How To Fear Less with Dean Sluyter

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you.

From you being you.

I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself second, and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome to today's episode of the show. Today we're going to be talking about something intriguing, which is fearlessness, fear. Fearless or fearless is what's the difference. And you know, of course we can all fear less than we do, experience less anxiety, tension, stress, worry, doubt, anxiety, all that. But can we become totally fearless? And what does that really mean? Because it might not mean what you think, which means, like, the total absence of fear, but there is a way to. To be liberated of fear. And from the cage that fear can put you in in your life, the way fear can dominate your life, there's a way to truly become liberated. And whether that's technically fearless and you have no fears or just functionally fearless in the sense that you really, most of your life, don't actually feel that afraid and you feel really okay in yourself and relaxed in yourself and comfortable and confident in yourself, you know, is that really possible? And I would say yes. And we're all. We can all become, you know, to the next level at more peace and ease in ourselves. And I'm excited because today we have someone who really gets this and actually guides people on how to do it. And his approach is very accessible. And I'm really excited about this interview because he's really knowledgeable in the way that he's been helping people for over. I mean, we're going on almost 50 years here. So very wise, very experienced in all walks of life, working with people from all different backgrounds. And so you're going to get a ton out of this interview. I highly recommend that you listen to this. Not so much with like a grasping in your mind, trying to figure it out and capture it, and just more like a open curiosity. Just like let it kind of like you're outside and you just kind of let the sounds come to you or let the sunlight hit your skin, that kind of thing. So don't worry about getting it. And so much more Just like letting it impact you because it's a very, very beautiful conversation and I felt impacted doing the interview. So I can't wait to share this with you. And without further ado, let's dive into that now. My guest expert today is D. Dean Slider and he is a teacher of natural methods of meditation and awakening. He's been doing that since the 1970s and he's been all over the country, the world doing this, from colleges to yoga studios to corporate offices and even has led meditation groups inside of maximum security prisons of which he has a beautiful story about in one of his books. So he's known for a very down to earth style and in fact his approach to meditation is particularly unique and extremely approachable. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited to have you on the show with us today, Dean, because I think there can be a sense of meditation being difficult, inaccessible, some white knuckle discipline that we have to force. So there's so much that we're going to learn from you. Thank you so much for joining us. Dean is also the author of his latest book called Fearless, Fearless Living Beyond Fear, Anxiety, Anger and Addiction. So thank you so much for joining us today, Dean.

Well, thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

So let's start with that title. I love it. You have it as two words, fearless or fearless. Let's just start with that. Is that the same thing? Are you saying we can fear less or are you saying we can, we can actually become fearless?

Yeah, it's not exactly the same thing. I have not met anyone who's fearless. And I've met the Dalai Lama. I tell the story in there. The Dalai Lama is afraid of worms, but he laughs when. And he's not wild about flying on jets either, but he laughs about it. My point there is that you don't have to be fearless. And I know that this word fearless has become very popular. You see it on T shirts and mugs and in advertising campaigns. But that's really, you know, if we try to set about to become fearless, it's one of those, one more of those difficult or unattainable goals to fall short of. I think of it more as if our fears are these great big, you know, the Macy's Day Parade, you have those big floats and that our fears are like, they're like big monster floats. They can look very scary, they're very overwhelming. They seem much bigger than we are. But the reason they seem so big is they're pumped Full of hot air. And that hot air is all our stories, all our self talk about those fears. And all it takes is one or two little pin pricks and the thing starts to deflate. So after a while, it may still be there, but it's no longer this huge thing looming over your head. It becomes this soft little thing just kind of bouncing around your ankles. So, for example, I start the book with a story about when I was 9, 10 years old, standing out on the softball field, way out in right field, as far away as the team could put me, because I was hopeless at athletics. And I was the kid who was, as they say, scared of the ball. Anytime the ball came toward me, I would just, ah, oh my God, flinch. All that. And some of these fears, you know, there, they may be very ingrained, but we can, by doing some little. Some methods that. The pinpricks in this case are methods involving mind, body, breath, in some cases, voice for just starting to let the hot air out of those. And I've been fortunate, as you mentioned in the introduction, I've been fortunate in being able to teach these methods to CEOs and guys in maximum security who never got out of grade school and to really find out, yeah, everybody can do this stuff. It works for anyone.

I love that. And I think that not needing to be totally fearless. I see this with clients often they want to be 100% confident, which to them means the total absence of any anxiety at all and no anxious thoughts. And that becomes this sort of battle that you can be chasing. It's kind of like what you talk about when people try to meditate and they think like, okay, that means I have to buckle down and not think. And you create a whole lot of tension trying to achieve this perfection. And I love your approach of, well, you don't just take out some of the massive energy that we've blown this thing up to and reduce its intensity. And then it becomes much more really, you know, as you mentioned, the Dalai Lama, it's sort of like, insignificant that he's afraid of worms.

Yes. And I'm really glad that you've drawn that straight line between how people think of this ideal of fearlessness and how people think of this ideal of what they think is supposed to happen in meditation. You know, they see pictures of the Buddha or the Dalai Lama, or, you know, they see that whatever their yoga teacher sitting in the front of the room leading a meditation, and they think, oh, he or she is sitting there with their mind just completely empty of thoughts. Well, I've been doing this stuff, you know, seriously since 1968. And I have lots of thoughts every time I meditate. But what I've learned from my teachers is to just ignore them. To just, you know, as one of my teachers put it, it's like having a. Enjoying sharing a pleasant meal with a friend in a crowded restaurant. There can be conversations going on at all the other tables, and it's not a problem. You're sitting there having a conversation with your friend because without even thinking about it, you're just, we all know how to do this, to just ignore the other conversations. Now, if suddenly you decide, oh, is a problem, and you start going around trying to shush the people at all the other tables, then that's what we call trying to meditate. That's what people try to shush their minds. That's the completely impossible task that they set themselves. And, you know, it's recorded even in the story of the awakening of the Buddha. You know, where he sat down under that giant fig tree, which I visited in northern India, by the way. It's. This is very cool. People come from all over the world to see it's just a tree, but it's a tree where a very significant thing happened. This person became very, you know, just woke up to his own inner boundlessness. And the way that he did it, he's very clearly recorded. It doesn't say that at last he said, oh, how wonderful, how wonderful. I've gotten rid of all my thoughts, or I've gotten rid of all my anxieties, or how wonderful. I finally suppressed all my neuroses. What he says is, how wonderful, how wonderful. Everything's fine just the way it is.

Yeah, I love that, that state of deep acceptance and surrender and not needing to fight things. So let's get into the specifics a little bit. And I, having read through Fearless, I would definitely recommend that if you're listening to this and you're intrigued to get a copy of that book, because we're going to get into some, some here, but there's just a wealth of really approachable practices and kind of the way you guide the reader to experience it is going to be, is very worthwhile. So if you're, if you're intrigued, go further. And for someone who just wants to start to get a sense of this.

Now.

Let'S say, okay, here I am, I am feeling fear. And I think we all, you know, we can have the mental side of fear that they're aware of worry or anxiety. And then there's also I think what makes people so, you know, want to fight that fear and wrestle it to the ground and get away from it is there's a physical discomfort to it. Like there's a squeezing in our ribs or chest and it feels sort of to part of us, intolerable, like, I gotta get rid of this. And so how would you help someone work with that so that they can get to that state that you're describing of, well, this is really, this is.

Okay being okay with it, right? As you mentioned, I give a lot of tools to put in your toolbox in this book and you don't have to do all of them. I try to give you enough so that if you find a couple of them really speak to you, you do those and you're fine. Now one of them, one of my favorites, and I very deliberately put this right up near the front of the book, is breathing through your feet. And in fact, when the book was published, this was picked up by the folks at Oprah's website. It's still running@oprah.com and this is something that everyone listening to this, we can do this together right now. It's so simple. First of all, if I say to you, pay attention for a moment to your left ear, right away, that's it, your attention goes there. There's no work involved. You don't have to visualize your left ear. As soon as I say left ear, there's some awareness, feeling it, imagining it, something like that, left ear. Okay? Now if I say right kneecap, your attention automatically goes to your right kneecap. There's some again, feeling it, imagining it, no work involved. Okay? So that's the general principle, which is actually is the general principle of all the methods that I teach, which is ease effortlessness. Alright, so now let's do a third shift and let's just put our attention on the soles of our feet. Okay? There we are. We're feeling or imagining whatever it is, the soles of our feet. Now another thing that's going on without effort is that we're breathing. We can't help it, we breathe through our whole life. So let's just put those last two things together. So now as we breathe in, just imagine or feel that you're breathing in through the soles of your feet. And now as we breathe out, imagine, feel that you're breathing out through the soles of your feet. Not trying to concentrate, not trying to push away thoughts, not trying to make the mind a blank, just doing this once again, breathing in through the soles. Of the feet, whatever else is along there with it, fine. And breathing out through the soles of the feet. And one more time, breathing in through the soles of the feet and breathing out through the soles of the feet. And done. How are you feeling, Aziz?

Still more stillness, I'd say, in my body.

Calmer. Yeah. And that's. I knew you were going to say that because everyone says that. And it's. I, you know, I mean, I've traveled in Tibet. I've spent, you know, sometimes six months at a time on silent meditation retreats. All of which has been great. But what I love about this kind of method is that I can share this with someone, as you see, in 30 seconds. And right away they've got something that, that can make them feel more still more grounded. And you can apply this in all kinds of situations. You can be sitting at home on your couch or your cushion with your eyes closed, making it a meditation. Or you can be, if you're picking up the phone and trying to call this person for a date and you're feeling nervous about it, or you're in your car and someone's cut you off and you're about to go into a road rage situation, which is going to be not a good result for anyone. You can take a few moments and just as we did here three, four times, breathe in through the soles of your feet, breathe out through the soles of your feet. And then whatever's going on, the fear, the rage, whatever it might be, you can't be completely caught up in it. At the very least, there's a part of you that is busy breathing in and out through the soles of the feet. So there's a part of you that is outside of that fear.

I love that. And I think that is what. Where the. I love the metaphor you used earlier about the restaurant and trying to shush all the tables or the floats, the Macy Day Parade floats. And because the issue is not the thought or the story, it's that our mind says something danger around the corner, that person's gonna reject you, something's gonna happen. And we say, oh, no.

Really? And then we oh, no, oh, no. Yes, we focus on it. It's not the thing that we're saying oh, no about, it's the oh, no, oh no. You know, the way that we kind of clamp onto that. Another method that I teach in the book is one that I learned years ago when I was living in New Jersey and I was practicing a beautiful martial art called aikido and if you've ever seen aikido practiced, it's a non fighting art. When the person comes rushing at you or trying to hit you or whatever it is, you basically pivot. You learn how to pivot and join the direction of the attack and use the attacker's weight, the attacker's momentum to help send him on his way, flying across the room and in these big circular movements. It's very dance like and graceful. Lovely. So I was studying for my next promotion exam. And the thing that I was practicing was where three people, one after another, attack me and try to tackle me. And as each one came rushing me, what I was supposed to do was send them sailing across the room. But what would happen was each time I would freeze up and wind up grappling with the guy. Then the second one would come in and pull me down, and the third one would come in and pile on top of us. And it was a complete mess. So I got up for the fifth or sixth time, dusted myself off. The first guy was about to rush me again. And suddenly I heard from across the room my teacher, who had noticed the situation. My teacher called out, dean, relax at the moment of contact. Now, for a moment, this was puzzling to me. I didn't realize that I was freezing up at the moment of contact. And the reason I didn't realize I was freezing up was that I was so caught up in freezing up, you know, that I didn't have any view outside of it. And when you freeze up physically, as you were mentioning before, this is very important, that there's always a physical or a physiological component that this stuff is not just mental or emotional. So when I would freeze up as the guy was rushing toward me, kind of like when I was 10 years old on the ball field, and the ball was coming toward me, I would freeze up and my shoulders would climb up, you know, toward my ears. And then I would become helpless. So now this time, okay, instead of freezing up at the moment of contact, I relaxed at the moment of contact. And suddenly doing the same footwork, the same pivot, all that, instead of winding up grappling with the guy, I sent him flying across the room. Then the second guy came and I started to freeze up again. My teacher again shouted, relax at the moment of contact. And again just sailing across the room. So how do we bring this into our own lives if we don't necessarily practice a martial art? The, the equivalent of the guy rushing toward you is whatever's rushing toward you in your life again. Maybe it's this situation where you're trying to work up the nerve to ask a person for a date. Or maybe you're, you know, you've got to make that really difficult sales call, or you've got to. You're going into the exam in school and your head is spinning and your mouth is dry and all that. It's exactly at the moment where we tend to do the opposite just to have that idea, oh, relax at the moment of contact. I had a conversation the other day with a guy in Connecticut who's a financial advisor dealing with, you know, moving around millions of dollars of other people's money and, you know, taking the phone calls with them when he's put them in one stock, and then it goes in the opposite direction from what they'd expected. And he said the thing that worked for him best out of the whole book was that relax at the moment of contact.

I love that. And so one thing that. It's counterintuitive. Excuse me? It's counterintuitive. Right. That's why your habitual nature, default mode might be to tense up in this moment of contact. And I think there's something here where we tense up, because this seems like what's underneath a lot of these storylines that causes fear is that there's some danger and that there's some threat and I'm not safe or I'm not going to be safe. And so now I need to mobilize my body and protect myself. And then there's this armoring, physical tensing of our body. And when you're relaxing at the moment of contact, it requires some level of trust in yourself or in life. And how do you help people find that? I mean, obviously, maybe once they start to practice it, then they can trust in themselves more and life more. But what about that initial kind of it's like, hey, let go. And they're like, well, I don't know about letting go. Is it really safe?

No, you're exactly right. And you're exactly right that getting your toe into the water and giving it a little try then becomes self perpetuating, just as our old habit of freezing up and putting on that armor becomes self perpetuating. I think what helps people take that first step is when you ask them, okay, the old habit, how's that been working out for you? The thing about that armor is it doesn't protect you from anything. It's not really armor. It's imaginary armor. All it is is tension masquerading as armor.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. That's a great synopsis of the truth. And it does not, you know, you're not better at, in the. Defending yourself in a martial arts situation. You're not better at the, you know, in the example of the advisor, financial advisor in dealing with the client or the customer. Like you're never better prepared when you're all bottled up and tense.

Right, right, right. I mean, one wonderful little pithy slogan that I got from one of my teachers years ago at a, at a retreat in eastern Oregon was there's never a reason not to relax. You know, I mean, that's something you can really, that's a good one to tattoo on the insides of your eyelids. There's never a reason not to relax. Just imagine, you know, anyone listening to this, just kind of as if you're reviewing your whole life right now, just replaying the video of your whole life. First of all, first, replay it the way it's been and now replay it exactly the same way that it, that it's gone. Meeting the same people, being in the same situations, except without the worrying. If you had left out the worrying, would things have worked out worse or the same or better? And I'll bet you'll find that the answer is better. In fact, there's a great quote I quoted in the book from Shantideva, who was a great 6th century Buddhist philosopher, and he said, if there's no solution to the. No, he said, if there's a solution to the problem, what's the point of worrying? If there's no solution to the problem, what's the point of worrying?

I love these Zen riddles.

They're good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So one thing that you provide in the book, which I really like, is the on ramps, the ways to kind of settle into more open awareness and not get as hooked into some of our fear thoughts and other things. And I was reading through them. You provide ways like, you know, have people start by focusing on the sounds in this moment or different sensations in their body or in their chest or their visual. So it sounds like really there's this thing that's clamoring for your attention and you just focus on something else intentionally. You intentionally bring your focus and then that thing that you're not paying him as much attention to is gonna. Is often sort of intensifies and it's like, no, no, no, you really gotta pay attention to me. And you know, I see this a lot with clients. They'll be, it'll kind of get, it'll catastrophize right you know, doom and gloom. And then I've heard this from clients sometimes because they'll say, but sometimes, you know, there is something that could happen. And so I do need to blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it's like, how do I know when to not engage with that at all? Or when is there, you know. And then, of course, next thing you know, it's a slippery slope. They're hooked in and they're.

Yeah, but sure, you know, it's. It's a very good point. Sometimes stuff is real. Sometimes stuff has to be attended to. So there's a, you know, what's the old saying, the old joke? Even. Even paranoids can have real enemies. But so here's what we do. First of all, there's another chapter in the book. This is one of my favorite things because it's so simple. And the title of the chapter is drop your thoughts. Drop your thoughts for five seconds. Whatever there is. Don't try to figure them out. Don't try to resolve them. Don't try to discriminate between the fears or the thoughts or the worries, whatever that are valid and the ones that are not valid. Just. And I suggest as a kind of a cue to yourself, you can slap your hands, clap your hands in front of your eyes to kind of shock yourself, startle yourself a little bit, and just for five seconds, drop your thoughts. After second number six, pick them up again. That simple. That simple. Now, the effect of this is that you start to realize that you have a choice. You start to realize that you're carrying this stuff around by choice and in fact, that you drop your thoughts thousands of times a day and then you pick them up again. For example, you know, someone will say, oh, this thing that happened in my childhood, this trauma or this fear I have about the future, about my fear of commitment or my fear of marriage or my, you know, whatever it is, blah, blah, blah. They say I'm carrying this thing around all the time. Well, are you really? So this thing that you think you're carrying around all the time, where is it when you're parallel parking in a tight space, right? At that point, you don't have the bandwidth available to worry about that thing because you're. You're paying attention to the parking task, and so you drop the thing. Then a little later you pick it up again. Where is your, you know, your big relationship problem? Or when you are, you know, it's April 15th and you're racing to get your income taxes done, where is it when you're fast asleep when you're in the state of dreamless sleep, you know, people say, oh, gee, I really want inner silence. I want inner peace. I want freedom from my worries. You actually have that for eight hours a night. Unfortunately, you're conked out. So you don't have consciousness experience of that zone of freedom. But that brings us to meditation. And this is really a core practice for me and a core teaching. This is the thing. My guys in maximum security, I sit with them, and these guys have become masters of meditation. What happens in meditation is basically you're settling into that zone of freedom where even though the thoughts, whatever, as we said, we don't have to shush them, they're still going on at the other tables in the restaurant, as it were, but you're just not paying attention to it. You've let go your grip on it. You've relaxed your grip on it. And what we find is that you're able to settle into that zone of freedom, that zone of dropping everything, even while you're wide awake. So you have the peace. It's as peaceful as being asleep, but you're wide awake to enjoy that peace. And that's what meditation is. People think often that meditation is something very, you know, mystical or weird or exotic or Eastern. And it's not. It's this, what the scientists call a wakeful hypometabolic state. Your metabolism or your thinking processes are settled down to a peaceful place, but you're wide awake within that. Now, the great thing about that is that more and more, you don't have to spend a whole lot of time. You don't have to spend hours a day, maybe 15, 20 minutes in the morning or in the evening. And the more you do that, the more then that carries over into the other 23 and a half hours of the day. And so it becomes more and more. You become less and less prone to falling into your old habits of being overwhelmed by worry and anxiety. And it becomes more and more clear what things are real, what things need to be dealt with, and what things were just old, stale thought patterns.

Yeah, I love that. And I think it just highlights that any change that we want to make, there's the. There's the desire, there's the decision, and then there's the discipline or the practice. And it doesn't have to be like, you know, teeth gritting kind of intensity, but just some way to really experience this more often so that it's. It's not this unfamiliar thing that you try to pull out when you're at your Most stressed state.

Exactly. You got to do the. I mean, the stuff is easy, but you've got to do the fire drill before the fire.

Yeah, yeah, well, so one thing that I noticed, so there was, you know, a big time in my life. The reason I'm so passionate about helping people with confidence and overcoming social anxiety is because I spent many years in my own life trapped in that, in those fears. And as I've grown and develop confidence and stuff, I noticed that some of the times where I'll get a sense of anxiety or fear is not because I'm stuck or thinking I can't. It's actually an anxiety of sort of grasping for more or like overwhelm of opportunity or something like that. So they'll be like, oh, look at all these things I can do. Cool. I want to do them all. And then very quickly I can find that sort of the way that I'm growing or things I'm moving towards starts as inspiration, starts as what I feel drawn to do. And then they could be, oh, that means, oh, so these six things at once, let's do them all now and then that's sort of an unrealistic attempt to put more into a period of time than is possible. And, you know, I can see, oh, well, you know, obviously letting, letting go of needing to do everything. And that's where I find there'll be this pretty persistent grasping inside that I work with that's like. But I'm calming. And so that's something that I'm personally very curious about. When it comes, because it is fear. There's a tension in there.

Yeah, it is fear. And what it is, is actually that's this, you know, new term, this is fomo, fear of missing out. And it is very much an anxiety of our time because there's so much that's available and so much that, you know, so much that's. That's going on and this feeling that, oh, if I don't do it all, if I don't experience it all, I'm not going to. I'm going to go through my life and not find the fulfillment that I want to have in my life. Now, the basic underlying desire there, the desire for fulfillment, is a completely valid desire. I mean, that is the drive in life is to be, for lack of a better word, fulfilled. The mistake is in identifying fulfillment with a particular experience that triggers the fulfillment. For example, right now, I happen to have a cup of tea in my hand. Now, let's say I really like tea and I'm really Thirsty. So I want tea. I want tea. I'm bringing the cup of tea closer to my mouth. And then finally, okay, here comes the tea. Ah, I swallow the tea and I go, oh, that's great. Now I, for a moment at least, I feel fulfilled. There must be a lot of fulfillment in that tea. You see, we ascribe that feeling of fulfillment to the tea or to the going to Coachella or going to. Or, you know, getting to go to bed with this person or that person or getting that job. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with any of that, except that it's a mistake to think that the fulfillment or the happiness, whatever we want to call it, is inherent in the thing. If we take the T and we put it under an electron microscope and pull the molecules apart, we'll find molecules of, I don't know what's in there, nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, something. We're not going to find any fulfillment in the tea. And that means there's only one other place where it can be, and that's in me. So what actually happens is the moment that I fulfill the desire that I get the tea, at that moment, I stop grasping. It's like if you're playing golf. I love golf. I love golf. I want to sink this putt. I want to sink this putt. At the moment that you sink the putt, you stop desiring, you stop grasping, you fulfill that and you sink back into yourself. That's the key. You sink back into yourself for a moment and you feel, ah. Now, in that context, what meditation is, is we eliminate the middleman, as it were, without having any outer external, without having any external triggers, without depending on anything external. We just sink back into ourselves and find that, ah, wherever we are. That's one of the reasons I love so much working with guys in prison. Their external situation sucks. The things that they want to have that we would normally associate with fulfillment and happiness, they're not going to get. And so they're. They're really. There's nowhere to turn but inside. So there, you know, that's why, as I said before, the prison guys I work with become masters of meditation. So coming, you know, full circle here, back to your question. What happens as we practice this kind of effortless, what I call natural meditation, which I was so fortunate to learn from my teachers years ago, is that we practice, we get pull naturally pulled within to this place of fulfillment without having to strain or try. And then more and more, it's like you throw a dry sponge into a bucket of water more and more, it comes out wet. So more and more, whatever you're doing, you're finding that fulfillment there. If you're. You're playing golf, you'll. Whether you sink the putt or not, you find it fulfilling. And then you don't have to worry, oh, but I'm not playing tennis, I'm not playing baseball, I'm not playing soccer. Am I missing out on some possible fulfillment? You find it wherever you are, even if, you know, God forbid, it winds up being a prison cell. Even if one day, as it's going to happen for a bunch of us, you wind up in a nursing home, in a wheelchair, you can't do much but sit there. You have to be able to be okay just sitting there.

I love that description and that coming, that moment, you know, okay, the conditions externally are met. So therefore now, now I can settle back into myself. At least that's the way that, you know, we play the game if we're not more aware.

And.

And then I just got, as you're talking, really fascinated of, in that, that moment and even that word fulfilled the idea that we're full and we're. We're filled inside versus, you know, empty or lacking something. And so it's like in that moment, I'm not lacking anything because I got the putt or whatever the external thing is. So now, temporarily, I can not need anything or feel like I need anything. And so there's that very relieving state.

Right, for a brief moment, and then we're on to the next thing. And of course, that, in a way, that's just normal life. That's the way most people live their lives. But in another way, when we. We see it clearly, the mechanics of that thing, that's a life of slavery. We're enslaved to these external stimuli, these external situations, to get the fulfillment that we all hunger for. And of course, there's always a bunch of people out there ready to exploit that slavery, whether it's politicians, advertisers, they're always ready to exploit our insecurity, our hungers, and to really, you know, to really have self confidence, which I know that's your thing, to really have self confidence. Ultimately, you have to know the self. And the self is not just a body. It's not just a, you know, a hunk of meat walking around with a little bit of electrical brain activity at the top. It's not just your whole album of personal history with all your little triumphs and all your traumas. It is this place of complete freedom, of just this complete, perpetual awe which is within you. And all the sages said that in different ways. You know, the Buddha said, out there, outside of yourself, it's samsara. It's confusion going around in circles. Inside, it's nirvana. Right? Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is within you. Socrates said, know thyself. Everyone said that in different ways. And the great thing is, what I've been so lucky to find out in my life is that it's so much easier than people think, this sinking within yourself, this natural meditation. And I want to invite people to come to my website, which is deanwords.com because no one can spell slider. It's a wacky Dutch name. So if they come to deanwords.com and I've got resources there and it's all free, open to everyone. I've got audio tracks where I lead meditation. I've got links to my YouTube channel where actually every two weeks we have a live meditation and question and answer session here in our home base in Santa Monica. So people can watch those meditate along with us and just find out how easy it is.

Yeah, fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. And I think that's a really good way to get started with this is to go to deanwords.com and then start listening to the audio where you guide us in that and then you get an experience of it. And of course, the book itself, you know, there's a wealth of information in there and I highly encourage people to pick that up as well. Fearless. And just for those who. I mean, you'll see it. Those who are looking at our site will see it, but it's Dean is D, E, A N and then S, L, U, Y, T, E, R in case someone wants to look it up on Amazon or Audible, which I would recommend. So, Dean, thank you so much for being here for sharing this. You have not only a lot of wisdom and I love the metaphors you use. They convey so much and are very easy to. Very memorable. And then of course, just your. The energy you emit really embodies this. And so there's sort of like this field of fearless emanating from you. So just interacting with you, it's very palpable and I'd imagine people listening can feel that as well. So thank you so much for just sharing who you are.

Thanks very much. You're very kind and really just I wish you all the best in doing what you're doing. You're doing a good thing for the world.

That brings us to the end of the interview and Almost the end of the episode. But first we gotta have an action step. Time for action, action, action. Your action step for today. I mean, wow, there's a lot here. I would Recommend going to deanwords.com and actually going through one of his meditations. That's what I personally am going to do and would recommend that you do that as well. But a quicker action step, you know, a more immediate one because you maybe you'll do that later today or tomorrow or something like that. But a more immediate one is just to practice one of the techniques he shared. So you could pick one that you like. But I would recommend the breathing through your feet because that one is just very accessible, memorable. It's easy to do and so just a couple times throughout the day, take 30 seconds a minute, breathe through your feet. Just like he guided us through in the interview. Because all this stuff is attainable. Everything he's describing, feeling more at peace, more confident, all this stuff absolutely is. The reason that we might not is often just a lack of practice. You know, it's like saying, oh, it's impossible to run whatever a 10k or a half marathon, it's impossible. It's like, well if you just ran semi regularly it wouldn't be impossible anymore. It's like, ah, it's impossible to fear less and feel more confident and comfortable in my own skin. Well, if we just practice these techniques of letting go fear more often, it's very possible. So it's really in the, in the practice and the doing. So I would recommend the breathing through your feet. And of course you can find more and practice more in depth with Dean's work. So thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again. May have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Azeez. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com. Sam.