Self-Love and Purpose: Insights from Jamie Muak

In this episode of the Human Experience podcast, host Blake Chalfant welcomes Jamie Muak, an embodiment coach dedicated to helping individuals connect with their purpose, embrace their unique gifts, and cultivate self-love. Jamie’s work spans across different age groups and settings, from one-on-one sessions to group environments, emphasising the importance of social-emotional learning and rites of passage. This episode is a deep dive into understanding our collective trauma, finding our purpose, and navigating through chaos with love and self-compassion.

Understanding Collective Trauma and Self-Love

Jamie Muak discusses the impact of collective trauma and the significance of self-love. He highlights how inherited shame and guilt can perpetuate cycles of trauma unless we actively work on restoring our health and permitting ourselves to be vulnerable and human. By understanding the difference between healthy dissociation and harmful behaviours, we can start healing and preventing chaos in our lives and communities.

The Hero's Journey: Owning Your Narrative

Jamie draws parallels between life experiences and Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. He emphasizes the importance of owning our narrative and being aware of where we are in our story. This self-awareness is crucial for personal growth and transformation. Jamie shares his journey of disconnection and reconnection, illustrating how finding a sense of purpose and belonging can radically change one’s life trajectory.

Purpose and Permission: Keys to Fulfillment

A major theme in this episode is finding and living your purpose. Jamie discusses how our purpose should benefit ourselves and contribute positively to others. He also touches on the power of permitting ourselves to be imperfect and to grow at our own pace. This self-permission is a potent antidote to the cycles of shame and guilt that many people experience.

Key Takeaways from the Episode

1. Healing Through Self-Love and Permission: Embracing self-love and permitting ourselves to be imperfect are vital steps in healing from collective trauma. This process allows us to break free from harmful cycles and fosters a healthier, more compassionate way of living.
2. Owning Your Narrative: Understanding and owning your life story is essential for personal growth. This self-awareness helps in identifying where you are in your journey and what steps you need to take to align with your purpose.
3. Purpose Beyond Self: Finding a purpose that benefits not just oneself but also others can lead to a more fulfilling and meaningful life. This approach creates a positive ripple effect in the community and contributes to a healthier society.

Resources Mentioned:

• Warrior Poly LLC: Jamie’s organization focused on transformational work for different age groups. Visit Warrior Poly LLC
• Embodiment Leadership Program: A program aimed at improving social-emotional learning for at-risk youth. Learn more about Embodiment Leadership
• Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey: A framework for understanding personal growth and transformation. Explore Joseph Campbell's work
• Psychedelic Experiences: Jamie shares how his experiences with psychedelics helped him reconnect with his purpose and the natural world. Discover more about psychedelic experiences

Transcript

0:00

1 Shame and guilt. We have inherited 1 It's part of 1 that collective 1 trauma bundle. 1 When we are restored and healthy 1 and loving ourselves and 1 giving ourselves break and giving ourselves permission, 1 we don't 1 tend to create chaos through the street or want to cause harm to others. 1 There's an important difference here between 1 healthy disassociation 1 and then 1 when those behaviors are your baseline. 1 My last little 1 of 1 wisdom would be like, 1 just wherever you are, 1 Give yourself permission. 1 Find that stoke, 1 just pick up one piece or two at a time. 1 You can't do everything at once. 1 Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Human Experience podcast. My name is Blake Shaffer and I'm so excited to bring you all today's episode. Today's episode really was a special one. I'm joined with a dear friend, teacher mentor of mine named Jamie Mock. Jamie is an embodiment coach who helps people from around the world come into their purpose, step into offering their unique gifts, and most importantly, learn to love themselves and others more along the way. 1 He is currently offering transformational work for kids, teens and adults in both one on one and group settings. Jamie is the founder of Warrior Poly LLC and the Embodiment Leadership Program, a container to improve social emotional learning for at risk youth within public schools. He is also involved in doing rites of passage work for boys and young men in his local community. 1 Jamie is someone who truly walks the walk, who carries these ways of being and qualities that people talk about. But he actually is living. He's someone who has taught me so much about how to be in relationship, how to build these cultures of relationship where we get to honor ourselves, honor each other. And yeah, he's really so much more than I could put into these words. 1 And I think part of the reason I'm so excited for this episode is that he's not someone who's all over the Internet. I think if you go look for podcast, I don't know, this might be the only one, but he truly has so much to say. You know, out of all the books, other podcast teachers that I've had. 1 Jamie for sure is at that top of the list, and I believe he's someone that has so much to say and a message that so many are needing to hear. And today's conversation was nothing short of incredible. It was something that went so far beyond the mind words, ideas, thoughts. It was something that resonated so deeply with my heart, so deeply with my entire body reverberating every cell in my body. 1 It's there is a very palpable transmission here today. And so I hope that you feel that. I hope you feel the energy behind the words coming through this conversation. And I hope that it lands in a deep way. Today's conversation was extremely wide ranging and covered some very important topics, starting off with sets, making the time that we're in. 1 You know, we're in a time of a lot of chaos. A lot of big things are happening on the world today, both collectively and individually. And I think we're in a time where we need story. We need stories that help orient us to the time that we are in and, you know, a roadmap which we were, unfortunately not given. 1 Actually, we were given a roadmap that really doesn't work anymore, which is why we are at the point that we were at as a species. And kind of why this conversation needed to be out of day, because we need a roadmap. We need to learn how to navigate this time that we are in. And a big piece of that is understanding where we are, right? 1 Really owning the narrative like we talk about today. And part of that is that we have been born into cycles of trauma and cycles of patterns that have been passed down and passed down. And now we're at a point where we get to claim where we are and start to find ways of being that are actually in balance and promote health on the planet. 1 We go into talking about purpose and how we can actually think about purpose that is beneficial for all people and that we all have the capacity to find that feeling within ourselves. We talk about God. We talk about giving ourselves permission and how that is such an incredible antidote to getting stuck in shame cycles and so much more. 1 So I truly hope that you all enjoy today's episode. If you're new to the channel and you haven't already, it would be so appreciative if you could leave or like subscribe or rate the show. It really helps the channel grow. It helps us get more outreach to new and exciting guests and it helps sustain me and my life. 1 So without further ado, please enjoy this episode with Jamie Mark. 1 Jamie. Mark, thanks for being here. Brother. 1 Thanks for having me, Blake. 1 So if we think about your life like the arc of a story with the rising action, a climax, a falling action, obviously there's probably more than just one. But I'm curious if you could take us through, you know, what comes to mind when you think of the climax of your life that has brought you to this point? 1 I'm just starting off with the bangers. We are. I like the invitation. You know, it reminds me of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey and just. It's really. It makes me think about, you know, me as a coach when I'm taking people through their journey. I call it the hero's journey. I really like that. That theme. And and the first step that I do with every single person that I work with, the first thing I do is own the narrative. 1 Like, own your story. Like, where are you in your story? We got to bend. So it's so it's a basic orientation, which is is pretty fundamental to, to doing somatic work. Right. And, and yeah, so I like that you're starting me they're giving me some of my own medicine back. Feels good. Yeah. What the overarching, like the big thematic pieces in my life would probably say I was going to summarize that in an easy way with myself. 1 I would say that I was just born into this world. A pretty, pretty, pretty sensitive of kind. 2 Of. 1 Like thoughtful, polite being Like that was my essence. I was courteous. I cared about making people feel good and showing people respect. And, you know, I was I was like really on it with my pleases and thank you. And I wasn't even just trying to trying to, like, get one over on my parents friends or anything. It was just like who I was. 1 I just how I like to be. And and I think at some point the forces of culture and multi-generational collective trauma is just really just kept knocking me down and disconnecting me from myself. I think I spent a majority of my life highly disconnected from myself. And and it creates the cycles, you know, for me like that, the pain of being disconnected from yourself makes you even more avoid it. 1 And so you disconnect even more so you can feel less and less. And it's just this, this feedback loop that just leads to nowhere. Good. And so I think I think just like circumstance with a lot a lot of grace, a lot of really beautiful teachers that planted themselves in my lives. Both, both like human teachers, but also I'm really grateful for, for things like not from teachers, like just totally interrupting a pattern for me. 1 I think being a 17 year old kid, like exploring with my friends and just trying to trying to not be a suburban brat. And we are every all of us saw that. That wasn't the story of being like what our parents generation was doing and living in these plastic suburban towns was like, not it. So we we, we practice without mentors, without rites of passage. 1 We practice the art of getting fucked up and getting in trouble and just creating chaos to see what else was there. And and I think eating mushrooms for me was probably one of the genesis. The first time that I really stepped knowingly into my hero's journey. I would say like where I was like maybe eight them to see cool things and watch, you know, unicorns flying through the sky and just to see equals. 1 That was the that was what I knew of mushrooms, of like, it's crazy. You see things that aren't there. And I was like, that's fun, Let's try that. But immediately just sank into deep lessons of what I'm here to do, what the world is actually about. I felt the animism of life coming back. I felt a sense of belonging to the natural world and belonging to myself. 1 And this greater human story that was happening and unfolding could be this beautiful life thing that we're part of. And and it really just was the best pattern interruption for someone who was feeling really empty and had no sense of direction and didn't enjoy the invitations for where humanity was directing me to go. I always say humanity, maybe Western culture more specifically. 1 Yeah. So, you know, that's a beginning chapter. 1 and your story, and I want to slow this down and go a little bit deeper into it because I think it's like so many people are confused or disoriented and there's a, there's a deep sense of not being fulfilled. And I think that comes from being in this, you know, this this plastic Western culture where we've lost connection to story myth elders, mentorship, really like depth, right depth in life and in relationships with ourself, self disassociated or parting. 1 And there's a there's an extreme lack of a road map, right? Because for most of us, that's all that we've been exposed to. For me, it was like, cool. Like next step, go to college and get fucked up for four years. But that was the next step of what I had been exposed to in life. Like, that was just the norm. 1 I didn't know another way of being right. I didn't know that people like yourself, for example, existed in the world. I didn't know that there was other circles of people who actually were pretty frickin cool that we're we're living in such different ways. So, yeah, I'm curious if we can slow this down a bit and go into like, you know, the people who are in that plastic world, right, who are feeling that lack of fulfillment, but without any sort of language for what's actually going going on and where to go from there. 1 Totally. Yeah. Awesome question. And just knowing, of course, there's so many for me, I really try. I think I pride myself on, and I'm really diving into complexity and nuance and and I call myself an embodiment coach. And I have a really analytical brain that can haunt me. So. But it, it is like a lot of what I, what I notice for a lot of us is just like, I guess or blessings and curses and it's like we're we're learning how to wield our sword. 1 So and I think I can I hear these kinds of invitations and I can answer them in a thousand different ways. And I'm really going to aim towards some version of us because I know like a deep part of your audience and a lot of the people that you're trying to touch are the they can that I was right. 1 It's kind of the uninitiated teenager has no idea where the fuck he wants to go so I will aim at from that angle a little bit 2 right. Yeah. 1 Yeah. You know, just like. Just like all the other. Yes, I was just kind of alluding to sensitivity. You know, it's an interesting word that's oftentimes been weaponized by people that are insensitive. And it's nice to even break down. Sensitive to what? Sensitive to what. Right. So, like sensitivity, when we really look at it, when we really embrace it is just robust strength, which is so cool, right? 1 Like sensitive to what people tell you because words fucking matter because they're prayers and action, because we're either blessing each other up or we're cursing each other or or ourselves, we the way that we talk. So those of us that are sensitive to actually it, sensitivity is connection. Sensitivity towards like, like when people are doing something that doesn't feel right and it hurts us because we're connected to what's happening. 1 We're connected to what somebody might be doing to something else or littering or polluting the planet, that that hurts. Like to me, man, That's like I'm learning to try to care more and to to feel grounded in that caring, to not let it shatter me, to let it be my way that makes me stand up taller and, like, really be stronger. 1 So, yeah, that's I think that's one of the reasons I'm so glad you exist, is that mentorship to take something that could be interpreted as something that feels like weakness and creates a narrative that leads towards collapse rather than then really like finding that alignment and leaning deeper into sensitivity, deeper listening, all those things. So, you know, just to go back to this, we'll probably talk about I'll probably just naturally bring up like Western civilization a lot and I think a word that I'll probably lean on pretty heavy today, which is important. 1 You know, we hear it a lot. How are we using it? Trauma, right. So I think becoming more and more trauma informed. And by the way, like most of the things, I'll probably open up a lot of loops and do half sentences. And just like I'm pretty good at closing them later, but I'm going to talk about some things like, I know what I'm talking about. 1 I just want to put like an asterisk next to like most of the things I talk about, I put a lot of time and energy into and I've got a decent amount of experience and I just want to say like I'm a I'm a baby crawling, trying my best in terms of like, know, I would love to be an elder one day. 1 He knows what the fuck he's doing. And I'm just like, there's so many areas where I'm not a fully initiated adult and I'm aware of that and giving myself permission to try my best anyway. So I just want to say that as I insert some beliefs here or the way that I see things is like I'm just with that humility of like, this is not the way things are. 1 This is like, you know, white upper class, middle, middle class, like dude who's just like trying to become someone who's a citizen of the Earth and seeing all the places that that I'm not other places that my trauma is informing me of certain things and privileges that are I'm still unaware of and, and breaking my own armor. So this is just me trying my best. 1 So I just want to throw that in there. So that being said, I just gave myself a little bit of compassion, give myself a little more permission to to lean into what feels true for me right now. And, and what I really learned is the more I'm able to give myself permission, the more I'm able to give the world permission to do their thing, even if it's hurting me or hurting life itself. 1 The more spaciousness and safety I have to occupy my own being, right? So I'm layering a few arguments here and but I just I've othered suburban worlds already in my storytelling. They've become the maybe we could fill in the blanks. The bad thing that my hero is up against breaking through these walls of this plastic civilization. And and it's easy to make them the bad guys. 1 But I think I did, and I still do in a lot of ways, a lot of times. But it's it doesn't feel like a big win for me. I think the more I'm becoming trauma informed, the more I'm understanding myself and in other through that lens, the more I just have compassion, the more I'm seeing that a lot of this beautiful journey of humanity is a love story like. 1 And if it's not a love story, we've got to keep trying to figure it out because like, it's so important, I think, to, to, to operate from a place of hope and and to see where, like, hope includes everything and everyone. If we're still if hope includes, like, obliterating this other half, like, well, when they don't exist, then, then we'll have people that are like, we got to think like that, you know, exaggerate your thoughts into its greatest form. 1 And like I learned that in my Native American church from my road, man, like, you know, this prayer has to include everything, even the devil like this. This is a prayer for everything. And all living beings are all unseen beings, like existing together in cohesion, which will get into part three later. It's like all of these maps start to relate in a really beautiful way. 1 So when I'm looking at collective trauma, multigenerational trauma, household, how to make disconnected sons and daughters like it's like it didn't start with the asshole dad they inherited some hurt from somewhere in that misunderstanding and how to take care of life. And they're holding that burden and they don't even know what to do with it. And so there's unconscious hurt, keeps getting passed around and along and and we see it in in war and we see it in in families. 1 And and so I think breaking those cycles and and getting ourselves out of that and starting to understand how our own heart and our own traumas affecting the way that we are creating our narrative and how we're seeing the world and how we're seeing ourselves. And so, yeah, I think a lot of my journey so far and still is finding like my North Star, you know, these big existential questions which we're probably won't answer today, but we can start with is like, Who am I? 1 Why am I here? These haunting questions defining what we're supposed to be doing with our life. And then, you know, the only thing that this sensitive group of times, but not even I don't want to like all of us. Right. We are, we're told, this old, outdated story and that, you know, the American dream, that's the best story that most of us in Western civilization are served is it's a dead. 1 I would it's like almost funny to call it a dying name. It's so fucking dead for so many of us. Like this idea in the best sense is find something that you're good at. Like maybe you can love it, but as long as you're kind of good at it or society deems it valuable, like, you know, doctor, lawyer, those kinds of things and just go for it to create security so you can have a better life than your parents could. 1 And it's just that that is it's a story of evolution that just is exceeded, exceeding and wealth. And but it's still a survival story. It's and so working with kids doing doing that kind of work, running a social emotional learning program in inner cities with at risk youth and stuff like that. And I had this kid the other day. 1 It was just like, I don't want to grow up. Like it doesn't work is like it doesn't work. But man, he's like 17 year old kind of hard kid. He's just saying that in front of all his friends. Like to. Yeah, it seems kind of bleak because the story that you're being told about growing up sucks, but grown up can be awesome. 1 And so just like just seeing that so straightforwardly, like you couldn't make that shit up. It looked like a Disney movie or like Lifetime's special, like having just get set up like this. But I found how, how basic a lot of these kids are able to express these things that you and I are dedicated their lives to is these kids like these teens, these young adults like adult adults, people older than us. 1 We're all missing a North Star, a way of navigating, a way of creating discernment and really finding our own truth and then trying it out and seeing if that still feels true for us or for we need to go a different direction. And and and most of us are lacking self trust, trust in others. The key word there being discernment. 1 Like is this my shadow? Is this my girl? Is this trauma for me or is this my gut intuition? And we're a fucking mess. So a lot of my work has been like demystifying my own mess, quantifying it, like creating structure around it and seeing if those things can be applied in universal principles to help other people. So just kind of pause there for a minute. 1 I got a couple of loops open 1 So much to unpack, then. Yeah. It feels. It feels hard to even ask the question of what is my North Star? Do I trust myself? Do I trust others? All of that when we're so disconnected and disassociated from ourselves, it's like our bodies are right here and we're existing right next to that. And so all of those pieces that you just mentioned feel like things that naturally start to come up as we start to connect more with ourselves, we realize, shit, we have no North Star. 1 Like you're saying, I have zero trust for myself. I'm like, What am I even trusting in myself? Right? The thing that I'm supposed to trust inside of myself. Like, I don't even know where that is. What is that? I want to go back, though, because I feel like we're kind of creating this this story here together. And you know, what I started with is what you named owning the narrative, right? 1 And I feel like as a species is we're being asked to own the narrative of what's the narrative We've been in it what's the narrative we've been existing in for thousands of years? What are the cycles that have been passed down and where are we at right now? Like really getting brutally honest with where are we at right now? 1 Because like you said, the hope that we're being asked to cultivate is not selective hope. It's an all encompassing hope. And I think part of that hope comes from owning the entirety of the narrative we're in and something I love that you that you said is that, you know, you're a you're a child. Like in the grand scheme of things, you're a baby boy trying to figure it out. 1 And I think that's for all of us living in the Western world where we didn't come into lineages connected to elders and we didn't have that kind of orientation into the world. We're all children. We're all trying to figure it out. And I think there is a lot of truth to faking it. So we make it like we're trying to do this whole life thing without any instructions and actually the instructions we have been given are broken. 1 That's what we're seeing is the instructions we've we've created in recent time is is falling apart. We can see that in suicide rates. We can we can measure that in many different ways. But I think we need to measure that scientifically. We can all feel it. And so I'm curious to like let's let's unpack owning the narrative of where we at as a as a collective, as a species. 1 And I love what you brought through on, on the collective, you know, trauma that's been passed down. And, and if you want, maybe we can go into the, you know, the, the wound of belonging. But yeah, I'll let you go from there. 1 cool. Break down. And I just really love the way you create space for beautiful conversation. And you're such a beautiful listener and things you connect to and and feed makes makes it really fun to be in dialog with you. It's a it's a felt experience, not just up here. It feels like we get to really explore the hearts. 1 And even this conversation I can feel in a sense, you know, we watch podcast sometimes or we watch conversations and it's like to to share what we know. And there's a bit of sharing what I've explored and what I know. But I'm also like feeling this invitation to be an exploration about what we don't know whether in real time with you, which is an exceptional way of, of, of showing up. 1 So just feeling that and honoring that. Man. Yeah. So you use the word instruction a couple of times and it made me think of indigenous wisdom and, and something that has been called the original instruction. I think we've been given instructions and, and you know, I think Sadler's came over here at one point and just like obliterated groups of people who had these original instructions, who had a really like not to romanticize it because everybody was doing different things and not everybody's the same and not every tribe's the same. 1 And that for the most part, there was there was there have been around the world these indigenous peoples and still are 1 who are just being so suppressed and and getting obliterated, watered down, divided and massacred these people with original instructions who have a beautiful way of being with themselves, with each other, with the world. And so it wasn't like it wasn't like a thing that man, a wish I wish we had that. 1 It was like a thing that was given to us over and over again around the world and from a place of deep trauma and disconnection. We just took that map, we took those instructions. We just burned it over and over again and burned the people who were holding them, who were trying to give us this gift. And just like like coming from this place where we had the answer. 1 There's so much in that that we're coming back to now. I was like, Yeah, there's so much to It makes me look at some of the automation, What I feel like my Northstar is in this moment, in this point in time in my life, indigenous wisdom like, is this the biggest North star I've got? Like these people who are connected to land, connected to their origin stories have a beautiful way of being. 1 And what that, you know, I think that there's complexity and honoring indigenous peoples and understanding that we were all indigenous at one point. We all came from tradition and that was connected in a land based way, Indigenous people, indigenous to like where there is a sense for me the best way of looking at that is that a sense of belonging. 1 They had one map collectively that felt pretty good and that map included a way of life that was in reciprocity with Earth like. And there's more. We can talk about it, but just like an that idea, like just that there's something from Indigenous wisdom that I really like, you know, they call it the Red Road or like living in a good way and, and having me there deep honor of, of, of getting to meet them, some Native Americans, some First Nations peoples, and sit with them in prayer and in ceremonies and things like that. 1 I was like at first this, this idea of they use the word good and not like I want to say, like people that I was in connection with would often times use these words like, good, a lot like I think I think New Age spiritualism is getting so complex and it's out there and we're like doing all these really fancy things and I'm sitting here with indigenous people in prayer and and going through ceremonies and they're like, Help. 1 You guys are feeling really good. Hope you had a good night. Hope you go out there and live your life in a good way. And it was just like, but it felt right. It felt so intelligent. And so I like continued to learn from this way of thinking about things and living in a good way of being in accord with all your relations. 1 Like the decisions that I'm making are good for life, which is not excluding me. I'm not like a martyr or sacrifice. I'm part of life. So living in a good way, not excluding myself, is creating creating more abundance and safety for all those around me. It's like thinking in terms beyond myself, but not excluding myself. And and there's so much money that can go into that. 1 But living in a good way to me is like, how am I decisions affecting basic things like land and soil around me? Is it creating more fertility and options, like with just the soil? And of course we can extrapolate that metaphor of soil is like the cream of fertility, where opportunity for growth in my community, right? Like everything's related, all my relations at home and calculus and like, it's such beautiful lessons and just like have become a part of me and, and something that is like a part of me, but also is my probably part of my greatest pain because I see these original interactions and I see how alienated I am from them. 1 I see how much of my decision making and way of life is out of accord with living in a good way. And so we have to add to the Northstar because now this idea of living in a good way has me not feeling so good because I'm seeing how far I am from from what a human being is capable of being living in a good way, in the way that I'm living so deep, entrenched and and like not even able to differentiate like the Western civilization that I was birthed out of. 1 And also just like a human being in the earth. And there feels like this tear inside of me creates shame and guilt and not all and not enough misses and makes me like really resent myself for not being better than I am. So there's complexity, all these things, but I'm still really grateful to have that as a North Star. 1 So again, we use the soil example, but the same with water. Water. The great one is how are we living? How is that affecting this water around us, the lifeblood of earth? So again, this global perspective of decision making, like how can I use a composting toilet? Like it's a great example of just in some way of upgrading, being a better human being. 1 And I've done it at times in my life and it's like a sensation that you cannot describe. It feels so good to go to the bathroom in the composting toilet and then have that compost your your, your waste, not be waste at all. And feed your garden, feed your fruit tree specifically and create more abundance that cycle in a part of life. 1 Instead, we exist in the human story where we shift into clean drinking water and then flush that into this waste treatment plant where we create more toxic sludge and just continue to hide it. Same with our garbage, same with our waste. It's just like it's it's unfathomable to even think about how deeply outside of relating we are. So the last lesson I have for now with Indigenous wisdom and it really I learned this one probably just doing like more survival trips, it was just intuitive for me of going out on the land and not having, you know, food or water provided for me for a number of days and done it by myself. 1 And I've done it with groups where just like there's something about feeling really good about closing this, these loops of relationship. So the further the bigger the loops are, the more middlemen there are, the least, the less connected we are. Right? So if I'm eating a hamburger like that, hamburger isn't just a hamburger. It's not just a certain amount of calories. 1 That's such a like, weird way of looking at how we're feeding ourselves because we're feeding ourselves in so many different ways. Like, what's our relationship to that meat, the patty? Like, was it like a factory farmed cat or is it like really like a thousand cows and one burger? There's like a couple pieces from all these different cows that just got cycled into one machine, like, and then there it is. 1 And it had this really awful quality of life. It's pumped with adrenaline and chemicals and all these things, and I'm inheriting all of that from a place that I don't even know some farmers that I'm in a relationship with. And then on the other side, is that a cow that I raised myself and gave a lot of love to and was in an open pasture? 1 Or is it like an elk patty? Because I went and hunted this thing and it's quality of life was insane. And and then I had this really beautiful moment and this exchange and this one elk is actually feeding my family and my friends for an entire year, just one life. And I'm in relationship to that one sacrifice. Every time I eat. 1 There's that gratitude for one life that gave itself to me to feed my family. And it's just such a different way of eating a hamburger. It's AB And it will change your life. It change the feeling, it changes everything around you. So as fucked as we are and living in a good way and spending a few days in nature starting to to close the gap in the circles of what's feeding us like feeding us is in our homes like hand-built homes, you know, urban homes, those kinds of things where we're we're actually in relationship to the structures that are keeping us safe from the weather and and all those things that to to what how 1 are we getting our water? Is it like from a well, is it from a treatment? Are we drinking living water? Where's our food coming from? Is it in relationship to people that we know and love within a proximity that's close by? Are we in charge of our food? Like the more we start to be in closer relationship to the things that are already nourishing us that we need to live? 1 Man, it's amazing how much wisdom and how much are lifeforce energy and how much just feeling really good. So it's come back. So is as bleak as this can feel. There's so many doors and opportunities that are just right in front of us that can have a who is walking in a good direction in a good way. And so then we've got to learn patience and permission and all these pieces to start to see the bigger picture and how to hold ourselves along the way. 1 So yeah, that's a that seems like a good pause point 1 Yeah. I mean sliding that also can. Yeah. And you know, like you said before, you, you, you went down this hole, rabbit hole. We were born into this world from generations of generations who have passed down their ways to us, Right? We were born into a world that, that has many systems that are living extremely out of balance with the earth, with nature, with relationship with these original instructions. 1 And so for anyone that's listening to all these things and is thinking to yourself, I don't have a compost, I have I don't have a composting toilet, I don't have any of this stuff, What am I doing wrong? And something that maybe we can get into after this is like, Yeah, that's a lot. There's a lot to hold there. 1 Like, I bear, I barely know how to garden and I know I've talked to you about that, Jamie. Like, I didn't grow up in a family where we planted our own food. We'd have we didn't eat our own food, but we, you know, didn't really plant our own food either. And I never learned how to garden. I never learned how to really have my hands in the soil. 1 And like, there's embarrassment behind that. There's embarrassment. There's there's like there's definitely some shame there. And so I think such an important aspect when we're on this journey of framing the narrative of where we're at as a species is is grief work, is is honoring the grief that's there, the grief of the world that our soul expected in dreamed of that wasn't there. 1 You know, the grief of growing up in such a plastic world that's disconnected. And, you know, I think I've really been playing with this idea lately of looking at nature and extrapolating how nature operates with nature and and embodying that as human beings, as we operated the world in something that I keep hearing you come back to is relationship. 1 Right? And so the more that we can cultivate relationships, but relationship with the natural world and how we're interacting with that. So whether that's the compost from the food we're eating and bringing that into soil, a composting toilet, the water we're drinking from like having a direct relationship with the water or drinking from, it's a two way street. 1 All of these kinds of relationships were put. Sure, maybe you're putting more effort in to go to a spring in and fill up your water bottle than you are to go to the store and buy water. But it's a two way street. It's a it's a reciprocal relationship. It feels good when you do that. And I think it's something we can talk about all day. 1 But I think there's a huge invitation here to just try some of this out, like go on a walk in the forest and make an offering, bring something you care about, and and offer it to the to the forest for the land that nourishes you on your walks every day. Right. And provides you with a sense of connection to yourself, like these things that people talk about, that we have been so disconnected from ritual offerings. 1 All of this, there's a quality that just feels really good. And some in two things. I would love to go into belonging because I think that is what we're dancing around here, right? It's just a sense of belonging to the earth and also permission. Right. You spoke a little bit about the need of giving ourselves permission as we're, you know, unpacking these these bigger existential places we're in as a species. 1 yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, man. Okay, now I'm feeling a layer deeper, so we talked about this idea of, like, a North Star, but in actuality, maybe, like, maybe it's more of a constellation that if we look from far enough away, it looks like one star, but it's actually a cluster of stars. So we can start to to to build this constellation. 1 This, like, in a related group of, of, of, of like B shining lights that are pointing the way for us. So indigenous wisdom will be one that they keep influencing each other and they all there's all this like crossover right. It's hard to we don't need to create separation but for the sake of just learning, right, we can create some discernment between these, these stars here. 1 So I think permission is a good one. But ultimately, like I think we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what life's about and I don't fucking know. Like, I don't know. I don't know why. Sometimes I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and sometimes it feels like a waste of time and sometimes it feels really fine and sometimes what a wonderful thing to explore with your friends while you're sitting under some blanket, sitting by a fire under the stars. 1 And it's like you, Know I love those kinds of conversations. It's great. And ultimately I think it's it's probably really different for everyone and for me, even in talking like this, like, and building a scaffolding to to move through my life in a good way to. And what does that mean for me at this point? Right now, I'll define that, but I hope it changes in a year and in five years. 1 I hope I look back at this podcast and be like, Wow, I knew a couple of things. Good for me, and I didn't know a lot. And I guess on some of these things, I was really wrong. Like, I hope that I'm really wrong on a lot of stuff in ten years. I hope that I'm not just be like, Yep, that's exactly where I am now. 1 That's not that's not it. And these are all stepping stones to help us in becoming and becoming becoming white again. I don't know. I don't know. Something really awesome. I hope so. There's trust and hope. There's all these these these pieces of the hero's journey that we see over and over again when we're watching movies and things like that. 1 We love when the character like, leans deeper into trusting himself in the mystery and then the knowing for herself and and dives into hope like, Yeah, you know, I'm not going to accept this like the way it is. Like, I'm not going to be asleep at the wheel for that one. I'd rather die trying for something beautiful, Like there's something that speaks truth to that. 1 So for me, there's aliveness and there's navigation moving for me, some of the ways that I'm looking at it at my life is like, what's moving me towards aliveness? Disconnection had me feeling really that inside what comes with disconnection is shutting down and not caring about myself so much, not caring about what I'm doing, like not caring about my contribution, not caring about my like my health, like not caring about my impact. 1 Like when we shut ourselves down from feeling we, we tend to make decisions that aren't for the greater good or even good for ourselves. So so there's this immediate discernment like, thank you. Cool. Like, does this choice add to aliveness towards feeling good or does it, does it create separation? Because right like, you know, working with some bratty teenagers, I can be like, do something. 1 It feels really good. And they're like, like partying and like, like playing video games, like eating junk food. I'm like, Yeah, let's break those things down. There's a superficial feeling really good. But if we continue to do these things over time that we don't feel feeling really good, like there's and then we get towards that sensational feeling and got into it like, No, no, it doesn't play it out. 1 Try it out for a while. Give yourself permission. See what it's like to walk down that road. Go ahead. This feeling good isn't like this fine line tightrope. If you fall off, you die. Like experiment. Go ahead. Don't just trust me in telling you it feels really good to try things out. But I think moving towards more aliveness, more towards excitement, about, like, purpose, right? 1 We can live with purpose. Does purpose matter? We've seen so many philosophers go into ecstasy, sensual arguments around do we define our purpose as a person, purpose given to us All these kinds of questions like I've arrived at this place, like who the fuck cares? Because I know that living with purpose gives me a sense of aliveness, more energy, more vitality. 1 So I've started to interpret this sense of aliveness as to this interpretation of feeling really good. To me, if that isn't like whatever you call it, universe, God, spirit, something greater than myself that's holding whatever consciousness is telling me I am a thing like that's holding that and is aware of itself. Like once we've touched on that, it's like, holy shit, that's like, it's like a language. 1 It doesn't speak English, it speaks and feelings and intuition and I'm being guided somewhere and I'm like, There's no greater journey than following this mystery. And it's communicating to us through discernment and intuition, all these things that we've got like and I can't find a better one that's leading me towards better and better places. The more I'm like, tuned into this, the more I trust, like, Hey, this feels really good. 1 Being around this person feels really good. And that temporarily like, helps me disconnect from myself. Hey, let's go get drunk at the bar and make stupid choices feel really good. This person's giving me permission to be who I am, to feel safe in this moment and not need to leave it. I like being around this person. I like the way that they think. 1 Like when I hear them talk, it feels really good. So I'm going to spend more time with that person. And then things happen, relationships deepen, business is get boring, and you're like, Whoa, cool. I didn't see this coming. So I find that dancing with mystery and and feeding into my aliveness and that discernment is bringing more lifeforce energy into me. 1 Does it feel really good? Is it feeling really good for those around me? That's a great question. Cool. I think I can trust that. I think that's where trust comes in. Feeling really good trust. Now we're building this constellation of navigating through life of believing in ourselves, and trusting that the universe has our back when we're doing something really good that we believe in that. 1 Holy shit, that's a fun game to play. And then trust becomes kind of silly. Trust becomes this thing that's like, Well, it's not really trust once you know anymore. I'm not trusting that I'm talking to you. I know that I'm talking to you. So it's like when we start to play that game of trust with the universe and then it keeps showing up and like, just keeps getting more beautiful and there's challenges along the way. 1 But you trust yourself in that. And then we get into a new place called Monopoly, which is pretty fun. It's it's not an arrival either. You know, there's a qualitative feeling that we come in and out of, and then sometimes we forget. We go back into trust and we forget that there's really sucks. Got to start trusting again. 1 So it's not like this linear path again. I hope I answered some of the questions in there. 1 man. I love where we're at. Yeah. It's like on that journey of following aliveness, it'll get really good. It will be feeling really alive. And then something will come up and we'll be feeling, like, disconnected from that aliveness and will think that, okay, that was just fake. The aliveness wasn't actually real. This this thing that I was trusting in that I trusted where it was going to take me. 1 It didn't actually take me there. Maybe this isn't the way of doing it. And then the aliveness returns, right? And actually usually we come out on the other side of those kinds of layers of the onion as we keep going deeper into the aliveness that inevitably have to come up. You know, I think we always come out on the other of them with more aliveness. 1 To me, I almost see it as like as the aliveness which I call lifeforce Energy comes is coming into us as we're opening enough space, connecting with ourselves enough for the aliveness to come through us. Inevitably, it's going to bring up the places within us that are going against that grain, going against the flow of that aliveness. And then we're going to and then and then comes a process and we sit in that density in that layer that needs to be let go of and then boom, as that energy, as that density, whatever it is, is being is being moved and transformed into something more beautiful. 1 Now there's more space for more aliveness, and it's this constant pendulum eating of more space, more space for aliveness, more aliveness coming through. And then process process comes up, density that needs to be released, The density is released, more space for aliveness, more aliveness comes through, and it's just constant journey. And yeah, it really is mysterious. And I don't know a better way to put, like to, to, to articulate God in source or whatever you want to call this greater intelligence. 1 It's like, you know, I don't know why we're here. I don't know what the meaning of life in life is, but for whatever reason, I know what feels true and what feels right to me right now in this very moment. And I have no logical explanation for why that feeling is there. But it is there. And for whatever reason, I want to follow that thread within myself. 1 And so then you keep going down that and then you get to a point of, well, where the fuck is that feeling coming from? What the fuck is that feeling connected to? And, and I think people, people can walk with me while I hold their hand down this thought, thought experiment. And then we realize that we just walked off a cliff right into the lap of God. 1 my God, you beautiful man. Yes. We're getting into some exciting terrain. I'm feeling excited. I'm feeling good. It's like universes. I can't keep going that direction. That's going to be a good thing. So what we're what I'm finding now is, like, again, like putting this map out there and I'm feeling like maybe like some of your listeners, like, not feeling connected to that, that feels so far away from them or like, what's the point? 1 You know, and, and, and I also see that a really logical minded person just like, you know, really questioning this idea of universal consciousness or something that's greater than ourselves, that maybe our brains are the highest powered mechanism on planet Earth, in the galaxy or in the universe. And there's nothing that's like maybe more aware than than we are, which would be really sad. 1 But it's an experience to be had. So it's like, I wouldn't ask anybody to trust that. But what I found is the more I leaned into these simple ways of being and leaning back into these original instructions, or at least I think the the spirituality of that, I really subscribe to that. I'm like into for myself. It's just it's pretty logic based. 1 And honestly, in a lot of ways it's just like, you know, I think it's silly. I created some silly frames for myself because I'm pretty fluid. I don't really have like too many labels out there, but there are some things I keep coming back to and one has been like this idea of common sense spirituality. And the more I've asked some of these questions and leaned into some of the things we're talking about, it gives me frame like a little frame when I'm meeting people, when I'm talking to people and they're talking about what they're doing in their life and what's important to them. 1 And, you know, especially when they're doubling down on a very capitalist way of being in the world and you're just like like a child, you know, as a coach, am I cool? How are you doing there? Why are you doing that? And the the gaps in logic for for really like capitalism and super like logic based. But you why like, honestly, you don't have to do it like for that long. 1 We're talking like three or four. What why, why we get into that we get into their mystery of their own consciousness quickly. Gaps in logic happened quickly because anything was disconnected from greater meaning just falls apart. It's not a very strong argument and some people are really intelligent in that area and you poke and prod just a little bit and all of a sudden we hit a roadblock. 1 So for me, like, I think it's really important to to troubleshoot some of these things and, you know, this idea of feeling really good, it's like at the end of the day, if you're doing something, this is logic, right? I mean, take us through some just basic logic, which is I'm going to sell I'm going to sell our dear listeners on my feeling goods are really important. 1 I think. I hope so. It's like, imagine any pursuit that we want to do. We're alive and like, let's say like, let's just land in orientation for a moment. We're alive in a time where statistically we talked about statistics earlier, you mentioned them. We are the most individ dualistic society of all time, specifically here in the United States, like markedly like the most individualist isolated society of all time. 1 Teen suicide and depression is at an all time high, higher than it's ever been on planet Earth in recorded history. So whatever it is we're pursuing, I think we can objectively say, like the stories that we're we're telling each other are not working that well. We live in a world where the generation that we're in and below us are seeing the collapse of this American dream and and still being fat. 1 Hey, just try your best at this thing. It's like, you know, my my mom, I love her. And yeah, she the message that she told me is just find something you love, honey, into it. Just find something you love and do it. And it was great message from a loving mother who, by the way, was a single mom who created really successful company that she owned in the nineties as a woman like and what a hero she found some she she loved. 1 She was a landscape designer, built her own company, teamed up with another woman and then just crushed it. She just retired, did it really, really well from themselves and provided me with an amazing life. So yeah, of course she would tell me that, but grow it for me growing up, I'm like being the bratty teenager that I am like, Yo, mom, that's not enough. 1 I can't just find something I love and like, it's a lifestyle thing. We're fucking up planet Earth. Like, we can't just do what we love. That's too selfish. It's not big enough. Like, we're we're. We're driving into our own abyss and seeking pleasure isn't enough. So again, discernment in seeking pleasure, doing something like feeling really good. Feeling really good comes from deep down inside. 1 It's a thing that we're constantly in relationship to. It's it's complex nerve bundle in our solar plexus and it's a connection to everything. And I don't know where feeling good really comes from, but it's an endless pattern of understanding. It's deeper and deeper and deeper, and we just simplify it with these terms. So all in all, though, like no matter what it is that we're doing, what's our guide? 1 If we're trying to save Earth and we're doing all these things on paper that are really good, right? Let's say we're an environmentalist and we're saving whales and the bees and the oceans and we're just like doing really. But we fucking hate our lives and we're miserable and we're bad parents and we're not great friends and we're not very impeccable with our word, and we're just really hard to be around. 1 But we're constantly trying to save a life. Like there's too much hypocrisy in that for me. Like God bless that person for for trying their best to do a bad thing. But if they're miserable, what is their frequency? What are they actually putting out in those daily experiences? They're trying to save things, but are they creating more guilt and shame? 1 Let's come back to those words for everyone around them who just doesn't even want to be around them. And then there's the pushing away and against energy and they just making everybody around them feel really bad for what they're doing. And they're just like creating this density or vibration of anger and against and protection and actually getting people to close off and not feel safer on them. 1 That feels kind of like wrong, which is why I call myself an embodiment coach. It's like the thing that we're doing is important, but how we're doing it feels equally, if not more important. I'd almost have somebody like creating just in peace with themselves and being at peace with things around them and doing nothing is actually doing a lot. 1 Wow. Cool. Creating safe space for other people to feel free to breathe, to be themselves, to feel what's going on like that. That's a lot. But I would rather have the embodiment nothing happening than trying to save the world being super miserable and making people miserable around them, you know? And we all know that kind of person, not personality types, like slow down, like feeling good feels really important. 1 How we do it feels really important. So this gets me more into the fundamental pieces of where I feel like my coaching has really been thriving, where I spend most of my time, which is permission, which we spent a lot of time with together talking about these things, like we're all feeling stuck in ourselves at some point. We're all our own worst enemy. 1 We all realize that disconnection that we feel at some point, whether we've inherited it from collective trauma, multi-generational trauma, at some point we grow up and we're adults, we're an adult bodies, and we can't blame anything else anymore. We can only take responsibility for ourselves. That's part of like the initiation of the hero's journey. Cool. This happened to me. 1 This happened to me. But in May, am I going to stay in this victim thing or I'm only thinking like this because my parents told me to do it. And the world does this in movies and porn and my gosh, it's so hard to be human like and I'm saying that facetiously. I actually feel it's a lot. 1 It is a lot, but it's important to play and not take ourselves too seriously. At some point, we have to be like, okay, I've got a heart, I've got a mind, maybe I have a soul and a spirit in there somewhere, and it's time for me to start doing things in a way that feels really right for me. 1 Time to me, for me to come into a belief system that feels really good, that's helping me go where I want to go. Nice. So shame seems to be the biggest block. And in actually creating connection from actually like hearing our truth, from being in discernment, from knowing the difference between shame based You should do this and you should do that and intuitive based, you should do that, you should go for it. 1 And we can't tell the difference. So shame and guilt that we've inherited so much, it's part of that collective trauma bundle. And so thank God for somebody like Bernie Brown. I remember she came up like really rose to the top and became like almost part of common culture, like, you know, my mom's or Ebony Brown. And throughout Ebony Brown, you're just like, she's become that kind of you hear somebody who hasn't heard of Bernie Brown, like, really, you know? 1 And so but for me, like, she does such a good job and I think she really like adds a huge layer of intelligence that's coming from from scientific research and has is really making some of these more subjective tacit experiences, really foundational and concrete, and is giving a stronger argument to come into the felt experience and all these things. 1 But it's not always that user friendly. It can stay kind of theoretical sometimes. So for me, taking some of the research around things like shame and adding on tools, really user friendly ways of troubleshooting this through our life, right? So the way I see it is we're stuck in ourselves somewhere where our own worst enemy, whether that's inherited thoughts or whatever, we've got patterns, systems of disbelief and ways of being that are harming ourselves in life. 1 And so and when we're coming in, we're waking up. And again, interesting term that can be misused a lot. But when we're when we're aware that we're back in the driver's seat of our own life and that we're pursuing something that's not just a narrative that's been told to us, but we want to live our life with purpose driven and feel good and and just enjoy the process of being a human being and when we start to wake up to that and that we're our own narrator and that there's something bigger going on that's beyond us, Shame, oftentimes, is the thing that just pulled us back into disassociation. 1 So, again, trauma based perspective, what we see is that when we start to come back into our bodies, this whole thing waiting for us, it just feels awful. All the ways that we've disassociated, all the ways that we've abandoned ourselves, all those thoughts and narratives that are just like daggers in our heart, in our bodies, the stories that we have about our own self image, the ways that we look in the mirror and pick ourselves apart, the way that we judge the people that we love and around us, the amount of judgment that we have towards ourselves and others is tremendous. 1 And we can feel it all stored in tissues in the body in the way that we're breathing. And all of a sudden it's just like becoming present sounds fucking miserable because we have to confront all the things that we've done to ourselves and others along the way. And holy fuck if that doesn't mean like, nope, I think go close that door. 1 No thank you. Being present does not feel good. Jamie Blake just said like coming into presence would feel really good. It fucking feels awful. No, thank you. So we run into this conundrum, right? You with me so far as this all making sense that. 2 Yeah. Cool. 1 So. So the tools that we've come back to, the biggest tool that I can give myself and anyone the affirmation. You know what it is, right? Probably. Yeah. Yeah. It's so simple. Maybe you, you want to riff on that one, but you're going to keep going. Okay. Yeah. I got this from this life coach comedian that is just like, Yeah, I don't want to pretend it's my I've made it my own, but I remember getting from him, it was like it was a kind of a coaching standup comedy thing, which is brilliant. 1 Love standup comedy too. But it was just like the affirmation is just, it's okay, it's okay. We'll constantly bring you into presence and just, like, confront and dismantle shame and guilt along the way. I'm thinking about this and I'm trying to meditate and I'm not having like very much space in between my thoughts. It's okay, you know, like, maybe we can even add labeling. 1 Hey, your mind's really busy right now. That's okay. Now, what happens with this? Again, this for me, a lot of this has just been kind of leaning into my intuition. And then just like I think I'm creating these pieces along the way that I can grab and harvest like like and offer back. I'm finding these offerings through my own trial and error. 1 I know I know this terrain really well, not because I was born super and body. Then I think I had so many the other day. I was like, You're not a very body person. Sure, you should be an embodiment coach. And I was like, you know, not a very nice thing to say. By the way, that being said, my superpower wasn't that I was born super embodied and just stayed really embodied and just like was with every breath and feel, every cell in my body. 1 And this was like born, this beautiful avatar who could like, you know, tap people in their third eye and wake them up. That's not the embodiment that I like. My superpower is that I have been so disembodied and gone into all the cracks and caverns of my own is embodiment and felt that pain to such a fucking deep level. 1 And I'm still holding those things. I'm still building that map of getting out of these places. And so much of my superpower is being in it with you and being able to like find these little guiding lights along the way and not on top of the mountain telling you to come climb up this way. I am in the cave with you holding a light, being like, Hey, what's working for you? 1 This is what's working for me. Let's go. And so you know that that just brings me back to this idea of It's okay. It's okay to be exactly where you are, which is funny because it brings us into the next piece, which is resistance, Resistance and shame. They're like best friends. So a lot of my work has been right now, this is where I'm at currently, and my journey is just and it's been so beautiful to see how many doors are open up and how much better life is getting. 1 If I'm in resistance to what's happening, it doesn't usually work out so well for me. So I don't usually go into like cheesy coaching cliches. But one of my favorite that is annoying but true is, you know, I think many of us have heard this life's not happening to you weren't happening for you. And again, I'm not going to pretend to see behind a great mystery and how everything's happening behind the scenes there. 1 But what I do know is that when I live into the experiment of life's happening for me versus to me, to me has a vibration. This is very victim based, like the mental thoughts that come with that. The constructs that we we go from is happening to me as we have to fight for and the things we have to fight for, those we have to fight for that. 1 And there's a there's a tone to fighting. Right. Which isn't bad. It's not wrong. Sometimes there's a good reason to fight for your life in a fight for something you believe in. And when life's happening for us, it's like this receiving. It's like if there's. If God's always whispering in your ear. Hey, go that way. I think you'll really like it. 1 Hey, your girlfriend's really mad at you right now. I think she might be trying to show you a piece of your own resistance that's creating harm, where you could be filling in that gap and love instead, like, maybe. Maybe this disharmony is happening. Like a Shakespearean play for you to understand something more deeply so you can embody that truth and move on with more. 1 Stop fighting the thing they'd stopped fighting. The lesson even. It's it's like, is it really an uncomfortable lesson or are you just uncomfortable with the lesson because you're in fucking resistance to it? So it just totally changed where I'm not like fighting my own lessons anymore, where I'm not even fighting like, like this idea of protecting my personality has been coming in a lot. 1 I just am protecting who I am. It's like I'm becoming and there's a lesson happening for me. And what if I, like, redistribute all this energy that's going towards protecting myself, which is like this form of fragility and this other term that I'm I'll introduce is like, fuck with ability that I is an original gangster one For me, I love this idea of fuck with ability or my term that I did not make out, which is synonymous would be antifragile, right? 1 So we start to see how we can hold ourselves. So it's creating more robustness while we stay connected. While we're not disconnecting from ourselves, we're not self abandoning, we're not disassociating through all the ways that we can share. I'm sure talk about disassociation through alcohol, drugs, pornography, you know, streaming services and and doomscrolling and all of those things. 1 The things that where we start to come back into this mantra of it's okay and we get one baby step closer towards connection instead of disassociation, Hey, I feel really bad in my body right now. And everything that I'm feeling feels really scary. I'm feeling a lot of guilt and shame. It's okay. It's okay to feel guilt and shame. 1 It's okay. Turns out from my experience, like is and I love you no matter what it is, it's okay. And I get excused from saying that because it feels really like I just landed in something that feels really real for me. Not feeling good about where I is and I can like, okay, something real is coming up for me now. 1 Like it's not theoretical anymore. I'm feeling it like it's okay. And I love you from myself, from the universe. It's unconditional love. Like we've abandoned ourselves. We've. We stepped outside of this thing that we've always been given unconditional love. It's a birth right now we're getting into more of a belief. This is my belief. This isn't. I'm telling other people to believe, but I found this to be true for me so far. 1 Is that when I give myself permission, I'm. I'm keeping the doors open to loving myself. And that is I meandered all this way. If I could leave with one point being made, like we're learning to stay in love with ourselves and we're we're here to love life and we can't exclude ourselves. So being in love with yourself, we're stewards of life. 1 We're here human beings. We've got this amazing prefrontal cortex that kind of takes us in and out of time. We're time travelers, right? We can we can use our imagination. We can do all these incredible things. And the most important thing that I found that we need to do is just like, be love. And it's so cheesy, but it's just like knowing when we're asking why, why are you making a lot of money so you can so it can have a nice car? 1 What would having a nice car do for you or help me feel like it's really cool and people would love be like at the end of the day, we're looking for approval of others. Maybe. Maybe that's the unconscious motivation. So you start to see when we ask why we see other people's unconscious motivations. But again, when we take these further enough, like, loving is what we're here to do, it's like start to look at your own unconscious motivations of why you're pursuing whatever it is. 1 You're pursuing safety, approval of others, which what helps us feel safe because we're when others approve of us, we can kind of relax. Nobody's out to get us. Nobody's attacking us. I can feel safe, right? So we're primarily looking for safety. And when other people are preventing us, a lot of times what we're looking for is approval of our jobs. 1 And when other people like us, it feels really good. When other people think we're cool, it feels really good to be more included. In some circles, it feels good. So we're a lot of times we're motivated unconsciously towards feeling really good. So why not making it? Let's make it just like obviously feeling really good is important. What are we doing to ourselves? 1 What thoughts are we doing to keep ourselves from feeling really good? Do we really have to do these funny actions and having this really nice job or this identity in order to give ourselves permission to feel good? Maybe we can just do that now and we can give ourselves permission to feel good. And then maybe our actions are coming from a place of feeling good instead of running and trying to chase feeling really good. 1 And we're all we're just training ourselves to chase and not feel really good. It's always we just going to spend a lifetime chasing, feeling really good, like it's something that we're going to get way out there. But actually we can do actions that do feel really good. It goes both ways. You know, go do some volunteer work for someone, do a good deed. 1 You're going to start to feel really good for yourself. It's okay to be selfish like that, but then eventually, like what a nice spot to be in where you just feel really good and from feeling really good you do other things that feel really good, that make you feel even better. And that's what a wonderful cycle to be. 1 And I like that cycle. So ultimately what I found is that where we're chasing love, maybe in romantic relationships in our community and we're chasing this, we're chasing this, it's really like unconsciously, we're constantly trying to find a place where we can finally improve of who we are. We're trying to get at that parental love that we never got from our romantic partners and from our friends, and from a job that we really want, or a certain amount of money, security. 1 We want to feel safe being ourselves, safe to love ourselves. And and I'm sure that there's more to that, and I'm sure I can add more. But at a basic level, if you don't know where to go, you don't know what to do in life, just feel so factory. You like. I think we're supposed to be stewards of life and protectors of life, and we can't leave ourselves out because we're kind of stuck in this body in this lifetime right now. 1 And it needs to start with us if we've abandoned ourselves. But we're trying to do a good thing out there. Kind of like the environmentalist is, just like making people miserable around, like we need to be life protectors. And that starts with like creating that frequency and being a steward of love right here and emanating outwards. So, you know, I wish I could say that I like living from that place all the time, but it is my guiding light that helps me discern where I'm at and where I could be doing a little bit better and then using some of these tools like, Hey, it's okay that you're not doing better right now because that 1 keeps on my back and sort of regressing. There's two steps forward, one step back, and we do that a little bit, but like, Hey, it's okay. You're not loving yourself right now. It's okay if you want to. Like if you're feeling really unsafe in your body and really upset about life and you want to watch two seasons or whatever on Netflix, like that's okay to, you know, we're not here to be perfect. 1 So that voice even is love. Like how beautiful that we're not using this idea of spiritual reason to abandon ourselves. Because I don't know about you. I see that all the time we use, we use this idea of indigenous wisdom or spiritual ascension or it's like Buddha nature or Christ consciousness is another form of self punishment, like the the best version of ourselves and and our and our like our purpose and what we're born here to do. 1 What beautiful ideas, but how good we become it weaponized, these beautiful ideas and showing us what a piece of shit we are and how we're not that yet. And then we just soak in that shame and self judgment and we disconnect even further. So again, I think sometimes. 1 Yeah. I want to highlight again. It's okay. That mantra. And it's so powerful. It's been so incredibly powerful for me. And, you know, I've been on a crazy journey with shame this past year and something you alluded to that I've discovered for myself is that shame is the shame is the biggest block of that lifeforce energy, of that aliveness that we're talking about, wanting to live more coming through us. 1 Like for me and, you know, talking to other people, I you know, I really believe like shame is one of the greatest ways to block that from flowing through us and into and to keep us stuck. and just to, you know, just to normalize that shame a little bit. It's like, you know, our, I think our culture that we're living in, when you look, when you think about a little petri dish in in a in a lab, right. 1 And you think about the environment and what it's causing, it's like the petri dish that we are in as a species is, is full of different inputs that are inevitably going to leave us feeling extremely shameful for how we're feeling. You know, one of those is the the lack of authenticity online and especially the youth growing up today on social media where there's no no one's talking about the shitty days that they're having. 1 No one's talking about the struggles that they're having. They can't stop watching porn and whatever it is. And so, you know, this is pretty this is cliche. I think people talk about it all the time, but it's so true. And I think we need to continue coming back to it, which is just like, how can we start living? 1 How can we how can we how can we witness and be witnessed by others in in more ways where the rawness of our experience is is being seen? and so with an extreme lack of that, inevitably we're all going to be, we're all going to have our own shame and, and whatnot. And so, yeah, it's okay. Like going back to everything we've talked about today at the time that we're living in everything that we weren't giving that, that kind of humans need to thrive. 1 Like, it's okay, you're doing your best. And I think the nuance of it's okay that some people get caught on that I've talked with about is like, it's not it's not an excuse for you to sit on your couch all day, right? Like, it's okay. It's okay if you do that. But you can it can be okay and you can want to be better at the same time without causing more shame. 1 Right. Like. Like it's okay that I fucked up today. I know that I want to be better. And tomorrow I'm going to try and do better. And 1 Yeah, yeah. You're, you're highlighting a really interesting point, getting little. 1 We've been going more and more global now. You can't miss an opportunity to be a little more myopic and granular, so it's okay in practical use, a big point. Like it's okay. It's kind of our biggest weapon to dismantle resistance. However, resistance is more tricky, motherfucker, so it tends to resist it. It's okay mantra. It creates fear, right? 1 Like if I give myself permission, it goes in this. It's confronting and brings up this belief system that in a lot of ways, you know, I'm pretty non-denominational in my in my spirituality. And I have I have a number of friends who are religious in their own sorts of ways. And and and I do tend to pick on Christianity a lot, which is hurt some people's feelings. 1 And the reality is like Christianity is so deeply entwined and like the structure of Western civilization or so like Christianity and capitalism is shaped so much of your subconscious mind is we're very our brains are highly rewarded from like thinking in this polarized sense of heaven and hell. These concepts are so deeply ingrained in us. And so then there's this idea that this original sin that if don't stay in full control of myself, if I give myself more permission like the wild man inside of me or whatever it is like I am innately bad, I need control. 1 So we look at our system of government and governance and it's it's a punitive system. It's punishment based. Your bad rehabilitation is putting you behind bars and make you feel really bad. Shame based. It's like, you know, I've been through that system a couple of times, so that's part of my hero's journey. Part two. But this punitive based system is and is it's interesting. 1 So one of the things that all kind of add on is that what I've found to be really true is that we want again, I would put this in the in the umbrella of embodiment. I really love being in the field of embodiment because it's kind of like being an astronaut. It's kind of like a lot of unexplored spaces and we get to define them ourselves, not highly defined, kind of make it our own. 1 It's kind of, you know, in some sense they're like, Well, where'd you learn that? Did you go to embodiment school or what kind of semantics degree do you have? It's like it's so beautiful because there's a lot of space to be exploring. This was really unexplored territory through pure first person experience and add ons into the catalog of what it is we're doing. 1 It's like really a beautiful collective gnosis that we're in right now. So there's there's not necessarily like, you know, I don't want to say right and wrong. I think sometimes I'm like, that's not embodiment for sure. That doesn't feel like embodiment to. Me, at least not for the most part. I have found that, my gosh, I lost my train of thought and then, like, juggling like eight balls here, there's a you know, I would just go back to the resistance piece that we the original sin is that, that if I don't use shame in my own self punishment because that's how the world keeps me in line through, it's not through like right and 1 and ideally in a in a healthy culture again most people don't even have this so it's part of we're offering as a map and a blueprint and a healthy culture. I would say laws would be a last resort. There is like the idea of a law which is if you break the law, punishment by death or by what's the other one that's even worse than death. 1 And in some cultures. 2 What? 1 Sure. Heckerling That's another great one. Super shame, shame, shame, shame. But when they ostracized, when they kick you out of the community, there's a really basic word for it. But I think you're now all the balls. So anyway, we break a law, we get punished, and that's. That's how we keep order is through law and through punishment. And so we've what what is outside and also inside we're learning this. 1 These things typically tend to be true and we experiment with them. So like, ideally, I think I want to live in a community, at least on some level, where we don't have like rules maybe are temporary crutches in some regards, but there's value systems. Shared value is what keeps us in one. And I think this belief that we're innately bad versus we're good, we're learning things, we're born with good nature and and we create society and a culture that shapes our goodness and we can actually relax into our own beauty, into our and goodness, you know, that the red road living in a good way. 1 It's also called the beauty way which I really like. It feels beautiful. It creates beauty around you as you go. And so it's such a different way of thinking in terms of heaven and hell and original sin. So getting back to this very practical thing in which you started this challenge of I gave myself permission to be a lazy piece of shit on the couch and get swallowed by the abyss of my my own lethargy, my lack of motivation. 1 And it's just like it's such a disconnected way of thinking about giving yourself permission. Because I promise if you actually give yourself a little bit of spaciousness to be in rest or even like I've been preaching this one for a while and I have two therapists and and, you know, I think I've shamed myself on recently and one of my therapist uses just like, like there's a healthy level of disassociation. 1 It's a mechanism that we're built with for a reason. It's a tool that we have access, like disassociation helps us feel safe. There's a right amount of it, and it's okay to have really long days and want to cuddle with your girl and watch Netflix at. The end of the day, you don't have to just be like, you know, sitting and meditation and lighting candles and gazing after after work. 1 It's okay to chill like you're not. Yeah, right. So, so coming back to this fundamental idea of that actually when we're when we are restored and healthy and loving ourselves and even giving ourselves break and giving ourselves permission, we don't tend to create chaos through the street or want to cause harm to others. We actually take away law and punishment and disarm shame. 1 Shame has been this wonderful tool to keep us in line. Shame is probably what maybe got you really good grades in school. Fear of punishment. Got you really good grades. You look at what our family's probably inoculated with as being a high performance athlete or student or career oriented was probably fear based. If I don't do this, I won't be loved, I won't be accepted. 1 I won't have security. So we used this the carrot or the stick our entire lives to shape our identity. And we didn't think that we could just believe in doing something for ourselves that felt really good. So on a just bringing that back to I'm talking exhausted and I'm unmotivated and I don't know what I want to do in life and just thinking about what it might be like to be like 14, 18 years old, somewhere in there, like I wanted to smoke a ball and play some video games. 1 So when I'm working with somebody like that, I'm like, Cool, man, do that. Like, don't. But what I want to invite for you is to be present with that. Don't smokeable and think that you're doing something really bad or wrong, or you're putting it in games. Be like, What do you really like about video games? I like embrace it. 1 What what what brings you pleasure about that? Don't do that and then feel guilt because then you're going to need to disassociate further from the thing that you're doing and might be like my or I feel guilty. I feel like I'm doing something wrong. I'm getting high and bad and bad, and we're just reinforcing the story like it's okay. 1 So what I'll do is I'll, I'll do this process that we're getting into called re parenting now, which is something I created for myself. I've seen it, see other people use those terms, but it did to me and really inspired way. And it's similar to internal family systems or parts work. But what I oftentimes do is play the surrogate of being a big uncle or a parent figure, or even for my clients that are older than me, because most of us need that. 1 So it's so different. It's so counterintuitive. This like, you know, I call myself a low performance coach because we've got the high performance coaches that like, actually we don't need to do more to feel better. What's it like to let go of needing to do anything and feeling good about yourself so often challenge people to let go of the big agenda that they think they need to do to, to, to, you know, win their own hearts back. 1 And and I'm like, yeah, let's do less this week and try to feel good about that. So with the, with this bowl smoking video game play metaphor All right man it's okay to smoke and it's what do you like about it? Cool. Cool. Those things make sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Why do you want to smoke? Like, right now? 1 Like what? you had a hard day, and this is a kind of a way of shifting and signaling that the day is over and you can relax and it helps you see like video games and really be in the moment from another perspective. Cool man, that sounds like a really good reason to like doing that. but that part doesn't feel good. 1 Okay, let's work on that. Let's work on this other part that doesn't feel quite right. So it's like now we have we have when we take away the shame, we can actually start troubleshooting some of the things that aren't working and create interruptions and patterns that are no longer working for us. And so I'm use this. This has been theoretical and I didn't know how it was going to work. 1 To be honest. I've been in research and development a lot with my coaching was just like, Hey, this is working for me. It works for other people. Some things don't work as well for other people. And then I find these these golden nuggets. Well, this this has a really good track record of working well and it's okay and permission to start to dismantle. 1 Shame has been gold. So I've used it. I've had clients who suffered from anorexia and bulimia multiple and I grew up with an eating disorder. So again, firsthand experience with some of these things that felt like such a awful, embarrassing, shame based thing that I held for so long. And now it's like, I'm so glad I had that. 1 That has given me so much deep understanding of suffering, compassion, empathy, and for for these experiences. So now I can turn around and be grateful for my suffering because it's made me and what I think I'm pretty amazing all over for suffering for other people. And and so I've actually like, I had a client who would just totally check out. 1 She knew when she was having a bad day. She like it just was like a switch. This association, should she have a ritual, she get a pint of ice cream on the way home. She knew it was going to happen. She'd just eat it in her and then she'd purge it. And and and it was happening a lot at the beginning of my coaching. 1 You know, it kept on coming back up and having these swings. And then I was like, Hey, stay in it. Like, give yourself permission instead of checking out and being really against this thing, you see it happening. Be like Hey, it's okay. I'm going to pick out this ice cream. I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going be with it. 1 And if I want to throw it up or make myself purge, I'm going to give myself permission to do that. And she did. And she stayed present and she didn't take it further. And it wasn't like avalanche and shame cycle and it's been years hasn't hurt. Same thing with alcohol, same thing with cannabis. Cannabis is a little sticky it's a little trickier, honestly. 1 But and the same thing happens when we're using this disassociate alcohol itself. I'm not against alcohol or substances. I really appreciate discerning when something feels like a medicine versus like abusing drugs. And I think there's a tonal shift. And in those things. But I'm a big believer in medicines and things like that. But alcohol is something that's again a tricky one. 1 I'm I really have enjoyed giving people permission to be in good relationship with alcohol. I really like a cocktail every once in a while or sharing a drink with friends. And also like my body doesn't like that much. So I'm really like maybe blessed and fortunate in the sense that it's like not something I could get stuck in. 1 That being said, I it's been helpful to be permission based with my with my clients and, and not be that life coach. It's like no, we're just going to do breath work. You don't need alcohol like normally go alcohol is cool, but are you using it to disassociate and disconnect or using it as a form of celebration? Because I think it's a different vibration. 1 It affects us differently when we're drinking the intention of celebration, It's very different, in fact, when we're drinking, to leave ourselves and use it as an end to the present, to leave the burden of who we are and that which can create blackouts and really embarrassing situations and all those things. So again, and staying present instead of being like, I know I'm going to drink and it's going to be bad. 1 And we're just feeding into that story of like, I'm giving myself permission to be with us. How can we create safety around us? And so again, we're building the scaffolding around that. And I know that's a pretty long answer, but I think there's this simple stepping stones to the affirmation of it's okay, but then we open it up and just address and connected all these things, and it's packed with all this beautiful intelligence that, you know, I've got experience and then my clients and experience and then everybody like you have your own experience and and it's just feeding this vibration that's helping the next person give themselves more permission. 1 So ideally I love this idea that all this work we're doing to dismantle that collective intergenerational trauma is hopefully lowering that resistance, lowering the shame, it's getting less there. And we aren't just doing this thing for ourselves. It's this morphic field that's actually interrelated and we're helping each other make this easier and easier. 1 Yeah. Yeah. So good, man. Just So appreciate the permission slip that you have given me over and over and that you gave so many people in the space that you hold. I, I would love to bring more clarity to that. To this what you're speaking to, because it's so important. I mean, for me, in my own work with shame, you know, the biggest area I've held shame is around sexuality and pornography in specific. 1 And, you know, I've had a journey with porn since I was in fifth grade. And have tried so many different things, been years of like really working at it. And what I realized is that I would never had made any progress if it was like if I had never addressed the shame. Like until I start with the shame piece, I'm never going anywhere. 1 Like kind of, you to earlier. It's like shame creates shame and resistance are best friends, and I think they're also best friends with the stories that we hold. And those three together create this perfect storm that we we don't actually get anywhere inside of. We want it. We, we have a vision of ourselves and we expect our self to be a certain way. 1 We strive to be that we don't meet that standard. We end up and we meet resistance along that way. We end up in shame and then we're back at square one. Once we kind of come out of this maybe a couple day shame rabbit hole, then we want to do good again and be that. And it's just constant, like one legged duck swimming in a circle. 1 And so when you're speaking of the the this person who, you know smokes a ball and plays video games with the ice cream, it's like at the highest expression, these people I'm just going to make this assumption is like they don't want to be doing that for the rest of their lives and. There's a there's an important difference here between like healthy disassociation and then when those behaviors are your baseline, like if you, if you want to smoke a ball and play video games every now and then, because that's like because you have to do it and it feels good and it's a nice little escape, great. 1 Go for it now. Like I'm sure this person wouldn't want to smoke a ball and play video games all day, every day. And so I think that's an important difference here. But the framework that you're using is like, no, no, no, this person doesn't want to do this every day. And in order for us to make any progress through this, we actually need to uncouple the shame. 1 And then from that place of when we have some room to breathe behind the shame, we get to actually understand like, what are the deeper layers of this, right? You're doing this because of this. You're doing this because it soothes this part of you. When you were five years old that felt really unsafe. Like, we get to understand all of it. 1 And and I think from that place of like, no, I really get why I'm doing this. I really get that there's a part inside of me that really needs to feel safe. This makes so much sense when we get to these different parts within us and these different levels of understanding. it creates so much more breathing room to actually move and to maybe choose a different behavior that actually feels good for you today. 1 Yeah. Yeah. I think you really touched on somewhere. I was, like, juggling all those balls. I'm like, what was I saying? Or, like, you really picked that piece back up so, so eloquently. So thank you for that. So, so what we, what we're noticing when we're kind of talking about is I think the word that we're looking for right now is curiosity. 1 Like, So there isn't like one specific thing that we're going to grab on to. This is going to be the panacea and just like save us, I thought it was ayahuasca for a minute. You know, like I was like, that's going to just be the answer to everything. It's like, no, there's no I don't think there is. The one thing maybe, maybe Breathwork look like the seed. 1 Maybe you maybe think that might be. But teasing aside, it's really how all these pieces interrelate. And when we get into it, when we're like, when we find that pocket of ourselves in presence, it can it can be just so beautiful how these things expose their inner relationship to us through our own subjective experience. And so there's a little bit of how beautiful it is to be a coach or a mentor, a guide, a big brother, a loving, connected human being who doesn't have a fucking title is just embodying these things and showing people how to do that. 1 Not pretentious like what could be like, Follow me guys. It's just like doing them really well. So in this case, like, I think as we're doing, you know, these conversations, to me it's just like, you know, you can call it man's work because we're, you know, identified males or we were talking and this is what men do in men's work, but also is a human work. 1 Right. And it's inclusive like that. And and for me, when we get past the shame, it allows something that's so valuable. Curiosity. It's impossible to be in our shame, insecure, curious. I don't think those things can be in the same room together. So it's amazing when we bring like, hey, shame, like, just stand up, we can get curious, why do I want to do those things? 1 Why do I feel bad about them? And then with curiosity becomes understanding, and then from understanding comes compassion, right? Even more permission to go get, which creates more connection to create more trust and knowing it leads to really good places. Curiosity is a gateway drug to a lot of other beautiful things. Okay, so let Curiosity be your gateway drug and for sure. 1 And and so, like, the more we get curious, the less will notice. We're in shame. So just like again, you don't have to think about all of the qualities of trust and blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's just like. Like what? I'll give an invitation to a client or something. I'm hoping it's just like, just let's get curious. Just get curious about this. 1 This not we're not even try to understand it completely. Let's just like, start asking questions. So this gets to an interesting place where it's just like, again, we're kind of building a practical guide here, which is pretty dope, right? We're kind of taking people through. I get I call it like the conceptual map, but then the tools to navigate the map itself, to walk the terrain so that we can create separation where we're sliding in and out on this conversation between, let's build this conceptual map. 1 Here's the map that we've been walking on. It's just really not a great map. And here's a really awesome map and here's some really cool tools to know how to get that well in a good way. And so for me, I think just giving clients an opportunity to get curious, to ask themselves questions is enough. So I call that minimal effective dose is a term that I use a lot and I think I borrowed that from James clear to other habits. 1 Maybe I'll start citing sources. 2 And yeah, and. 1 We're both avid readers there. You just came out with enough new book Carry Through about one. Yeah. Talking to a future bestselling author here like I just like remind myself that sometimes I'm like saying I'm so lucky to be part of your journey. Real life. Is that just the go anyway, just throwing that out there. But yeah, minimum effective dose. 1 Don't try to do all these things. Don't try to forgive yourself. Don't try to just obliterate your shadow and step into full blast self-actualization. Let's just try being in our experience with curiosity and asking a question. Start there and guess what happens? Listeners, great listeners there, they try it and they're like, Jamie, you motherfucker. I asked questions and I didn't hear shit. 1 Yeah, cool. But you got information. You got information. You didn't hear anything back. If you're both the lab rat and the scientist and if you're like which I really love to do it myself and the experiment and the experimenter. Right. And holding both of those hats in my in my in my beingness and trying things out, How does it play out? 1 So with that, with that experiment of being curious and literally asking yourself a question, it's an interest. There's a lot implied there and asking yourself a question you're having a conversation with yourself, which is implicit that there's like both a listener and a protector and a mystery unto yourself and deeper layers of self that are aware of itself. 1 There's a lot there. And just self-talk, which we all do, they're called thoughts, but now we're being in control of them and doing them on purpose, which gets into a whole new category, which is really self empowering. So all of these things, all these maps are really beautifully interrelated. But back to my point, you get curious. You don't hear anything back that to me when I'm like, Hey, what's going on here? 1 Why am I like this? And then nothing. And then, wow, I can't hear any answer back. I'm really disconnected from this part of myself because it's there. It's doing a thing. And now I'm getting curious and I'm not getting information back, but it's doing it. So again, from a parts perspective, we would, you know, we can look those kinds of things out that that would be called, I found myself in exile. 1 I found myself a really strong protector who is like feeling safe, having this conversation with me. So again, I'm going to build a little bit of a framework around getting the no answer back. I say keep trying. So the way I look at a lot of this stuff from a re parenting or a project perspective and can get deeper into those theoretical frameworks later, for the most part, when we're starting to get out of shame and step into the next level, which is like curiosity, the way I think about it is we're addressing our own trauma, right? 1 For the most part, those disconnected ways of being addressing why we're checking out or self-sabotage, whatever that is, or maybe for several of us where we're checking out, or maybe for some of us, we're just wrapping the engines, right? It can look really different. Disassociation isn't all the smoke in a bottle playing video games. This dissociation might be like super type-A driven, fucking focused on your job, but not asking any questions about your life or caring about your experience. 1 You're just like goal oriented and doing it. I would call that like pretty disassociated too. You're just like on a mission not caring about your experience, right? And so whatever that is, when you start to get curious where we're knocking on a door that has been closed and locked for a very fucking long time. And so the way I look at it is like you're in you're approaching an inner child, like a you know, we're getting an inner child or, you know, every or whatever you want to call it, like the way I look at it, depending on the level of disassociation and the harm and the trauma that you're you're up against, which might 1 be bigger than a whale and it might be like a tiny little flea, I don't really know. But the way I picture it is like a smaller kid, and it doesn't even need to be a younger version of me. It's really whatever the dealers choice. But there's a kid in a corner like rocking in a fetal position or like curled up into a ball, not looking up and been there the whole time. 1 That's that's some version of you that you weren't paying attention to that is terrified, scared, abandoned has been yelling for help. And what have you done? Shut the fuck up. You've been in like broken patriarchy. Like, shut the fuck up. Stop complaining. We're doing a thing. Hey, shut the fuck up. I'm going to drink alcohol until I can't fucking hear you anymore. 1 I'm going to shut you the fuck out. And what we call it, we call that part of us, that pussy. We call it names like. And then we just like we've internalized the bully and we become our own bully and we just push this part and shame that part. Say the fuck in the corner. Don't come over here. 1 I don't care what you have to say. And then here we are. Now we're getting curious like, Hey, you over there. Okay, then this part of us is like. Like we're the abuser to ourselves, which hurts. It's hard to acknowledge that we are the prison guard of our own freedom of our inner child, and we lock that part of ourselves away abusively. 1 We've internalized all the abuse in the world, and we've done it to the purest, the most beautiful part of ourselves. And that recognition and we start getting curious and we're like, Why aren't you talking back? I just it reminds me of like, a really shitty dad. Come on, son. I'm trying to have a conversation with you. Speak up and you're like, You're not. 1 You never really listen to me. Like, I don't know if I wanna start talking because you pretty much weaponize everything I say to you. I don't know if I want to speak for my heart right now. So it's like not just getting curious. Now we get into tone. Now we get into like, maybe getting curious needs to be associated. 1 If we're not hearing anything back with like, I'm going to come back tomorrow and check in and and maybe it's coming with a little ownership, right? Maybe again, goose bumps. This is feeling super true for maybe more work that I'm ready to go back and do myself like my body again. It's amazing. Why am I getting goose bumps or ingesting words? 1 This intelligence is I don't know what's happening. I can't explain the mechanisms of that. But I know and I speak from my truth. My body gets shivers and things and eyes get wet. Wow. What is this intelligent thing? This just interrelated systems in my being. When I speak from my core and my truth, they're just like. Like, just like all these cool things happen. 1 Like, pay attention to that. So for me, maybe I owe myself an apology, some ownership. Maybe I need to be the parent to myself that I never had. Maybe I need to, like, really speak so tenderly with compassion to those parts and get away from all the shame. Okay, I did all these things like, what are we what do we need to hear? 1 Like, what is what do we need to see on a global scale? As like, as especially like and government Why people like what? The thing that we've been waiting for. Have we apologized to indigenous peoples on a like public grand scale yet how has the White House ever said like, Hey, we didn't do this, particularly our forefathers did, but we're standing in the power in the wake of genocide and we're so sorry and we're here to listen and to make good and do this right. 1 I'm so sorry. Why is that so hard? Shame. Shame is getting in the way. Ignorance, selfishness, greed, all the things. But fuck if we can't start with ourselves, if we can't look at that little kid in the corner just rocking back and forth like that. I am so sorry. I spent a lot of time not listening to you, shaming you, telling you not to believe in yourself. 1 Like I never want you to feel that way. I'm so sorry that I did that. You like fuck whatever that is for you. Like, there's a conversation that we have to not just be killers, but we have got to earn back trust in whatever way we can. And we can't leave any of those pieces behind. Right. 2 So. 1 I think this is the, the transition into the second episode that's awaiting us. Next time. Yeah. It's building this culture as a collective, but starting internally rebuilding this, this internal culture of all the different places within ourselves. And yeah, I don't have anything to add and it's very beautiful. My man. 1 Yeah, I would just. Yeah. My memory that on to that is I use the word I haven't you introduce it into the conversation belong like belonging there's nested belonging, safety, love. Right. It's like there's really beautiful framework for this whole that I think we all want to live in that we're building. We to belong to ourselves in order to belong to ourselves. 1 It's like this interrelated thing that doesn't go one way. It goes all the way, all directions. And we just need to start somewhere. Maybe it's belonging to community, maybe it's belonging to the earth. So practicing like any sense of belonging that you can bring into yourself, whether it's like this kind of parenting practice or getting into internal family systems, creating safety to be yourself, to belong to yourself. 1 Or maybe it's like community belonging, but they'll feed into each other. You belong in one place. You're going to start feeling belonging other places, learning the trees and the ecology around you. Like most indigenous peoples practices, like they they knew hundreds, thousands of plants and animals and they knew landscape. They went outside into the forest knowing that some deep scary place the dark voids are the mythos of Anglo-Saxon white culture. 1 Don't go into the woods. It's like really, like, that's our home. These are our brothers or sisters. We know these things. These are like infinite amounts of medicines that cure people when we're sick, like, that's home. It's not the deep, dark, scary woods. That's insane. So these myths like that have kept us from belonging and keeping us playing it safe. 1 When we when we belong to ourselves, we belong to a robustness of ourselves and we belong to a healthy, robust and pocketable community. Like now we've got something. Now we can take bigger risks. Now we can really go for those dreams, for creating in some version of heaven on Earth. And we want it here. So, like, all these pieces are interrelated. 1 We can't do it all at once. My last little bit of wisdom would be just wherever you are, you give yourself permission. That's okay. And beyond. That's okay. It's okay. Be stoked about it. Find that stoked wherever that is. Just pick up one piece or two at a time. You can't do everything at once. Give yourself permission to care about one thing and try it out for a little while and create a little bit more permission to belong to yourself, belong to life and this beautiful thing that we're on this beautiful journey. 1 So I that we get a chance to do a part too. I really I know we talked about maybe getting into an sexuality and development and how I think I think a big piece and more in the men's world part that feels so important to me is I was just cruising with a 16 year old kid taking driver's ed and we got like in our class of driving and we just got into everything. 1 How, how we want to relate romantically what it looks like. And holy shit, if that's not a topic that will is so important to save years and years of suffering for male, female and everything in between body people to to feel safe, to live in a good way, to create connection and not perpetuate this this this taking right we take from ourselves and we take sexuality from others and and it's just like depleting instead of this beautiful thing that can create more safety and connection and beauty. 1 And I really want to give that gift to young man. And you're such an ally in that work. So I hope we get to have a partner and go that direction to 1 let's do it, brother. Thank you so much for everything today. 1 All of your wisdom. It really felt like an important conversation and so much to unpack, so much to integrate, so many offshoots to yeah, to contemplate more so, man, before we wrap it up, I would love for you to talk a little bit about your work for anyone who is interested in you and in getting more of you anywhere you want to plug them in. 1 him. That's super cool. Yeah. Thanks for the invitation. And I haven't been very active on social media. That might change at some point. I've been in the experiment of being pretty off the grid and really an intimacy based family style business. 1 So it's been word of mouth for the most part, which this falls under to some degree. But warrior poet, coach on Instagram is a way that, you know, I might not be posting on their lot or they're dropping anything on there, but I do receive messages. So if you want to reach out asking me questions, Warrior poet, coach is, a great way to be in touch and other projects I'm working on right now, I'm about to leave with my my beautiful partner Ragan, and her and I are going to be going to Vermont, where we're going to be doing a wilderness camp for for for kids and young adults ranging from about 7 to 17. 1 And if you're older than that, you're welcome to be like a volunteer counselor and stuff like that. So those are be awesome ways of getting involved. I hope that Blake's on that journey with us at some point maybe next summer I run a social emotional learning program. So I work directly with public school districts and stuff like that to do a lot of what doing in there in public schools, which is been profound, profound. 1 Some of that we're going to be more proud of. Other than that, I've been working for almost seven years doing one on one work with people for a minimum of three months, but ideally been doing a longer journey where I really believe in that transformation, where it takes takes a good year because like I so I work one on one, I've got something that's interesting for people I only work with. 1 I work with 15 people at a time, honestly, which has been amazing. But because I'm going to be doing some other really big projects coming up, I've only got a few people I'll be working with. If you really know, you might want to be one of them, you're welcome to reach out again. Worry about Coach would be a great place to do that. 1 And that's really if you're inquired it's not going to be like this high pressure thing, but I can talk about that. If it feels good, I'm happy to just talk to you, explore, and it's really up to you if that's something that you want to pursue. So yeah, those are the ways to to be in touch, to connect. 1 If you got kiddos you want to go to can reach out if you want them and help yourself reach out and yeah it's an honor to if you're out there listening to this and this is resonating with you I really appreciate you giving you me and Blake your time and attention. It's one of the most beautiful gifts that we've gotten and helping these seeds that we've planted today. 1 And in a good way in your heart, in your life, and and and blossom into a really beautiful garden. 1 Amazing. All that will be in the show notes. Highly encourage everyone to, give this man your energy. Thank you again, my brother. Until next time.