Ep.193-Becoming an Elegant Adult: Personal Growth, Self-Love, and Embracing Life's Challenges wit...

This is the You Winning Life podcast, your number one source for mastering a positive existence. Each episode, we'll be interviewing exceptional people, giving you empowering insights and guiding you to extraordinary outcomes. Learn from specialists in the worlds of integrative and natural wellness, spirituality, psychology, and entrepreneurship so you too can be winning life. Now here's your host, licensed marriage and family therapist, certified neuro-emotional technique practitioner, winner and certified entrepreneur coach Jason Wasser.

Welcome back to another episode of the You Winning Life podcast, where we explore what it means to grow, lead, and live with purpose. And today's episode features someone whose work that's deeply influenced how I think about personal growth and supporting others— my lifelong friend Scott Freed. I first met Scott around 1994 1995 when he came to speak at my synagogue when I was in high school. Scott's an award-winning international public speaker, HIV/AIDS educator, and author. And for more than two decades— at this point, for almost three decades— he has spoken to over a million teenagers and adults about the struggles of self-responsibility and self-love. He shares his gut-wrenching personal story of how he came to get infected with HIV because he didn't love himself enough to keep himself safe. And since then, he's dedicated his life to helping teens, young adults, and now adults that are in their 40s make better life choices from a place of self-empowerment, self-love, and mutual support. In addition to his impactful speaking, Scott is the author of several transformational books, including If I Grow Up: Talking with Teens About AIDS, Love, and Staying Alive, My Invisible Kingdom: Letters from the Secret Life of Teens, and his newest release, How to Raise an Elegant Teen: The ABCs of Gen Z Parenting. But today we're focusing on something that applies to all of us, no matter what age— how we can, as adults, become more elegant in our lives. What does it mean to show up with grace, integrity, and a sense of purpose, especially in times like today's where we feel uncertain, overwhelmed, with tons of chaos, especially in the political worlds around us? How can we embody elegance, not just in our appearance, but how we interact with others, how we lead, and how we care for ourselves? In this conversation, Scott and I will share insights and perspectives of what it means to live with elegance, offering wisdom from his journey, his experiences, as well as some of mine. We'll dive into the importance of self-care, personal growth, and how we can live lives that reflect our, our highest values. So take this time for yourself. Listen, learn, and grow alongside with everybody else in this amazing community who are committed to living with intention, grace, and hoping to become more elegant. All right, everybody, welcome back. So as you heard in the intro, not only is today's conversation gonna be incredibly deep, incredibly powerful, hopefully incredibly insightful for you, but I know that this is one of the people that have had that has had and continues to have an impact on my life all the way since 1994, 1995. And Scott, I've been trying to figure out exactly when, but I know it's around that time, that 10th grade going into 11th grade timeframe that, that you and I first met. And, uh, first I wanna thank you for, for taking the time to, to be welcome.

I think it was, uh, it was in Florida. Mm-hmm. At a youth group or summer encampment, something to do with, uh, Jewish camp or Jewish day school.

But I remember. Yeah. So it was specifically at Beth Torah. It was specifically with, with shout out to Joel Berger, who was the youth director at the time. And I remember we had dinner afterwards and I remember going up to you and introducing myself. I remember there were so many firsts in that conversation. Right. Which, which we can get into, which people can, you know, hear, obviously, you know, go into the book. And other things that already exist out there in the world about you that we don't necessarily have to repeat. But I remember that was the first time having someone in this environment talk about self-care, about self-love. It was the first time I've ever heard someone talk about HIV and AIDS in this environment, especially to teenagers. It was the first— you are the first person, you are the first person that I've met living with HIV. And at 15, 16 years old, this was something that wasn't typically in the bubble.

Well, it was also the '90s, early '90s, so it was the height of the epidemic. It was before the, uh, introduction to, or of, antiretrovirals and combination therapy that effectively works now. So it was a time in the world, or certainly in, in, in this country, where, um, meeting somebody with HIV meant that you may never see them again because it was not as treatable and manageable as it is now. So I think my presence in your life, and certainly in the lives of the others who were there, just, just to be the first person they met with HIV had a lot bigger of an impact because of, uh, the stakes that were so much higher back then. And I'm happy to say decades later, of course, we know that HIV is manageable and we have ways to keep people alive a long time and also tremendous new ways to get people to not get infected at all in the first place if the information was out there. But back then, it was a big deal to meet somebody with HIV and for me to reveal my status. But yeah.

Yeah. And I remember thinking that, like, because I remember when I talked to you, I literally remember this and it was upstairs. In the youth lounge, right in the school building, because we had the— you spoke in the sanctuary and then we went next door to the school building. And I remember at the end of our conversation, we hugged. And, you know, right, talk about fear, talk about stigma, that what you don't know. And I think this is, you know, still apropos today with how afraid we are of other people for any number of reasons. And to see someone going through what you, you know, at that time going through and sharing your story and love with us and seeing this as a regular person, this is a regular guy, there's nothing to be afraid of. There's these stigmas that society— that it wasn't even put on me, but that we carried, even if it wasn't put on me— can easily be broken for good. Was such a big step for me as a teenager, was such a big step for me as a man. And I know obviously we continued our relationship over the many years through my parents' divorce, through when I lived in Israel, which I know that story has made its way into one of your books. Our multiple conversations on the phone, car conversations, sitting in your car when you were down speaking, right? I know that, that, you know, you're— I'm not alone in this, in this experience. And, uh, you know, the blessing of when I reached out to you was I want people, uh, at this point in the podcast, as I'm getting to 200, who had such a massive impact on getting me here to where I am in the first place. So I want to first thank you for, for being one of the people that you talk about, which is the risk of being loved, the risk of being seen, the risk of being accepted despite flaws, despite shittiness in life. And, and, and that's one of your big teaching lessons that I've gathered from you over the years.

Yeah, well, also, you know, kudos to you for reaching out and wanting more. Yeah. And being able to be as curious and inquisitive as, as you were. I love that in the early days of my HIV infection One of the things we would always say in our support group, and that was a lifeline for us, just our group of people that helped us live, see the world differently, and as we were dying so quickly. And there was this great quote where they said, curiosity is like the lighting designer of life, right? Because if you stay curious about things, then it gives you a whole new way of seeing the picture in front of you, like a lighting designer does on a stage on a Broadway show. It gives you a whole different way of looking at the world in front of you. So it's important to stay curious and it helps you stay detached. And that's what you always were. You're always so curious. And so I want to just say right from the start, you referenced my visit to you when I was in Israel. I remember I was there, I was doing some work in Israel and you were living there that year. And I was teaching in Jerusalem and Petach Tikva and Tel Aviv and a gay and lesbian Agudah, Association for LGBTQ. Only back then there was no Q and very little T. And we went to the Kotel together. I met you at the top of the Yaffa Gate. There was a giant staircase going down to the Western Wall, the Wailing Wall, and you told me something so beautiful I've never forgotten. We get down the staircase, I can see the sea of black hats in front of me, below me, below the staircase, and there was On the left-hand side, the men davening, shuckling, shaking in their coats. And the right-hand side, the women doing the same thing separate from each other. And we were walking and I remember talking down the staircase and you stopped me halfway down and you put your finger perpendicular to your lips and you went, shh. And I said, why? And he said, do you remember this?

I remember like aspects of this, but this specifically I don't.

Why?

What?

He goes, I just, I want to hear what you have to say. Always the therapist. But I, I still think it's important to understand. See all those people down there, right here on this step? All those people, we're above them. On the left-hand side, the men. On the right-hand side, the women. They're praying. Everybody's praying. And I like to think that right here on this step, this very step on this giant staircase down from the Jaffa Gate down to the plaza where you can step into Have your prayers heard. On this step is where all those people who are praying, their prayers that are rising meet us. And I think it's important to continue down the staircase in silence. And it taught me this idea that I've carried with me ever since, which is that everybody's praying all the time. On the staircase going down to the plaza at the Kotel, you can notice that people are praying., and they're quite visible, and it's a beautiful thing, and it's cinematic, and they come from all over the world. But it's true also, right, that people are praying invisibly, maybe not as cinematically, maybe they're not as high-profiled, but they're praying. And so I've been thinking about this a lot, and the whole notion, right, that everybody we meet, or I meet is somebody who's praying. And I actually believe the people who say they don't believe in God are the ones who are praying the most. And that's just my opinion. I know that people can contest me on that, but I really think that. And I think that there's only two prayers that we actually pray for at the Kotel and generally when walking around in life. One, take it away, this disease, this heartache, this chaos. Or two, bring it back. This loss, this, that, that which I lost, um, this innocence, my, uh, 401k in the stock market, bring it back, take it away or bring it back. Yeah. And I happen to think there's one more, and that is, this is what I got from you on that staircase at that very step. If people are praying all the time, I think the greatest of all the prayers is, see me in the way that nobody else can see me. Dear God, put in my path someone who just gets it. Somebody who— in front of whom I don't have to work so hard to keep my guard and mask up. And someone who understands the language that I don't have the words for, but knows what's written in my heart, not on my heart. On my heart are all the things that I keep protecting me from what's in my heart. Someone who sees what's in my heart and loves me and accepts me for who I am. And that's a tall order. But I believe it's what we're all praying all the time, scanning the universe for those people who give us permission to be exactly who we are. And so if it's true that people are praying all the time and they're praying to be seen and loved for who they are, then if we give somebody our unconditional love and radical acceptance, we are the answer to people's prayers. We are the answer to anyone's prayer just by giving them permission to be exactly who they are. So I heard you say, I talked about back years ago about the risk of loving. I never put those words together, but I hear that's how you saw it. But I guess we can go there. I don't really see it as a— yeah, it's a risk, but it's more of a desire to be loved. And to be able to love completely and to be completely lovable.

Right.

And, and so I think that's been my life's journey, not just to experience it myself, but to teach it, because we teach what we need to learn. Right. And so those who are praying or are looking for what I'm praying, looking for and praying for, and that's how you get world peace.

Yeah, I see, like, of the many things that you share of yourself, you teach, you guide, love is just this baseline. And love, you know, when we're talking about risk, I'm looking at it from the Brené Brown vulnerability risk paradigm, where people are afraid, right? Vulnerable means I'm at risk for something versus giving yourself the opportunity for this to show up for you. So when I'm looking at the risk of love, when I'm looking at the risk of connecting, when I'm looking at the risk of— it's that we have We have to take, you know, the opportunity, the people that I've had on this podcast, even you included, there was, there's a risk that you could have said, Jason, I love you. I don't have the time in my schedule, no different than anybody I've had. That's, you know, anybody else. But showing up anyway is the focus that I took away is show up, be curious. And put yourself out there and allowing it to come back, right? Allowing it to be reciprocal is how I—

Okay, great. And it's part of the curiosity that adds some dimension and perspective to your life.

Yeah. Yeah. So when you're talking about love in general, self-love, self-acceptance. How would you personally define those ideas for you through your journey?

So I don't think it— if I'm going to define it, it has to do with the, uh, it's not about risk. It's, it's actually not at all about risk, uh, because then you've set yourself up for some sort challenge. It's the absence of risk. It's the, it's the knowing that you're safe, at least in your own, in your own mind, in your own, in the world that you inhabit. I mean, giving a lot of thought today to just today alone to, to, to the ways in which we, all of us have had adverse childhood experiences, you know, they call them ACEs, A-C-E-S, and ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, generally refer to people who have had really bad childhoods, but it's really for every one of us has had an adverse childhood experience. A dog ran away, grandparent died, parents got divorced. We didn't get picked for the team. We were, there were people who didn't see us, people who saw us too clearly. We all have had them. We didn't like our own reflection in the mirror when we're growing up. Time to time. So in a lifetime or a childhood of growing up with adverse childhood experiences, I don't really even think it's about risk and love. I think it's too tall an order. It's about acceptance. You know, there's that great nursery rhyme that we all learn as kids about the rowing your boat thing. Row your boat gently down the stream. It's so interesting, right? What would it be like if we rode our boat gently down the stream? What would life be like if it was just a dream and it was just merry, merrily? Acceptance. Ah, now this. In my HIV support group, I remember years ago, the facilitator would always say over and over, people would come in and they'd say, I guess I got diagnosed with AIDS. I, uh, I don't know how to tell my parents, and I gotta, uh, I've been rejected again by a guy that I like because he didn't want to deal with my HIV, and my T cells are down, and I'm, I'm afraid. Whatever it was that they'd bring in, or the fact that they know they're dying and this is the last 2 months of their life, the facilitator would always say the same thing. She'd say, ah, well, she'd say one of 3 things, but they all ended up being the same thing. It was about acceptance. You could say, ah, now this, or, well, all this is a part of all that is. Or she'd say, well, here we are. Well, here we all are. So I guess to answer your question about self-love, it's not about risk. Risk is great. It's a whole different thing. It's more about accepting the situation that it is. And how can you take this experience, this moment, this diagnosis, this encounter this, whatever this is, and, um, and use it to be more compassionate. There's a great question that the Universalist Unitarians ask in their covenant, one of many, and the one I like the best is, what's the most loving thing I can do or say right now? What a beautiful way to live your life when you're having a conversation with somebody, right? To think, well, what's the most loving thing I can do or say? And what's the one thing I could do or say that actually would hurt this other person? Can I remove that? Do I need to say that? And how much more compassionate can I be? But when I hear that question, what's the most loving thing I can do or say right now? I don't hear it the way most people hear it. I think most people hear it as, how can I be more loving towards you? But I hear the opposite, the inverse. What's the most loving thing I can do or say right now to myself? And that's what I think you're referring to in terms of the risk, Brené Brown, vulnerability. How much more loving and compassionate can I be towards myself rather than just being taking a risk and being compassionate, passionate towards others. Right? Does that make sense?

Yeah. And I can see myself being just like everybody else who's listening to this in any life situation, right? Whether it's again, right, this is the week that, you know, after the tariffs and people's investment accounts have taken a massive hit and chaos politically and chaos with, with the war in Israel and just everything that's been going on in the world and different communities, especially. And, and, and I, and I go to Tara Brach's book, Radical Acceptance, which is, which is a very Buddhist book written by a Jewish therapist. And, and, and it's, it's, it is, it's being in this moment. And I struggle with this. I struggle with this because obviously this is something I want to guide my clients into exactly what you're saying, knowing that 3 months from now they might get divorced, knowing that a month from now they might, their stock market account might be wiped out completely. Savings might be wiped out and they can't move, knowing that they don't know what their next job is going to be or if they're going to get a contract renewal. And, and yet knowing how to guide someone into what are you capable of? So what, what don't you know about yourself?

Right. Well, those questions are, you know, when you deal with somebody who's got a life-challenging illness.

Yeah.

And HIV is no longer a life-challenging illness if it's maintained correctly. But like in the early days of HIV, those questions that you just asked are, are already like, they're questions we already ask ourselves at the age of 23, 24. You know, in the height of the epidemic in the early '90s, we were 24-year-old young gay men, cisgender, living in New York or San Francisco, asking ourselves, what happens if? But it wasn't, what if I lose my job or my 401? What happens if this is the last 2 months of my life, not just my marriage? And so I learned from a young age, as a young adult, to start living my life with a bit more urgency and immediacy. And so, well, here's another example. 9/11 happened in 2001. I'd been infected already for about 15 years. And I remember watching people saying around that time, you never think you can go to work one day and not come home that night. You just don't ever think about it. I would I say to myself, really? Because I think about it every day.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying I'm better, deeper, richer, closer to God.

I'm just—

it's just a different perspective. So to think I could be divorced in 2 months, I could lose my job, I cannot get my retirement portfolio to get back, what if, what if, what if, is how we live every day with HIV. That's what it's like. So the question really isn't, what do I, um, What do I do about my 401? It's what am I going to do about the time I've got now? Of course, we've got to ask that question. But how much more rich can this day be? Yeah. And Tara Brock, she does a lot of shadow work around radical acceptance. And she asks you a lot of times to take whatever you're feeling and see if you can have it meet a companion, right? Who's gonna be a gentle, tender presence next to that which is creating so much chaos or grief for us. So how can we touch it with kindness? And that's basically what I'm talking about. We're talking about the same things. Yeah, right. Vulnerability and radical acceptance and love, being loving and compassionate to, to ourselves is all possible.

Well, you just said a word that only one other person in my life, um, has said that I've stolen straight from them, and they know it. Uh, therapist that I had years ago, Dr. Paul Gallant. He's a former professor at Nova and, uh, like where I went to graduate school. And I remember, um, he once used the word tenderness in a conversation. And I, and I, at first I'm like, that's an odd word because no one uses that word anymore. That's very like, you know, 1940s. But I leaned into it and how much I love that word. And I, like I said, I stole it and I use it all the time now. And you're the only person I've heard in years use that word tenderness, being tender, and how important it is, especially with everything that we're, we're talking about.

Interesting. Yeah. Okay. And it touches you?

It catches me big time. And it's one of those words that, like, you know, like, in certain communities they'll use certain phrases. Like, I know in the church world they'll talk more about, like, you know, pour into that person. And I think that's, like, such a great term, you know, how can you pour into that person with what, you know, with what they might need and help serve, you know, help them and, and, and, and give, right? And, and show up for them. And I like that phraseology. But there was— there's something since around 2000 that that word tenderness— I'm sorry, 2010— that that word tenderness is really— so, so one, how cool, right, that that's a word that you share today.

That—

and again, I don't want to get too stuck on this, but I think it's a word that's been lost and how much we can milk it. To use for—

I remember what I told you when I spoke to you a few months ago. The root of the word, as I see it, tenderness really comes from the word tender, right? And the verb tender, not the adjective tender, but the verb, um, to tender something is to carry somebody, carry something or someone to safety, with safety, from one place to another. So to, to, uh, to give somebody your tenderness is to carry them in safety. That's how I see it. Which is, which is, yeah, which is what we all want. Yeah, yeah.

So let's, let's talk about being elegant.

Oh, okay. So yeah, there's more.

There's so much more. There's so much, you know, and I know our time is limited today, and, and there's, there's so much. There's so much.

But I wrote this, uh, my last book, my most recent book, is called How to Raise an Elegant Teen. And everybody asked me, well, no, isn't that a sort of a paradox? Exactly, it is. But I, I, it's really an idea of how to raise a mensch, really, how to raise somebody who is how to be somebody who is— as I mentioned, I got this idea of— I heard the words "elegant man" when I saw Sean Penn accept his Academy Award for playing Harvey Milk in the movie Milk years ago. And he talked about Harvey Milk being a rare but quite elegant man. And I started playing with the idea of what is an elegant man. So I put together my definition. An elegant person is a person— I'm going to read it to you because it's from page 1 of my book. An elegant person is someone who's in touch with their pain, their joy, and their sorrow. So just break that down. So it's someone who can feel joy and pain at the same time and have room for both. Our ability to be elegant is our ability to be able to hold all kinds of emotions and to recognize that we live with lots of emotions, but not just one at a time. Even, even sorrow. And, and know that that itself is part of the healing, to be able to be available to all your emotions. That's, that's a healing thing. Someone who can balance being responsible but still maintain the spirit of a child. Someone who is learning to love themselves as they prepare for life's faithful aches. What does that mean? What's a faithful ache? Life is hard. It's supposed to be. It's not a surprise, or it shouldn't be. It isn't to a lot of people, it is to some. When life hurts, it's faithful in its ways of treating us that is painful sometimes. And so in order to be elegant is to be able to still love yourself in the face of the fact that life is hard because there's that great— as much as I said that nursery rhyme, row your boat gently down the stream, there's a lot of other verses. And one of the verses that we're not taught as kids is, "Row, row, row your boat, watch the water flow." Rowing's fun. Rowing's hard. This is what I know. We don't teach our children that verse. Rowing is fun, but rowing is hard. It's not just merrily, merrily, merrily down the stream. It's also hard. And this is what I know. And that's one of the many lyrics. So to be able to maintain that belief that life is still worth living and still be ready for the faithful aches is elegance. It's tension. It's living with contradiction. To be able to embrace pain and grief and joy and laughter. Contradiction, tension, dimension. Uh, one more thing. A person who's elegant is a person with agency in search of purpose. Let me take about— take a moment to talk about that. So a lot of talk about gotta find your purpose, gotta find your purpose. And I think that it's a little— the accent's in the wrong place. It's not about what is my purpose. It's that I need to embark on a journey to find a purpose. Whether it's— it's not for us to judge what our purpose or somebody else's purpose is. It's something that keeps us motivated every day. And I'll give you an example. My friend Michael Lord was the longest living person with AIDS at the time that I knew of. He was not living with HIV, but clinical AIDS. And it was the mid-'90s, and there was really no, uh, meds around to keep him alive. He died before 1995, when the, uh, combination therapy was finally perfected and released by the— approved by the FDA. And therefore, we stopped seeing as many people die. And so he died before then, but he would just refuse to die for so many years. And when somebody asked I asked him, what is keeping you alive all these years? His answer was simple. He said, well, I just need to know who wins the Academy Award this year. Is it going to be Sophie's Choice or is it going to be Gandhi? He had a purpose. It wasn't world peace. It wasn't finding a cure for his own AIDS. It was who's going to win. It got him out of bed every morning. So the idea of purpose is itself great. What the purpose is, overrated. The fact that we're in search of finding something that gives us a reason to stick around, that's the point of it. Not the purpose, but the searching for the purpose. And never to judge what it is. An elegant person is somebody who has a deep reserve of compassion for themselves and others. That's what we talked about. What's the most loving thing I can do and say for you? And of course, to my— myself. An elegant person is somebody who can fail without shame. I love this memory. In college, I remember I was sitting in a waiting room somewhere. I was in college days at NYU. I was on campus, and this beautiful woman was dressed so nicely that day in a waiting room somewhere, and she was eating a container of yogurt, and it spilled. She spilled it all over her, and she just looked at herself in front of everybody, and she just laughed. It was so elegant to fail without shame. What a beautiful way to live your life. Elegant.

Beautiful.

Someone who mitigates uncertainty, especially in our lives right now. There's so much fear about the future, the anticipatory grief, the what-ifs. How can we mitigate the uncertainty with a little bit of charm? Courage. That's elegant. Someone who struggles and perseveres and welcomes diversity, right? Welcomes the knowledge that everybody's different while tending to their miracle. What does it mean to tend to your miracle? I got a letter from a good friend of mine years ago, Sean, and, uh, he's— he signed it off saying, remember that every miracle needs its own tending. And there's that word, tending.

Tending. Ah.

Needs to be made safe and cared for. Just because it's a miracle doesn't mean it doesn't need your help.

Right.

Miracles need attention and they need to be tended to. And so to tend to your miracles, to understand that yes, while we have them, We still need to pay attention to them, is what it means to be elegant. And finally, I'll say this. Elegance. When I got infected with HIV, I got my results, and the first thing I did was go to a Barnes Noble because there wasn't any internet in '87. And so I went to the self-help section on the second floor to look for a book on how to survive a AIDS diagnosis after only having had unprotected sex one time, my first time. No such book existed. I wrote it. I wrote 4. But at the time, I couldn't find it. And I did find some other books, but I found a book by— on the spine, by a name that appealed to me. And the name appealed to me because when I went to get tested in '87, I didn't want to give my real name. I didn't want to say Scott Freed. God forbid the results come back positive. What's gonna happen to my health insurance, my job, my life? Am I gonna get letters in the Am I going to— because this was the days of mail, not email. And so I kept my head down, hands in pockets, secrets hidden, and gave a fake name. And the fake name I gave was Stephen Levine. Why? Because— or Levine, Levine— because it seemed Jewish enough. I was living in a subletting an apartment from some people whose last name was Levy. So I thought, okay, if they get mail that says Levine, maybe they'll think it comes to me from the Board of Ed. I tried everything to hide my name. So I made up this name, Stephen Levine, Stephen Levine. And so when I'm at the Barnes Noble, That's the name I gave to get tested. And so the, the person who got the HIV results was a guy named Stephen Levine— me under the pseudonym Stephen Levine. So Stephen Levine, me, took my piece of paper that said you have HIV and, uh, a phone number to call at the hospital, and I walked to Barnes Noble. On the second floor, there was a book by a guy named Stephen Levine. And it was the book called Who Dies. Stephen Levine is how he pronounced it, was the foremost author on death and dying in the '80s and '90s, along with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. And he'd written many, many books at the time already. He just died a few years ago. And one book that I saw was the words, the title, Who Dies? So I bought it. And I read it from COVID to cover, and it changed my life. And I went to see him in person at a workshop where everybody who was in the room was living with a life-challenging or life-threatening health situation. It's a room full of people who were dying quickly, mostly AIDS, but a lot of others. And there were a few hundred people there. And I remember the day he sat on a stage above us and he said, you want to know the secret to life? I'm going to tell you the secret to life. And we all sat forward on the edge of our seats because we're all dying. And look, we all are, but we just knew that the, the day might be sooner than others consider in their lives. And so we all leaned forward. We wanted to know the secret to life. And he said, it's two words. It's actually quite simple. But hard to do. It's really quite simple, two words, but it's really hard to do. Stephen Levine said the secret to life— and this is the true definition of being an elegant person— secret to life is pay attention. Pay attention, because everything that's coming at you is coming for you. Right, to serve you, to help you, to grow you, to help you tend to your miracles. And this was before the introduction of cell phones. So here we live in a world today where we don't pay attention. People walk right into me while I'm walking my dog on the sidewalk because their faces are in their phones. And, and hey, I'm just as guilty. I'm not here Judge. I'm just as guilty. We don't pay attention.

Yeah.

You want to be elegant? Look into someone's eyes. Listen to their silences. Ask yourself, what is it they're afraid to say? What is it they're afraid to show?

Yeah.

What is it they're afraid to love in themselves? And if I could hear it, see it, and love it, I could heal them, and I'd be elegant. So pay attention. Elegance, it's really an interesting way of living and not an easy one. A lot of work.

A lot of work. Yeah. And we're a few days out from, from Passover, and you know, the, the whole theme of, of leaving Egypt, right? The Israelites left Egypt, they left slavery, they left bondage, and, and and you're familiar with this interpretation, that, right, each year we're supposed to relive this experience, right, as we retell the story of this Exodus in the Jewish community. And I know some of the commentaries talk about what does that mean, right? That how are you— it's a couple thousand years ago, how are we supposed to like act as if we're reliving this? And, and I forgot who says this, but, but the root word of, of Egypt in, in Hebrew, uh, Egypt in Hebrew is Mitzrayim. For those of you who are not, who are listening and not familiar with the language, but it's Mitzrayim, Egypt. And, and the root word of Mitzrayim is meitzar, is narrow, constricted. And, and right now we're in this time frame of, you know, Passover is coming up, Easter is coming up. Just with this conversation couldn't be better timing of what's the old story that, that we're holding on to that, that's constricting us, that's keeping us stuck in our mental slavery, as Bob Marley would say, that's not being kind and loving and tender to ourselves. And we have opportunities.

I think it's— I think that's way— that's, that's a step beyond the actual ask, okay? The question is, what's constricting us? This whole notion of— I remember once being in Israel, and an Israeli who didn't speak great English said to me, you seem sad. What's on your heart? And in English, we'd say, what's on your mind or what's in your heart? I mean, it's just semantic, but it got me thinking about this whole— I said this to you earlier, this layer upon layer upon layer that we place where we wrap around ourselves with what's hiding, what's on us, as opposed to what's in us. And so I think it's just really important to be able to, to understand the distinction and give ourselves a little, a little bit of grace and forgiveness for having something on our heart that we're that's there to protect us. It's okay. This whole notion of loving yourself and accepting yourself and being good to yourself and being compassionate to yourself, as what I've been saying this whole time, is it's a very lofty, elegant goal, but really not something that we can do that easily in the world today. So how about we start with just by being okay with the fact that we're protecting ourselves. So, for instance, if somebody is not being kind, if somebody is not being compassionate, it's because they're protecting themselves. So the question we have to ask ourselves in their presence, right, is, What got them that way? What's going on here? I was at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta last week where Senator Reverend Dr. Warnock gave this sermon, as he does every Sunday. And he had this great— I got to give him credit for it— but he had this great quote where he said, you know, when somebody's upset, we'll say, what happened to you? What happened? What's gotten into you? What's, what's, what's wrong with you? And, and if we really break it down, what does it mean to say what happened? What made you this way? What are you protecting? What is, what is it that you've had to be— that's happened that made you have to behave this way? Uh, in the Six Principles of nonviolence that Dr. King got from Gandhi, who got from Thoreau, right? The, the third one is to understand that evildoers are not evil people. They're victims of a society that taught them hate or taught them to protect themselves by hating. And so the question you have to ask is, what what got them that way. And that's what they would have to do while they're sitting at a sit-in, getting hot scalding coffee poured on them at a lunch counter of Woolworth's in Anniston, Alabama in 1962, '61, not fighting back, but thinking, wow, how do they get this way? And so it's not as simple or as grand as, gotta love yourself, gotta be vulnerable, gotta take a risk at love, gotta have compassion for others and hopefully ultimately yourself. It's much smaller. It's so much farther away from that. It's what's in the way, right? What is in the way? What's got you that way? I met this man in Memphis a couple of years ago whose godfather was the Klan member who assassinated Medgar Evers, and he was raised by this guy. And he's a reformed Clansman trying to change his ways. And when he told us his story of his childhood, it helped me understand, you know, how he could easily be seduced into hating. And I'm only going to say his childhood before he became a member of the Klan involved a puppy and a drunk father. It doesn't end well. It's all I can say. I mean, you think about it, you break, you break a child, and then somebody comes along and says, I'll teach you, follow my ways. And, uh, and hate is taught. My mom used to say when I was a kid, she would say, make nice, go out and make nice. And I would think to myself, make nice? Isn't, isn't the world just nice? Isn't there just nice as is? Isn't that the resting pulse of civilization? But I, I, I thought it was because it was such a niceness, my little world, which was as wide as a circle of hands that held mine. But when I broke away from that small circle and realized how big the world was, I understood my mom was, was, was, was on to something. For there to be nice, you must make it right. And so, but if, if you're having a hard time making that nice, you got to ask yourself, or the person who's having a hard time, what What happened to them? What's going on? And that's why I love to say it's easy to love people who are easy to love. My dog, easy to love. My nephew, easy to love. The guy at the post office this morning who didn't get off his phone while he took my package and never made eye contact, right? And then handed me my receipt that says, give me a good review on this receipt. And I got to ask, What's going on with him?

Yeah.

What happened there? Instead of getting angry with him, what was his night like last night that made his day so difficult that he had to not make eye contact with me?

Yeah.

So it's way outside of the batting zone of loving yourself and being vulnerable and taking a risk. Well, that's so important. It's what's in the way. What's in the way is what you brought up. What's in the way? And how can I be patient and compassionate for that which is in the way? I do a lot of men's work. Work, and when I'm helping or facilitating a man who's on the carpet, who's trying to work through a childhood memory, an adverse childhood experience, as we said earlier, I, I don't— I'm not only having compassion for this guy who was a kid who was beaten by a drunk dad. I'm not just having compassion for the guy who's got this child inside of him. I have to have compassion for the dad who beat him. What happened to this dad that ended up being the kind of dad that he was to this boy who then became this man in front of me? Compassion for all the characters so that I can understand how to help him best. Does that make sense?

100%. 100%. It's so practical. And it's so— yeah, I've known you for so long now. And I can only imagine as people are hearing what you're saying, for the many, for the first time, if not maybe most for the first time, and, and me just sitting here and being like, there's more to learn. There's, there's, there's people in my life that I'm so blessed to have that even casual conversations are life learning conversations. It could be.

It could be, right?

With the right people. And you're one of those people. And it's very rare that I am lost for words. And anybody who's listened to the show knows that I'm very rarely lost for words. And I'm just sitting here just with great gratitude and great awe. And knowing that you have teachers, right? You've been a teacher to me. You've been a friend to me. You've been a confidant to me. And knowing that there's people that you've been lucky enough to bring that into your life for yourself, and, and teachings and learnings, and, and you've been able to trickle that down and, and package it in a way that's delicious if you're hungry.

Yeah, we are.

I think the world is hungry and You know, I want to make a challenge to people that are out there, you know, and, and Scott's sitting here with me, you know, he doesn't know about this. Just coming to my mind is, is, you know, there's books that he's written out there that aren't in reprint right now, if I'm not right. It's not— they're, they're basically out there. If you can find them, you can find them, some of your older books, correct?

I have some.

You have a bunch. Okay, so, you know, this is just a short conversation. This has not even been an hour conversation. And, and I can only imagine, right, as I'm hearing things for the first time, I'm hearing stories from you for the first time, and I've known you since 1994, 1995, that, that I can only imagine what just someone cracking into a few pages of your books, someone listening to an old YouTube interview with you, or the video that, that's up online, what that can do for them. And, and I know you're doing like you said, this, this work with other people now. And what a blessing, you know. And this is the reason, one of the main reasons why I wanted you here, because the trials and tribulations of my life— parents divorce, growing up in a home of domestic violence that wasn't talked about, didn't even realize it was domestic violence— having adults in my life when I needed the most— you, Billy Joel, right? Not Billy Joel, but that'll be pretty cool too, but Billy Planer, who's been on my podcast, Joel Berger, you know, people that have influence you in your life, my life, other people's lives. This is, this is why I'm doing what I'm doing as a therapist, is why I have this podcast, is we may not know these people, but these people are sharing, like you, these important— I don't have a word for it again, like I'm just struggling here to put the right words together, but just how, how necessary these conversations are.

So there's a great quote from Emmanuel who— gosh, so Emmanuel, there were two books, the Books of Emmanuel 1 and 2, in the '80s by Pat Roddygast. She's a housewife who was washing dishes one day in her house in Connecticut when she started, so the story goes, channeling this spirit from centuries ago named Emmanuel. And she wrote to beautiful books of him coming through. And in it, one of the things Emmanuel says is when the— when this teach— when the— when the— when, when one is thirsty, the other will drink. One is thirsty, the other will drink. So we need each other, right? We need each other in life to teach each other and to help motivate each other to get to where we want to get to. Yeah, yeah.

And I want people to take advantage of that. I want people in a good way to know that you exist.

People like you exist.

Right. And yeah, then, and the books and the book that's, that's gonna be coming out, the playbook.

I haven't even started writing it, but there's this idea that I have for my fifth book called, um, well, it was originally gonna be called My Pandemic Playbook, because it's all the things that I started noticing when the pandemic happened in 2020. And people were asking, how are you going to do this? How are you going to survive this? And what are your— what's your strategy for getting through this next year, 2 years? And I would always just say that I'm just going to be as I'm saying to you right now, how can I slow down and be more compassionate? I started doing a lot of Zoom talks and put together all these lessons I learned from the early days of my AIDS infection in the late '80s of what we would— when we've gone through that pandemic, that century's pandemic, how did we survive that? And so I've been doing these lectures called My Pandemic Playbook: How We Survived life. And it's what I teach at this course. I teach up in Central Maine at Colby College in the winter semester. I teach a course that I call AIDS and the Meaning of Life because there's a lot of meaning that comes from life. You can come from AIDS— I'm sorry, you can get a lot of meaning out of life when you're diagnosed with an AIDS diagnosis, HIV diagnosis. And so it's a lot of, of those lessons that I learned along the way. The greatest of these, which is from my friend John Fletcher Harris, who died of AIDS in the early '90s. And I remember where I was when he said this next sentence. He was— he would have these meetings on Tuesday nights, and we would just sit and talk and feel and try different things to work through whatever was happening to us emotionally and physically. And he had a talking stick, and he would pass the talking stick around. You could only speak when you held onto the stick. And it was his turn and he was standing in the center where we're all sitting around him. And he said this great sentence that I believe he made up in the moment. It wasn't memorized and it wasn't— because it seemed to be a surprise to him as he said it, like it was coming through him. He said one word at a time, when When a tree reaches up to drink in the sun, it never asks if it is deserving. When a tree reaches up to drink in the sun, simple common photosynthesis, it never says, OMG, I couldn't possibly capture the energy of the sun in order to use it to turn on whatever I need to do to make carbon dioxide or Oxygen, bring in and then exhale oxygen, whatever it is. It doesn't say, I'm too fat, I'm too gay, I'm not enough, I can't risk love, I'm not being compassionate to others. It just takes what it needs: warmth, light, heat, love. It doesn't ask, do I deserve this? It's so unfortunate to me that the expression 'I am enough' has been sort of popularized and it's become sort of a cliché because it, it's so powerful, but it requires a lot of work. It's never enough just to say 'I'm enough.' It takes a lot of work to believe it, to believe that I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. And to simplify it, which I shouldn't do, because to be enough is not easy, not easy to believe that you're enough, although it's what we all are. It's all the stuff that's in front of it. To simplify it would be John Fletcher Harris's quote. I don't need to do anything, to be anything, to say anything, to wear anything in order for me to be able to accept or deserve the love. That's my birthright. Yeah. Everything else is in the way. Everything else is in the way. And it comes back down to that.

Yeah. Someone I knew well— I know well— used to say, 'Hineni.' Yeah, here I am. Here you are.

I could say in our support group years ago, 'Ah, here we are now. This, all this is part of all that is. All right, here we are.' Which, by the way, Hineni. Here I am. Book of Isaiah. Isaiah says to God, I'll do it. I'll do it. You want to use me? Send me. I'll step up and help. But really, another way of looking at it is in the musical Rent, there's that great song, No Day But Today. And the guy who wrote it, Jonathan Larson, was sitting behind us, or me, every Wednesday night in my support group. And he wrote the musical in part based on what he heard us say on Wednesday nights. And we would say, you know, here we are, and he would put it to music. And the lyric was, instead of here we are, it's no day but today. Same thing. No day but today. Don't miss this day. Stephen Levine would say, pay attention, look up, see what's there. Everything you need is coming at you. You have all that you need right in this moment. Right, right. We are.

Pay attention.

Yeah, yeah. Hineini.

I mean, Hineini. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I just did the math, you know, I've known you for 30 years, give or take, and, and, and I'm just so excited for, for people to hear this conversation. I'm very excited for people to, to reach out to you, to reach out to me, thoughts that they have, questions they have, curiosities that they have. Knowing that it's just beginning, it's just starting. The good stuff is, is, isn't, is in escrow for, for, for all of us when we have conversations like this with people that we love and know that love us. And they're out there, they're out there waiting for us, and they're out there waiting for us to show up to, to claim it and for us to give and for—

if I may I know you're trying to wrap the bow. I just want to— I'm going to throw my challenge out there. It's not that easy. No, it's not. And I hope that your listeners can understand that it's hard to find the right people who don't judge, who receive. When we're born, we're wrapped in, I'm told, something called a receiving blanket, a little piece of has pink and blue. And then we're placed on a table to be weighed and fingerprinted, and it's known as a receiving table. And we are received. And then our lives begin. And the rest of our lives is a journey in search of what it is to be received again. It's not easy. It's not easy to be received. There are not a lot of people people who are advanced— perhaps that's judgmental— who are willing to just receive without fixing, without solving, without judging, without grading, without punishing, without changing you, just receiving us. And so I don't want anybody to be under the illusion that just go out there and find somebody who can just, you know, radically accept you, because That's not an easy thing to find. No, it's not. But once you do, once you do, that's how the healing begins. And therapists do that for a living. The good ones, they receive, they wrap you in a cloak of kindness, and they help you remember who you were when you started out and who you are. So, you know, We're all in a lifeboat, especially this month. We're all out there on some lifeboat. Be very careful who you let into your lifeboat. Protect your lifeboat. All you need is one person with a razor blade or a sharp— and that's a hole in your lifeboat, and you go down. So protect your lifeboat. And remember, as you journey looking for those, those rare people who receive us, who wrap us in, in a state of acceptance, radical acceptance, as you mentioned earlier, that, uh, you only need a few, but they exist. They exist.

Well, I want to thank you for 3 decades or so being that, being in my life, for being one of those people. And I hope that those who of you who are listening to this conversation know that this is possible. No, it's possible to, to have people like this in your life. How, how— whether you talk to them every day, whether you talk to them once a year, whether you talk to them, it doesn't matter. Just to have people like this in my life has been beyond life-saving. And Scott knows more stories, and one day I might reveal more on the future episodes about the trials and tribulations that I've been through when I was younger and, and, you know, even today. But Scott, I really one first wanna tell you how much I appreciate you, which you know I do, but I want to just, you know, even more so say it very clearly right now, and how thankful I am to have you as a guiding light.

I'm honored and happy to help you, support you, and watch you grow.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, and for everybody else out there, If you can't find Scott specifically, find someone just like Scott, because he only has 24 hours a day and he has to sleep and he's got projects to work on. But, you know, he is available for some. But thanks for speaking, and thank you. Obviously other ways you can reach and connect with him, but, uh, I think I'll, I'll end it with that. And like you said, scottfried.com, website's up and available, and Um, yeah, thank you again.

All right, be well. All right. Thanks for listening to the You Winning Life podcast. If you are ready to minimize your personal and professional struggles and maximize your potential, we would love it if you subscribed so you don't miss an episode. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at Jason Wasser LMFT 🎗️.