What We're Afraid to Lose

I was with a group of founders recently, and it's a group that's really focused on their inner work. Many of them have achieved a lot of material success in their lives, often at the expense of their emotional and even physical well-being, and they're now investing their time and money into workshops and retreats and meditation and therapy. In our chat, many expressed a deep appreciation for having the resources to do this, and also a concern that if they didn't have those resources, they'd be left with no choice but to go back to their old ways of driving themselves with fear and anxiety. So this had me wondering, how often do we take something that can legitimately support us in our path, whether it's resources or security or love or community, and then turn it into something we're afraid to lose, placing yet another condition on our freedom and our joy? Today on 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, and I'm here with Joe Hudson.

How's it going today, Joe?

Well, that's, that's a heck of a story you just told. I mean, what hits me as soon as I hear that story, first of all, it's like, go back to anxiety, they're still in it. Like if they, if they're scared that if they, they need something to be happy, the anxiety, it hasn't changed, right? The, I was anxious that I needed to get this money and now I'm anxious that it's gonna go. I, I'm anxious that I'm incomplete without money is, it hasn't changed, right? That, that anxiety is still there.

Yeah. I see. It's changed forms, but it's the same anxiety.

Correct. Yeah. So Now they just have potentially a little more time. So on the plus side is they have a little more time to dedicate to it. On the downside, they don't have the acute anxiety on a day-to-day level to work on. Right? Like if you, if you look at the data on who is least likely to recover from alcoholism, it's independently wealthy people that don't need to work. That's also bullshit. I mean, everybody needs to work, but who don't have like, have a need to work every day to drive a certain amount of income so that they can feed themselves. Like, the truth is that those are the people that are least likely to recover from alcoholism. There's no flaming field, if you will. There's no immediacy that that creates a drive to make their life better. There's nothing that can fall apart as easily as like losing your job and not being able to feed your family. So you can just keep on drinking. So I question the whole premise, but what it does make me think about is how much the idea that we need something to become free, like that idea seems to be, and when you hit a place where you feel that deeply profound freedom, you realize all of that was complete bullshit. There was— there's no need for money or eating in a certain way or exercising the right way or having the perfect love or whatever it is. None of that actually is required.

Yeah, yes. This reminds me of a personal story for myself as well. Like, Several years ago, I had, I had made it. My business was successful. I had made successful investments with that money and made a ton of money. I was like, okay, great. Now, now I can do the things that matter to me and not any of that other bullshit that would like hinder me on my path. And what happened when I look back on that time in my life, it was actually in many ways very stagnant. There was a lot that I was learning. I was spending money and time and doing retreats and exploring all the different things that were out there. I definitely learned a lot and I definitely explored a lot in myself and I'm grateful for it. And there are certain things that I just did not address during that time. And ultimately those things, the avoidance of them brought things crashing down. And then I had to go through the struggle of it. I had to readjust my lifestyle. I had to lay people off that I cared about. I had to reengage in areas of my life that I thought were on autopilot and that I took for granted. And yeah, uh, and that was actually what really initiated a really deep stage of a really productive stage of personal growth for myself. And looking back on it, I can see, I'm like, I don't know, was I better off for having had the money and the time or not? It's just a different path, but it was not necessarily better or worse. And, you know, even the idea that like one needs to be better than another is also an anxiety of, am I doing it right?

Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's an old question, right? It's like, if you can dedicate yourself to the monastery, or are you going to be a householder? And if you're a householder, is it less likely for you to become awakened, right? Like, that was the old way of asking this question. And there's definitely certain things that are supportive, like not having to worry about feeding yourself can be very supportive. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's pretty clear that when you're more likely to worry about things like being authentic and being like finding your truth if you have the rest of your world taken care of, your basic needs taken care of. At the same time, you know, I don't— will very, very seldom take on like extremely wealthy people who aren't— who don't have a project because I find that often that's entertainment for them. Like it's just entertainment because they don't— if push comes to shove, they don't have they often don't have the reason to get uncomfortable, to embrace the intensity, which is the thing that actually pushes us along the path more effectively than anything else. Yeah, some, some do it naturally, but many don't.

Yeah, yeah. Something else that this reminds me of is the, like, the, the parable from the Bible about how it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven. And yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to read that, and even like historically to read what was even meant. But one way that I really appreciate is that there's, uh, there's an idea— I don't know if this existed— but there's an idea that there was a, there was a particular gate in the wall of Jerusalem that it was only the width of a camel and the height of a camel on its knees. People had to remove all of the load from the camel for the camel to get through, and this was for security reasons. Um, presumably. And that's fascinating to me because it's like, I, I know many people now who have had a similar experience to what I described, where they made it in some way, they got everything that they wanted, and then they were just driven nuts with anxiety about losing it until they lost it. And then they finally found a deeper level of freedom that, like, apparently a lot of them describe, like, I had to go through the experience of You know, building a $100 million company and having the whole thing fall apart to finally, like, now I actually can show up fully in a company in a way I couldn't before.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen that.

Right.

I, and I've also seen entrepreneurs destroy certain revenue streams so that new revenue streams can grow. There's like, there's this interesting pruning cycle that is required for some people. For me, it, it wasn't like that at all. It was. I was dedicated to my self-discovery over everything else. I just dropped everything. I never, I never said I'm gonna build something so I have enough money to be free, right? I, I just went to debt. I just sat in a room and meditated for years and, and focused on my journey, um, not by doing other people's experiences but by doing experiments and running my own experiences. And so So for me, it wasn't that, that wasn't my path, but it definitely sure is a lot of people's paths, right? And some people's paths are going to the very bottom of their pain to get, you know, to find their way out, like to really have an extremely painful life to find their way out. I can't tell you what makes which one happen, but what I can tell you is in all the cases, The thing that's similar is there's an idea that for me to be free, I need to X. I need to have money. I need to not have money. I need to be a wealthy person. I need to not be a wealthy person. I need to be somebody who's in shape, who really takes care of my body. I need to forego my body. I need to— whatever it is, there's some set of ideas. And this is the most important thing about it is that there's some set of ideas that people hold. Everybody who's listening to this holds, if I want to get to freedom, I need to do X, Y, and Z, meditate for 7 years, or, or, you know, have a lot of money, or whatever it is. And, and all of it is not true.

Have a perfect body.

Yeah.

Be healthy. Not, not have physical pain.

Not smoke. Not sleep around. Not gain a friend.

Have skills that are marketable and relevant.

Exactly. Yeah. None of it's true. Your freedom, none of that is required. And there's— and you don't have to look far to figure this out. Like, if you look at Mandela's writings, if you look at how he came out of that prison, like he had the exact opposite of freedom, right? Like he did not have a good diet and he did not have a good exercise routine. He did not have any power. He did not have any privilege. He did not have any wealth. He did not have any Right. All he had was time with himself. And, and, and I've definitely met people who didn't even need the time with themselves. Right. I can like almost hear somebody in the, in the, okay, now I'll just go live in a cave until I have that freedom, which is one way to get there. Don't get me wrong. If that, if you're called to do it, go do it.

I'll go meditate until I'm in debt.

Right, exactly, exactly. But none of that's true. It's, it's actually seen through that thought that is a more direct path to freedom, is seen through the thought that you need the money or you don't need the money.

So, so we're talking about how people think they need X in order to have Y, and we've talked about it in terms of freedom. And what exactly do we mean by that? What are we talking about here when we, when we say that?

That's a really good question. I think there's a conflation between two ideas typically when somebody's talking about freedom. So the one is the freedom to do what you want to do, and that usually seems to be a thought process of resources. Once I have a billion dollars, I'll be free because then I can do the things that I want to do. And then the other freedom is like this feeling of, oh, I can be who I am, and I— and I'm not— nothing's dictating who I am and how I'm going to be, which is another idea of freedom. And, and, but, and then both of them have this emotional experience that we call freedom. And, and so the second is really where the spiritual— like, when the books talk about finding freedom, like, whether it's, you know, the mysticism of Christianity or the Buddhism or whatnot, the, the— that freedom is they're talking about that feeling of like, oh, I'm no longer burdened by any internal or external structure of what I'm supposed to be, and I can just be myself. The, the interesting thing is the first one, the one of like, oh, I have the resources to do what I want to do, it's like there's so much truth to that and there's so much BS to that. So just as an example, like if you and I were living in 1820 and we became the most powerful humans on the planet and we were the wealthiest humans on the planet, we would not have the freedom that we have today, that poor people in America at least have. We can have air conditioning, we can have heat, we can get on an airplane, we can get on a train, we can like go into a store and buy a soda pop or whatever, like have 20 different choices of potato chips. We can get coffee made for us, you know, and 25 different varieties. Like, we have more freedom now than we ever did. And it doesn't make anybody then go, "Okay, I haven't—" Like, there's never enough in that world, right? And I know plenty of billionaires who have what everybody else would call freedom, but they don't have the freedom to buy this company or sell this thing or get to the moon or, you know, live on Mars or whatever. There's always something next that you can't do. It's all relative.

Or they don't allow the freedom— they don't allow themselves the freedom to date the person that they want to date for whatever reason, you know. There's like—

their money's going to be taken. Yeah, right. Yeah.

So yeah, it's like the difference between, between the external freedom and how, like, what we could do in the world and how we interact with the world and then the freedom of how we actually are as we are doing that, interacting and whatever is available to us, right?

And so that— it's that second freedom that in general I think anybody who's doing self-discovery is looking for. I, I will say that they, they might have something with the other form of freedom, but this— like, people who are into self-discovery, that's what they're looking for. They're looking for this feeling of, oh, I can be I think joyful, happy, content in a world where I am being myself despite, where I feel free to be who I want to be. And I'm not constrained, whether it's by the voice in my head, or by the thoughts of the people around me, or by some set of like shoulds that society thinks or whatnot. Like, I think that's the— that's why it's described as freedom. Yeah. And that freedom doesn't require anything. That freedom is a birthright. Like right now, every single person can be themselves. Nothing is stopping you. There's consequences potentially to being yourself. You might not like them and you might choose to not be yourself because you don't want those consequences. That's all true. That doesn't mean you can't be yourself.

I mean, an argument could be made that what's stopping us is our awareness of of it. And, and there's a way that this kind of inverts the kind of the privilege spectrum where when I was in the situation where I was able to just pay for what I wanted to pay for and do what I wanted, there were a lot of things I just wasn't in contact with that became, rather than fears, like you said earlier, anxieties that were present with me every day in, in my face, they were present with me every day in a way that I was able to effectively push away. So I was able to like neatly go out and have the kinds of growth and spiritual development experiences that I might have that served the identity that I wanted to have, even though I thought that I wasn't going for an identity. And then there were the ones that were actually going to give me the deepest growth, and those were the ones that I wasn't as aware of, even though they were like present in my consciousness every day. And so there's, there's like many stories of people who they were not on a personal development or self-discovery journey per se. They just went through some really rough shit. And like Byron Katie, I think, is a really good example of this. If I recall her story correctly, she was just in a room one day and she wouldn't even let herself sleep on the bed. She had to sleep on the floor because she wasn't good enough for the bed in her mind, because she was just in so much shame and struggle about her life. And something just popped. And the way that it popped, in my opinion, is that she became so close to it that she had no separation from that anxiety anymore, and she had to feel it. And so there's like an interesting, interesting thing, like, like you were saying with addicts who have all the resources to continue to enable themselves, that we're— we can consider ourselves lucky when we have experiences that bring us into contact with those internal barriers to seeing ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, the easiest way for me to think about this is like when I was in my 20s, I had no money. So to get around and travel, which I wanted to do, I hitchhiked. And I hitchhiked up to Alaska and I hitchhiked around California. And I got to meet people that I will never get to meet again in my entire life because of what happens by hitchhiking, by not having the money or sitting on the back of a Greyhound bus and meeting the person who, had 13 kids and had an immense amount of freedom in the back of a Greyhound bus. I've met the folks who have seen through this veneer or through the fog of war, but the war is the internal war. They've seen through that fog of war and I've seen them poor, I've seen them rich, I've seen them in shape, I've seen them fat and smoking. I've seen them in all different ways, man. Like, it's— don't get me wrong, if you, if you're overweight and you're smoking, it doesn't feel physically as good. Your, your thoughts probably are different than if you are in shape and you are not smoking. But it doesn't mean that you can't find the freedom. Like, that freedom is there no matter what, and it's just whether you're— whether you can recognize it. And one of the mechanisms to to do is to just like, I think it was Adyashanti talked about this somewhat differently, right? If you look at Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, they went into this huge depression and then popped out, which I've seen happen with a couple folks. But Adyashanti talks about his relationship with Zen and he describes it as like banging his head up against the wall until finally he just like, he just fought it, fought it, fought it until he couldn't fight it anymore. So it's the end of that fight. Whether it's depression or whether it's through hardcore meditation or whether it's by grace or whether it's by just seeing like, oh, this— there's nothing actually in my way, but it's the end of the fight. And with that fight ends an identity too, right? Because a lot of what keeps us in the fight is an identity.

Yeah, I'm thinking of a time when, like, during this period where I was I had more money than I ever had, but I was more anxious about money than I'd ever been. And there was a moment when I nostalgically went back to a moment in my 20s where I was completely broke in Cape Town, South Africa, and I like wrote down my phone number and my email address on napkins and started passing them around to hostels in the area, seeing if anybody would do what— like needed some web work. And I nostalgically looked back on that time from that moment as like, ah, that's when I was truly free. Yeah. And it's interesting. There's a way that I was like clawing back to an old identity at the same time as I was like trying to get out of my current one. And at the, and also there was like a deep recognition of the, like the bullshit of the story that I was in. That I was somehow not free. Yeah.

Yes. Also, there's the thing about money in particular is there's some other aspects of it as well. And this is— can be with any of it. It can be with like, uh, being in shape or having the perfect diet or whatever. There's oftentimes this— an identity in it that will suffer, will require it to dissolve. Meaning if you were with money in this time and you were like this is a burden, this money is a burden, and I deserve the burden, you'd probably still have the money, right? If you felt like this money is a blessing and I deserve the blessing and I feel great about this blessing, you'd probably still have the money. If you felt like, oh, this money is good, but I'm avoidant because of it, or this money is— I'm I'm privileged and I should have a certain amount of guilt around this money, then potentially that's going to be something that allows that money to leave quicker than it would otherwise. And this isn't like a perfect, like, algorithm, but without a doubt, I noticed that people's relationship with the money that they have or they don't have has a big correlation with what happens to the money that they have or they don't have.

Yeah. Yeah. For me, it was— I saw money as freedom. Which was an implication that without it, I wasn't free. And that was the fear.

Yeah. And then the golden algorithm kicks in and you're inviting the feeling that you're running away from. Yeah, so anyways, but this happens with all of it. Like, oh, once I meditate long enough, I will be free is like, is a big trap. Once I have enough money, I'll be free is a big trap. Get it. Once I listen to the guru long enough and I get it, then I'll be free. It's like all of it is just—

or I get their approval, or if I get someone— or I find the partner that loves me as I am, which then once you find a partner that loves you as you are, then all of a sudden you're afraid to lose them and you go through all the— right, all the Golden Algorithm stuff to push them away.

Exactly. Or I have to stop caring whether people love me. To be free. Like, all of it's BS. The truth is you can recognize your freedom right now. Right now there's, there's nothing stopping us from being who we are. There's nothing stopping us from being in touch with ourselves. There's nothing stopping us from, you know, one, you know, it's like another one is once I do enough, uh, courses, once I see enough therapists, once I blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, once I've healed myself, then I can have a relationship.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So it's just not— it's not how it works. And everybody that I know who's found that freedom, they recognize— they might think, oh, here's— this is a good path to get there, but they recognize that nothing's necessary for it. The, the description of it everywhere that you look is is a remembering, or it's a birthright, or it's what you are naturally. It's your nature. Like, it's, you know, the only difference between the teacher and the student is that the teacher sees that it's true, and the teacher about them, whereas potentially the student doesn't see that it's true about them, but they're both free. And so that, like, everywhere you, everywhere you look in any tradition it points to that. The tradition that teaches freedom, it points to the idea nothing's necessary. They might say, hey, meditation is a great way to see this, so sit in a room and meditate. But the core of the teaching is that it's your nature that you're finding, right?

So how can, how can people who are listening to this right now find and explore and uncover, unearth some of these, some of these conditions that they place on their freedom?

They're going to be found in the things that you're working towards with anxiety, the things you beat yourself up for not having, uh, the things that you think are going to make you happy, or the things you're scared to lose. Basically, that's your list. Just write them down.

So it could be, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm trying my best to become the smartest, most intelligent, most eloquent podcast speaker person. That is the least eloquent I've been this podcast.

Then I'll be happy.

Then that could be one of them. Or when people are afraid of losing a capacity or a skill that they've had with aging or with an injury. Yeah. Yeah.

Once I become an NFL star, then I'll be happy. Oh my God, if I lose being an NFL star. So it's really the more core ones. Like, the thing that's crossing my mind is like when the girls were first born, I was deeply scared of losing Tara. I was like, oh my God, like the worst possible thing in the world would be losing Tara. And I'm wondering, like, did I think that Tara was required for my freedom? I didn't. Did I think that my world would be deeply constrained if Tara left? I did. And if Tara, for whatever reason, left, died, whatever, got cancer, if that happened, would I have found a deeper level of freedom? I might have, interestingly, right? What's interesting to me is, and I haven't really ever considered it till now, is that there's a group of people who, when I meet them, I say, "Oh, you've you really dedicated your life to serving somebody, like taking care of somebody, like wiping someone's butt for years. I can tell, right? And oftentimes, they had a kid who was born with disabilities that they had to care for. They lived with a parent for multiple years taking care of them or some version of that. One person who's coming to mind right now, her husband got MS and couldn't move and she took care of him for a decade. And, I can, I get, I can, I can see that in a person because they're so soft. There is just like a gentleness to them. There is a, like, there's something has been worn down, um, through that process of— it's an interesting thing that the thing that we fear often can provide another level of freedom for us, even the things that, that don't seem appealing at all.

And it's an interesting kind of recognition that just because there's another potential freedom available doesn't mean you need to dive into like, okay, I'm just gonna go like have a spinal cord injury now so that I can go through that experience and find the freedom, which I know many people with spinal cord injuries. And it's a harrowing experience and they often find a lot of freedom that they didn't expect. And you know, that's like not something I'm gonna go do to find my freedom.

Exactly, and unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah, but the idea that once I change, once I get out of a situation, once blah, blah, blah, doesn't mean you can't leave a situation that's unhealthy for you, but the idea that you're gonna be free once you blah, blah, blah, it just doesn't, it doesn't ever pan out. And all anybody has to do is look back in their life and there's something that you thought would give you the freedom that you got that didn't give you the freedom. Whether it was the woman that you finally found and then the money or the acknowledgement from the parent or the whatever it was, we can all see the freedom didn't last very long. I think the freedom is more about the fact that the desire for something to make you free went away. So it's like, oh my God, once I have money and then you get the money and there's this short little period of time where you're like, I got it. And you don't have any other want that has spun up yet, no new demand for you to fulfill to get your freedom. And then you're like, oh great, and that's actually where the freedom is. And then 5 days later, it's like, oh shit, I have to like now really understand my emotional world to become free. And off you go on your next, on your next thing, right? So it's, it's oftentimes those like moments in life when you've accomplished something that the, the joy in it isn't that you've accomplished it, it's that there's nothing left for you to accomplish for a little while. Like, you can just revel in the moment of life, of being alive.

Yeah, what that brings up for me is the path of following your wants rather than your shoulds. It's like when you follow your wants, you get to have those experiences. You get to have the experience of getting what you want and finding that it wasn't actually what you imagined. And if you don't let yourself follow it, then you get to continue to have the illusion, the story That if I got this, then I would be free. Reminds me of my favorite Jim Carrey quote, which is, I'm going to paraphrase, I'll probably get it wrong, but I hope that everybody could find success and fame so that they can find out that that's not what it's all about. Right, exactly.

The interesting piece that, to me, the most interesting piece about this is that at some point when you, when you're going down this road, you get to this question, which is The easiest way to put it, there's a thousand ways that people ask this question, but the way I'm gonna ask the question is, if I am awake, if I'm free, then I should be happy to live on top of a disco, right? But then people who feel awake and free don't tend to live on top of a disco, right? And so it's like, should I live on top of the disco? Was that the best path to my freedom? Should I not live on top of the disco? Is that my best freedom? Like, like, should I keep on being with this relationship that's somewhat abusive and like a little dysfunctional? Is that my path to freedom? Or should I go and try to find a better relationship? That my path to freedom, right? So it's this question of like, should I endure some sort of pain, or should I, or should I get— avoid the pain and go find something else? And It's a lovely, lovely question. And my answer for when people ask that is, whatever you're doing is the right answer, right? If you're living on top of the disco, that's the right answer. If you've left the disco, that's the right answer. It's like that both of them are paths to freedom. What, like, what are you going to choose to do? I think the— and, and both of them have a problem, like enduring abuse is like, like, if you look at Mandela, Mandela wasn't like— they opened the door and they weren't— he wasn't like, okay, I'm just gonna stay in here. He's like, yeah, I'm out, I'm gonna go like run the country, right? It wasn't enduring, he wasn't choosing it. So that obviously enduring abuse is telling yourself that this is not— you're not worthy. But that's exactly how Byron Katie found it. And then avoidance you know, is the alcoholic, um, the alcoholic who can't recover because they have all this wealth? There's no good answer to that question.

Yeah, it's like every path just leads to different epiphanies. Yeah. And different people need different epiphanies. Like, each of us has a different history and a different set of— a different shape of fears and anxieties and hopes, dreams. Images. And if we follow the evolution that just comes up through us, we're bound to run into those perfect epiphanies for us, for our particular anxieties and our particular—

and, and trusting yourself makes it a little bit quicker. Like, it's like, oh, I trust that I can listen to myself and know which way to go. It makes the whole journey a little bit quicker. I remember this story, it was like a Ramana Maharishi story, I think. And somebody comes to him and is like, "Should I give up being a householder and go and join a monastery?" And he's like, "No." And the guy's like, "You don't know me. How the hell, what makes you think you can say that?" He got defensive. Of course he got defensive because he's taking away the guy's identity, which is, "Should I, should I not? Should I, should I not?" Totally identified that way. Ramana's like, "Nope." guy gets angry. And, and Ramana's response was, you should be sitting here asking me a question is what you should be doing, right? And, and, and that's like somewhat unsatisfactory, somewhat points to like the freedom that you're looking for is in this moment. Don't like— what, what makes you leave the moment? Because it's right here, right now. And so there's something in that, but there's also something about, hey, what's, what's making you not trust yourself in in this moment? What's making you not say, "Oh, this is exactly where I'm supposed to be. I'm supposed to be having a $100 million company worried about money. I'm supposed to be like, this is the place." And I don't mean that like you're supposed to be like in a magical thinking kind of way. There seems to be some sort of interesting thing that occurs around like we find ourselves where we're supposed to be. But I mean it more of like if that's your mindset, if your mindset is like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be, this is where the opportunity is found to learn about myself, to grow, to lean in, then that's the most productive idea on how to face a moment, no matter what the moment is. Like, yeah, it's a lot more productive than I shouldn't fucking be here, you know. It's like, I should be here and potentially be here so I can learn to leave, right? Okay, that's fine. But like What are you here for?

And this person was supposed to bring their indecision to Ramana Maharshi so that it could be reflected back to them. Like, they were gonna continue using that pattern until eventually it ran into some sort of a wall, some sort of a mirror. And so that was exactly the question that they needed to ask.

Right. Yeah, exactly. And maybe they needed to get the answer 10 years later. Yeah, you know, but, but the, the, it's a much more productive thing to say, oh, right now is the lesson that I need to learn, than it is to say, where am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to be doing? Should I— what if I lose the money? What do I need to get there? I need X, Y, and Z to get there. Far more productive to just be like, oh, The thing that I need to get there is presenting itself to me right now, this moment, not the next moment. And so the, the, the other, the other thing is it's like, this is like the setup of life too, right? It's, um, once I graduate from school, then I'll get into the right college. And once I graduate from college, I'll get into the right job. And then once I get the right job, I'll have enough money and I'll get the right, I'll get the right girlfriend slash boyfriend and you know, and then I'll have kids, and then, like, a lot of my clients have done all that stuff, you know. Like, it's like it didn't pan out. It doesn't pan out. And I met people who've meditated for 20 years, and then once I've meditated for 20 years, where the thing that they're looking for is right there. It's always been there. It's always— or right here. It's always been right here. You can't, you can't avoid it if you stay in this moment. It's like it's unavoidable. Right now I can be who I want to be, I can say what I want to say, I can do what I want to do, and I can be in contact with myself. And like that, like, that's where the freedom lies.

But I'm wearing a headset in front of a podcast mic and I have to pee. How can I possibly be free?

It's a good point. Nobody's free because everybody has to pee. Once I have to stop peeing, then I can be free. Once I finally control my body, then I won't— then I won't be told what to do by my biology, goddamn it.

And scene. And scene. Is there anything else you want to add? Now that feels right. Great. Awesome. Thank you everybody for listening. Pleasure, always.

I like that we ended with P. That's good.

Yeah, yeah, do that more often. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with somebody. We love that. That's how people find our work. That's how people find the podcast. And till next time. Awesome. Ciao. Bye.