Self-Love, Healthy Selfishness, and Inner Healing with Blake Bauer

It takes some time to clean that pan to like scrub off the stain. And so every day that you value yourself and you treat yourself with love, you're washing off that stain, like Ron Dass calls it, polishing the mirror instead of adding another layer to the stain. And so the secret is to stop hurting yourself in the present and stop letting yourself get hurt in the present. Which means you need to learn how to love and value yourself practically from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. And that is the key to forgiveness.

Hey there friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than a star combo of Ashish Katari and Anil Ramjiani who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. Get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the squad.

Hey Happiness Squad, it's great to have you with Ashish and I as we continue to discuss with our guests who are industry leaders helping individuals and organizations unlock their inner happiness and flourishing. Do you practice healthy selfishness? Imagine a spectrum. On one side there is pleasing others and on the other there's being self absorbed. But what can we do to give ourselves the healthy amount of love both inwards and out so that we can do what we are here for, enjoying being alive. We discuss this and much more with our next guest. Meet Blake Bauer, author of youf Were Not Born to Suffer. Blake's expertise has helped thousands worldwide who could not find lasting solutions from conventional methods. His pioneering work focuses on practical and unconditional self love as the key to healing, fulfilling life's purpose, fostering love for others and unlocking personal and professional potential. Drawing from personal triumphs over suffering, Blake shares his highly effective strategies with for mental, emotional and physical well being. The ensuing conversation is beautiful and packed with conscious, expanding reflections around how we betray and compromise ourselves, harbor anger and resentment, and much more. There are so many tips shared throughout, but stay tuned till the end when Blake shares his secret to forgiveness so that you don't have to suffer. Please join Ashish and I as we welcome Blake to the Happiness Squad and rewire for Happiness together.

Foreign. It's so nice to be with you. Yeah, you know it's amazing, Blake. It's. I still remember so fondly, you know, our first time when we met right. Just at the coffee shop and I was having a conversation with somebody else around hardwired for happiness. And we were going on and on for like close to an hour. And then I would be done and then you tap me on the shoulder and, and you said, hey, you know, I just overheard you how much the work resonated. And you said, you know, you've been on a similar journey and you shared with me your book, which I've loved. So it's just delighted to have you, another kindred spirit, another journeyman who's on this, you know, path towards helping people unlock their best selves, Blake. So it's such a joy to have you share your insights and your hard earned wisdom and love for yourself and for others with our listeners. So thank you.

Thank you so much. It's an honor. Thank you.

And I know you've been on a big journey, Blake. And so our first question, we always ask this to our listeners is what does happiness mean to you and how has that changed from your younger years till now?

What a great and big question. I think I'm sure you can relate. You know, when I was younger, I definitely believed that happiness was outside of me somewhere. And so I spent a lot of years searching for that through a few different means. One of them was definitely love. I think I thought that I would, you know, find happiness in terms of a woman and romantic love and falling in love. And oftentimes there was a lot of joy and a lot of happiness in that for me. But as a young man, I. I had this habit of looking for love outside of myself because I never learned how to love myself. So I never learned how to give myself the love that I was unconsciously seeking romantically as a means to happiness. And then I obviously realized later in life that a lot of us do that. Yep. And then I think the other big theme was, you know, as an 18 year old young man, the only framework that I had for happiness and success in our world had to do with money. And that somehow achieving some financial wealth and freedom equaled happiness. And I grew up around a lot of people who had very self destructive and unhealthy relationships to money. And so I had a big contradiction inside myself because my, you know, my instinct was that money was not the path to happiness. But my conditioning was very much tied up with this belief that you needed a lot of money to be happy. And so it took me a long Time to realize that that wasn't the whole truth. So obviously, we can unpack that as much as you want.

Yeah, I love both of those. Right. I think that's so true for so many people. Right. Which is for love. We look outside. We want to be with others. We want to see our worth in others. We want to be respected. We want to be loved. We want to be recognized. And. Which is all fine and good if you already rooted in that, if you do it from a rooted place, but to seek it out, because I feel empty within, is what is the cause of suffering for so many out there? And then, yeah, I mean, even the second point you highlighted, you know, we pick up the script from a young, early age around, listen, you need money to be money and success to be happy, so go crush your soul and suffer. You know, it was funny. I reminded Blake, actually, of this. Of this story which I heard from Emma Seppala. She's one of the happiness researchers. And, you know, I believe. And in one of our courses that she was teaching, I think this was at Stanford, one of the top schools on happiness, one of her students came to her and said, listen, I can't do this course. And she said, why? She's like, because what? Your teaching is completely against what I've ever picked up. She said, what do you mean? She said, my parents, when I joined said, if you want to be happy, you have to be successful. And to be successful, you have to work hard. When I asked them, how would I know I'm working hard? They said, when you are suffering. So if you're not suffering, then you're not working hard enough, and you're not gonna be successful and you're not gonna be happy. But, you know, that story is so true for so many people. They feel they have to work the long hours, they have to take on the stress. They have to do all of this because that's how it is meant to be. You know, apples fall down from the tree. Humans are born to suffer. And that is exactly what you target in your book. Say we are not born to suffer. What are we born for, Blake?

Absolutely. Well, I think that's the perfect question, because I think it's two different worlds. When you have a sense of purpose and you work hard versus having no sense of purpose, and you're working hard just for financial means or ego gratification, to accumulate accomplishments and degrees and medals, metaphorically. But in terms of what? At this point in my life, you know, I spent over 20 years asking the question, what's the Purpose of life, and what's the purpose of my life if we didn't come here to suffer? And the conclusions I came to were that we came here to enjoy being alive, to figure out how to do that in a healthy way. We came here to learn about love, and we came here to learn to love ourselves in a healthy way on every level, so that we could become capable of offering healthy love to the people around us and to the environment around us. So we are not a toxic parasitic cell in the human organism, but a healthy, functional, positive cell in the human organism, whether you're in a family, an organization, a relationship, or just alone with yourself, that you could just enjoy being alive and know how to take care of this miracle. Really, I think this is one thing that we miss. To recognize the miracle of your life, of your existence, and to take care of it. And when you do that, you're then able to take care of the miracles around you, like your loved ones, your children, your partner. And then you approach whatever you give your time to on a daily basis, in particular, your work from that perspective. And if you can't approach your work from that perspective because it's so soul crushing or meaningless to you, then you need to make a shift and find something that has more meaning and purpose and is more authentic for you and channel all that hard work and all that discipline into something that really serves your inner growth.

You know, you just said something, Blake, by the way, that just triggered something in me. So Anil, I want to pass you, pass it to you for the next question around Blake's origin story, because it's a beautiful one. But I just want to say this. I think there is a way in which you phrased it. And I invite my listeners to rewind it and listen to you again and see if it comes up for you. You used a word so we can stop being the parasitic human organism or human, you know, parasitic being. And that really kind of stuck with me. And the reason it stuck with me is if you think about the relationships most humans right now have with nature, it is predominantly an exploitative relationship, right? That's what parasites do. They cause the death of other cells so they can live on. And that is what we humans are doing to every other species, plant or animal out there. We have become parasitic. We are acting in that way. We are not living here to make a positive difference. So many, right, we're just living out of this fear and kind of running, running, running. But the nature is consumption, nature is exploitation. And a lot of people say we should care about X, Y and Z. But I love what you phrased and how you phrased it, that that shift is not possible unless the shift comes from within. Unless the shift comes from a fundamental realization that we are worthy as we are, we are loved as we are, and we don't need to conquer, control or put into compliance the external world. In effect, we can learn to be not parasitic, but true symbiotic. Where we grow and through our life we help others grow and be better, beautiful.

And I know we're going to dive into the concept of self love, but I'm sure you can relate on your journey. As you learn to love yourself and take good care of yourself, you begin to realize that you're not separate from anyone or anything, including the environment. And so when you start to really have strong self care and you think about the quality of the air you're breathing, for example, you start to see there's no separation between your lungs and the trees that give you oxygen or the water you're drinking or the food you're eating or what you're giving your children right on a daily basis. And so with self love actually comes the blossoming of transcending the separate selfish self. And you start to really feel and see and perceive your connection to everyone and everything. Which is a paradox that actually through self love you can get to selflessness. You can transcend the self through self love. So I'd love to we can go deeper into that. But yeah, I very much resonate with what you described.

In listening to the two of you, I think it's what I find fascinating is we talk about the outward, right? Like the effect that we as humans have in this rat race that we're in. We were obviously parasites on what's happening outside, right. Nature. Despite needing to have that symbiotic relationship as that you brought up. On the flip side, we're also hammering ourselves on the inside. It's a bit of a double whammy, right? Harm on the outside, harm on the inside. And we're not taught as something Ashish and I, we've spoken about. At what point do you recognize and realize that you've not been taught how you can actually give yourself that self love, how you can actually look back inside and find, you know, and I love what you shared earlier, Blake, around the fundamentals. Like we're here to enjoy being alive, to be loved, to love and just be healthy across all levels in order to love back. And you know, I'm sure when you reflect back on Your story in your life. When I was actually looking to get to know you before this conversation, I was like shocked, man. I mean, where you are now, what you've done, where you've come from is just. It inspired me. And I would love for you to share with our listeners your origin story and how it has shaped you to who you are today. Someone who's not parasitic, someone who's no longer beating himself up, but actually living a very joyful, loving and caring life.

Oh, thank you, Anil. Well, feel free to cut me off at any point if I start to ramble, but I'll try and give you the most succinct summary. So, like a lot of people, I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family with a lot of suffering and I grew up around a lot of drug addiction. And then, you know, I had a lot of psychological and emotional pain that I never learned how to talk about or ask for help with. So as a young man, I self medicated and I got heavily into drugs and alcohol and really abused drugs and alcohol in my teenage years. And I was arrested a number of times before I was the age of 18. I played sports growing up and I played football in high school and I was co captain of the varsity football team with two of my best friends and we all had offers to play college football. And then one night in the summer going into senior year, I was out partying and on a bunch of Xanax, so prescription medication that I didn't have a prescription for, a lot of alcohol, a lot of cannabis. And I was driving, which I had a habit of doing. And so three o' clock in the morning, I'm driving home, I get to a freight train in the middle of the night. I pull the car up to the guardrail and I was delirious, like literally two minutes from the house. And I was so tired, I just put my car in park and thank God I put my car in park and I put my head back and I fell asleep and I woke up to police knocking on the window. And I rolled down the window and I said, excuse me officer, was I driving too slow? And he goes, son, you've been sitting here for at least an hour with your car running and your lights on, you know, in front of the train tracks. And so I was arrested. I got a pretty bad dui. I had possession of all those substances with me and then my coach later found out, kicked me off the football team. When I was at the peak playing my senior season, I lost my offers to play college Football. And so at the age of 18, I went from being very arrogant and thinking I was invincible and having this huge ego to spiraling downhill to being very tortured mentally and emotionally. I became suicidal, very insecure, very paranoid. So here I am at 18, just completely sabotaging everything I cared about, everything I loved, and everything I identified with. So who I believed Blake to be, I completely shattered. And underneath that arrogant facade was a very tortured, insecure, traumatized soul and, you know, little boy, really from a traumatic upbringing. And so then at 18, though, is the pressure of what am I going to do with my life? So I'm getting ready to leave high school at the same time, and so I can't even wake up and function or think straight, let alone have any clarity around what to study or how to make a living or what am I going to do with my life. But the pressure, which I'm sure you guys can relate to, felt like, you know, a 10 out of 10. I mean, that pressure weighing down on me every day to have life figured out was intense. And so I basically began every day from that period on, starting the day with two questions. I would wake up tortured, mentally and emotionally anxious, confused, depressed, and. And say to myself, how do I fix this? Like, life is not meant to be so painful, and I am not okay, but how do I get okay? How do I heal this? And then what the hell am I doing here? Like, what's the purpose of life? What's the purpose of my life? And so I move forward from the age of 18 just trying to answer those two questions. And that pursuit led me to five different universities where I studied psychology, nutrition, philosophy, all the organic sciences. And then I went to two different schools for traditional Chinese medicine, so acupuncture, and Oriental herbal medicine. And I got very much into yoga and then into meditation, into training my mind. So different kinds of spiritual practices. And then, like, you both, and like a lot of seekers, I'm sure, who are going to listen to this. You know, I read every book I could find on self help and personal growth and spirituality and God and all the religious texts, just trying to understand, you know, what is actually going on here and how do I feel some clarity and some trust in this experience that I'm having. And so eventually, I had a series of realizations where I could see that my entire educational journey, my entire healing journey, my entire personal development journey, all the money I spent on my education, all the workshops I did, all the books I bought, all the gurus I sought out, I was really just doing two things which were the same thing. I was looking for love because I was looking for the love that I knew would heal me eventually. I was looking for the love I never got as a child because my parents didn't know how to love themselves and could only love me to the degree that they were functional and healthy in themselves. And I was looking for myself. In other words, I was looking for the love that I am. And to get to that truth, I had to learn how to love myself to one, heal all the damage I had done from a young age, and two, to stop looking outside of myself in the present. I had to learn how to love myself in the present and give myself everything I didn't get and everything I was seeking. And so from all my training, I could see how disease grows in the body and the mind as a result of us never learning how to love ourselves as children. And it was just, it just all made so much sense. We never learned how to take care of our mind. We never learned how to express our emotions and our needs in a healthy way. We never learned how to take care of our body. And instead we learned to betray ourselves and compromise ourselves to survive. Our family, our friends, school, then the work environment, often even a marriage. And so a lot of people are living their life betraying themselves, rejecting themselves, abandoning themselves, and then they get sick or they cheat on their wife or their husband, or someone cheats on them or they have an accident and then they ask what happened? Why did this happen? And so the worldview that I encourage is that what if everything is always teaching us about love? And what, what if all of our suffering is a cry from our soul, from our body and from life, asking us to love and value and take much better care of ourselves. And so I've spent the last 20 years just trying to share that perspective.

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You know Blake, and it's so true, right? Which is there are people who constantly are hustling externally for worthiness and love by betraying themselves, in your words, to fit in. Right. Even though I might feel something differently, I'm going to like just give in for my spouse or even though I don't want to put in that extra hour, I'm just going to sacrifice something else I care about to do that. Because I don't want to be fired, I want to get promoted. I want to get to something else. And then there is the other group that are so focused on self. Right. And I want my listeners to kind of make sure they understand what you're proposing is not just focus on yourself and be selfish. That is not what you're saying. But there are a lot of people who are on the other side who might go like, yes, that's awesome. I've been selfish. I only care about myself. I put my will onto others. I'm good. I am on the right path. No, that is not what you're saying. I think what you are talking about and I want to in my next question ask you specifically how you invite our listeners to do that. How do you overcome fear and love yourself back to happiness, confidence and peace? How do you do that? From that place of center, from that place of balance and how that place is actually different from those two polarities. Pleasing others or completely being self absorbed, where what others care about doesn't even show up.

Absolutely. So I like to frame the idea that I actually think everybody's selfish and that it's intrinsic to nature, both all of nature, but then human nature. But where we get caught up is that I think there's two kinds of selfishness, which is healthy selfishness, which is what we're talking about here, versus unhealthy selfishness. And so because selfishness is often associated with this unhealthy form of selfishness, typically where we repress our emotions, we're kind of toxic. And so we become selfish in a way that's destructive to our environment. So that gives self love and self care a bad name. Whereas you can frame self love and self care as a healthy form of Selfishness, because that selfishness is intrinsic to human nature. And by doing that, you fill your cup and we'll talk about how you do that. But from a big perspective, that's how you actually fill your cup. So you don't burn out, right? You don't become resentful, you don't become manipulative. And then you can sustain the giving that you give to your family, to your friends, to your career, right? Without burning out. So how do we cultivate that, that healthy selfishness? And then I think too, one thing that popped into my head, Ashish, as you were talking is I think one of the key factors is you're taking care of yourself, you're loving yourself, you're being true to yourself, and you're a giver instead of a taker, right? I think being a giver versus being a taker is one of those like cherries on the top, right? So you've cultivated this healthy selfishness, but then what do you do with it? Do you give back or do you just take from your environment? Right. And so it is really important to emphasize that giving. So did you want me to dive into some of the practicalities of this healthy selfishness?

Yeah, go for it, please.

Again, just to drive the metaphor home, if you think about an apple tree, because you use that metaphor, and I love the apple tree, the apple tree has to selfishly take from the environment, right? What it needs, it has to. Its roots have to take from the ground, its leaves have to take from the environment and from the sun, right? It selfishly meets its own needs. And then what happens when it does that? It grows in this strong, beautiful tree that provides oxygen and food and shelter, right? It has so much to give because it selfishly took what it needed, right? Just what it needed. And then it gave back, right? And then I think most of us have just never learned these healthy self care and self love practices to be like the apple tree and keep our cup full so that we could give for generations, you know, not just a day, but for an entire lifetime and maybe eventually for your children and their children and you know, et cetera. So I've spent the last 20 plus years for myself figuring out how do you actually do this in a healthy, practical way. And I did that because I needed to learn that personally, not just for some intellectual pursuit. And then over time I started to share that with people. And I'm sure you can understand because none of this is just an intellectual pursuit, right? We have to figure this out for ourselves to actually be of Service to other people. And so I break down self love into specific habits and I can start to share some of them and then we can dive into whichever ones you want. Learning to express yourself honestly and kindly is one of the pillars of what I share. Because a lot of us just never learned emotional self awareness and presence to be able to name and identify what we're feeling in the present. So a lot of times people feel angry or they feel sad, or they feel overwhelmed and they don't even know how to say I feel overwhelmed or I feel sad, I feel angry. And we've all learned this very toxic other language. So when I feel overwhelmed or I feel angry, I might say F you or F off or I'll swear at you or I'll call you names. But that's really code for me saying I feel hurt and I feel angry. And we just never learned this non violent form of communication. And so then we create this whole mess because we don't know what we're feeling, we don't know how to express it, and we don't know how to express it in healthy ways where we actually push away and hurt the people we love the most. And then this creates a whole other layer of mess that we have to try and clean up, which is actually very hard to clean up. Because when you hurt the people you love with your words and your actions, it's hard to take that back. And it really sabotages a lot of marriages, relationships, parent child relationships. And we don't realize that our words are actually shaping our reality. And there's a quote I love and I don't know who said it, and it goes, the words you speak become the house you live in. The words you speak become the house you live in. And so we have to learn to express ourselves not only honestly, but kindly so we don't hurt and push away.

The people that we care about.

Yeah, and that's such an important skill. You know, this notion of giving brought to life this, this research and that Adam Grant in organizational settings, you know, Blake talked about. And he found, you know, he wrote a book which is quite influential, called Give and Take, where he found, you know, most of the people are matchers. But givers, if you look at givers in an organization, what he found was often the givers made the organization better, but were usually in the bottom performing, overrepresented in the bottom performing, performing individuals. What he also found was givers were also overrepresented in the top performers. Okay. So it wasn't the nature of the Fact, whether you give or not, which was the problem. The problem was being able to set the boundaries, being able to kind of really take care of themselves, really being able to self love rather than give from a place of seeking wor that's belonging and fitting. Right? So I mean I loved what you had to, what you shared that this is the kind of good selfishness, right? You have to take care of yourself but you have to be oriented towards giving. And I think that's one, one powerful way to kind of keep it, keep it oriented. And then I wonder what reflections come up for you and a question you might have, Blake.

Yeah, no, sure, I'm reflecting. This has been quite powerful, Blake, what you and Ashish have just said. I think, you know, there are a couple of things that stick out to me but I'm going to talk about first. We all know the difference between unhealthy and healthy. And I think my invitation to our listeners is take a minute and just pause and think of a moment where you did something selfish and you know, imagine you're the apple tree, you know, are you the one that's taking in and taking in and then imagine are you subsequently giving back? And I feel that that's something that we should process because I feel we find that going back to what we started with earlier, we like to suffer, right? We work hard, we play hard, we make money, we want to. But at some point it's like we almost think that we need to spend money in order to make ourselves happy. We need to buy things for ourselves and we almost sometimes overlook that it's actually not about how much do we accumulate, how much do we aggregate. And I think that's that unhealthy selfishness that we all have an ability if we just give ourselves space to reflect on. And I think the second pie is. And Ashish, this is in the book, right? When it comes to self awareness understanding, I feel like it's not I'm angry, you're not angry, you feel angry and that's a feeling that will pass. So again, another invitation to Blake's point. You know, we may not have been taught that language on how to express ourselves kindly and really understand how we're feeling. But just take a moment. The next time you say I'm angry, just change it to I feel angry knowing that that feeling of anger will pass and you'll be wiser on the back of it. And I think that's then when that self love, that self care, that healthy selfishness can start to play in and I think just on the back of that, I think when we think about forgiveness, I personally will raise my hand and say, Blake Ashish, I sometimes struggle to forgive myself.

Right.

I also struggle sometimes to forgive others. You know, I hold on to resentment, and sometimes I might do something to someone else out of resentment for someone else that I'm actually more angry. And I. I think, you know, Blake, this is something that you've talked to us about. What is the true key to forgiveness from your perspective? And how does one either forgive or learn to forgive?

Beautiful. Such a beautiful question. So I'll give. I've got two primary practices for forgiveness. And so the first one is more common. But for some of the listeners, if they've never done it, this is one of the keys, which is I would make a list of all the important people in your life, like your mother, your father, your spouse, an ex spouse, and write a letter to everybody in your life that you've never cleared the air with. So there might be people who in your past you've hurt and you've never made amends with. So it's really healing to write them a letter and say you're sorry and explain yourself. And this first draft of these letters that I'm describing, I would encourage you to think in terms of not giving the letters to these people. So you don't filter it. Basically, you just write without having to be perfect. So I'd write a letter to everybody you've ever hurt. Okay. Then I would write a letter to everybody that you feel has wronged you or hurt you, and then get all that hurt and anger out of your chest, literally out of your mind, out of your body by writing to the people you feel have wronged you, hurt you, betrayed you. And you don't have to do it perfect, just get it out. So you can be nasty, you can be mean, because you're not going to give this to anybody. And then once you write these two brackets of letters to people you've hurt and to people that have hurt you, you, then I would. And you can also do this to people who have passed away. So if you have a parent or a loved one who's passed away, still write the letter because it will help you heal. Get this out of your chest. Some people even believe you can still communicate with a loved one after they've left, based on your belief system. And then after you get this first draft out, that's messy. For the people who are still alive and in your life, I encourage you to write a polished letter that Uses these I feel I need statements. It's important to me that. So nonviolent communication is the key word which you can.

Grounded in how you feel versus what others have made you. Right? You did this. Rather than here's how I feel. It's important. So it's also nest. Judgmental.

Exactly. So let's say we're brothers, right? And if I say you're. This. As soon as I start saying you and I start pointing the finger, whoever I'm pointing the finger at, their ego is going to pop up. They're going to become defensive, right? So there's no room for understanding when you go on the attack. Whereas if you're. If I'm your brother and you actually care about me and I say, you know, I feel really hurt right now. I feel really angry with what just happened. I'm allowing space for you to actually demonstrate that you care about me because I'm not attacking you. So when you go on the attack and you say you. You block the ability for your loved ones to show you that they actually care because you're triggering their ego and their defensiveness. And so the secret is to leave the space by saying, I feel hurt right now by what you just said. You can say that I need some space, you know, instead of get the f away from me or leave me the F alone or blah, blah, or you're such a selfish. Blah, blah, blah. You know, I don't know if you allow swearing on the. On the podcast.

I love that. Right, because you're grounding in yourself and, you know, for our listeners, you know, I love the notion that, you know that I love the notion of letters and journaling. You know what? I would build on that, Blake, and I would love your reflections on it as, you know, somebody who's been on this path for 20 years. Sometimes I feel even before writing letters, right? Like for some people, because these are such deeply somatic, felt held kind of things, especially over so many years. Yell it out, act it out, right? Put a photo, get out there, close your room, and shout if you need to, but don't like, because then you write, you're still. It's a cognitive exercise. But the idea is, you know, oftentimes we hurt because we hold on to the. We hold on to those feelings, right? And they never pass through our body. Allow. Give space, act out, but don't act out with the person. Act out by yourself, and then write it right in the same vein of what you wrote. Even you can record it, right? So you play it back and you write it. So that's the next notion of involving your body, not just thinking it, but writing it. So when you're shouting, when you're acting it out, right, you kind of throw your hands up, you're using your body. But again with words, when you write, you're writing it, you're using your body. So I love that element, you know, And I don't know if you've kind of tried that modality with your clients.

Yeah, I think that that's great advice is just the somatic, you know, whether it's a punching bag or boxing classes or they have these. What are those rooms called? Where you can go break stuff.

Yep.

And that's all really.

But that's awesome.

Yeah, yeah. Where you can go just use a bat or something and just break plates and break stuff. And you can pay actually to go do this, this. And so that. I think that's a huge. That's very important. That brings up just a big topic, Ashish, which is just all kinds of physical therapies to help you release trauma that's related to what you need to forgive in the body. Like. Like massage, like deep breath work. Right. Even yoga, the practice I teach, qigong, all these physical practices can help you release the stored hurt, anger that's tied up with what you need to forgive. And then that kind of brings me to the second secret. And this is something that is very special to me and at the core of my work, which is that, and this is not written about enough, which is that this is the true secret to forgiveness, which is we have to learn and then practice how to not hurt ourselves in the present and not let ourselves get hurt anymore in the present. Because. So if you don't know how to love yourself right now, that means your habits throughout the day are hurting you. And you're allowing yourself to be mistreated and hurt by other people, which means in the present, you're creating and allowing more that you later have to forgive yourself and others for. Which is why the secret is to learning how to love and take good care of yourself in the present. And so when you learn how to do that with your thoughts, with your words, with your habits, your lifestyle habits, your eating habits, your sleep habits, your relational habits, your work habits, that self care and that truth and that love on a daily basis literally washes out, literally washes out the pain that's stored in your body. I recently used the metaphor of think about like you've been cooking in the kitchen and you have a pan that's burnt, you know, like you've fried something and like you've got to. It takes some time to clean that pan to like scrub off the stain. And so every day that you value yourself and you treat yourself with love, you're washing off that stain, like Ron Dass calls it, polishing the mirror instead of adding another layer to the stain, to the pain. And so the secret is to stop hurting yourself in the present and stop letting yourself get hurt in the present. Which means you need to learn how to love and value yourself practically in every situation in a relationship from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. And that is the key to forgiveness.

There's a lot there and I want to go backwards. Just something I'm taking away from this personally. Before we maybe leave with what practices or what tips you'd offer to our listeners, I'm thinking about what you both just shared of. There are exercises you can do. Breaking things, yelling at things, punching a punching bag. But Ashish, what you said earlier as well is really important. It's reflecting. It's taking that time to write down and really reflect and understand what feeling went through you, what emotion went through you, what does that mean to you? And I think that the fact, Blake, you just mentioned how it's really important that we learn how to love and take care of ourselves in the present. Just repeat that secret. I think it's only possible if you really are reflecting and understanding. If you just do the action of getting your frustration and your anger out. Okay, great. That's half of it. But the other half is what does that mean? And how do I better myself in the present as a result of it? And that's something that's kind of sticking with me. Ashish, what do you think?

Yeah, look, I mean, it's also, you know, at the heart of forgiveness is really important. It's one of the in master your emotions hardwired for happiness. Practices right is a core part of the nine part frame. The piece that I would build is the center practice, which is the practice of self awareness. Right. And journaling allows you to do that, but you also have to actually go before you forgive. Start to also think about the belief we have about the wrong that was done. Point number one, was it really a wrong right? Or is that just how I'm interpreting it? What's my grounding assessment that I'm using to determine whether there was a wrong or not? There's a second part of it which is what was my role? We always like to point the finger out, right? But I always like to say when you point a finger out, you have three fingers pointing back at you. Right. Somebody wisely once said, so what is our role? We are fundamentally, we always live in a state of inter being, which means we always have a role even when there is a hurt that has happened. Except in the case of sexual trauma and other places where we truly don't, you know, have that control. But in work settings, oftentimes if somebody does something, there is always, you know, we always have, most of the time there is a role that we could have played that we can play. So recognizing our role, I think the third recognizing also the role that somebody played and separating what they did with who they are, because through that we can be compassionate, right? Through that, we can have compassion for that other person too. So I think that awareness and getting curious about how we see the world, what we are defining as a herd, becomes equally important. So that when we do write, when we do actually start to make a shift, that shift is authentic and it is truly from a place of connection rather than from a place of I'm the victim, but now I'm going to be, I'm going to take action to fix this. Right.

Do you know, and Ashish, just, I want to take a moment here. If you were to think about the last time you were angry or you were resentful, let's say that took up 60 minutes of your day, 90 minutes of your day or a full day, just throwing this out there. I've been there where I've carried something with me for hours, if not days. What you just described, ashish, took maybe five, maybe 10 minutes. And I think this is where we're kind of saying when you start to build these practices, when you give yourself the space and you jot it down, imagine how that five or 10 minutes can save yourself hours or days of resentment, of pain, of anger that you're dragging with you. Not only that, you're passing that on to other people. So my invitation to our listeners is, hey, take those few minutes, build that habit. Take that moment to write it down and reflect as Ashish just laid it out. And Blake, as you've laid out several examples, and I think that's there's some real power there. And I think just as we look to wrap up, you know, I know you shared a number of oops, sorry.

And I would say and start now because that element of start in the present is a really important. Because we love to procrastinate, right? We love to say yes, I'm going to do this over the weekend. I'm going to do it over a vacation right now. I just need to go through this. But I'll do it later. No. And when we talk about the present moment, every breath is the moment. Not at the end of the day. Every breath is a moment to start to forgive ourselves and to forgive the other, start to love ourself. Every moment, every breath, even a single breath, dear friends, if we do it lovingly and connect our breath and through that breath, our mind, which is kind of in this resentment mode to kind of really deep place of calm, we can start now this breath. Not end of the day, end of the week, end of the month, and.

On vacation as we look to wrap up. Thank you, Ashish, for saying that, because I think that's the one key back to being in the present. As we wrap up in the present moment. What is something or some things? Two to three things. Blake, from your perspective that you would like our listeners to start now, they hit pause on the podcast and they're ready to go. What are some final closing tips from your side to them?

Well, I think the first one is I'll just follow on from what we were just saying, which is with my clients and the people who come to my retreats, I teach that all you need is 10 minutes of meditation in the morning to start to have these major breakthroughs. And I think that's the ground for everything we just discussed, for having that space inside to look at things from a new perspective. So you're not operating from a victim consciousness, and instead you're taking responsibility for your thoughts and thus your mind and then the things that you say and do once you move into the world. So I think for me, 10 minutes of meditation in the morning is the secret because basically when you wake up and your thoughts are all over the place, and those thoughts can be victim thoughts or dread. You know, I'm not looking for, you know, I'm not looking forward to the day. I don't want to do this. Like you're setting yourself up for a horrible day. Whereas if you can start your morning with clearing your mind. And Ashish, I don't know if you guys provide, for example, some guided meditations for people. That's amazing. So I would plug that for you guys and if I could contribute, I have one I'd be happy to share. But 10 minutes in the morning is the secret, because the thoughts you think when you wake up in the morning are the thoughts that are creating and shaping your Day. So you guys talk a lot about the science of happiness, right? So if you break this down, you could say that the thoughts you think in the morning are creating your entire life, because your life is just an accumulation of your days and the habits with which you move through your days, which begin when you open your eyes. And so if you're not working with your mind first thing in the morning, you're just letting your conditioning and all these random horses, random thoughts, your monkey mind run the show. So 10 minutes in the morning, I always suggest wake up, use the restroom, have some water, no phone, no coffee, no nothing else. Just set your alarm for 10 minutes and just focus on your breathing. When you start to think, come back to your breathing and your body. We have these videos or tools that we can share with you. And that is number one, it's really the ground for everything, for being able to articulate, articulate yourself in a healthy way, to have the perspective, like Ashish was saying, of, you know, was I even wronged or what was my part in this? And I like the concept of you get to choose every day whether you're, you feel sorry for yourself or you respect yourself. And given the choice, I think we all know that we would choose to respect ourselves over feeling sorry for ourselves. And so training your mind first thing in the morning is the secret to that. So I'd say that's tip one. Tip two is I love the question, if I were to value myself 100% in this situation, what would I say and what would I do? Right. So that really frames things clearly, like you're in a situation with your partner or work or a family friend or a family member. And if you ask yourself, if I were to value myself 100% in this situation, what would I say and what would I do? And automatically that shows you your fear, your limiting beliefs, why you're justifying not valuing yourself 100%. It just brings up everything immediately.

Yeah.

And then the, the last thing I would say would be a lot of people struggle with self doubt. And so the reason most of us don't trust ourselves and so our confidence is weak personally and professionally, is because we've been mistreating ourselves and not taking care of ourselves every day for most of our lives. So if you want to trust yourself, heal yourself, doubt, and have confidence in your personal life and at work, in your professional life, you got to trust yourself again. Which means you have to be able to depend on yourself to be good to yourself from the moment you wake up till the moment you go to bed. So start working on rebuilding your own trust with yourself with these habits now. Because like you said, Ashish, if you keep putting it off, you're going to always put it off. And that's tied up with this. I'll love myself if and when, right? I'll be happy if and when I meet some condition in the future, which is a sick game we play with ourselves every day because we don't know how to love ourselves in the present. We say, I'll love myself if and when I lose weight, I make more money. He loves me, she loves me, I get the promotion. But that's not what's going to make you love yourself. What's going to make you love yourself is having healthy habits, a healthy relationship to your mind, your emotions and your body from the moment you wake up till the moment you go to bed. And then you'll attract everything you want.

Super powerful. Blake, thank you. This was an amazing, amazing conversation. We're so grateful. And my friend, I'm a big fan of you and the work you're doing. So looking forward to continuing collaborations and we'd love to have you back again another time for another podcast. There is so much to unpack here, but thank you.

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, we'll have to do an extended deep dive.

Yes.

Unpack Beat by Pete. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you, Blake. Thank you so much. Ashish. Always a pleasure. I want to wish our listeners a wonderful day and thank you all so much for listening. Take care. Big hugs and lots of love.

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