Embarking on the Journey — Master Class Series #2

There's no way of getting it right. There's no complete. There's no finish line. There's no done. There's no I'm gonna get it. There is just what's the next experiment? What's the next adventure? What can I learn from what just happened? There's just play.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Today we're going to talk about everything you need to know about embarking on a personal transformative journey. Conditions for transformation, what happens on the journey, what we can get excited about, and what will get in our way. So Joe, tell me, what does someone need to know about embarking on a transformative journey?

There's kind of a way to look at it that we can dissect it into the— all the parts of it, and let's do that. But before I even start there, The most important thing that someone should know about deciding like, "Hey, I want to do something that transforms my life," is that it's a process to be enjoyed. And not only is it a process to be enjoyed because that's nice, but it's because it's more effective. And the only thing to tweak about that is that enjoying yourself is a little bit different than maybe how you're thinking of it. So most people think, or a lot of people think, if someone says, "Hey, go enjoy yourself," they think, "What am I going to do?" You know, like, I'll go play golf, or I'll go and have a conversation with a friend, or I'll go get high on heroin, whatever their idea of enjoying themselves is. That's not what I'm speaking to. What I'm speaking to is how do you allow yourself more enjoyment in everything that you're doing? So that's what I mean by enjoy yourself. If it means that you're in a satsang listening to a guru, how do you enjoy yourself in that? If it means that you are listening to this digital recording, even if you notice that you're criticizing yourself, how do you enjoy criticizing yourself? That's the question. The question isn't, how do I do the things that I enjoy? The question is, how do I enjoy the things that I'm doing? That's like the golden mean of the journey. Like, that's where you guide your footsteps by. And then everything else is kind of a technicality that revolves around that sun. It's like the gravitation. Is how do you enjoy yourself? And as far as like the details, I think you can clump them into like 4 parts. One part is what are the conditions that need to be set for transformation? There's an acupuncturist once taught me this idea of like conditions for healing. It's like, what do you need to do just so that somebody can potentially heal if you're treating them? So there's that conditions that need to be there for transformation to be possible. And then there's a question of approach, like how do you approach it because at the end At the end of the day, you're responsible and your approach is going to make a big difference in the alacrity, the enjoyment, and the depth of transformation. And then, I think you can also talk about what to expect on the journey because when you really get into it, there are certain things that happen over and over again and they can kind of fool you and they can also, when you see them in a slightly different light, they can really propel you. And then I think then you can also talk about like what gets in the way, what are the impediments of the journey? So that's how I would break it down.

So let's get started then. What are, what are the conditions that we would set in place for us to enjoy our transformation?

The first thing is, I think the most important thing is you need to feel safe. And safe is misused often in today's world. A lot of times people use safety as a way to control, like, I don't feel safe. It's not actually a lack of safety. It's a way that they can control their environment. But you have to feel safe. Fear reduces your capacity to learn. So here's something that you've never seen before. You've never seen two people in a yelling match, like one person going, "You son of a baba baba, and you mother baba baba," and the other person say, "Oh yeah, you know, you're right. You've got a point there." It doesn't happen because it's neurologically impossible. So feeling safe is really critical to being able to learn. So that's important. And it's really important also to understand the difference between whether you feel unsafe or whether you feel defensive. And there's a great trick to doing that. Take a moment, you know, pause this or whatever, but feel in your body what it feels like to feel unsafe when you really felt like your life was threatened or that you were threatened, and then feel what it's like when you are really defensive. And your body has two different signals for that, defensiveness and safety, and they get confused sometimes. So to know the difference is really important.

What are some examples of what that might feel like in the body? Because I remember like early on going through your courses, a lot of the instruction of like, how does that feel in your body? A lot of times it would just be dissociation. I couldn't quite feel. What do you mean in my body? I'm thinking, this is a thought.

Oftentimes safety is felt more electrically in the body. It's usually It can be felt in the shoulders and in the belly often, but it's different for everybody. And it's really based on whether you— when you feel unsafe, if you go to fight, flight, or freeze. And that's— so your body's literally going to feel one of those ways. Defense is usually a hardening. It's usually like a more increased rigidity in some way. So, uh, tightening. Yeah. But it doesn't always have to be that. So it's very different for each person, but those are some of the signals to look for is like how much electricity is moving through, what feels like electricity or energy is moving through your body. Um, how rigid your body is, what part of your body lights up. These are the ways to know the difference for you between safety and resistance. And then another thing that's the condition needs to be set. There needs to be trust. If you don't believe that you are going to transform, you are at a severe disadvantage. Trusting a teacher, if you choose to have one, is really important. Trusting yourself is so critical. So trust is a really important thing, and the belief that it's possible to really know that that transformation is, is there. There's this thing called the placebo effect, and the interesting thing is that that's always seen like as a glitch of science, like We can't really test it because some people just think that they will get better and so they do. In this work, the placebo effect is a feature. It's not a glitch. It's not a bug. It's really important that you think that it's possible. And I don't mean to do it in a mamby-pamby kind of way. I'm talking about like, do the research, do what you have to do to find out that it's possible. Talk to people who have been in the course or know that it's possible. And the truth is, is like, you know, we have a great success rate in our courses. We've had, you know, great studies done and we have a consistent shift that's measurable. But the main part is the belief that that's possible. And the other thing to see is that some people don't change. Occasionally you get someone who goes through who doesn't change. And one of the things that you can always know about that person is they never came in with the confidence that they could change. They were resistant right from the start to the whole thing. So, if you're that, just don't do it. It's a waste of your time and it hurts the other people that you're on the journey with. Another really important thing is seeing beyond your intellect and knowing that your thoughts are only part of the way the transformation happens, that like do your research if you need to, to know that like there are things like mirror neurons and mirror neurons don't register in the intellect of the brain. They're just some way in which we know that our body has an intelligence, that if you move differently, your thoughts will be different. Research things like sensory processing disorder where they— we know that kids who do not get to inhabit their body in a full way have a different brain function than kids who have inhabited their body in a full way, who have an understanding of where they are in space, their proprioception issues. So, we know that the way that we move changes So our body has an intelligence, our emotions have an intelligence, our intellect have an intelligence. And if you are trying to do all of your change through the intellect, you're going to be screwed. It's going to be slow. You're going to be able to describe everything that's wrong with you, but very little is going to have changed.

I've experienced that myself. It took some time to realize that while I could logically create a framework around everything that I was experiencing, I wasn't able to actually transform until I let the fuzzier logic of emotions and the body make movements that I didn't have to intellectually understand.

Yeah, yeah. For me, the journey was similar. It was like slightly different. I just deconstructed. I spent like almost 10 years deconstructing all my thoughts so that I could be free enough of them to trust the other ways of knowing. And it's so apparent, you know, it's just like Ask somebody who's like a great gymnast how they did it, and they're not going to give you an intellectual explanation. There's knowledge that happens that isn't— that the intellect can't describe. Muscle memory is examples, like emotional memory.

Endocrine system has its own memory.

Hormone systems, right? Exactly. Nervous system. All of that is very hard to describe. Another really important thing is vulnerability. It's really hard to have a transformational journey if you're like, "Yeah, I got it. It's cool. I'm good. Yeah, it's not that bad. I mean, yeah, there's something that could be done there, but it's not that big of a deal." If you're coming at it with that approach, you are not going to have that much transformation. It doesn't mean that you have to think there's something wrong with me either, right? It doesn't mean that you have to be like, "I'm broken. Fix me. I'm broken. I have to fix myself. I need to be healed." You don't have to have that.

Absolutely. You could create that entire model of yourself and stay in that for years too.

Exactly. But if you can't explore the depths of your pain and your constriction and express it to other people, then you're not going to be able to approach it. You're not going to be able to do anything about it. You're not going to be able to understand it better. You know, it's like unless your attention can go to the discomfort, then your system can't do anything about the discomfort. And so, a lot of people have learned how to just not go to the discomfort. And obviously, it builds up, other things happen, it's a painful life, but that's a really important thing. And I'd say finally, and I think I've stated it before, which is just if you're not willing to take full responsibility for your journey, if you start blaming a teacher, if you start blaming your wife, if you start blaming, you know, your mom and dad, you know, you have to take full responsibility for the journey. And it doesn't mean that you shame yourself. It doesn't mean that you blame yourself, but it just means you don't shame or blame anybody else. You have to just say like, I am exactly where I need to be. I am responsible for this. That is, that is incredibly important in the journey because every time you blame somebody else for where you are, including blaming yourself. So anytime you are blaming anything for where you are, you are slowing the process down tremendously.

Yeah, it seems like each of these is— there's kind of a catch-22 because they're both conditions and also the effects. Like for example, with trust, many people might approach personal development because starting with the position of that they don't trust themselves, they don't trust their own goodness, or they don't trust teachers, or they don't trust the process and that's something that they're working with. So what advice would you have for somebody who wants to embark on a personal transformation journey but is worried about being manipulated or controlled by a guru or ending up in some woo-woo backwater?

Yeah, I would say maybe 2 or 3 things to that. The first thing is like, it's back to the first principle, right? It's enjoying yourself. So if you are not trusting somebody, how do you enjoy that? Movement of non-trust. It's clear that if you feel safe, there's a deeper level of enjoyment. If you feel trust, there's a deeper enjoyment in being vulnerable than there is in being protected.

Do you have any tips or exercises for anybody who's embarking on this and finding that they're having that difficulty with, say, trust or vulnerability? Some way to help them just enjoy feeling what they're feeling rather than trying to change it?

Yeah, let's say you are in with a teacher and you're not trusting them, or you know that you want to sign up for the course, but you know, you're going to have trust issues. The best thing you can do is just go to the person and say, I don't trust teachers and I want to, and how can we work together so that this isn't a burden for you and this isn't a burden for me? That would be taking responsibility, being vulnerable and trusting. And even in saying that, you're trusting yourself, which is the more important thing than trusting the teacher. And in saying all this to a teacher, you're giving them trust in that moment. And if they react in a way that's just like, "Well, if you don't trust me, motherfucker," you know, then you pretty much know it's not the right teacher. Or if they go, "This is all about just letting go," into my words, then you know you don't have a great teacher there and that maybe that you shouldn't be trusting them.

Yeah, it's a good litmus test. A teacher should be able to receive that mistrust.

Yeah, should be able to receive that mistrust, especially if you're taking ownership. And if you're not taking ownership and they point to the ownership, then also a teacher worth trusting. So that's an easy way to look at it. And yes, you're right that to some degree, all of these things are they are the things you're working on as well as the things that you need to be successful at it. So then it's just an order of operations thing. It's like, make trust your first thing to work on.

Yeah.

Like, don't make your mommy issues the first thing. Make trust the first thing. And it probably relates to your mom issues or your dad issues, but make trust the first thing and really focus there.

And another feature of this is that it creates a positive feedback loop, you know, like the safety trust and vulnerability and seeing beyond the intellect may be the things that are initially holding you back, but then as you work on them more and more, the speed of your development increases.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And it becomes more enjoyable, which is, you know, the speed, it becomes far less important than the enjoyment. Like, if you enjoy your entire developmental journey deeply, who cares how fast you're going and who cares when you're gonna get there?

You start to get to that point where you feel that restriction, like, oh, I'm interviewing Joe, I'm feeling restriction now. And then you're like, oh good, this is something to work on. Instead of like, no, I wanna go away.

Yeah, that's a beautiful pointing. That's a great way to think about all of this stuff is like, there is a point in that path where everything that's uncomfortable, you trust. You're like, that uncomfortable thing approaches and you're like, oh, I can trust this thing because it's going to teach me something. I just have to be vulnerable in it and take full responsibility. Yeah, beautiful.

So tell me more, tell me more about how to approach this, how to approach setting those conditions. Yeah. And, and the spiritual path in general.

Yeah. Approaching the spiritual path, what I mean by that is like, what's the best way to be on the path, right? If those are the conditions that you— that are important for you to just make sure are met before you even like packing your bag. Like that's the tent and the food stores. This is like, how do you walk down the path? And that's how, when I say the approach to a path, that's what I mean. It's like, how do you walk down it? And how you walk down the path is, you know, you know some of this stuff because of our, the 18-month course you did, but it's, I have it as the 5 principles of how to be on the path. One is loving accountability, which basically means that you're honest with who you are, what you've done without shame. It means that you can apologize to somebody, that you can take an honest inventory of yourself without shame, that you can look at yourself directly and not feel like you have to be any different. That's loving accountability. And it's approaching life in that same way. It's asking those around you to meet you in that place. So an example of that would be, you know, to say to the teacher, I'm having trust issues and I don't want to be having trust issues. It's kind of loving accountability to say I have trust issues because that might be making them responsible. But that full loving accountability is that I have trust issues and I don't want to have them. I want to be able to trust life. I want to be able to trust people. That's full loving accountability. And then embrace intensity is— it's not creating intensity, which I think some people mistake it for often, but it's embracing intensity. It's a business theory as well. It's like being a great CEO, one of the biggest things about it is just making sure the right amount of attention from the organization is going to the right parts of the organization. Are we being attentive to our problems? Are we being attentive to being proactive? Are we being attentive to our culture? Are we being attentive to our customer? Like how much attention is going where?

And where there's intensity, that's generally where that attention needs to go. Correct.

That's right. Like just like in the body, if there's pain, it's— that pain is telling you, hey, This is where you pay attention. If you want to take care of yourself, pay attention to the pain. It's the same thing. But I call it intensity because it's not all pain because it can be pleasure. Often what we avoid more than pain is pleasure. And people have a hard time seeing that until they see it and then they're just like, "Oh!" I always say it's subtle till you see it. In that moment when you actually notice like, "Oh, it's more intense for me to be in deep pleasure than it is for me to be in pain." That's a moment. So that's embracing intensity. The other principle is everything is an iteration. So it just means that there's no way of getting it right. There's no complete, there's no finish line. There's no done. There's no, I'm gonna get it. There is just what's the next experiment? What's the next adventure? How do I learn? What can I learn from what just happened? There's no blame. There's no shame. There's just play. There's just like, let's do it this way. Okay, now let's do it this way. And there's just a trust that you're gonna keep on iterating and it's gonna keep on getting better and you're gonna learn and there's no need to think of anything that you've done as right or wrong. And I can hear the brains out there already like going, but if you kill somebody, that's wrong. I would agree that killing somebody is, is not how we want to behave. But if there is a person out there who has killed somebody and they're not going to be caught, that my hope for them would be that their mindset is that of iteration, that their mindset is that of like, okay, well, that felt shitty in my body and I feel horrible and I'm still thinking about this thing and my guilt is creeping up on me and like my life has gotten worse and it didn't make me any happier and it didn't solve my problems. So 'Let's do a different iteration next time I have a problem with somebody.' Like that, that's what I would hope that they would do.

That brings up a great point because a lot of what happens in soldiers that come back from war with PTSD, a lot of the PTSD isn't around what happened to them personally, but it's perhaps around the fact that they killed somebody and they did it in like anger or rage in the intensity of the moment and that they actually enjoyed it or something about having done it makes them feel like a monster. And so they think that that's just some core part of themselves that's unchangeable and makes them bad. And then holding that core belief just causes so much more suffering and pain in their lives and the lives of those around them.

That's exactly it. It's just like, we're never finished. We're never— there's no moment of perfection. And we are reacting to an environment and we're iterating. That same person never going to Iraq or Iran or wherever people are fighting these days, that same soldier, if they hadn't hit that environment, what would they be thinking about their core selves? So it's a very iterative thing and I think it's really important to have that mindset and that change not only can happen, it's the only thing that you know will happen. So that's it, I think being curious is really important as well. That's the other way of approaching the path that's really important is being curious. The most enjoyable ones. You know, it's— let's take that person as an example who like feels like, oh, I'm a bad person because I killed people. Like, what if you're curious about that? What are the questions that actually come up instead of being knowing that you're a bad person? What, what would be the most curious questions about it?

What was that feeling that led me to take that action?

Yeah. What makes me not want to kill everybody right now? If that's who I am, what's making— what's stopping that in me right now? If that's who I am, what's making me keep on beating myself up over it? Like, what's the part of me that's beating myself up over it if it's essentially who I am? And if it's essentially who I am, like, what makes me not go into the grocery store and kill a whole bunch of people? So there's just curiosity, and it frees it up because your fear and curiosity can't exist at the same time. Like, If you imagine yourself running from a tiger, like really close your eyes for a moment. You're running from a tiger. This tiger is fast and it is hungry and you are running and feel the fear coursing through your system and you're moving as quick as you can and it's catching up on you and you can like hear its breath and it's like, "Oh," you know, it's like it's gonna get you. And you can feel that fear in your system and now wonder, how much does the tiger weigh? Right? All the fear goes away. You can't operate from fear if you're curious. And it doesn't just operate like I can be curious if I'm not scared. It's why safety is so important from earlier, right? Because if you— you can't learn. But you can also just turn on curiosity and it just reduces fear, just like if you turn on fear, it reduces curiosity. So that's a cool one. And then the last one, and I'd say the most important one, is connection. That it's really important to stay in connection, in connection with each other, in connection with yourself, in connection with your body. It means being in contact with— it's, it's like you were saying earlier that like before when you were thinking about emotions, you're like, well, I don't know how to work in my body. All I have is disassociation. Contact means literally like touching. It's just like to have that point of contact. Can I just touch into the emotion? Can I just touch into the pain? Can I just touch into you? Can I just touch into me? Can I touch into that part of me that I don't want to see? Can I touch into that part of me I'm not proud of? Can I touch into that part of me that is proud? It's connection. It is what allows the tree to evolve. It's what allows us to evolve. Is connection.

Tell me more about how embracing intensity or being curious about the lion that is about to eat you, how is that enjoying yourself? And how does that help you get away from the lion?

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, on the lion part, obviously I'm not suggesting that you should wonder how much a lion weighs or tiger weighs if they're chasing you. Our system isn't curious when we're in fear for a reason. But if you are in fear over something else, like, you know, what color car you should buy, or if you're gonna get fired, yeah, being curious is far more enjoyable than that. And being curious about being fired is far more enjoyable than worrying about being fired. So the curiosity is like, you can just feel that in your system. Like, if you just take a moment And, you know, you can pause here and just feel what it's like to know shit, to like be like, I know, I know what you are, I know what I am. And then to be curious about who you are, you can just feel there's more enjoyment in the body. Embracing intensity is a little bit more complicated as far as the enjoyment goes. It's the embrace part of it that makes enjoyable. Like, intensity happens. You can't stop it. You know, the Buddhists talk about it. They say, "Pain occurs, suffering is the choice. It's the embracing of the pain that prevents the suffering." And so, the enjoyment is embracing something that you can't avoid or that if you avoid, it's less enjoyable, right? Meaning like if you're a heroin addict, you can avoid the detoxes, you know, you can avoid withdrawals. But it's not going to make an enjoyable life. So, at that moment, you want to embrace the intensity of the withdrawals. Part of it is the embracing of it when it needs to be done or when it's unavoidable or when it's just better to face the intensity than not, which is almost always, you know, sometimes we create intensity which is not necessary, but if we're not creating it, in a conscious way, then embracing it is great. In fact, embracing intensity is one of the great ways to stop intensity from happening in our lives.

Yeah, in a way, you let it move through you and change you, and then you learn the lesson in the intensity.

Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it.

So tell me more about what happens on this journey. What are the— what are some of the pitfalls or some of the things that might be surprisingly enjoyable.

Being on the journey, the pitfalls in my mind are slightly different, but the, the being on the journey is, there's just some things to know about it. Like, so one of the things to know about it is the way human beings learn is a back and forth nature. It's a pendulation is the word. I don't even know if it's a word, but it's the word. It's the word I made up or I'm using depending on whether you can find it in a dictionary, but There's a back and forth nature to it. So if you look at a baby and a baby learns to walk, they don't just like crawl, then one day stand up and walk and then never crawl again. That's not how we learn, right? We don't learn all at once. We learn by going back and forth. And in fact, what they know is that when that back and forth doesn't happen, like particularly in babies crawling, that their brain develops differently. And it's not a good thing if you pull a butterfly out of the cocoon, it won't be able to fly. Like what we think to be struggle or friction, that pendulation of going back and forth, is really a necessary part of the learning process. And so what you'd normally hear people talking about when they're on the journey, they're like, "Man, it was doing so good and now it's all gone." You know, like, "Man, it was like I was feeling so blissed out and now all that's gone. How do I get it back?" The other way to look at it is to say, oh cool, that's gone. I'm, I am in the learning process. This is how learning goes. So there's, there's a way of looking at it that, that says, oh cool, I don't, I, it's gone away, which means that I am as much in the learning process as when it's there. And I am getting closer because it's gone. I am getting closer to a life where that's fully understood and fully recognized. So that's a really important thing.

That relates to something else I've seen when, like, when somebody starts going through this journey and then all of a sudden they start feeling more emotions that they label as negative and they're like, "Oh no, like I had done all this work and now all that work is undone and I'm a total mess." Yeah, right, which is not—

that's beautiful. It's not at all the case. One of the things that could be happening is they're just recognizing that they're having the emotions instead of like just taking them out on people when they didn't recognize it before. That's common. The other thing is that they're able to handle them now, right? Like one of the things that I'll talk about often is that I will do a lot of exercises where people really increase their love and you'll just notice this happen is like when people can love themselves and every part of themselves that was unlovable comes to the surface to be loved or the next wave of them. So, it's like shining a light in the water at night to attract cuttlefish. The more work we do, the more attuned we get. Like if I make an album, which I did in my 20s, I made a rock and roll album, I can't listen to songs the same way before and after. I'm so much more sensitive to it, but that allows me to understand and enjoy music in deeper and deeper ways. And so, that's the same thing. There's that sensitivity. That's a beautiful point. Another thing to understand is that when you have big jumps in development, when these big moments happen, there's a kind of a natural step that happens, which is things go from unclear to clear to being able to affect the change. So easy way to look at this is with kids, you know, the first thing infants, they don't even know it's their hand, it's hitting them, it's scratching them, they don't even know it's theirs, then they recognize it's theirs, but they can't control it, and then they can control their hand. Piaget calls this like, I think, primary, secondary, and tertiary circular reaction, I think is the terminology for it. But that doesn't happen just with the use of our hands. It happens like when people like fully access for the first time, let's say their emotional intelligence or their somatic intelligence or their awareness, like if they're finding that moment of seeing that they are their awareness, oftentimes they can't even talk. They're like, "What's going on?" And they like try to reconstruct their life because they're like, "Well, everything I believed is gone. What the hell's going on?" And that's the way it works. It's like they've walked into this new world that they can't control and they can't even identify the parts of. But slowly you just hang out in the world and everything takes care of itself just like it does with an infant, you know? So If you don't get scared about it and you're just like, "Okay, yep, I don't know anything and I don't have to reconstruct anything," pretty soon you're talking from that place. So that's another thing to know. Development moves like a corkscrew. I think that's really important. So if you think about a corkscrew or stock market, it's kind of like you're moving up and to the right in human development, just like a stock market, you're moving ahead, but there's like, it's like a corkscrew. And every time you're at the bottom of that corkscrew, it's like, daddy issues, and every time you're at the top, it's mommy issues, and then you can have abandonment issues or whatever. But you have these core things going through your life and you're refining them, and they're becoming more and more subtle and more and more different as you become more and more sensitive so that you can notice more and more of the pain and agitation that you're feeling. What people often say is like, I thought I dealt with all my dad issues, and it's like, you know, before awakening dad issues after awakening to dad issues.

Yeah, I was just gonna say there's that one meme where it's like before awakening and there's a child with a boot on his face, and then after awakening it's a child with a boot on his face, but you can see it's zoomed out and he's holding the boot to his face.

I haven't seen that. That's funny. That's great.

Yeah.

I would say after awakening he's loving the fact that he's putting his own boot on his face.

And yeah, you know, and there's, yeah, that's the unclear to clear part is like, oh, I'm putting this own boot on my face. And then the corkscrew is like, oh, these are all the different ways I put the boot on my face. And it's kind of the same way each time around, but I just keep finding more and more subtle ways to heal it.

Yeah.

That comes back to that pendulation, which is like, wait, I thought I dealt with all this before. How am I? Well, you know, sometimes you're just wrecking, you're just seeing the new spin, the new turn on the corkscrew.

Right. A television show isn't enjoyable if it's just everybody celebrating the whole show. If you can enjoy being in the not clear as well as the clear, if you can enjoy the corkscrew, you know, there's this great metaphor and truth. It's kind of, it's not a metaphor in a way. They know that if two people are on a roller coaster and they're going down, same exact experience, and one of them is like, woohoo! And one of them is like, oh my God, I'm so scared. And you go into their neurochemistry, like what they know is that like one of them is releasing— the one that's scared is releasing carcinogenic chemicals into their body, and the other one is releasing anti-carcinogenic chemicals into their body. The exact same experience can, can be used to destroy somebody or to heal somebody. It's that you're going to be on the roller coaster ride. How do you enjoy it? That's the question. How do you allow enjoyment to happen? That's the real question. The last thing to think about on this is we have our 3 brains, you know, we can call them the head, the heart, and the gutter, the human, the mammalian, and the reptilian, or the nervous system and the emotional and the intellectual. They limit each other, you know, even though they're really all one. If you're really developed on your intellectual side and you're not developed on your emotional side, It's like having 3 pencils attached by rubber bands and one can get only so high if one is so low. And the most bang you're going to get for your buck is to move the low one higher because it gives everything else the most flexibility. So, it's just important to know that if the path that you're working on has stopped working, you know, you probably neglected one of the sides of yourself, one of the parts of yourself. So that's a really important thing to know.

So tell me about enjoying those things, like, 'cause this process we've just discussed is that there's gonna be a pendulation. You're just gonna go from like, "Oh, I'm healed," to, "Oh, I'm still a total wreck," and corkscrewing through the same problems over and over in different ways, spending a lot of time feeling unclear and then playing whack-a-mole with these three parts of our nervous system. How do we enjoy this process?

Yeah, a good story from my life was that, you know, there was this time when we got kicked out of a house for— and at the time it felt like very unjust reasons, and in retrospect it was just, it wasn't a match. And, you know, it was a long time ago. And every time I saw the people involved or the house, it just like this knot in my stomach just was so there. And it would come and go like all emotions do, they come in waves. And at some point I'm like, oh cool, there's something there that I get to learn from. And it got to the point where like I would literally drive by the house to hope that that feeling would come back so I could be with it and I could love it and I could spend time with it, I could attend to it. I learned how to enjoy the thing that I thought was uncomfortable. That's critical. And that's what it is. It is to not buy in. I mean, even this story is a way to help you enjoy it because if you buy into the pendulation that you've lost it, then it's very hard to enjoy. If you realize it's a learning process, then it's very easy to enjoy. If you are enjoying it, the learning happens quicker. It's like a virtuous loop. It's like the more we enjoy it, the more we want to approach it, and the easier the whole situation gets.

That feedback loop.

Yeah, that feedback loop. Exactly. And like clear to unclear is another great example of it. It's like It's really easy to enjoy not knowing. It's really easy to enjoy being taken and be like, you know, get in a car with somebody and ask them to drive you somewhere, but not to tell you where they're driving you and not to tell you how long and just see, like, that can be just as enjoyable, if not more enjoyable. Right. Yeah. It's really how do you let the enjoyment in is the question in all of this stuff. That's really the key to preparing for the spiritual journey.

That's great. Something to be curious about the entire way.

The entire time, yeah.

Yeah. Now, before we run out of time, I would like to get back to touching on these impediments and pitfalls. What kind of things can happen that can block this whole process?

One of the pitfalls is thinking that you should do anything. Finding the wants behind your shoulds and letting your wants motivate you instead of your shoulds motivate you In essence, the journey of self-development is the discovering of the self. It is self-realization. It is self-awareness. And a should in its nature is saying that you need to be controlled, that who you are in general needs to be managed, controlled, modified. Your wants is there's a general trust in who you are and And if you think about it in a developmental perspective, you know, an infant from 0 years old till 7, like they don't have any shoulds. There is no should in their brain. I don't know for sure, but I bet there's a culture where there might not ever be shoulds ever. But in that time period, they develop more than any other time period in life. They just follow their wants. So following your wants is really the most effective way to transform. And following your shoulds is the least effective way. And And to make it a should is really just a doubt and doubt of trust and of who you are. The other crazy thing about wants that I think is really important is, you know, you take a 5-year-old and they want something and they're like, no, no, yes, no. And they throw a temper tantrum. And obviously when we get older, we don't want to throw temper tantrums. And so we say we shouldn't throw a temper tantrum instead of getting in touch with the fact that we don't want to throw it. Like that isn't We have iterated, we have evolved, we now want something different, but we turn that into a should. We change that natural impetus inside us into something that we should do. Resisting resistance is another big one. You know, people don't embrace the resistance, they don't embrace that intensity of a resistance. So there's a great phrase that just says, if you can't love it, love the resistance to not loving it. And that's really an important thing is that don't fight the resistance. That's just more resistance. Another one is—

How do you not resist that resistance without creating a new resistance around that?

Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. In a war with yourself, who's gonna lose? Exactly. Yeah. There's no way to do it but to drop it. You can't— you just have to just stop. It's the only way. I think it was the first time I was like 24 years old, I went out into the woods to fast and I was looking over this ridgeline and I was noticing that I was fighting myself and then I was noticing that I was fighting myself to stop fighting myself. And then I was noticing I was fighting myself to stop fighting myself to stop fighting myself. And I was just like, yeah, this isn't gonna work. So I just stopped. And that was the first moment that I realized that it's not a matter of effort, it's a matter of acceptance. It's a matter of not efforting. It's the stopping of the trying. It is the trust. Another piece that's important is skepticism. There's two forms of skepticism. One is important, one sucks for the spiritual journey. The important one is Hey, if it's not true for you, you should know it's not true for you. And you shouldn't think that it's true for you because some guru said it or because some Bible said it, or, you know, like if there is a truth, then that truth will be apparent in you and it will resonate in you and you will know it. That— so being skeptical of truth until you understand it, fully feel it is important. Being skeptical prevents you from trying, preventing you from experimenting, preventing you from being open enough to see a truth, that level of skepticism is getting kneecapped. It's like getting your legs cut off in a race and then spreading that to other people is violent. Another important one is just notice when you're future or past living. Like one of the biggest impediments is somebody who's like either future living by state seeking, you know, like, oh, I want to be in that expansive state again. Oh, I want to be, 'Enjoy again.' 'Oh, I want to be awakened.' 'Oh, I want to be that future living,' or the opposite of that future living, which is like, 'This is going to be so hard. Oh my God, I don't want to have to do this work. I have to feel my emotions again. This sucks.' Like that. Oh boy, both of those things, it's like not enjoyable. It is not enjoyable.

Or even just having an idea of what you're going to look like, who you're going to be once you've transformed.

Yeah, exactly. Not enjoyable.

Projecting your current self onto your future self. Like, oh, if only I was perfect in all the ways that I currently think I should be, you know, then I'll be done.

Yeah, exactly. Not enjoyable. It is like the moment is far less enjoyable when you're thinking about how you're going to end up than enjoying this moment. Like, if you think about the moments that you've enjoyed yourself most, you probably weren't thinking about like your conclusion, you know, you're probably— some of the times we enjoy ourselves most is when the proposed conclusion just happened. And so there's just nothing to strive for in that moment. And then you're like, ah, and then you create something to strive for and then you don't enjoy yourself anymore. Then there's like the future and past living in the past. And that, you know, comparative mind is like, is a form of this, of who's better than who's worse, is like, that requires future and past living to be able to do that. So yeah, so anything like that is also— they're big pitfalls or stalls in the journey. And then the last thing about the journey that I think is really important, like this is the one that gets the most, is that there's this natural cycle that happens that people go through, and I'm sure you can recognize it, is like, You think to yourself, oh, I really wanna, I don't know, we'll pick anything. I really wanna stop smoking. We'll pick an easy one. I really wanna stop smoking. And then, okay, I gotta do that. I gotta really do it. I gotta do it. Why you should do that. You should do that. You should do that. Why aren't you doing it? Why aren't you doing it? Okay, okay, okay, I'm good. And then you do it. And then as soon as you do it, you're like, oh, okay, I hope this lasts. I hope this lasts. I hope this lasts. And then it's like, "Oh, it's already going away. I already noticed that I'm wanting cigarettes again. Oh, oh shit, I had a cigarette. Oh, it's all over. I'm going back into— oh, quit. Fuck, now I'm smoking again. I got to quit smoking. I got to quit smoking." That's the routine. And all of them rely on each other and you can cut it off at any other point, but one of the easiest places to cut it off is when that moment when you actually have quit smoking or you have stopped yelling at your wife or you have stopped being a victim is to appreciate it, is to actually just appreciate that moment and to keep on appreciating it instead of trying to hold on to it.

Right.

The idea that it's gonna go away, it is the thing that creates it going away. Like the only thing that's really there to do is just to enjoy this moment. Enjoy that it's gone and the same thing can be said when you're smoking. Like if you're in the middle of smoking a pack a day, it's like, how do you enjoy each cigarette? Like how do you enjoy the hell out of yelling at your wife if you're gonna do it? 'Cause nobody really enjoys yelling at their wife. So if you can really enjoy loving yelling at your wife, I bet the way you yell at your wife will change. If not go away.

That kind of circles back to a lot of the goal isn't for things to go away, it's to just watch how they shift and how they change. And like, what is the impulse behind the behavior trying to be rather than what our resistance changes it into? And so like all of these impediments that you've just listed all seem like different forms of resistance. And so I just wanna ask you, how can you enjoy Resistance.

You just pointed to something which is really great, which is if you want yourself to change, it slows down the process. Want is the wrong word. If you're getting angry and you are trying to change the fact that you get angry, that is a slower process than if you love your anger and you invite your anger in and you welcome your anger. That is a far quicker process.

How can we do that without hurting people?

Unless you start doing it to try to make it go away, like I'm going to I welcome my anger to make it go away, then it doesn't work anymore. I'm not saying welcome your anger at people. I'm just saying welcome the experience of anger that one feels when they're angry. So I'm not suggesting to go and be angry at people, but to welcome your anger, to accept it, to love it, to express it in a way that's safe and doesn't create more shame. So I just want to point that what you said was brilliant in that. And then I think your question was How do you enjoy resistance? Yeah, and that goes back to that statement of if you can't love the thing, if you can't love the anger, love your resistance to the anger. How do you enjoy resistance? How do you love your resistance? This is the whole question of the spiritual search and the whole way to prepare is how do you enjoy this process?

Accomplishment. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and rate us in your podcast app. We'd love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions or comments. You can reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.