy to fail ourselves. But we do not like failing others. So I encourage you to speak these out into the world, to share them with people so that they can support you, and you can have some healthy accountability.
And one other important thing as it relates to the refocus phase, is that I like to choose a word for the year. So originally I would just choose it for myself, and it's evolved into this really cool thing where I choose it collectively with Gabrielle, my wife. And we've started to learn the power of choosing a word for the year.
So again, it used to just be about me, now it's about our family. And this word is kind of an anchor point. So two years ago, the word was adventure. And we honored that. We took more trips than ever. We explored the world. It was amazing. We also learned a lot of things about that. Last year, our word for the year was challenge.
And we lived that as well. You know, we challenge ourselves in new ways. This year, our word for the year is action. And so, it's a strong word that you can remind yourself of and you can anchor a lot of your priorities and commitments to.
And believe me, it can be easy to be like, "ah, it's just a word." But, it's amazing when you're intentional about creating this word and choosing it, how it will just show up throughout the rest of the year. In all the years that we've done this, that word just has a beautiful way of showing up.
So think about your word. Choose a word that represents some things you want to invest in, the energy you want to evoke this year. And then let it be your anchor, your guide as you move through the new year.
And finally, do not take on more than you can handle. It's really easy to just craft this massive vision and then you get a week or two in and boom, your willpower gets crushed. Your whole plan collapses. So I like to approach them more humbly, a little bit more conservatively.
Set some healthy priorities, some targets, some ambition. But be mindful of too much. It'll easily overwhelm you and then like I said, you'll feel stuck and defeated. So humble suggestion, I like to pick three big things and then a dozen or so smaller things.
So for example, leading a retreat is a big thing. Even attending a retreat, is a big thing. Starting a podcast. A lot of my friends have talked about this. That's a big thing. Okay. Family trip to Europe. We did that last year. It was epic and it was a big thing. It was a huge thing, right?
Whereas if we look at smaller things, lead a zoom webinar, right? That's a small thing. You can pull that off. Create 12 blog posts for the year. Another small thing. That's one a month. You can work through that, without the pressure and the weight of having to constantly like grind. Take a local camping trip. Another small thing. So, in healthy contrast of like big retreats or big family vacations, just get out locally and do a camping trip or an epic overnight hike, you know.
And that's it. My intention here was to be quick and clear and concise and just give you a little bit insight into my world as I turn the corner. This time is really important to me. I've seen it impact a lot of other lives. People I've worked with, people I know. And I'm wanting to be more intentional about sharing this and at some point kind of crafting a template or a course or something that people can follow.
Because I believe with conviction that being intentional about how you round the new year can really, really impact the way you show up. It can impact your health levels, your quality of life. And it's just been a beautiful gift for me.
So I hope there's something in here for you, and enjoy the new year. It's going to be exciting, more podcasts coming, more retreats, more content. So I look forward to being with you soon.
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He’s currently testing his limits as a dedicated family man, adventure explorer and podcast host of The Athlete Dad.
This episode is packed with insights around ambition, the pursuit of balance, testing our emotional limits and the beautiful integration of all this back into family life.
Ben shares his epic story of recently climbing Mt Denali in Alaska. Details of his journey were so real and vivid that I felt like I was right there on the mountain with him! There is so much wisdom in his experience, including a conclusion you wouldn’t expect.
I appreciate Ben for his curiosity and integrity. He’s showing up for himself, his family and his community in a very authentic way.
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object(stdClass)#2565 (2) { ["title"]=> string(9) "Mt Denali" ["url"]=> string(36) "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denali" } } ["episode_insights"]=> bool(false) ["episode_quotes"]=> bool(false) ["episode_transcript"]=> string(74443) "[00:00:00] Ali: Welcome back, folks. Today, I have Mr. Ben Gibson, fellow Front Row Dad, who I met at FRD live last year in December. Had an awesome time, we played some ball, we got to chat a little bit, understood a little bit about your background, and just who you are, but not enough, which is why we're chatting today.
There's a lot of stuff I want to get to, Ben. And on this show, I like to let people introduce themselves. So how would you introduce yourself today? Who is ben Gibson?
[00:00:34] Ben: Yeah, thanks Ali. Excited to be here, man. And, I will also add context that while we did play basketball, mostly what I did was run around and throw the ball into the air. And it made no contact with anything. So yeah, I am not the guy to pick for pickup basketball, but I did have a great time with you.
So I would say first and foremost, I'm a dad and a husband. Those are my main priorities in life. The things that really give me the energy that also really pushed me to grow as a human.
But I I'd also say that I am uh, I'm adventure curious. I am constantly curious about ways that I can go out into the world and I can explore and I can get my hands dirty in the outdoors. And that's in all fronts, the mountains, the oceans, the deserts, whatnot.
And, being that my roles of dad and roles husband are most important, I try to find ways to combine those things. So, you know, how do I integrate the people I love with the things I love? So I'd say that that's really how I introduced myself as dad, husband, who also happens to try to drag them out into the woods and the mountains as much as I possibly can. Yeah.
[00:01:43] Ali: Totally. Yeah. As I was, uh, snooping on your Instagram profile after we chatted a few weeks ago. And it's beautiful, dude. It's the type of stuff that lights me up. I see you on mountains. I see you skiing. I got a great laugh at a picture of you, like sippin some wine with your, uh, youngest, who was probably very young at the time.
You know what I'm talking about? Just like "parenting's easy." I love that because it was playful. It's like, parenting's hard, really hard, if you're balancing the things you love, like adventure, while still prioritizing being a dad and a husband. So, your Instagram, Ben, is something that I feel shows authenticity. A lot of times I run into Instagram profiles that just look like a straight up performance.
And so, I love that you're kind of living into what you just spoke to. And, as it relates to that, my first question comes right into the balance of your role as a father and a husband, and then The Ben that wants to be adventurous. Did you always have this balance? Or was there sort of a journey into making them blend? Making them integrate?
[00:02:58] Ben: I'd say, oh absolutely not. No, and I, and I think it's, something that I am still I don't know if struggling with is the right word. I think of balance is like balance is certainly at least for me, it's not like I'm going to put an equal amount of time into all things, and there I have balance. But it really is just this oscillation between things, you know, investing in 1 and then investing in another. But we can't really do those things at the same time in as many ways as we'd like to.
And so, I think because seeking to achieve balance is so fluid, I don't know that anyone ever really like nails it long term. And I certainly haven't. I don't know that I've ever fully achieved it. And I don't know that I really have it now, you know, fully transparent.
And, I think it is really in the pursuit of balance that I find a lot of that. Those benefits come from. And so, yeah, I think it's a thing that I've tried to be more conscious of, especially since becoming a dad.
You know, when you become a husband, certainly those priorities shift, right? You want to make sure that you're showing up in a different way. But it's also like, you still are like with your friend and you can take your wife with you on these things and not a whole lot, maybe changes on the balance front. But kids kind of rock your world in terms of balance because it's a 24, seven round the clock job.
And I think a lot of us realize too, that it's not just about showing up and clocking in and clocking out. But like, oh, wow, if I want to show up more in line with these grandiose visions that I had of how I thought I'd show up as a dad, like, I also have some homework that I've got to do on the side and then I also have to do my job as a dad.
And so that's where I think balance became really challenging for me, especially when it came to my physical pursuits. Because it was easy when I was just married, no kids to be like, Hey, I'm going to go climb a mountain for three days. I'm on the sat phone, you know where to find me. But with kids, it's like, there's so many other factors that come into play and it's a much different, more serious conversation than just say, I'm going to be on the mountain for 3 days.
But, yeah, I think that that's why I've had to be much more deliberate about it. I would say it's, it would be so much easier for me just to be like, well, these are important to me. So, like, yeah. I'm just going to go do them and like whatever chaos ensues at home ensues.
But again, coming back to like, that's not how I want to show up and that's not how I want to be. That's not the model I want to set for my kids and it's certainly not the experience I want for my spouse.
So yeah, I think it's been a big focus lately. And for me, it's like, I feel like I'm constantly coming with more questions about balance and answer and kind of like forcing my way through the never ending fluid battle of trying to achieve it.
[00:05:41] Ali: Yeah, that's real. That's very real. It's interesting, Ben, because I used to really grip that term work life balance, especially as I became a father. Like you said, all the new chaos, all the changes came and I was like, whoa, and balance was just thrown off. And I was, I remember now that we're talking about this, I remember just like you said, trying to pursue this like beautiful vision of equilibrium. Like, yo, I got everything here and here and it's all just great.
What's interesting, too, is that I didn't use to like the term work life integration. I thought balance was way better. My ego mind was like, nope, it's gotta be balanced. Forget about integration. Whereas now I'm actually starting to come around to look at the other side of that equation saying like, Oh, to your use your words, balance is this never ending pursuit.
In some ways we're just a constant uphill battle because it is quite tricky to feel that and preserve that balance. Right. But integration has been a very powerful word in my world recently. And now that we're talking about this, it's reminding me that I see the integration of the things you said, investing in different things, as a better path towards the way that I'm showing up the way that I'm being in the world.
And I appreciate just your candor there. Like it's not easy, whether it's balance or integration, doing the things we love and caring about the people we love and giving it all energy can be exhausting.
[00:07:15] Ben: Yeah. And I think of it like there's like a sequence of it. And I guess I'll preface this by saying that I don't think that not achieving balance is necessarily a negative thing, but that the constant pursuit of trying to attain momentary balance is actually beneficial for us.
Because it's one of those things where I think that there's a lot of ways in our lives that we find ourselves needing to like, sharpen our axe, to stay sharp, to stay on top of our game. And so if balance was something that like we sought out to achieve and we achieved it and then we're like, cool, I'm balanced. Uh, that's it. I'm done. Then we've stopped growing. We've stopped challenging ourselves.
And odds are, if somebody feels like they've got a good balance, I'd probably challenge are you being ambitious enough in your life and your pursuits? Do you have enough that you're trying to accomplish with your life, with your family? Or in order for you to feel confident, they're like, yep, got it all figured out.
Whereas like when I'm constantly trying to find that balance, it makes me better at what I have to do, because it means that I am that much more present. And I have to learn how to be present. I have to learn skills and frameworks of how to be present.
And also these little things around the house where it's like, okay, to invest in my family before I go on a trip, I have to be that much more thoughtful. I've got to think about meal plan. I've got to make sure. Coffee's ready. There's flowers for my wife. Like there's there's all these other things that I need to include to truly make sure that I in this moment have achieved balance.
And I think that healthy, constant pursuit shouldn't necessarily be perceived as a negative or I used to get myself a really hard time of like, like, why can't I figure this out? Why am I so out of balance? As opposed to like, Okay, This is something I'm never going to nail, but it's in that momentary achievement of I, I feel like in this moment, the things that I have my focus on, they are equally invested in.
But to your point, too, of this idea of integration. Like, I think there's like a 3 step approach and part of being in that process of trying to achieve balance had to really sit and distill these pillars for me to be able to deliberately try to go after.
And so I think the first one is this idea of modeling ambition. Going out, being ambitious, going after your goals, going after your work pursuits, your physical pursuits, your family pursuits. Like all those things are an important piece of showing up, I think, as your best self.
But there's there's a component of that where now you have to really focus on trying to achieving balance. And that's, I think, the easier of the two when we think about balance versus integration. And so balance is something that is often done in isolation. So like you may be investing in your family, but then you leave to go do this other thing and leaving those responsibilities behind is way easier.
Then the third piece, which is integration of like, how do I bring those responsibilities along with me so that there's no distance between the people that I love and the things that I love.
And I think that those three work together in kind of a beautiful harmony. Because there are times where I can't bring my family along, right? There's no way to integrate. It's just not possible. I'd love to bring them on to a mountain in Alaska, but it's just not feasible for a one and a half year old. Right.
And so that's where that separation is okay. And I think that that's where you have the responsibility to invest in them equally, invest in before, invest in after, be present, et cetera. But the integration piece, man, that's a hard one. That's a really hard one because it requires a lot of creativity, a lot of sacrifice sometimes.
Like there's a lot of times with the integration piece where it's like, cool, I have a three hour workout today. And I'm going to try to bring the kids in a stroller with me on this three hour run. And anyone who has tried to do anything with a child for more than 30 minutes knows that there's a lot of shit that goes into that, right?
Like I need three hours worth of snacks. I probably need three different distraction mechanisms. I need to look at the trail and I need to know where I'm going to be able to let them out and run around. So it's actually not a three hour workout. It's probably a six and a half hour day with dad that I'm now planning for.
And, like, somebody's gonna lose a shoe, somebody's gonna need a full outfit change, like, there's all this stuff. So, like, yeah, sure, much easier for me to go, how about I just set you guys up for success and then leave. But, man, the integration piece, how about I take you with me for three hours. Like, dude, if you can achieve that, like, that's, like, next level dadding, husband for sure.
[00:11:39] Ali: Dude. Totally. Wow. I love that. I love so much of that. I love the three, these pillars, these words are using ambition, balance, integration, how they can flow and be together. And then you segued right into what I wanted to kind of talk about next is adventure.
Mountains. Getting out, whether it's solo versus kids. There is a difference as you explained. I want to zero in though on one of your recent adventures, which really piques my interest, climbing Denali.
Tell me about that in terms of right in focus of what we're talking about, kind of preparing to leave and then being gone. This was a multi week adventure, correct?
[00:12:22] Ben: That's right. Yeah.
[00:12:23] Ali: And then just bring your pillars in what happened? Where was the balance? Where's the integration? Cause you're now you're what? A couple of months from it?
[00:12:30] Ben: Yeah. Several months removed from the adventure. So yeah, we spent about a month on the mountain total. You know, the way you get on to Denali is it's so remote. It's way out in the mountains of Alaska. So the way you get on the mountain is you get dropped off on this essentially like modified bush plane that lands on a glacier.
And then you're out there. And the only way you get off the mountain is if a plane can come back to that same glacier and pick you up. So sometimes you're waiting to get on, sometimes you're waiting to get off, which actually happened to us on both ends. But yeah, see, we were out there for about a month.
But you know, this was for me a really big leap in my physical pursuits. And so right from the bat, I knew that like the hardest thing for me wasn't going to be preparing for the climb or the climb. It was going to be all the other stuff, the family stuff. And I don't want to diminish how difficult it was to prepare and to do it. It just is, I think sometimes emotional weight is much heavier than physical weight, right?
Where, and I was talking with a fellow dad friend of mine who's a big athlete. And we were just talking about this idea of like, Man, when it comes to physical pursuits, like we can push through just about anything. Like any amount of pain for any amount of time, we can always kind of like muster the strength to push through it.
But man, when it comes to emotional weight, sometimes that first you know, confrontation or first mistake or whatnot, man, that just we break, we totally break. And it's like, why can't we apply the same mentality for our emotional weight, our emotional challenges as we can for for physical ones?
And so, for me, I knew that the, the emotional weight of this trip was going to be really heavy. It started with a conversation with my wife, probably about a year and a half before I actually was going to commit to doing it. Because I knew it was going to be several conversations and I needed to come really prepared for that. You know, out of respect for my wife, I needed to have a really clear why.
You know, here's why this is really important to me. So that there was something that was really grounding the conversation and purpose and meaning and not just like, well, this would be cool. It's like, this is why this is so really important to me.
And I think that that's important because it really it creates this like mutual buy in for the ask that I'm about to make. And then through those first several conversations, a lot of it before I even knew if I was going to be able to do this was ideating with my wife around what would this even look like for the home stuff?
Like, okay, I'm going to be gone from a month basically. And not even just that. In committing to doing this, I'm basically training for a year before doing this, which means that I'm not just asking you for a month to watch the kids. I'm asking you for these very long training days for a year. For me being annoying with what I want to eat and how I'm thinking about my diet during training.
And me being annoying on vacations when it's like, "Hey , I know we're on vacation, but like I got to go for a run. So I need to wake up at like four in the morning to go and I'm just gonna, I'm going to meet you guys." And like, all of that is it goes into it. So it's not just like the event itself.
And then, of course, like most well laid plans, they often need change. And so it was talking through not just like, what would this look like? But what are all the potential implications of the plan changing?
Like, a big thing for us is that my oldest son, who's four now, he was born preterm. So he's got like, chronic lung disease. And so anytime he gets sick, he basically gets hospitalized. And so we had to think about like, okay, well, what if you're, you know, 20, 000 feet up this mountain in remote Alaska, only accessible via like text message on satellite phone... and he has to go to the hospital and we have a one and a half year old. Like, what do we do? How does that play out? Like how fast can you get off the mountain to get home?
And so it again starts with all these initial conversations of thinking through very honestly, like what's all the downside? What are all the things that could go wrong so that we can try to put a plan in place for that? And I think that that's a lot of where if you're going to try to achieve balance or anything of this nature, like you've got to be really pessimistic about the approach.
Because I think where some people maybe fail is they think like best case. Like, well best case, nothing goes wrong. It's so easy. Kids are great. That never happens. Right.
But if I think through all the things that could possibly go wrong, and I'm very honest, and aware and planning for those things, more likely we're going to fall somewhere in the middle. Some shit's going to go south. Some things are going to be better than expected, but like, we've prepared for those contingencies. And so I think that that was a big part of our balance is like, just being very honest around, like, how's this going to go?
And then, you know, there's the preparation for it. And this is where I felt like I needed a lot of help going into this. So I talked with as many people as I could that found themselves in similar situations of dads who have been on Himalayan climbs and dads who have done like rowing across the Atlantic and things like that.
And basically asking them, "like, what were your wins? Where did you feel like you dropped the ball?" And just trying to like piece together some interesting things. And so much of what I think helped make this go well is helping make the day to day successful. It's always like the little things, right? Like, Can we get meals ordered in advance so that my wife doesn't have to cook every night?
Like everyone, every parent knows that like, man, the nights that you decide just to kind of tap out and just order food, you're like, Oh, bless DoorDash. Like no dishes, no food, like, Oh, it's like vacation at home. Right. And so like, how much of that can I iron out in advance of it? And so I said, yeah, that was a lot of the balance piece.
And then the integration piece was fun, like trying to incorporate my kids in as many of the training days as I could. You know, throwing them in the stroller, throwing them in a pack. You know, the good thing about your kids getting older, if you're a climber, and you need to carry heavy stuff up a mountain is that as your kids get older, they get heavier, and they can, they can just be thrown right in the back. And it actually works out really well.
And then my wife actually printed out the route for our wall in our dining room and cut out my head. And so every day is on the mountain as I would provide my updates of where we are and how it's going, my son would move my head kind of up and down the route to know what that is.
Yeah. And then I shared with them in advance kind of like , you know, there's always very prominent features about where you are on the route and kind of shared that with them so that they knew that, okay dad's at 14 camp. And then he could like, see pictures of 14 camp and learn about it. And mom could read about it.
And so, yeah, it was again, a lot of, like, almost like disaster planning. Like, what all can go wrong? How do we plan for that? But then how do we thoughtfully weave them into this process in as many ways as we can?
[00:19:09] Ali: Wow. Oh man, there's so much in there as I'm listening and learning, Ben. And we haven't even got into the, that's just planning.
That's just prep.
[00:19:20] Ben: Right. Yeah. That's just thinking about it. Yeah.
[00:19:24] Ali: Okay. So I want to reflect some things back to you. First, I love how much intention went into this. That you saw ahead. You proactively reached out to other dudes, other people. I know a part of me would have just been like, "I'll figure it out."
I really love how thoughtful you were. And how you brought this convo to your wife consciously way in advance, knowing that you'd need a year to plan.
And, dude, you're spot on. It's like the little things. I was just talking to Gabrielle about this this morning. Like the little things are often what cultivate into the larger things or kind of trigger some subconscious stuff that it's a little bit deeper that we don't even know what it is yet. And just taking care of those man, whether it's like meals or just getting some people to like pop in every now and then to help, especially with young kids is massive.
So very wise of you there.
The thing that I have to come back to and ask, though, before we go into what it was like to be on Denali, is what was your why? If you could summarize that.
[00:20:29] Ben: Yeah, I would say my why has always come back to this idea of transformation.
Like when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut because I wanted to go to foreign lands untouched unseen by most human beings and experience what that would be like. And I think that's where I talked about at the beginning I'm like adventure curious. Like so much of me is like, "God, I wonder what that would be like, I wonder what that would look like to see that with my own eyes to experience that with my own body."
And so for me, this idea of transformation when it comes to climbing was understood very early on in my climbing career, probably onto my very first climb. When I realized that the person that went up the mountain was not the same person that came down the mountain. And that it took me like weeks after a climb to figure out, well, who came down?
Because it's a different person now. And something's changed, something shifted in my perspective and in, in my identity with myself.
And so mountain became not just a physical pursuit, but almost like a spiritual pursuit. Which is profound for me because I didn't grow up with a religious background. I really struggled with spirituality and religion as a young adult and never really found a place for me to like buy into any of that until I was on the summit of a mountain. I feel like we have all different definitions of God, but I tell you, I touched God when I went to the summit of a mountain, it was transformative.
And I realized, that my soul was telling me, " We do this now, this is a thing that we do. This is very important to us." And so for me, with my wife, the why was a lot around that continued transformation. And like most things, in order to grow, in order to continue to grow, you have to continue to challenge yourself to a greater degree.
And on many levels, this one in particular was going to be challenging in so many different aspects, the physical, the mental, the emotional, the logistical. And so that was really the why it was like, I feel like I have a purpose in my life to go out and pursue these things because I feel like it's an important part of who I am as a human and how I continue to evolve as a human.
[00:22:39] Ali: Mmm... I love that. Dude, I love that for a variety of reasons. The first is that I too had a... deep fascination with space as a kid. And it's still like, it's still arguably the top of my bucket list. I still want to explore space.
I've started to realize how beautiful this earth is. There's a lot more that I want to see of it. But deep down, like I geek out around like going to space and just kind of exploring. So we are definitely aligned there, brother.
The other thing is that I wholeheartedly agree with you on the symbolism of mountains. I was raised with some Christian upbringing and even I was exposed to like other religions, the mosque as a young kid and nothing really landed.
I mean, I was seeing it, I was hearing it, but as I started to really dive into nature as an adult and find my way up mountains, literally, it became how I interpret spiritual experiences, just like you. And so it's beautiful. I think that more people are speaking up and just recognizing.
That everyone has their own spiritual journey and I, I respect all of it. Some people, it is the church, it's the physical church to go sit down and find God. For me, it's being on those mountains or being deep in a forest and just observing nature, observing myself and kind of getting lost in that beauty. So I wanted to just give you props for noticing that, speaking to it. It's a beautiful thing.
Let's get back to the Denali then. So the prep is done, not done, but the prep is ready. The family is engaged, ready and engaged. So you've got some cool stuff you explain with your wife and your son.
And then we already talked about this epic, like landing to get to the mountain, you have to get helicoptered in. So let's zoom right back to that point. You get helicoptered in. What's it like climbing this massive mountain?
[00:24:43] Ben: Yeah. I mean, talk about going to another world, like. When you fly in, you know, you start flying in over tundra, so it's green, it's pretty lush, and then you look into the distance, and you start to see these mountains rise up. But you go, wait a minute, I'm here to climb the biggest one in this range, where's the biggest one? Where's the biggest one? And then suddenly you see it, and it's so tall that it's still incapped in the clouds. And you're like, there's the one I've been waiting to meet.
And you've been thinking about this one for a long time, and you've been waiting to see it with your own eyes. There's something interesting about this idea of kind of coming back to what you said of like, you know, climbing a mountain is like a metaphor that gets thrown around. Like, metaphorically, there's a lot of power in this idea of mountains.
And I was always like, what if I, instead of metaphorically, did this what if I literally went up the mountain? Right. And so there's this interesting thing where you've been seeing pictures of Denali even seeing the route and then to finally see it in person, that in itself is like this greeting of "Hello old friend, I'm here to meet you. I'm here to greet you."
And so right away, it was like this very deep moment of you're the one that I've been waiting to meet. And we fly in and the mountains are getting higher. And what's crazy was when you fly in, you don't fly over the mountains. You literally fly through the mountains and see you're passing these crazy steep ridges of rock and ice and snow.
And then you make this really big swooping landing down to the glacier. And what's great about it, as soon as you land and the plane leaves, it's like you're on another planet, because that's your lifeline right there, right? Like that plane is gone, I'm on a glacier, and it's gone. It's on.
And so right away you get to work. Like there's no like, "wow, this is great." It's like, get your tent up. We got to boil water. We got to eat. We logistically, we got to get going. Because you got about like 120 pounds of stuff on you. And so it's a lot to manage the whole time. And so yeah, you, you really quickly understand from that very first moment that so much of your success on the mountain is not going to be due to your ability to climb well.
That is certainly a piece of it, but so much of what makes up your success is how well you can do all the logistical stuff. How efficient can you be? And the most efficient climbers are often the most successful climbers. And for many reasons.
So like we get to the glacier. We immediately start digging out a tent platform. So we're digging through several feet of snow to set a platform. We're collecting snow for melting for water. We're getting our meals together and starting to talk through the plan. And the thing is, is that you're not like dropped off at the doorstep of the mountain. Again, because you're on a glacier, you're kind of on like a fork of the glacier way down the glacier.
And so you're going to unload all your stuff. So that the next day you can pack up all your stuff and you can throw it in a sled and you can walk, you know, about seven hours down the glacier to just get to the base of the mountain. So the thing that really struck me right away was just like the sheer scale of everything. Like, mountains have this weird thing where they're often so big that they seem like they're just right there.
Oh yeah, it's like right there. Right. And then you're walking for like hours and you're like, why are we not there yet? And why is it still so far away? And you're like, oh, it's so big that the scale is thrown off. And so when it takes you seven hours to get to the base of the mountain across this glacier that is literally miles wide, it just makes you feel the scale of the peaks that are surrounding you, everything is so big.
And so you get to the base of the mountain. And I don't like, I don't like like these terms that like military or like conquering that to apply them to mountains because I think that a lot of people when they're like, "I'm going to conquer the mountain."
It's like, ah, you're not. Like the mountain can flick you off at any time, it's indifferent. But you're essentially laying siege to the mountain in that you are very methodically bringing your gear up and down the mountain. Establishing camps so that you can get your supplies up the mountain in an efficient way, but also to help you acclimatize.
So you land on the glacier at like 7,000 feet. You get to the base of the mountain at around 9,000 feet. And the summit of Denali is a little over 20,000 feet. So from base to summit, it's actually more distance to travel than even a peak like Mount Everest. And so the up and down acclimatization runs, laying caches, is such an important piece of it.
And the more efficient you are in that process, the more successful you're going to be because you're going to have more energy. You're going to be able to get food and fuel and rest in you more efficiently. So that becomes the game right away. How efficient can I be? How methodical can I be in my process to conserve energy and get things going?
So yeah, the scale is enormous. You're way out there and there's also just this incredible sense of like disbelief. "Like, I can't believe where I am right now." I can't believe that there's like these international teams surrounding me right now. Like, Oh, the Polish team is going up. Oh, the Japanese team is going behind us.
Like, it's just this really cool moment where you pinch yourself. Like, wow, I'm kind of like playing in the major leagues right now. And then to come back to the kind of the mountain you're waiting to meet. There's also these like really almost like kind of like when you're a tourist and you're like you go to New York City, you're like, I can't wait to see this.
This, you know, historical thing. It's like, you're so excited to see these like features of the mountain. Like, I can't wait to get to 14 so I can see the Messner Kulwar that people ski or to be able to see the Kassin Ridge, because this epic climb that took place on that, that ridge. And like all the stories and history. I mean, I could talk for probably weeks around the particular adventure, but like, those are the initial things that really like come to mind when it came to the mountain.
Was just this sense of disbelief, this focus on efficiency and methodically moving our way up the mountain. And just the sheer gratitude of playing in this, enormously unimaginably big playground.
[00:31:09] Ali: I love that dude. Yes. And this is so great because like for someone like me who aspires to do bigger mountains like Denali, I've never done something that big. Not only is there just like pure wisdom in here, but it's things that I just wouldn't know. It's things that I wouldn't assume.
Like efficiency, like, yeah, that could seem obvious, but it's not the first thing that would come to mind as I'm training, like, gotta be efficient. Because I would literally probably show up there and be like, "this is amazing, like, oh, my gosh." But to your point, it's like, this is a journey and those who thrive and survive are efficient, right?
I also love the note about scale. Just being in nature's grandioseness and being like, "wow." And as you're describing this, Ben, I'm like, there with you. I don't know tons about Denali, but I know enough. And as you're sort of giving this visual experience, I'm just vicariously like imagining this vast white wonderland and my tired ego being like, "when are we going to get to base camp?" like hours pulling 120 pounds? Like that is serious.
Okay, so, to continue this story and also honor time, like you said, you could probably speak to this for hours, if not days. Tell us a little bit about the adventure to the summit. What was that like? Did you make it? What were some of the biggest challenges, whatever comes, whatever feels like share worthy?
[00:32:37] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the really interesting climbing on Denali happens at 14,000 feet and above. And I think that that's also where things start to get really real on the mountain. So something happened our first morning climbing at 14 camp that really took us out of that sense of like wonder and really back into grounding like, this is the real deal.
Very serious things happen on this mountain all the time and things change very quickly. So we're packing up our stuff to go up to set a cache. So we're going from 14, 000 feet to like 16, 500. And to do that, we have to go up these fixed lines. So they put fixed lines on mountains where they're very, very steep.
And so this is like 45 to 60 degree plus, some of these sections is like straight up blue ice, which is like the hardest ice you can possibly be climbing on. And the whole climb, the whole day up from 14 to 16, five is straight up this like very steep wall.
We're packing up our stuff to go do a very hard climb and we see all these rescue helicopters coming in. There had been a storm above 16, 000 feet for the last week and a half. So teams had been pinned down, stuck in a storm, above 16, 000 feet, typically at our 17, 000 foot camp. And so right before we're about to leave, we see them long lining a body off the mountain.
And that's not a good thing, right? It was shocking. I felt tingly. I felt numb. I was like, oh, boy, like, "all right, let's go climb this thing?" It really was kind of a shock to the system. And again, a reminder that this is the real deal. And so going up 14 that day was really stressful.
You start to question things like, "What am I doing here? Like, this is insane. Like, I have kids at home? I've got a wife at home. Like, man, like, what am I? Why am I doing this?" And talk about efficiency, like that day in particular, going up the fixed lines for the first time, I was wildly inefficient.
So you get to the top of the ridge and you just had this horrible experience to start the day. And you're like, totally gassed getting to the top of this like knife edge ridge. And you're again, questioning everything.
So it's not just about like, "Oh, climbing is so wonderful and grandiose." But like a lot of it, especially for these very long days was filled with fear and filled with uncertainty and certainly a lot of self doubt.
I remember getting to the top of the ridge and for the first time being like, "I don't know, dude, I don't know if I can do this." Right. And thank God all we were doing was setting a cache and then going back down. But that was a very real moment for me. And then to cap it off that night was the coldest night on the mountain.
And to kind of put it into perspective on like how cold, cold can be. So I have literally every piece of clothing on that I brought with me on my body. And that includes basically what equates to like a fully Himalayan down suit. And then I've got a negative 40 degree sleeping bag. And then of course I'm in a tent with another person which, which helps with the warmth.
And I'm still cold. Normally, like you wear that on a 60 degree day, you are dying. You will literally die from heat exhaustion. And I'm sitting here like shivering in my down suit in a negative 40 degrees sleeping bag next to another human being being like, "Wow, dude, it's pretty cold."
And like that you think about 36 hours of those experiences of the long lined body coming off the mountain. Of wildly inefficient climbing that result in total exhaustion of altitude to all the sheer cold. I mean, it was the 1st time again where I was like, really doubting if I was going to be able to do this.
And so, you know, so much of the climbs is understanding that those moments are going to happen. Where talk about planning for contingencies. The thing that I think I did really well in this prep for this trip mentally was preparing for those mental contingencies of like, there's going to be moments where I am not going to feel my best and I'm not going to be confident in my ability to do this. And I need to be prepared for that.
And so I did that a couple ways where I literally wrote down expressions for self talk for how I would get myself out of that jam. I had a little playlist that I called it my head right playlist. So like, I got to get my head right. You know, what, what am I going to listen to?
And then I knew people that I might actually reach out to, to get my head right. And I actually did all of that, all of that was required for me. So I, I went through my mental self talk. I listened to my playlist and then I messaged a friend through a sat phone that, and I just kind of told him the deal. I was like, "Man, I'm really starting to doubt this. I just need a little bit of confidence boost right now."
And I think that was the start of the most satisfying part of the climb because the next day it was like a shift. It was like, it's game time, baby. Like we're going to do this, but like, we're also not fully attached to the end result of the summiting, right?
Summiting is a dangerous thing, especially on mountains at this altitude. You know, if the soul benefit that you derive from a climb comes exclusively from summiting, then you will not derive benefits on most climbs. Because if you're pushing yourself or if you're respecting the mountain, or if you're playing it safe, more times than not, you're going to get turned around.
Or, conditions aren't good. The weather's bad. You're not feeling it. You're not feeling right. Something goes bad with the partner you're climbing with. Something goes bad with somebody else. You need to jump in and help. So for many reasons, like, I try to detach my success or the benefits I get out of a climb from reaching the summit.
And so it was in that moment that I reminded myself the commitment that the most important thing for me to focus on right now is, you know, getting to the next camp. And really what that came down to the next day was literally the next step.
And that can seem kind of maddening for a lot of folks, but I actually found it was funny. I was talking with a buddy of mine. There's this weird thing that you do when you really need to focus and get into a zone where you, you count your steps, which seems like insane because you're literally walking for 12 hours. Right? So you're like, that's a lot of steps, but you do it in groups of like 50 or 100 and usually like the lower number that you are counting to the more shit that you're experiencing because you can't focus beyond 25, right?
So you're just like, get to 25 and then I cycle again. And that like repetitive mental exercise actually helps you really focus on things like efficient steps, breathing, focus, zone out, but be present. Like this interesting kind of mode you have to get into.
And I remember talking to my buddy after the fact. He's like, "were you counting your steps?" And I go, "yeah." He goes, "what were you at?" I'm like, "I was at 25." He goes, "ah, that was a rough day." And he just knew that because I was counting and because I was counting so low, he's like, wow, that's a rough section.
But so we climbed from 14. We pack up all our stuff. We get up to what's called the 16 Ridge, which is this knife edge Ridge that takes you from the high point of the Ridge up to your high camp of 17, 000 feet. And that next day was like night and day for me. I felt great. I felt terrible, but mentally I felt great because you're at altitude, right?
You feel kind of like crap a lot of the time. It's really hard. You feel tired, but I mentally, I was like, this is no problem. I'm just going to feel gratitude and enjoy this. We get to 17, 000 foot camp and what we found was a theme on this trip was that weather was bad almost the entire time.
Weather's bad notoriously on Denali, but it was extra bad this season.
[00:40:03] Ali: Like windy, cold, that type of environment?
[00:40:06] Ben: Windy, very, very cold, and oftentimes together, and then a lot of precipitation. And precipitation meaning like it starts to snow, right? And so, that combination can be very dangerous because they often happen almost Immediately.
I was shocked at how quickly weather windows would close and these massive storms would come in and bury your tent in snow. And so you were, it's also not like if it starts snowing and you're stuck, you're just like, well, I'll just hang out in my tent for a couple of days and chew on Jolly Ranchers.
It's like, I have to, I have to dig out snow all day, or I will be buried by this storm. And then you also have to like eat and go to the bathroom and like do all these like other normal things. And so it's kind of chaos when these things happen.
So we get to 17, 000 foot camp and we get to basically the last hard section of the mountain, which is called the Autobahn. And it's called the Autobahn because if you were to fall on this particular section, you would pick up speed as if you were traveling down the Autobahn and it drops off for a very, very long time.
And, there's fixed lines, but people still fall all the time. And it can create a dangerous situation because if you're, you know, not clipped into the rope or somebody is not paying attention, you could pull your whole team down the mountain with you. And so 17, 000 foot camp, like you're feeling the altitude. For sure.
And you're kind of mentally preparing for this next day. And the word that we got was like, we got a weather window of one day. And so we've got to get up, we got to tag the summit and we've got to get down all the way back down to 14 camp. So that's 17, 000 feet to 20, 000 feet back down to 17, 000 feet pack camp, and then immediately go down to 14, 000 feet down the fixed lines.
And so we know that like, Okay. Not only did we just have to come up the fixed lines from 14 to 17, we're going to sleep and then the very next day, go for the summit. And then after the summit, we have to go all the way back down to 14. So there's like this mental preparation of the ordeal that you're about to go through.
And here's the challenging part too, like icing on the cake, is that you don't sleep well at altitude. In fact, the first night you get to high camp, you have this weird thing cause your body isn't used to breathing at that altitude. So you wake up with these like deep gasps of breath, really. And you do that all night long. And so you don't sleep. And you're also like excited for the summit. And so you're basically awake for like 36 hours. And then you're going to do that whole thing.
We wake up for summit day, last hard push of the trip. And I thankfully got to witness the sun kind of cresting the summit behind it and just kind of like breaking apart the clouds.
And it was again, kind of that moment of like, there you are. I see you, here I am. I've come here to meet you. And so we get our stuff, we're feeling good, and we start working our way up the Autobahn. And it's very, very hard climbing. There's no footpath. It's meaning there's no, there's no like steps that somebody's already kind of kicked out. It's like very angled, steep terrain. I see your angles are busted.
And unfortunately, as we start to get to the top of what's called Denali pass, which is notoriously the worst weather on Denali, cause it's splitting the two summits. And it's again, like 18, 000 feet up, so it just gets like hammered. The clouds start to kind of envelop us a bit and we start to feel the wind at our back and we start getting hit with a little bit of snow and we're about a third of the way until we finally at least get to the pass and almost with every step the storm is getting worse and worse and worse and worse.
And finally when we're getting around to turn the corner at Denali Pass, we're having to lean into the mountain with our ice axes whenever there's gusts of wind because it's there's this weird effect when the wind comes, it kind of like scoops under you and like kind of peels you off the mountain.
So when the wind gust comes, you kind of like hammer your ice axe into the side and just like wait. And then you kind of sprint in between like wind gusts and we turn the corner and it's just, we're just getting hammered.
And we sit there and we debate and we're kind of peeking up at the summit and you can see this lenticular cloud just squatting down on the summit. And lenticular clouds are indicative of like the worst weather you're going to experience on a mountain. So if there's ever a lenticular cloud on your route, stop. Do not pass go. Turn around immediately and especially the summit ridge to Denali. The wind up there can just flick you off the ridge.
And so we get to about 18, 600 feet and we start having these very real conversations around. I think this is it. Like, I think, I think this is as high as we go. And that's a really hard realization because in getting to that point, that meant that we had climbed all the hardest parts. We did it. Ali, we were done. We just had a little jaunt, couple more thousand feet to the summit, tag it. You know, that would have been something that lives forever, but, you know, it wasn't meant to be.
And I think that that's where the experience comes in of knowing that, well, my goal wasn't to summit. My goal was to give everything I had, and the fact that we're getting turned around because of weather, and not because I couldn't do it, I feel okay about that. And that was something I had made peace with in my tent the night before was, I'm okay if we don't tap the top. I'm okay, I feel good about it. I'm gonna go back and do it again... but I feel good if we don't do it.
So we make that decision. But this is the thing is that, you know, getting to the top is great, but that means you're only halfway done. You got to get down the mountain. Right. And now there's this storm bearing down on us. So we've got to get off the mountain pretty quickly. So I'll try to distill it as much as possible.
It's chaos trying to get down the mountain. On the Audubon it's a one way road and all these other teams are still trying to get up and you can't turn around. You have to go up and go back down. And so we're like literally unclipping and walking around other teams on this slope to try to get down the mountain.
And by then we're in a total whiteout. So the only thing we can see is the feet in front of me. And I can just barely see the climber that I'm roped up with in front of me, that's maybe six arm lengths away. And we're just walking, descending in the cloud. And there was a moment where someone on our rope team fell and we had to catch and self arrest.
And so getting back just to 17 camp took like three times as long as it should have taken. It was such an ordeal. But the climb's not done. We had to pack up camp, we had to go down the ridge, we had to get back down to 14, 000 foot camp. And we basically trudged down there after this, like, incredibly long day, having not slept, having been at altitude for a while to get to 14 camp. And so it was just kind of like this totally dilapidated crew that had just gotten thrashed and worked and kind of emotionally spent pulling into camp to 14 to kind of put a bow on the end of the summit day.
So we didn't ultimately touch the top. But I feel really good that we climbed all the hard parts and we did it in style. We did it the right way.
[00:46:50] Ali: Dude, wow. What a journey. And I want to give you props for your storytelling. Cause like, I'm having trouble jotting some notes because I'm just so immersed in what you're describing. Especially, like if anybody watches the video I'll put on YouTube, like, you're talking about like leaning in with your axe when the storm's coming through, dude. And like how cold it was.
But what I will say to that, Ben, is that there's definitely a level of humility in you and your fellow climbers. Especially noting that some people were still going up, you know, they had to touch the summit.
Part of me wanted to ask like, well, did other people do it? But that's not important because I'm just so immersed in your story. And I love that you made that conscious decision. That you didn't become potentially another statistic where the ego took over. Because as I've done my research and learned from other storytellers, that's literally how people get killed. They just get infatuated with well we're this far , you know, it's so close. And I literally heard you like we did the hardest parts.
But what's so beautiful and powerful about the climax of this story is the way I filter that is You respected in nature. If there's anything to respect in my world, it's nature. Like it will literally tell you.
I was just hiking with my kiddos the other day. We're out in Vail, and even though Colorado is a lot of great weather, when clouds come in, especially when we're at higher altitudes, this is probably like 10 11, 000 feet, I'm aware. And I'm looking around and I'm also using that opportunity to teach my kids. I'm like, Hey, Sepia, who's five now, what is nature telling us? And she looks up, she's like, well, the skies are dark. I'm like, are they normally dark? She's like, no.
And I'm like, cool. So this is a time to be more aware. And then a few drops started coming through. Right.
So this is, I'm trying to like, you have this epic adventure. And I'm like giving this hiking story, but anyways, I sat in pause. I go, we have to make a decision now. We've been hiking for almost an hour. If we keep going, we risk hiking higher into a storm where it's more likely for lightning to be present and be in danger.
And so it was just a really good opportunity for me to distill the one thing I wanted them to take away from that experience was respect nature.
You did it on a much more grand level with so many other factors. Like you had invested years into this prep. You're weeks in, you're tired, but I also want to reflect I love that you shared your mental sharpness was still there. Because what I'm gathering as I'm hearing this Ben, and learning from you, is how much of a mental and emotional game it is.
Like to your point, a lot of us are probably in physical shape to climb some of the highest mountains in the world, but are we in mental and emotional shape?
Probably not.
So that's one of the biggest lessons I'm taking from this or the gifts. So thank you. Just, yeah. Thank you for your story. Thank you for sharing that.
So you hit 14k. Is there anything past that or at that point does the journey kind of unfold? Actually, no, of course there's stuff past that. I want to know how you kind of reintegrated into life.
Sure.
[00:50:08] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I think you hit it too with like the mental aspect of it. Like something I realized early on is like the physical stuff is important, but it is actually your mental desire that makes up the most, the biggest piece of it. Like if you have a desire to do something, you will outrun people that are more physically prepared than you in every aspect of it.
And that's why the mental aspect of it, I think, was so important. And I'll say this last thing on that piece of, uh, you know, the mental sharpness. This idea of balance. Like in that moment, it was a really important test of my balance. It's really easy to say that we can be balanced or try to achieve balance at sea level when we're at our home and things are comfy.
But when I'm getting hammered by wind at 18. 6, and I have every right in my mind to be able to justify I should be able to keep going, it puts into question my values and I have to really double down on, am I going to live out the way that I talk about my values or is it going to show that they're not really rooted in something?
And I always say that, like, the way that you are able to balance things, or at least the way that you're able to attempt to achieve balance is a litmus test for the health of your ambitions. So I think that in that moment, had I been willing to take on more risk than I should have, put my, my role as a father, as a husband at risk, I think that would have shown that my ambitions were not rooted in something healthy and that I had some introspective work to do to right that when I got back down.
And so, because I felt really secure in the root of my ambitions, it made the decision very easy. Didn't make it not difficult, but it made the decision easy. It's like, I've already made this decision. I'm just having to do it now.
And so getting off the mountain, before I got the opportunity to integrate back in life, it was kind of harrowing. The storm followed us all the way down the mountain to the point where we basically went from 14, 000 feet all the way down to the airstrip without stopping.
We took breaks along the way, but due to various factors, we basically just had to pack up our stuff at 14 and go all the way, basically walking for a little more than 24 hours straight to get back to the airstrip. Only to get stuck at the airstrip for four days, waiting for the weather to clear for planes to get off.
So it was, uh, the mountain didn't want to let us go. And I think the hardest part about integrating was that not only did the mountain not want to let us go, but I feel like I left a piece of myself on the mountain. Like, it took me a while to get back to where I felt like I was normal. I've talked about it earlier where it takes like weeks to kind of figure out the meaning of what did that climb mean for me and who came down the mountain and how is that person different than the person that came up.
And more than ever, I think because of the duration and the intensity of the climb, I was stuck for months feeling like a little bit lost and spacey trying to navigate this new person that is just jumping back into dad. Jumping back into doing all the normal things of life and sending emails.
And that contrast was really challenging. I think that that really was because much like going up the mountain, your work is not done until you get off the mountain. I think when you get off the mountain, your work is not done until you've completed that introspective work of like, what did that mean for me? And who am I?
Because that's the other part about these physical pursuits is that if I believe that I need to pursue them because they're important to me, but as a family man, I also have a responsibility to bring those benefits that I gained back home. And I think that's the introspective work. That's the responsibility there is to continue doing the work until the work is done so that I can figure out what that meant for me and then bring those benefits to my family, and not just be like spacey dad forever that's just dreaming about getting back to Alaska as soon as possible.
So there was a lot of journaling, a lot of just sleepless nights, laying in my bed, thinking, and not in like at all a negative way. But almost like a, if I closed my eyes, I was right back there to figure out what did I leave there and what did I take with me and, and all that work.
And so I know it sounds like I might be dancing around a lot of like, uh, like nebulous thoughts. And I think to a degree, it's almost like we talked about balance where it's like, I don't know that I ever will fully know with certainty what that meant for me, but I think it's in the exploration of finding that meaning and finding more of that meaning that is where I find the benefits of it.
So yeah, integration was challenging, but fairly meaningful to have to go through that exercise.
[00:54:22] Ali: Man, I love that. Wow. So I love the metaphor of leaving parts of you there and the focus on introspection. The focus on giving yourself space and not just coming down like, boom. Got to get back, got to be a dad, got to do all the things I'm normally doing. But, you know, sort of sitting in the rawness of what you just experienced.
I've had many versions of that where, in fact, this Colorado retreat that I led out here with Chris Emick over the summer. Same thing, man. We were in the wilderness for three or four days. We climbed a thirteener, which isn't, you know, as high as Denali, but it was meaningful for me and the other men. And I had this 48 hour period, Ben, where like I just had to sit. And I had to be with the things.
I remember my mind wanting to do things. It was like, yo, dude. Snap out of it. Like let's go, because my family's in Florida and I had some opportunity to get caught up on some things But my body was like no thanks. We are going to sit here and we are going to force you literally to be with what just happened. And it was beautiful.
And the other thing that I heard from what you shared is like coming back to balance and an integration. I think part of you is left there, and that's just part of your journey.
You might not ever make complete sense of that. It might just be this thing that continues to live in you and through you. And then one day you might have an insight. I'm describing a way of being open and not needing closure.
Because I think that's what can kind of destroy us inside. It's like, well, what did it mean? Like, who am I now? Instead of being like, yo, that was an extraordinary experience. I left a part of me there and now that's a beautiful part of who I am today. You know?
[00:56:11] Ben: Yeah, that desire for definitive outcomes is something that's so normal in life. Like something we all need is to a degree in our life, we all require certainty and closure. And I think some of this stuff is like tangential to other important things.
Like I talk about balance being a litmus test. I think the need for definitive outcomes with physical pursuits is also a litmus test of " is my goal the right goal?" Right? Like if my goal is only to summit, then what benefits do I think I'm going to actually gain that I will then be able to bring back to integrate with my family?
And I don't know that those are the right ones, right? I don't think that it's like, well, I did some extra risky shit and that's why I was able to summit. And so how does that come back and benefit my family? How does that benefit me as a human? Other than knowing that, like, woof, got lucky on that one.
As opposed to the alternative, like my goal is to venture forth into the unknown literally and figuratively and give everything that I absolutely have in the safest way possible. So that I can explore these unique spaces on the mountain and within my own mind and I can come back and take those lessons back to my family. Like, if anything's going to be definitive, it's that I will bring something back and then I will come back and I will be able to share those.
And I think that that's like where I think I learned really early on my first climb where I got sick and had to turn around. I was like, my goals have to be different. And I think that a lot of that was releasing the need for the definitive outcomes when it came to these things. Because that's just not how life works, you know.
And I think there was a lot of people that came off climbs like this that they were like already ready to go back. And I'm like, I'm not judging any everyone's different, right? But for me, I was like, huh? I feel okay. I'm at peace. I certainly want to go back, but it's because I feel like there's more to learn to be able to finally put that last couple thousand feet together and put it into play and be more efficient and yada yada. And that's not the time right now.
[00:58:17] Ali: Dude, that is powerful. Releasing the need for a definitive outcome. Just to repeat that. That is powerful because you're so spot on, man. Like humans just get caught up with these laser focus goals.
And I read it really well the other day. How dangerous expectations can be in all facets of life, especially something like summiting Denali, like the expectation to summit.
And so releasing the need for this definitive outcome and just being with the journey.
Ben, this is an epic story. Before we wrap, I want to actually transition this a little bit into your podcast. So you run The Athlete Dad Podcast, which looks awesome. You interview some super cool humans on there.
Just tell us a little bit about that. I have to imagine it blends into everything we just discussed with this adventure.
[00:59:11] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So I recently spun up The Athlete Dad Podcast. And the idea is that we explore this intersection that we've talked about between physical pursuits and fatherhood. Right.
I actually spun it up out of a moment of desperation around this idea of balance and was like, man, I, I'm not starting this podcast because I have all the answers. I'm starting this podcast cause I need to be able to ask questions at scale. Because boy, do I need some guidance here.
And my hypothesis was that other men must feel this too. This desire to go out and explore these physical pursuits of ours. And I specifically call them physical pursuits as opposed to sports because it can encapsulate a much broader array of ways that we can go outside of our home and challenge ourselves and push ourselves in nature.
But I just felt like there's got to be other people who are out here that feel this innate need to go do this and this is such an important piece of our life. And they've got to be probably doing the like the bringing of the home of the lessons better than I can. Or they're managing balance a lot better.
And so, yeah the idea is that we hear from incredible humans, incredible fathers who also just happened to be doing amazing feats. And what's interesting about these conversations is that, you know, I was talking with a guy named Garrett McNamara, who surfed waves that are like 80 feet tall in a place called Nazare. So the largest waves on earth.
And yet when we dive into these conversations, the thing that I really love is that being a dad is the great equalizer. So even though this guy has surfed a hundred foot wave, you know, all we really dig into and riff on is like the dad life.
And what does it mean to be an athlete that is a dad? What does it mean to model ambition with these pursuits with your kids? How are you trying to achieve that balance? How are you trying to integrate them into your passion? So we remove that distance between the pursuit of our goals and the pursuit of being a great father.
And so it's just been so many rich and meaningful conversations where like every call, I feel like it's like a therapy session for me when I'm just like, yeah. Reminded of what's important and I'm grounded and I'm just getting the opportunity to talk to this, just this incredible human being again. And I always like to say that it's like these incredible dads who just also happen to be the world's greatest, you know, fill in the blank.
And the thing that I think has been a really important reminder coming out of this show is that there's this great story of so many dads doing these amazing things and they have these young kids who have like no context for what their dad has just done and how epic it is or how like how like cool their dad is outside of their house. And their kids love them just because they're dad, right?
Or their kids are almost like annoyed at their like celebrity status of like, it's just dad. Like he's, he's just dad. And I think that has been the most important reminder of everything is that even though we feel this desire to go outside of our home and pursue amazing things, the most important thing always remains the people that are within our home.
And we have this quote that my wife put up on our house and it's like that "the most important work you will ever do is within the walls of this house." And that I think has been a healthy reminder to kind of relinquish some of that anxiety that's maybe associated with, I need to go out and do this and say, well, let me make sure that that the people that I'm leaving behind me to go do these things are the ones that I'm really here serving in these pursuits.
So yeah, long story short, the podcast has been phenomenal. I feel very privileged to talk to these amazing human beings. And we've just finished our first season and are about to start digging into the season two and make some really cool changes to the podcast. But, you can find it at theathletedad. com or on all majors podcast platforms. So.
[01:02:57] Ali: Mm. I love it, dude. Yep. It's an awesome show. One of the things that I want to reflect back that I love about your pathway into this is that it's rooted in curiosity. I see a lot of podcasts that are not rooted in curiosity. They're rooted in other agenda based things.
Like, Oh, well, I do this business in the world, so I should just do a podcast because it's going to give me leads, blah, blah, blah. Whereas you're like, Yo, I want to know how other dads are doing this. Like, I still want to adventure and I still want to be an awesome dad. So how can I learn?
You know, that's very much why I started my podcast. This show we're listening to that's around personal growth, discovery, transformation, which you highlighted in your story. And so I'm a huge fan of you and pursuing this podcast and pursuing these conversations because it's authentic. And I hear that. I feel that from you, dude. It's rooted in curiosity.
I think curiosity is not only a superpower, but it's one of the most beautiful things that can keep us grounded, like you said. When we're naturally curious, we tend to show up as we are. When we let go of that curiosity and we start to become overwhelmed by fear and other, you know, ego based emotions, then we just start doing things that don't really align with who we are.
So I love that. We'll definitely link to the show. And what I'd love to do if you have some space for it is end on a few rapid fire fun questions.
[01:04:28] Ben: Yeah, we'll love it.
[01:04:29] Ali: Yeah, sweet dude. So number one, what's your favorite food?
[01:04:35] Ben: My favorite food. I would say eggs, baby. Eggs and eggs. Here's the kicker though. Eggs with chili crisp sauce. There's nothing better on this earth than an over easy egg with chili crisp on top.
[01:04:49] Ali: Nice.
I too love eggs. In fact, I have a almost unhealthy obsession with egg burritos. I make at least three or four a week. Usually after my 11 a. m. workout , I make an egg burrito, put all types of stuff in there. So I love that answer.
Number two, designed for you, what's your next adventure?
[01:05:11] Ben: Yeah, the next adventure is really exploring my backyard here in Bend, Oregon. And I've already started to do that. We have the beautiful cascade mountain range with all these interesting, unique volcanoes.
And so I actually just climbed middle sister with a dad friend of mine. And talk about releasing definitive outcomes, we just went out there as like a reconnaissance trip, like no idea what's going to be good, you know, might be shitty, might be awesome and ended up summiting and having an amazing time.
And that really just put me in the back country. And you see all these interesting ridge lines on all these other peaks and the mind starts wondering. And so I'm actually really excited to adventure closer to home, more day trips in the cascades around Bend. And specifically too, I want to try to ski off a couple of these summits. So.
[01:05:54] Ali: Very cool, dude. Yes. You live in a beautiful place. We talked about that a few weeks ago. We had an awesome time visiting Bend. And I love that after coming off of something like Denali, you're like, there's so much to explore right in my backyard. So that is cool.
Last question for you, brother. What's one of your favorite childhood memories?
[01:06:15] Ben: You know, one of my favorite childhood memories that that has come up a lot lately is actually around this idea of like the relationship with our kids. So, you know, I think that as dad's oftentimes we feel like we have to be superheroes and design these like amazing perfect moments or like we're going to say we're going to deliver like dad wisdom that's just going to, you know, change their life.
But I think about this moment in particular where when I was a kid I grew up wrestling and that meant that we were driving, like, you know, four hours to the Central Valley in California. And that meant that on the way back it was like driving through the dark with my dad, just talking. And there's nothing out there.
And I just vividly remember sitting in my dad's truck with just the glow of the radio and the headlights on a road in front of us just driving straight for miles and just talking about everything. About life.
And I love that memory as a kid because it kind of reminds us to again that like the most important thing that you can be for your kids is there and present and engaged. And you don't have to be superhero and that they love you because your dad. And my dad did a lot of amazing stuff for us, but it was that moment, those moments that I really appreciate the most.
[01:07:23] Ali: That's real. Wow. I feel the goosebumps of that energy, man. So thank you. That's very real. Just show up. You know, it doesn't always have to be some epic gift or adventure or surprise. Like, just show up. And if you're going to show up, be present. Don't just be in the room, but be present.
And wow, that's so nostalgic. Because I had some beautiful road trips with my family. And you just kind of brought me right back there, brother. So thank you.
And this was a gift. This was an epic story. There was so much wisdom in this. I got to know you better. I'm excited for some future adventures. So I'm going to figure out how to get into your world and be like, yo, let's go do this. Let's climb that. Probably be in Bend sometime soon. Hope to see you at FRD live this year.
So thank you, brother, for being here. Thank you for sharing this. Anything left unsaid?
[01:08:16] Ben: You know, I just want to express my gratitude for you, man. I just love getting to have this conversation with you. I love what you're doing with the podcast. I love the thoughtfulness.
And, you know, you and I had talked a bit offline before we started recording. And you're like, how are you doing? And I'm like, I'm actually pretty stressed right now. But, I wanted to have this conversation 'cause I knew that talking to an amazing human like you was gonna give me energy and ground me and get me right back to where I needed to be.
And so, just wanna express my gratitude to you and, um, I'm excited to keep our own journey as friends and dads going together. So.
[01:08:48] Ali: Mm, thank you brother. I receive that. That is another gift, just shows the quality of human you are. So great words to end. And yes, I hope to see you soon.
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He spent time as a Taoist monk and doctor of Oriental medicine. He’s written best-selling books, produced films, and helped millions of humans find better health. He’s also known in the world as “The Urban Monk” which is a powerful brand and avatar for the energy and content he’s creating.
This episode is loaded with insights around environment, self inquiry, energy, life force power, and the innate vitality we all have within us. We also talk about Pedram’s book – FOCUS: Bringing Time, Energy and Money into Flow. We dig into the Life Garden concept and how it applies to our energy management.
Pedram also shares some history and mythology behind Bodhidharma and the Shaolin monks. We discuss how those origins shaped the Star Wars story, other hero’s journey examples, and Pedram’s mission to become a force for good. I really enjoyed this conversation!
I appreciate Pedram for his courage and stand for justice. He’s committed to truly helping people and he’s up against the “dark side.” You’ll have to listen to this episode to understand why 🙂
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["episode_quotes"]=> bool(false) ["episode_transcript"]=> string(45651) "[00:00:00] Ali: Welcome back folks to The Power of SPACE. I have a longtime friend, Mr. Eric Turnnessen. Also, this is a special first repeat guest. So as I was preparing for this, I got really excited, Eric, because you were the second episode. An episode that I love, that I've listened to more than once. We cover a lot of cool things, and that was almost two years ago.
And here you are again, the first repeat guest. A lot of life has happened since then. You and I have had several conversations since then. And you're one of the few people in my world where almost every conversation we have is record worthy.
So I'm already happy. What's that?
[00:00:50] Eric: No pressure.
[00:00:51] Ali: No pressure. Yeah.
So I have to start with the intro, which I thought about not starting with because it's our second time, but I actually think it'd be interesting to see how you answer it. So who is Eric Turnnessen today?
[00:01:08] Eric: Oh, Lordy. Well, it's not as straightforward as it was the last time, I believe.
And someone asked me this recently, like, "what do you do?" That kind of question when you're meeting somebody new? And they say, Oh, what do you do? Right. And I answered in a particular way. And then after I was done answering it, I wasn't really satisfied with it. And I came up with a better answer or more accurate answer, which is that I'm listening.
Um. Because I do a lot of different things. Kind of whatever fancies my attention. You know, I do some coaching, I do some music composition, I do a lot of meditation and things in that realm, but I wouldn't necessarily define myself by any one of those things in terms of like saying, Oh, this is who I am.
At a high level, I'm endeavoring to not be so goal oriented in terms of where I think I'm going. And as a result, I have to live with a lot of patience, live with a lot of surrender, and have a lot of discernment in terms of when to take action, and do something, or when not to.
And I think that that's a generic enough overview of me to at least maybe interest some people, but it certainly doesn't say anything about who I am.
[00:02:35] Ali: Hmm. Maybe it does. Maybe it does. Because as I was listening to you, I agree with everything you've just said. And my mind quickly wanted to honor and congratulate you in ways where I'm like, yes, you do. As of late, especially, you've always spent time feeling into things. And the point you made at the end, the discernment around when to take action.
I've admired that, since I've known you, when you feel it and you know it, you go. You don't wait around. Whereas I, myself, and a lot of humans, I think we get in a lot of trouble when we feel something, we know it in our gut and we just wait. And we play with it or we let it linger on, which from my own personal journey has created all kinds of weird hassles and even issues sometimes.
Where I'm like, I knew right away. Body told me, my body quickly had that initial reaction. It's something I've been sort of sharing with my children at five and seven years old. I'm like, your body knows right away. So listen to that, be with that.
[00:03:46] Eric: Yeah. And I think that's really critical and an important skill to develop. And of course, that plays a part in what I'm doing.
And I think that waiting is also a fundamental ingredient, especially with complex situations like say the ending of a relationship, whether that's with a person or whether that's with a job or something like that. There can be multiple things happening in the body at the same time and they can contradict each other.
So in that situation, you can't just be like, okay, I'm going to go with what my body feels. Because in that situation where there's a lot of conflicting things like maybe part of me is a yes. I want to do this. And part of me is a no. And then you have to discern, okay, what's the percentage? What's the bigger part of me?
And that does take time to sit with that and let things settle. Because if in that situation, there's a knee jerk decision, then it's probably going to be reactive as opposed to responsive. And that will end up probably having regrets as a result.
[00:04:56] Ali: I'm with you. It reminds me of this model I took from conscious leadership, which is the whole body, yes.
Some people call it the hell yes, the full body yes. The idea is that when you have those, you know, it's certain. And there's a lot more decisions where we get a ratio like you described, where like, there's a chunk of me that's a yes, there's a chunk of me that's no. And so going back to what you shared, I think that's where the awareness comes in.
The reflection, like, is this fear speaking? Is this something else? And being with that ... I like what you said, because it's not always that easy. I love to be like, Hey, I only say yes, if it's a whole body yes. But then it'd be a very binary lifestyle. I still honor the whole body, yes, but I can't make every single decision like that.
[00:05:48] Eric: Yeah, and, and also I think, from my experience, I've learned that especially if it's a decision that's like maybe a departure from a path that I was on.
There's usually a part of my body that feels uncertain about it. It's kind of like if you're the monkey swinging in the trees. And you're going from one branch to another. Like if you have a branch in hand before you let go of the other one, there's some comfort there. But if you have a leap of faith where you let go one branch, but it's kind of like, you have to travel through some air to get to the next branch...
Yeah, there's a full body. There's a partly a full body. Yes. Like, Oh, I'm going for that branch. But then also there's like, "Oh shit," you know, am I going to make it kind of feeling, which I think is something to pay attention to because that very sensation can be the thing that people micro focus on and then choose that to be an obstacle as to not take that step.
Because he'll get the yes. But then, like, the fears will crop up, and the unknowns, and then the mind will fixate on that, and then before you know it, the power of attention magnifies those fears. And so now you've lost the awareness of that yes that was originally there, because you've chosen to focus on this smaller part, which then, because of your attention, ends up being magnified.
And then you just don't do it.
[00:07:16] Ali: Yes. Well said. I was smiling as you started talking about the monkeys swinging because I was just waiting for how fast we'd get to one of your awesome metaphors. You have the best metaphors. You always combine nature with them and they're clear, they're simple, like the monkey swinging from the tree.
Like that's easy to comprehend.
[00:07:36] Eric: Monkeys are great.
[00:07:37] Ali: So that is a beautiful path into something I want to talk to you about where I have high curiosity, because I know your story, and it's around the topic of transition. So, you are... focusing on your music. Now you're focusing on coaching, like you said.
But this came about from you know, kind of opening up some space recently in having an exit from the business where you and I met a decade ago. Now that we're here, what comes up for you in reflecting on that transition?
[00:08:12] Eric: So, it was a transition. That's what I can say about it. There are certain parts that are too far in the future for me to, like, kind of feel in my body anymore and, like, live it or retell it. But kind of being where I am now, it's clear that it was the right decision for me. And also the other branch hasn't shown up.
Right. So it was very clear to me that this wasn't just a decision about letting go of a company or moving away from a job. It was more about a closing of a chapter of life and in closing that chapter at the simultaneous, we was an invitation and a preparation for whatever the next chapter is.
And this goes back to what I said about me in the beginning about the listening. I don't know what that next chapter is. I have some senses about it, but, it's still not clear. What's happened though is like puzzle pieces show up. Like, different pieces seem to appear.
Actually, before I get into that, I'll reflect that it reminds me of... how MemberMouse started in the first place. Like I was working at a consulting job and I was looking around me at people who have been doing it for 25 years and we're super successful. And I was like, that's not a goal that I want to spend 25 years.
Like, even if I get there, that wouldn't be success for me. So I left my job, but I didn't have any plan for what. I just knew I couldn't do that. And ultimately like two years later, MemberMouse kind of emerged from the mists, you know. Like there was no plan for that. It was really a lot of happenstance that made MemberMouse come about. And then MemberMouse became clear. And then I made that 14 year journey.
So it feels very analogous to that. I can use and reflect on how that felt for me then to help guide me through this experience. One thing I'm very aware of is like if the puzzle of the consulting job was like a one dimensional world, leaving that was basically preparing me for a two dimensional world.
And so it's not just a leaving of something. It's an opening up to new perspective of seeing things. So as puzzle pieces showed up in that transition, I would be perceiving them with the old mindset of one dimensional and trying to fit it together. But it wasn't until there was some like, aha moments, realizations that showed me, oh, actually, they go together like this in a two dimensional way.
So, the same is happening now. Puzzle pieces are showing up, 2D puzzle pieces are showing up now. But I know from experiences that they're not going to make a 2D puzzle, there's going to be a three dimensional puzzle that comes out of this. So it's going to be a completely different way of being that I can't perceive right now and I think that's where the trust and surrender comes in.
Because if the fear of not knowing took hold, and I can sense myself doing this on a nearly weekly basis, like, "Oh, let me find the thing that I'm used to and comfortable like, what do I need to do?" And it's always looking for the thing that I know, and I did before and I was comfortable with.
But, you know, after acknowledging that is going on with me and sitting with it and letting it pass, it all comes back to waiting to see what's going to come my way. And really just like, being playful with the world in a sense. Like I have enough experience to know that even in MemberMouse, so much of the success depended on seemingly random events happening. Like a significant person coming in with an opportunity or a particular client, you know, that led to more things.
Like there are things that are completely out of my control. I know enough and have enough experience with that to be patient and wait. Because on the MemberMouse journey, I wasn't patient. I was working, I was firing all six cylinders. Where in retrospect, I realized I really only need to be running on two because it's not all about effort.
So yeah, I mean, this time is like a new classroom. It's like showing up. I've learned all these skills and the teacher's like, okay, well, we're going to test that and see what you've learned. So I do feel like I'm being tested and, you know, a lot of that shows up.
The tests happen in an internal way in terms of thoughts, emotions, in that realm. And so that's also why I spend a lot of time and a big amount of my focus on meditation and other kind of introspective practices to show up to that battlefield for lack of a better word.
[00:13:03] Ali: Wow, that's interesting.
There's so much that's interesting in what you said. The first is that like I expected even more awesome metaphors came in. So we started with the monkey swinging on trees. Then you brought this cool puzzle, and I was there with you, I was seeing you, like, put the puzzle together, and then advancing to the next chapter, the next puzzle.
And then you brought in the classroom, right? Which is its own metaphor, it's beautiful. Oh, man. And then at the end, you drop the battlefield. We'll see if that goes anywhere.
But, what I think's really cool, I want to reflect back to you, Eric, is that, in some ways, I feel like, watching your transition from my lens and being your friend and supporting you, it was just like the monkey. You saw the branch, you didn't really hesitate, which might go against your pattern, because you explained how one of your deeper patterns that got you into MemberMouse was kind of blindly going. But I think there's a part of you that perhaps saw the branch, and you swung to it, and you went, because you're like, this is the new branch that I'm going to, I want to see what it opens up.
It would have been really easy for you to stay, and not swing there, which I've done, in my journey. And so I know what that feels like and what you shared about like staying from fear is so real. So I love that part. I also think that the Eric I know today, especially compared with Eric five years ago or ten years ago when I first met you, is very patient, is very still.
And these are two moves that I think are so impressive. I'm laughing because there's, these are like the two things I'm trying to teach my kids, even though I try not to teach them a whole lot. I'm like, hey guys, sometimes you just need to be patient. We just need to be still and surrender.
Because the point I want to make there is that I found that life becomes so much more beautiful for me when I let go and let things happen instead of trying to be the composer and control things and architect them and do all this stuff for this crystal clear future projections, instead of being just kind of sitting back and saying, well, let's just let the music play.
These are some random thoughts I have. It also transitions into what I want to talk to you about, which is music, which is some of the stuff.
[00:15:23] Eric: Before you do that, can I comment on the branch thing, please? I think that that's what intuition is. And maybe like the full body, yes, or whatever we want to call it. It's basically something non logical, non mental that is indicating to us that there's something.
So there is part of us that can see the next thing, but it's not a part that is mental or intellectual or logical, right? So that's where the rub comes in. Can you be somebody who can trust in things other than what's seen and known?
Um, and that is, I think, a really important practice to do to be human. Like it's important to grant the mind its realm and what it's good at and the things that it's good at. But ultimately, it's something that requires a lot to function. It requires a lot of information and data gathered over time from past sources from other people. Maybe indirect or direct. It all depends.
But there are other ways of navigation that don't require information and data. And they are equally, if not more important than the mental ones, depending on what one's trying to cultivate, of course. But I'll just say for me, more and more, the non mental logical areas are much more important than mental.
[00:16:54] Ali: I'm really glad you came back to that because I'm going to double down and share that something that happened in my world a little over a year ago was an experience that came through a means of breathwork, very intentional, deep breathwork. And... The exercise showed me something that I'm literally going to do next week in terms of leading a retreat, being in nature. It showed me a glimpse. It didn't even show me the whole picture.
But the reason that I think it's so profound and it connects right back to what you just shared is that, I could have only quote unquote, "seen that" by feeling it. In other words, I didn't know how to intellectualize that. It wasn't something I could mentally navigate to, to use your words.
But I saw this brief picture. And at the time, this is well over a year ago, almost two years ago. I didn't even know what it really meant. I just knew to your point, it was something calling me. So that's why I say I could quote unquote, "see it." And it's amazing because that would have never happened if I didn't kind of surrender to the fear, let go of some things.
So I 100 percent agree with that, and what I'm going to filter on that note is that there's only so much we can mentally navigate that we can intellectualize, especially as it relates to what this feels like our calling or what we're getting pulled to the energy that wants to come through us.
And like you said, I couldn't think my way through it. I had to feel it to see it, which sounds kind of crazy. And here we are, next week, I'm going to step into this thing that I felt back then.
[00:18:43] Eric: Well, there's actually a simple exercise that can help the mind actually see how this isn't so crazy. And it shows the limitation of perception.
Basically, like, if you imagine a circle of people sitting around a tree and you go around the circle and each one describes what they're seeing. Everybody's gonna have something slightly different that from their perspective that they're seeing about that tree, but they're all 100% correct. They, it's their truth, right?
It's their truth, but it's also not just their truth. It's everybody's truth, mm-hmm. But the people on the opposite side can't see with their physical eyes what the person on the opposite side is seeing. So, just like with a physical object, when we take it into a more etheric world of ideas and goals and whatever, it's the same thing. Like, whatever we think that we perceive is only part of it.
And so it's very fallible to believe that we know, even if it feels like very strongly that we can see something. It's always, I think, healthy to allow for a certain amount of like, okay, "I don't have the full picture, I don't know." And it keeps one's mind open. Because something else I've learned from taking journeys of different kinds is sometimes the motivation that gets us up out of the chair to walk out the door that's palatable to mind, like maybe a trip like, okay, my desire tells me I want to go to Santa Fe.
Okay, so I get up. I drive. I'm heading out to Santa Fe. But then Something happens, like some UFO flies across the road and is like, "Oh, crap, like there's a UFO going that way." Like that seems intriguing and it's calling me that direction. Now, the stubborn mind will be like, "Well, I was going to Santa Fe and that was the original plan," right? And we'll ignore the thing that just happened.
But the open mind will be like, "Oh, well that must be why I'm here, right?" And I think that happens a lot where what we're given to get us into motion isn't necessarily always going to be the end result.
[00:21:00] Ali: I like that. Yeah, that's real.
Okay. Uh, something I want to talk to you about is music. Music is in focus for you now. I love seeing some of the stuff that you share. I believe you just did a contest of sorts. Tell me about that. What's going on with music in your life?
[00:21:24] Eric: So I've been recording with orchestras for the past few years, which is essentially like the culmination of a lifelong dream. Like I started composing when I was 14 and very early on I had these visions and desires to have my stuff recorded with an orchestra. Never could see how it would happen, and pretty much gave up hope on it happening at at different times.
But yeah, three years ago certain things were shown to me that I took action on and ultimately ended up recording once, thought that would be the end of it, did it again, figured that would be the end, and then I did it again this year.
And also this year I did the contest because, and I'm going to say because and there's going to be a reason, but the reason isn't the only reason why it happened. Again, it was a listening thing. And there was there was a lot of... like an iceberg, there was a lot of stuff under the water that was happening. But I can tell you about what's above the water, which is the quote unquote "reason."
And the reason is that, I know how powerful it was for me to have that experience and I wanted to pass it along to other people who might have been in my same situation. Composers who had never had their stuff recorded by orchestra before.
And so the contest was basically to put out to everybody, no entrance fee, to all ages from 12 to 70, any level of experience, submit a piece of music for a particular ensemble, orchestral ensemble, and then I would choose a winner. And that winner I would pay for that to get recorded by the orchestra.
And yeah, it was just a really amazing experience on a number of levels to kind of be the one shepherding somebody else through the process, but also getting to meet people, the community of musicians and seeing how large the community was and engaged. And yeah, there was a lot of interest in that particular endeavor.
And It's probably one of the most successful campaigns of sorts that I've done, even including anything for MemberMouse in terms of level of engagement and excitement, you know? So to me, I take that as a sign that it was aligned. Like I don't take ownership of that, but I look at it as like, okay, like I took these actions and I was definitely meant to do this just based on how it felt as a result of going through doing it and seeing what came out of it.
And, um, I also recorded three more of my pieces with a 60 piece orchestra. I'm currently in post production for all of that stuff right now, like editing a lot of behind the scenes footage together to release more videos on my YouTube channel.
But again, like it's interesting with the music stuff, like I go through waves, like the beginning of the year, I was preparing for preparing all the music. There's a lot of pre production that goes into this to get 60 people all to do the same thing. At the same time, within a very short period of time with zero to minimal error because it's so expensive. So there's a lot of prep that happens.
And so my level of engagement and everything was really involved from the beginning of the year all the way up to the recording session, which was in May. And then the May experience of having it all come to this culmination point was a peak experience.
And then after that, it's almost like, ah I never freaking want to listen to that music again. Why did I even do that? And it's interesting because this happened last time, and it's kind of like this cycle where you have these peaks and valleys that come, even though I know I love it so much. You know, when you've listened to something like literally thousands of times and you have to do it with a critical ear and, you know, it's work.
So, at the end of it, I still feel like I'm just coming out of that kind of aftermath or postpartum feeling of having gone through the whole creative effort. And so, again, I'm in the situation where like, "okay, well, maybe that's all that was meant to happen with music." And if I never do it again, I'll be fine.
But I'm still listening, and if I get the message to do it again, then I'll do it again. But there's no plan.
[00:25:40] Ali: Yeah, that's cool.
I remember the first time you did it and when I tuned in on YouTube LIVE when you were sharing it publicly for the first time. One, the piece is beautiful. So you have a real gift. But more importantly, I was like, "Oh, shit. I see Eric." Like, I see him, even though I couldn't physically see you, right. But I was watching.
And that's what was so extraordinary about it. There was the music and then there was this visual piece that you kind of put together. And even though I saw you as a buddy for years, and we worked together, we were in a very technical, uh, professional world until we started having these conversations.
And we're like, Oh, so we could talk about more than just coding and memberships. And then when I watched that, I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is his art." Not that I don't believe it's your only art by any means, but I was like, this is definitely part of your art. And as a creator, I was blown away. I was proud as your friend. I had all these sensations, even though I was watching it digitally.
I can only imagine if I was sitting next to you in like a live orchestra, the energy that would happen with that, which would be awesome to do at some point if that presents itself. But I really admired that you've swung to that branch because that's a big branch. It's a scary branch.
And then now you're giving the gift to someone else. When are they expected to start their process?
[00:27:14] Eric: Well, we already did it.
[00:27:15] Ali: Oh, it's done. Wow.
[00:27:16] Eric: Well, we recorded it. And you know, all these videos are on YouTube, but I still have yet to produce like the final, final video that basically culminates the whole thing.
Cause it's still in post production, the mixing and mastering of the piece. And then I have to take that and edit it to the video footage and produce, you know, the YouTube content. But all the pieces are almost done. The recording already happened. So the winner, you know, had a great life changing experience and super thrilled about it.
So yeah, it's just waiting for everything to get in front of me, all the pieces, and then for me to have the motivation to actually like produce that content. Which you know, I definitely identify with as a creative and producing things is definitely different than sharing them.
Right. You know, I get a lot of inspiration for production and creation, but then when it comes to like putting it out in the world, like I definitely dragged my feet a lot on that front. And I'll do better this year than I've done in the past year, but last year when I released, it took me like a year to release the stuff that I recorded. And the first year was even different.
Because it's about being seen at that point, you know, it's like, okay, I produced it and it was great for my experience, but now like putting it out in the world is, um, a different experience...
[00:28:37] Ali: Okay, so this is important.
Do you think the, let's just call it the resistance to share comes from a relationship with an identity?
[00:28:51] Eric: I don't think so.
[00:28:55] Ali: So then tell me more when you say it's about being seen.
[00:29:01] Eric: Oh, I think coming back to the body, right? There's just like different levels of comfort that we all have. And so, meeting with resistance simply is identifying that there is something within us that doesn't feel safe doing that. And maybe that can be because of some past experience where it was done and there wasn't a good experience and there wasn't proper healing from that. So it's basically a trauma response.
Like I know I've done a lot of performing in my life. I was in a boy choir in middle school and I sang in college and I know for me, I've always kind of had stage fright. I'm fine with groups. Like I sing in groups fine but anytime I had a solo, or on the spot like with the attention on me like that felt really intense and I couldn't get my breath and often I couldn't do the solo.
Sometimes I've done it but it's always like a nerve wracking experience that, you know, similar to like public speaking, like I've had to do some live things for MemberMouse sometimes and it always like filled me with dread.
So I think it's the same thing. It's like, basically fear of rejection, I think is part of it. And, uh, it's a vulnerable experience. So ultimately to knowingly go into a vulnerable experience takes courage.
And so through whatever work that I've done through spiritual practices and other modalities, and through just doing things like my own podcast and MemberMouse. Basically going from the behind the scenes in the dark corner software engineer to the person at the end of my time with MemberMouse, where I was more just doing all the public things, you know, YouTube videos, live things. Just by doing there was comfort, you know, gained from that.
So I think all these experiences build on top of each other and in preparation for, things like this. Because music, like you said, is like art, there's not much filter between that and me as a person, like that is an expression of me.
Whereas, like software, you know, it is an expression, but there's a little bit more of a mental barrier.
[00:31:17] Ali: It's not as subjective as art.
[00:31:20] Eric: Yeah. So, yeah. So releasing music is definitely more, uh, a different exercise.
[00:31:29] Ali: So it's very interesting that you said that. And the reason that I quickly poked at the identity, which as you answered that it doesn't feel like that had much to do with this. Where your answer was, was very felt very authentic to just kind of the fear as it relates to bringing your art to the world. And clearly art that you care about. So when you start using the words vulnerable, and as I know, you know, your path, that makes so much sense to me.
And why this is so interesting is that just the other day, like literally earlier this week, I was having a conversation with Gabrielle about the act of promotion, of sharing things, especially in social media, or just in public, like just in passing and communication with people, and specifically as it relates to SPACE.
So the podcast, the coaching, the retreats, the work that lights me up that I am passionate about right now. And it's funny, Eric, I was telling her, I was like, " I feel so much resistance," which is why I shared that word with you. Like, I don't want to post this on social media. I don't want to do marketing.
I was I complaining like a five year old, right. Just getting out of my body. Like, I don't want to do this. And she looked at me and smiled. And she's like, "it sure is easy for you to share your pictures when you're traveling with your family. It sure is easy for you to share a picture of a little zucchini that comes out of the garden you've created."
And she started giving me this reflection back that, "Oh, I do like to be seen" to your point, especially in some of those ways where it's artistic. But for me, there is a little bit of this fear, this resistance in mapping the work I'm doing, and broadcasting that.
And so it's this really weird mind game that I got some clarity on just this week and being like, wow, I sure am good at marketing the things that are fun and authentic. But when it comes to more serious things that relate to the work I'm doing in the world, now I get more resistant in marketing myself, you know.
[00:33:43] Eric: That makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure everybody can relate. To that I can relate to that.
But I think it reminds me of this quote from shadow work. That's like your greatest gift lies next to your greatest shadow, something like that. Right. And it's a hero's journey, essentially, right? So when we've committed to doing the hero's journey, which is basically to do some work that does create resistance and does take effort and does take soul searching.
Then, yeah, the piece of like putting that out in the world and being seen to be doing that is also another component of that journey. And I think for me, the message is, not that to share myself to be seen is about me continuing to write music and getting large orchestras to perform it. Because in a way even that is kind of like a delaying tactic because there's so much production involved, you know, right?
And it's like, it's not as immediate. You know, so this is something that just happened actually two days ago. I was attending a Kirtan event here in Asheville. Kirtan is essentially just call and response chanting of sacred mantras.
It's a musical experience, but it's it's a lot about energy and creating a space, and being together in community singing. And I have had the experience of attending some kirtans here in Nashville that they don't go particularly the way that I would like them to. Where I'm like, I have these feelings of like, "oh, that's, that's not how it should be done" or "that didn't work." Like you had the energy and then you dropped it. You need to keep the energy going.
And so, like, after having those complaints internally, I approached the person afterwards to ask, " would there be an appetite to do more of these? Because I'd be willing to lead one." You know, and he said, yes, and there's something emotion that may lead to me doing these here in Nashville on my own.
And so it's like. Oh, great. Well, now there'll be some Kirtans that I appreciate. "I'm like, oh, crap. Like, I might have to, like, lead Kirtans now." Which is a very much more immediate way of being seen and sharing. Yes. Right.
And so it definitely feels in line with the kind of work that I'm showing up to do. And it's something I'm excited about. And it's something that combines the work with tea that I did, like holding space and doing building energy arcs with groups of people and meditation.
So it brings together a lot of pieces, you know, the experience of doing music and sharing that, but it's getting closer and closer and there's less things to hide behind as I move forward in the journey. So, that's something else that might happen soon.
[00:36:39] Ali: That's cool. That's courageous.
Okay. It's perfect for the last topic that I've been very intentional to get people's perspective on the word transformation. Particularly self transformation. And I don't think we talked about this much in our first episode.
So, what does that mean to you right now? Like if you were to identify with some personal transformation that's taken place recently or even transformation you've experienced through others, like what comes to mind?
[00:37:22] Eric: I think seeking transformation is dangerous. Because it goes back to my kind of like puzzle metaphor hmm.
If you're in the 2D world, you're going to plan your transformation according to what you know, which is 2D. And so you'll orient to whether you're going the right way or not mentally based on if things look according to the map that you see in your head. But transformation, like if you're truly transformed, then what you are now is different than what you were before, and therefore there is no relationship in a way between the two.
Something has transformed. Therefore, whatever is transformed can't relate to what it was before. It's different. It's a new world. Kind of like the caterpillar and a butterfly. Like a caterpillar and a butterfly meeting won't know that they were the same thing necessarily. I don't know what they think, but metaphorically speaking, they don't know.
And that's to me is true transformation. And actually that's a good metaphor because the caterpillar goes into transformation and they completely dissolve, essentially die, get liquefied into like this death liquid, and then are reborn as a butterfly. So if you want true transformation, you have to be willing to die.
So if you're planning what that's going to look like, you're creating safety for yourself, right? You're basically saying, "Oh, I'm just going to do this a little bit." Um, but to me, if transformation is a process of letting go and trusting, like watering a seed. Well, the way that transformation is revealed is when nature takes its course and ultimately it's a flower or something else you see at the end, but you don't know at the beginning. You commit to the process.
So I think that that's complete.
[00:39:18] Ali: Wow. That's so fascinating because right here, right now, you've given me a healthy reason to challenge using that word as something that people would want. Meaning I have it on the SPACE website. And I never even thought about that, Eric.
So first, thank you for that gift. As you said that I wasn't resistant to it. I was very open. I was like, "Oh dang, there's some truth in that for me." Like seeking it is dangerous because you just don't know. Whereas I totally agree, it's something that has to be realized. It has to be felt. It has to be almost surrendered to, to tie back into other themes we've talked about today.
Whereas if you go into it being like, well, "I'm going to transform. I know I am." Then that defeats the whole point.
[00:40:09] Eric: And there's a certain component of grace involved.
[00:40:11] Ali: Ah, yes.
[00:40:12] Eric: Because if it's completely egotistical, the ego can only operate from what it knows, which is essentially stale because it's all based on past memory. So it's limiting. It's self limiting to operate solely from the ego, literally.
[00:40:35] Ali: Totally. Yeah, that feels complete.
[00:40:38] Eric: But, you know, words... With regards to changing a website or whatever. I mean, that's always the, the kind of like crappy part. Like the words that we use, isn't just about what we're trying to communicate, but the way that our audience speaks. So it's like, that's why before we started recording, I gave you the disclaimer of like, "I'm just going to have a conversation with you. And if you don't want to use it, or if it doesn't fit, like don't use it, but I'm not going to try to speak to an audience."
Because as soon as that happens, there's a filtering process going on like, yep. And that has to happen in kind of like a sales page sense or like a presentation sense, so that you're not so beyond...
Like you have to create a transformational bridge through your communication. You can't just be on the other side of the bridge.
[00:41:26] Ali: That's a good point.
[00:41:26] Eric: Expect people to, you know, to meet you there. They're not there yet. That's the whole point of you trying to offer them a service or something.
[00:41:34] Ali: A hundred percent.
[00:41:35] Eric: Yeah. So I wouldn't go tear the website down necessarily.
[00:41:42] Ali: Change everything! Yeah. That's so real though, because it is, it's like, I think there's people in the world, and I'm in this bucket where I've reached a place where I don't really want to play a whole lot of games. I just want to speak my truth and be in relation with people that give me energy or that I have a connection to that I care about.
And then honestly follow things that peek my curiosity. That challenge me in healthy ways. And there's a lot of authenticity wrapped up in knowing that doing things like website copy and marketing doesn't always feel easy because I'm like, well, I just want to say this, but to your point, I'm like, that's not going to land with anyone. Cause it's almost like a different language to them.
And I'm like, who is this dude? What the hell is he talking about? So there's this whole filtering, deciphering, almost wordsmithing for sure, to say, this is what I'm trying to explain at a low level. It might land with you, hopefully, and then at some point, I love that you said there's this bridge, it's the beautiful path, the process, the journey, to getting to what I want to share with you.
[00:42:53] Eric: Right.
[00:42:53] Ali: Because yeah, if I just said what I initially thought.
[00:42:56] Eric: But, to contradict the thing that I just said, um.
[00:43:02] Ali: It's like, why do we do that?
[00:43:03] Eric: Well, I think that it depends on what your intention is. Like if your intention is you want to be a part of the majority of the online world that's kind of playing by a certain rule set, then what I just said makes complete sense, right?
But if you're clear in your intention, like you just stated, " this is what I want, and these are the people I want to work with," then say whatever comes to your heart. Because ultimately, words aren't the thing. Like energy transformation, transmission is what is going to attract people to you.
And if you're trying to do the mass market thing, then yeah, what I said makes a lot of sense. But if you're going for a specific audience, then you being intentional and clear on who you are and who you want to work with. Use whatever language feels comfortable to you because you're being true to yourself.
And basically attracting your audience is about clarifying your relationship with yourself. It's not about vice versa. Like, let me cast a wide net and see how many fish I can catch or trick to come into the net. That's traditional marketing.
But the other side is like, if we can be clear about who we are and be willing to transform our things as we transform. Like the copy that I wrote two weeks ago may not feel right anymore because something has transformed, something has changed. So that needs to be updated.
You know, and I think over time if you're doing that, people see this kind of trail that you've left of how you've transformed and that becomes in and of itself a selling point.
[00:44:43] Ali: That's it. Right. That's it. Oh, that's so good.
That's so good. So yes, then there will probably be no website changes from, let's see.
Eric, this has been a treat as usual. I have a few fun questions though, before we wrap, is that cool?
[00:45:02] Eric: Okay. Yeah.
[00:45:03] Ali: The first one, which I don't think I've ever asked you in 10 plus years of friendship. What's your favorite food?
[00:45:10] Eric: Well, the one that came into mind was pizza, but I actually, yeah. Well, I'll just say that, pizza is my favorite.
[00:45:18] Ali: What would be on the pizza?
[00:45:21] Eric: Um, it's just margarita. My thing is like, minimalistic because that way you can know if you've had the best. If there's too many things going on, there's distraction and you don't know that this one is better than the last one.
And my relationship with pizza now is such that like I'm gluten free, dairy free now. So, I don't eat pizza the way it used to. But basically the pizza that I had at Ken's Artisan Pizza in Portland has the current ranking of the top pizza I've ever had.
And to me, like, I'm willing to eat like a gluten dairy pizza again. But the only way I would do that if it's as good or better than that pizza that I've experienced.
[00:46:01] Ali: Now that is an answer, a pizza answer. Yeah. I love that. I did not expect to say pizza. All right.
Number two, who is a dead person you'd like to meet in person?
[00:46:13] Eric: Paramahansa yogananda.
[00:46:20] Ali: Oh, okay. Do you know what you would ask them?
[00:46:27] Eric: I wouldn't ask anything.
[00:46:29] Ali: That might just be...
[00:46:33] Eric: Just being in the presence would be significant enough.
[00:46:36] Ali: That's what I was just gonna say. I was gonna say it might be enough to just be with them Hmm. Yeah, that's a cool answer
Okay, brother, last question. What's one of your favorite childhood memories?
[00:46:48] Eric: Climbing trees. There was this really nice white pine in my yard. And by the time I was like three years old, I was climbing trees. Wow! Yeah. This white pine, it was like really tall and at the top, the branches... worked themselves such that it wasn't like just one single trunk going on.
It kind of like was like a seat. Like if you hold your palm out and your fingers up, it was kind of like that. So I could climb all the way to the top and just sit there. And like, look out.
[00:47:22] Ali: It's very nostalgic for me because that's an activity I did. Not quite at three, but we were up in trees by age five or six. And just remember how scared our parents would get, and my buddy's parents. Cause we'd go up there just like monkeys. We'd swing from the trees. We'd climb just fearless.
And now I'd love to get in a tree, but it's interesting. I don't see a whole lot of kids in trees when I look out in the neighborhood.
[00:47:50] Eric: Well. Yeah, they're not outside as much as we were.
[00:47:57] Ali: Eric, this was beautiful, man. Thank you. I'm honored to have you as the first repeat guest. This is going to be a beautiful episode to share.
[00:48:07] Eric: Yeah, I'm really happy with how the conversation turned out. So I appreciate you holding the space.
[00:48:13] Ali: Thanks, brother.
And I hope to see you in Asheville, in the flesh sometime soon.
[00:48:18] Eric: Yeah, that'd be great.
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Pedram Shojai is a modern day Jedi. He spent time as a Taoist monk and doctor of Oriental medicine. He’s written best-selling books, produced films, and helped millions of humans find better health. He’s also known in the world as…
Navigating Life Dimensions with Eric Turnnessen
Eric is a man of depth and creativity. He recently experienced a profound transition after exiting his software company of 14 years. Now he’s focused on coaching entrepreneurs and creatives, producing music, and surrendering to what life presents. This episode…
About this Podcast
Ali is a father, husband, coach and serial entrepreneur with a deep drive to create. He started this podcast to amplify his curiosity and awareness around the human pursuit of transformation.
This content is intended to ignite our natural curiosity and inspire us to realize new levels of personal transformation.