Luke Storey - BIOHACKING Your Body From Addiction To Wellness - Dr Joy Kong Podcast

If you light, and I'm not trying to freak people out, but if you look at your computer, your iPhone, whatever, if you turn on your average led, like, very cool color temperature light, what happens is you're sending a signal to your brain that it's noon. I mean, it's just the stupidest thing ever. I'm not calling people stupid. I'm just saying the fact that humans invent and then normalize something so dumb and so antithetical to our biology is just shocking to me. But again, you know, it's convenience and it's a lack of knowledge. I personally believe that the reason we as a civilization of humanity are so ill is literally just because we don't live in nature anymore. And not only that, we're disconnected from nature. And so that means natural light. That means getting hot, getting cold, eating wild foods, being electrically grounded to the earth all the time. No emf, no artificial light. At night, one is getting healthy, safe sun exposure, and actually just being outside in natural light. There's lighting above me that I don't have turned on because it flickers. There are fluorescent bulbs, and if you film them with your cell phone on slow mo, they flicker on and off about 60 times a second. Really bad for your nervous system, really bad for your eyes, bad for your brain. Okay.

Welcome to Dr. Joy Pong Show. So I'm your stem cell specialist and longevity expert, and my goal is to make sure that you feel great, look great, and be great for every day of your life. And it's all about the quality of your life. So I have brought together some of the most remarkable experts in the health and wellness space to bring you up to date knowledge and interesting information so, you know, the kind of tools that are out there to enhance your health so you can live vibrantly. So today I am so excited to have Luke Story. He is a remarkable person, and I have actually been on his podcast, and he is one of the best hosts. And I just want to give you a quick, you know, background about Luke. So, first of all, Luke, thank you so, so much for coming onto the show.

My pleasure. It's great to see you again.

Yes, yes. So Luke has a fascinating story. He has gone through his own health journey. He was going from, you know, being pretty in a very difficult position with health issues with what he says as failure and misery and suffering, and going from that to somebody that's highly successful and respected in the biohacking sphere and who's bringing the, you know, one of the top podcasts in biohacking information to the audience. And he is also a metaphysics teacher. He teaches meditation, he's a writer, he designs lifestyles for people and shares transformative principles on health, addiction, recovery and spirituality. He spent two decades refining the ultimate wellness lifestyle and his teaching combines primal health and ancient spiritual practices with the most cutting edge natural healing and consciousness expanding technologies. He has tenaciously applied the results of his field research and used them not only to completely transform his own life, but also lives of thousands of fans and followers through his various media channels and speaking engagement. So I can't wait for him to share his wisdom. So yeah, thank you so much Luke for being here and please share your story. What happened when you were younger and how did you get on this wellness journey?

Well, as a kid I had a pretty rocky road and experienced a fair amount of trauma. You know, I mean, trauma is subjective, right? Everyone has their own degree of it. But the trauma that I experienced kind of set me off on a pretty rocky road in terms of just behavioral problems and eventually problems with law enforcement. And just sent me.

I can only imagine.

Yeah, at one point I had gotten arrested. I think I was like 14 and I got sent to this boarding school. And I learned later in life, actually quite recently, that it was, it's since been shut down, but it was essentially like a cult boarding school. And so I went there for two years and that kind of straightened me out and helped me with some of the healing from some of the things that I experienced in childhood. But then shortly after that, I moved to Hollywood and I was playing in bands and being a musician and a waiter and just fell really into alcoholism and drug addiction in a very meaningful way and had a lot of problems as a result of that, mentally, physically, emotional, spiritually, all the ways. And so by the time I was 26 years old, I had just reached a really hopeless place in my life and was just profoundly unhappy and just dysfunctional in every way you can imagine. Just was not employable and was very close to becoming homeless. And so I checked myself into a treatment center and luckily enough found the grace to be able to get into recovery. And when I did that, I started to also really work on myself physically. I kind of understood at first that finding a spiritual way of life and learning to meditate and aligning myself with 12 step groups and things like that were going to be imperative if I wanted to sustain my sobriety. But as I started to do that, I realized I was also just extremely toxic physically. I mean, this is over 10 years of doing really dirty Drugs every single day and eating God knows what. Although funnily enough, I was also. Even when I was in the depth of my addiction, I also always took vitamins and drank green juice and went to the health food store and got smoothies and stuff. It was really funny. But I think that just both my parents used to give me vitamins and they took vitamins. They were kind of into alternative health and shopped at the health food store and stuff. So even though I was like living in the belly of the beast in Hollywood and, you know, running around all night smoking crack cocaine, I, you know, come to you the next morning, go get a green juice to try to repent, you know. But anyway, you know, I got, I got sober and, and I just was so toxic. So I started doing infrared saunas and hyperbaric oxygen chambers and making my own kombucha and exploring herbalism, medicinal mushrooms, fasting, all of this kind of stuff. Cold exposure. I used to go to like Russian spas and Korean spas and do like hot and cold therapy and things like that. And I started to slowly feel better. I became a vegetarian for a number of years and thinking that would help me heal physically, although for me, that actually exacerbated many of my physical problems. So I eventually outgrew that. But you know, I was just trying anything I could to feel better. And while I was working on myself and getting into alternative healing, which is kind of now called biohacking, I was also deeply committed to meditation and practicing mindfulness and doing every personal development program and self help book and just really trying to get, get better to where I enjoyed my life and get to the point where I could have a positive impact. And so I did that, you know, really up until now. It's been 25 years since I. And it turned my life around and made the focus of my life. At first healing myself just out of desperation and need to survive. And then eventually as I started to feel better, I really started to implement more service into my life and started to see how rewarding it was to help other people. As someone who was, I think just by the nature of being in active addiction, I was extremely selfish and self centered and, and was very rapacious in my behavior and was definitely not really. I mean, I was a caring person, but I was always looking out for number one because I was in a survival state. You know, I was just in such a desperate state all of the time. So over those first few years I started to see like, wow, when you think about other people and care about other people, you feel better, you know. And so I started doing a lot of work in recovery, working with other addicts and things like that, and was. Was very committed to my recovery program for. For many, many years. And I worked as a fashion stylist for. For that time, just someone who dresses celebrities. I was living in Hollywood and spent my time during the day making people look beautiful on the outside and spent the rest of my free time doing everything I could to feel better on the inside myself, and then eventually merged out of that career as it wasn't really my true calling, and started the LifeStylist podcast, as you mentioned, as you've been a guest and. And have spent the past six years or so, really sharing information that can help people heal on all levels. And so I oscillate between you know, exploring plant medicines and psychedelics and helping people heal emotional trauma, as I've done myself and continue to do, and then also just solving just pesky problems for people, you know, physical problems, just things you can't get rid of, finding solutions for things that are kind of outside of the mainstream medical paradigm. Because in my view, and this has been, in my experience, that if you give the human entity, I mean, the body, mind, spirit, the correct inputs and you stop giving it the inputs that are making it sick, magically, it gets better, you know. And so I think I really, truly believe that anything can be healed. I believe absolutely in miracles. You know, just the fact that I. The fact that I'm sitting here today and I am not compelled in any way to do drugs or drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or any of the things I used to do addictively and compulsively. Just that, to me, is proof enough that there are miracles and that someone can heal. And much of my journey and much of my healing has had to do with my spiritual life also. So while I'm someone that talks a lot about biohacking and things in the physical healing realm, I personally believe, because this has been my experience, that healing our emotions and healing our trauma and finding a connection to whatever sense of higher power is appropriate for us, that works for us, that we can learn to build faith in. I think that's the underlying foundation that's most important. And then all the other tools and tricks, in terms of the biohacking stuff is kind of just icing on the cake. And sometimes even for me, just kind of a fun hobby and a novelty to just see. Oh, man, you know, just think like, my knee hurts. What can you do about that other than going and getting a rod put in it or getting it replaced. Oh, wow. I could go see Joy Kong and get stem cells and probably be sorted out, you know, so just. It's fun being able to fix the body. But I also know people that are chronically ill that have tried all of those things, and it doesn't work. And in many cases, what has been at the root of those physical symptoms has been emotional trauma that hasn't been addressed. And so I'm all about, like, going at a holistic version of a person, the whole entity, you know, their. Their mind, their spirit, the way they think, the way they feel, their emotions and the body. And I think if we approach things in a truly holistic way and not discard any of it, we can make a lot of progress. You know, just likewise, I mean, you could. You could meditate 10 hours a day. Right. And get yourself aligned spiritually. And that's not necessarily going to fix dysbiosis in your gut if you have sibo or something. Right. So it's like sometimes you do need a targeted approach for something physical because the emotional and spiritual mental work you're doing is not getting to it. So it's not like one or the other. It's. Which is the best use of one's time in any given moment to achieve the desired result of vitality and longevity. Yeah.

And I think I've seen that in the space that some people tend to address one or the other and not realizing we're dualistic beings. You know, we do have a physical body with his own physical. Own physical principles, but we're also spiritual beings. And then there's a lot of things that can happen from the spiritual realm. So I really believe that true healing, you need to incorporate both sides. But I've seen spiritual healers who, you know, completely deny the physical aspects, and I don't think that's. That's fully accepting what humans are either. So that just my belief. Yeah.

So that's funny. It's funny you say that because I was. As you were speaking, I was thinking about so many of the gurus over the. The ages that have been really out of shape and sometime obese. And I was, like, thinking, like, kind of judgmental thoughts on that. And I thought, wow, like, I could really use some cardio. You know, I'm starting to get a pretty good gut on me. Maybe I need to meditate a little less. Right. And spend a little time with the higher heart rate, sweat a little bit. So it is a balance. It's not a right or Wrong. But, yeah, it's just a constant kind of balancing act to just do what serves oneself. And to me, the ultimate goal of that, of course, is to have fulfillment and joy in your life in a sense of purpose. But it's like, why do I want to feel good? Well, I want to feel good so that I can serve. I want to feel good so that I have something to contribute. Being at a place in life where what I derive the most value from is loving on other people. But in order to do that, I have to have the energy to do that. So if my mitochondria are trashed and I'm not producing enough ATP and all I want to do is lay around all day, then what opportunity am I going to have to actually go contribute to society and make a meaningful impact to whatever degree I can?

Yeah.

So it's interesting. It's all. It's all sides of it, you know, it really is.

Yeah. When you talk about the gurus, you know, I have a few gurus in my mind as well. And, you know, they have their obese, you know, with a belly and probably have inflammation, cardiovascular issues. Just imagine if you are. If they are more tuned up, if they are more vibrant, how much more they can contribute to the world, and they can probably have another 20 years that they can share the wisdom. So I really. I really believe we need to address both aspects.

That's a good point.

Yeah. I really want you to share your wisdom on what you've discovered along the way. You know, what are some of your favorite biohacking tools? Because you've tried everything. So from your experience.

I think I honestly have, because whenever I hear. Whenever I hear of anything, and it has some research and, you know, there's some hope of efficacy for it. I. I'll try it. Like, just actually next week, for example, I'm going to see my friend Dr. John Lawrence in Florida because he texted me the other day. Like, one of the things I've not been able to fix in my own body is my tinnitus and hearing loss in my left ear. And I just, you know, I've just learned to ignore it. But there are times when it's so loud, it's actually very difficult to ignore. And it's. It's kind of distracting if not frustrating. And he knows this, so he texts me. He's like, man, you got to get out to Florida. I met this doctor named Dr. Shim, and he developed and I guess patented a technique of doing stem cells into your ear. And he's healing Tinnitus and hearing loss, like, legit. Many, many cases, you know, vast amount of research on this. So he's going to come to. He said, John says he's going to come to our clinic and train my staff. And if you can get out here, we can make sure that you get treated by him and we can probably fix your ear. And then John also does something called Lumamed, which is a special laser that they use for the same purpose, and they have great results with that. So he's excited to innovate and maybe combine those two techniques and really help a lot of people. And so I'm like, hello. Right here, guinea pig. Five minutes later, I'm booking my flight. I'm on it. So it's just. I'm just kind of wired that way because I still do have a few things that are annoying. And it's like, this shouldn't be this way. Like, why do my ears ring? I totally know that my brain and my ear on that side is totally capable of being restored to its natural, natural function. Like, the blueprint for it is there. So what's wrong? You know, why? What is it missing? I don't think I'm doing anything to it at this stage in life that's exacerbating the problem, but I just know it wants some help, it wants some love and attention. And when I hear something and my intuition says, like, ah, that sounds legit, I'm going to try it. So I think that's how I end up just as you said, trying everything, you know.

Right, right.

But thinking about, you know, thinking about the needle movers. Because I get asked this question a lot as someone who just experiments with everything constantly, I got to say, and I also like to say this for people that are, you know, especially people that have been ill and lost their vocation. Right. And they don't have money to go do stem cells or do some of these more expensive interventions. I mean, just today I was doing some labs, for example, and just, you know, I was doing like a urine test and a semen test, and I had to go FedEx it before this interview because I'm just. I'm going to do some stuff with my prostate. Too much information. But I guess you're a doctor, you. You can handle it. And I'm looking at the paperwork, you know, like the, the requisition forms, and I'm just like, it's so confusing in the instructions to actually do the test. And I'm just like, man, if I was a chronically ill person who had really bad brain fog or just low energy, it would be almost impossible to even fill out those forms. So I feel for people that are kind of incapacitated by physical challenges especially. And so those people oftentimes don't have money because they can't work anymore. Right. So I always start with the most powerful things that are free. And you mentioned when you were going through my bio, when I talk about primal healing and ancestral living, I personally believe that the reason we as a civilization of humanity are so ill is literally just because we don't live in nature anymore. And not only that, we're disconnected from nature. And so that means natural light. That means getting hot, getting cold, eating wild food, foods, being electrically grounded to the earth all the time. No emf, no artificial light at night. Like think about someone living even pre agriculture, agriculture was pretty rough too. So let's go back 15,000 years. Now we can't go back 15,000 years. And I love recording a podcast here on the Internet. So I'm all about living in the modern world, but what are the things that we can go back in time, so to speak, and recapture that are missing from our life now? And so for me, this is getting into the stuff that's free. One is getting healthy, safe sun exposure and actually just being outside in natural light. Many people think of natural light as being in a structure that has a lot of windows. Like you would say, oh, I'm in a lot of natural light right now, but I'm not, because half of the UV spectrum of light is being chopped off by the fact that I'm behind glass. So I'm actually getting a fake blue light just from being behind windows, for example. Right. And blue light, of course, has been linked to skin cancer and all sorts of other metabolic issues and such. So the free things that have helped me the most are really getting pretty committed about mitigating my blue light. So for example, right here today, I have a photon red light. You can see for those watching the video made by a company called Sauna Space. And this is a red light spectrum incandescent bulb that can be used like topically. They make saunas with these bulbs, but I just keep one on my desk to balance out the spectrum of light. So I'm getting some of that, the infrared spectrum that's being cut out by these energy efficient windows. So just a little tweak like that. There's lighting above me that I don't have turned on because it flickers. There are fluorescent bulbs and if you film them with your cell phone on slow mo, they flicker on and off about 60 times a second. Really bad for your nervous system, really bad for your eyes, bad for your brain. So I'm not living in a cave, but I do have some red light in here because I'm missing that from the sun. I'm not adding fake light from the lights in here. I'm using the ambient light from the environment. At night, I have a blue blocking eyewear brand. It's called Gilded by Luke Story. I go grab, but they're across the room. So at night, if I'm driving or I'm out somewhere where there's a lot of artificial blue light, I throw my gilded glasses on. Those are going to completely eliminate all of the harmful spectrum of blue and green light. And it's like I'm living in firelight. So I just have habituated myself. For example, in the lighting piece, when I see the sun going down a, I'm going to try to sun gaze and watch the sunset to get that beautiful red light that's given to us by nature, which is profoundly healing and regulatory to the circadian rhythm, et cetera. But once it gets dark, I'm pretty much going to avoid, on a good day, all blue light until I go to sleep. And that sounds like a neurotic kind of, you know, control thing. And there probably is some of that in there, if I'm honest. But for me, I've just done it so long that I'm just habituated to it. And so in my house there's.

You ever watch Netflix, you know, videos?

Yeah, I do. And I'll wear my glasses and some, you know, sometimes I don't like. Sometimes if I want to see a movie that's visual and I. It's going to be ruined if everything's kind of has a red hue to it, you know. But in our home, for example, we have different sets of bulbs in the recessed lighting in the ceiling and different lamps. So some of them are red, some of them are bright, full spectrum incandescent bulbs that have all the colors of the rainbow that mimic sunlight. So if I want to be awake during the day and I want to get that full spectrum of light that's being filtered out by the windows. In my house in Hot as Hell Texas, I have daytime bulbs and then I have evening bulbs. And so in the room where the TV is, I can also balance that out by just turning on a couple lamps that have red bulbs in them. And then you're having a more balanced light so you're not shocking your system with that. What your eye sees and your brain interprets as noon, midday sun. You know, like if you, if you light, and I'm not trying to freak people out, but if you look at your computer, your iPhone, whatever, if you turn on your average led, like very cool color temperature light, what happens is you're sending a signal to your brain that it's noon. I mean, it's just the stupidest thing ever. I'm not calling people stupid, I'm just saying the fact that humans invent and then normalize something so dumb and so antithetical to our biology is just shocking to me. But again, it's convenience and it's a lack of knowledge. So back to the things that are most meaningful. So handling the blue light, hugely impactful on sleep and also just on regulating your neurotransmitters and ultimately even some of your hormones. So when you're exposed to blue light, your cortisol goes up and your melatonin shuts down. Your cortisol and melatonin have all sorts of other influences in your physiology, right? I mean, it's not like just to make you alert, just to make you sleepy. If you suppress melatonin, Melatonin is the number one cancer fighting property in your entire body. Right? When we produce melatonin as we sleep because there's no blue light, that's what makes us make melatonin is the lack of blue light. That's what's keeping your body from developing cancer. I mean, one of the things, right? I mean the most thing, so the light thing and then the other thing again, I'm going back to stuff that is mostly free. Exposing ourselves to hot and cold temperatures. Depending on where your ancestors were from and their proximity to the equator, many of us that are on the earth now, I mean, I guess unless you're from an equator region, would have had extreme hot and cold throughout your entire life. You know, especially people from, you know, Scandinavia or something like that. Right. I mean, I'm, I think I'm kind of a Euromut, probably northern latitude people mostly. Maybe a little southern Italy in there. But the fact is the human body is not designed, generally speaking, to just be at 68, 72 degrees its entire existence. Right. We're supposed to get cold. So the easy way to opt into that, which I started back in the 90s, is called cold showers. First I would do hot and cold contrast therapy or hydrotherapy as some people call it. And then eventually I just went to all cold. And now most of the time I just do an all cold shower.

Wow.

And it's. It's amazing. I mean, it's like the best mood elevator. And then even beyond that is just getting in cold bodies of water. I've been doing that my whole life, living sometimes in Colorado and Idaho and places where it's cold. Or even in Southern California in the winter months when the ocean is pretty damn cold. Just purposefully getting myself uncomfortably cold very often. And then also in terms of getting hot now, here in Texas in the summer, you don't need a sauna. It's 105 degrees in my backyard. You know, where the sun is above me is pretty freaking close too, because of my latitude and longitude, et cetera. So I just go outside and I'm sweating like crazy. In 10 minutes, I'll do like 20 minutes out there. I'm really acclimated to the sun, so I don't tend to get burned or anything. You know, obviously people want to be careful, but I make sure I get hot and cold every day. And to make sure I get even colder, I have a thing called a Morozco Forge, which is an ice bath. And I have that in my backyard. And when it's warm here, which is a lot of the year, I'll get in that thing three, sometimes four times a day. And it's anywhere between 35 and 40 degrees. And I go sitting there for a couple minutes, maybe two minutes, three minutes, and I've just acclimated to that. And I'm literally, I could even say, so far, not a negative sense, but just this is how committed I am. I'm literally addicted to the ice bath. Like, if you came to my house and said, luke, you can't, you know, I'm going to give you five things that you can have to support your health, it would probably be number one or two. Wow. It's that important to me because of what it does for my mood, what it does for inflammation. I mean, you get loaded with norepinephrine and dopamine. I mean, it's like the. It's the greatest natural high ever. So moving past that into something else free, that has been really impactful for me. I did it this morning is a combination of breath work and meditation. And I've been meditating in a pretty committed way for a couple decades. The breath work is probably 10 years or so, which I got from practicing Kundalini Yoga. They don't call it breath work, but a lot of the, what they call Kriyas and Kundalini Yoga Involve all of these strange ways of breathing that have really profound effects on your consciousness and also your physical health. So just getting a breathing practice, a sun practice, a hot practice, a cold practice, meditation practice, and I'll add to that a sleep practice. Like really turning sleep into a priority. I used to view sleep when I was younger, I'm 51 now. Sleep was like, to me, it was like I was wasting my life. So if I slept eight hours, it would be, it would be a deficit to my life. I would feel like, oh my God, I just lost hours of my life. Right. You know, now I know I see it totally different that I'm actually, you know, probably adding to the number of years in terms of longevity that I'm going to be here on earth in this body. But the quality of life is so greatly enhanced by all of the restorative mechanisms in the body and even in the mind and even spiritually. I mean, if there's a night when I don't get great sleep and it happens here and there because life happens, I'm much more irritable, I'm much less compassionate toward people and myself. I'm way less productive, I get more brain frog. I have a more difficult time focusing. I mean, it has such a negative impact on all areas of my life. So for me it's like really focusing on sleep has become extremely important. It's one of my most cherished values in my life. It's really, really important with sleep. I mean, yeah, for many, many years I, I, I would say I was pretty close to having insomnia, which I think was multifactorial. But for me probably had a lot to do with how many emotional problems that I had and just all of the unresolved trauma in my life and just how neurotic I was. Frankly, you know, the first thing I think that started to help was really getting committed to a meditation practice. And that enabled my nervous system to start to learn how to calm down and help me differentiate awareness from thinking. Right. So that I could start to get that witness observer perspective that there's a part of me that is part of, well, just is consciousness that's observing this phantasmagoria of thinking, you know, this non stop thinking. Because a lot of the time I would try to sleep and my mind just wouldn't stop worrying about my problems. You know, I was so, so unhealed and just had so many unresolved traumas and things that my mind was just stuck on like negative thought patterns and I would just be laying There worrying about my problems or trying to fix it, or, you know, like, addictively going over grievances and resentments I had toward other people and just thinking of all the ways that I was blaming them and was going to give them a piece of my mind next time I see them. I mean, just craziness, just neurotic craziness. And anyone that does that, that's listening, like, I'm not judging you. This is just me, right? Not calling you crazy, but I just had a very dysfunctional way of thinking, and my mind was literally fragmented. I mean, I just. I had an injured brain from so many years of drug abuse and so many years of negative, toxic thinking that I became habituated to being in probably a high beta, very alert state that I just couldn't turn off. And so things like meditation and just healing emotionally and spiritually and doing all kinds of therapy and all the things eventually started helping my sleep. But what I discovered a couple years ago was all those years that I had poor sleep, one of the things that was. I would say one of the biggest contributing factors was that I was too hot, because most mattresses are made poorly, and they just. They radiate heat. They capture your body heat, and then it gets stuck in there, and it radiates back on your body. And how I learned this is I got this thing called a chilipad a few years ago. Now they've evolved, and they have. The original chili pad is, like, the cheapest one. Then they have the Uhler and now the Dock Pro, which is freaking insane. So I got one of those. And it's a little pad with veins, silicone veins of water that goes under your fitted sheet, and you put it on your bed. Think of an electric blanket, but no electricity in it, only water. And you can make that water hot or cold or any degree in between with no electricity. Well, there's a. There's a. There's a little unit. I wish I had one here, but I'm in the studio. There's a little, like a motor in a unit that is. I don't know what it's called, but it's the thing that makes the water hot or cold. It's maybe like 12 by 12 inches. And you put that across the room, and then there's a water hose that goes into this mat that goes into your fitted sheet.

Wow.

And so there's no electricity in it at all. I wouldn't. I'm a super EMF nut, so I would never have electricity anywhere near me when I sleep. I see but what it does is it makes your bed cold to your liking. And then using something like the oura ring, I started testing my sleep and I was like, holy crap, my sleep scores just shot through the roof. And then nights when I would forget to turn it on or if I would travel and I wasn't able to get the AC cold enough in the room, say in a hotel or I'm in Thailand or somewhere super hot, I would realize I'm waking up over and over again all night. And then I started to become cognizant of the fact that the reason I was waking up wasn't what it used to be prior, which was just a crazy mind. It was actually that I was just overheating. And so getting, for me, getting the temperature right while I sleep has by far been the number one thing that has helped my sleep. I mean, just exponentially. And I keep fine tuning it. You know, I get better and better at finding like the right temperature. Like for example, last night I had the Doc Pro by Chili Sleep. That's the name of the company I had that. And it was on 68, but I also had the thermostat on 68 for my wife. And so I woke up getting a little too cold. So tonight I'm gonna be like, ah, 69 or 70, I'm gonna find that sweet spot to match the thermostat for her comfort. So she's happy, I'm happy, and we both sleep well. But that said, that's just one. There's of course tons of herbs and supplements and stuff that can help sleep. But for me, that and also just doing my best. And I'm not perfect at this, so I'm not going to make claim that I'm good at this, but the better I can get at avoiding screens after eight or nine at night, I sleep much better. If I'm like scrolling social media at 10pm and then I try to go to sleep at 10:30, I'm gonna have a difficult time falling asleep, guaranteed. And that just has to do with brainwaves. That has to do with just I'm still in beta and I lay down like, oh, I'm deciding I want to go to sleep now. And my brain says, no, you've been engaged. You have a little cortisol pumping, your brain's in beta brain waves. You're still excited because you were like engaged with something, right? However, if I, on a good night, if I am able to go, all right, Luke, just put your phone in a drawer and just relax and read A book or hang out with your wife or play with the dog or whatever. I find that my brain starts slowing down, so I'm going into alpha waves and then I'll start to get sleepy and I start to feel those theta waves. I mean, I've done a lot of neurofeedback training. I have a decent sense of, of kind of what my brain is doing in terms of the brain waves and how those feel subjectively. And so that's a great sleep hack too, is just having the discipline to like not engage with your phone, especially if you're going to be on your phone doing work. If I do work like till nine at night, because I'll test this sometimes I'll wake up many times that night, my sleep will suck because I was doing work, my brain was too excited. Even if I shut it down at 9 and at 10 I try to go to sleep, it's not going to happen. You know, I'm sure some people are more sensitive than others. My wife isn't like that at all. I mean, she can do whatever she wants. The minute she gets in bed, she hits the pillow, she's asleep. That's just me, you know, so this. So you know, so sun exposure, limiting blue light, breath work, meditation. We could throw some spiritual practice like prayer or reading spiritual literature, the contemplation of spiritual ideas. Just expanding one's awareness about who we are and why we're here and whatever relationship we have with the higher power. Hot and cold sun, sauna, ice bath, and then really focusing on sleep. And honestly, those things more than anything have helped me be more healthy in all the ways. And then there's the next category of things that sometimes can cost a lot of money and that are a bit more extreme and experimental. But that's like the foundation of my life. And if you think about that, that again, going back 15,000 years, Joy, that's kind of normal life back then, right? You would have been in a tribe of 50 or 60 people. You would have been hugging people, human connection. You'd be out hunting, foraging. You'd be by a fire at night, there'd be dancing probably, you know, depending on what, what kind of tribe you're from. There would be no artificial light. It would get cold at night. The ground that you'd be sleeping on would be much colder. Even in a hot climate, the ground is still considerably colder. So all those things I just described, you'd probably be bathing in natural waters, in a creek, river, sea, something like that, cooler water, you'd be Sweating, you'd be hot out in the sun, you know, chasing an antelope or whatever, right? And you'd be eating, you'd be eating wild foods, you'd be eating foods that are nutritionally dense, which are exceedingly hard to find now. So all that stuff, like a lot.

Of grounding you're touching and then, you know, you get letting the frequency and electrons to go through your body and to release all the accumulated stressors.

Thank you for adding that, because I forgot about that. And especially when I'm in the sun, I like to be grounded. Because you are soaking up radiation from the sun. I mean, it's, it's native natural radiation, but it is oxidative stress, essentially. Grounding helps that. If you're getting sun and you're touching water or ground, I mean, conductive ground. So that would be not asphalt or plastic or anything that's not conductive. But if you're touching rocks, water, mud, dirt, sand, concrete, all that stuff's conductive. Trees. Yeah. Sometimes when I'm like in, you know, in a city, I'll just stop and put my hand on a tree and just ground for a minute with my shoes, you know, with like my rubber soled shoes on. But yeah, if you think about it, all those things that I just described to a modern urbanite would sound totally insane. Like, who has time to do all that? Why would you do all that? That sounds crazy to someone 15,000 years ago. You know, sleeping with a cell phone that's known to cause brain cancer next to your head would be crazy. Turning on lights in your house and tricking your biology into thinking that it's noon when it's actually midnight. They would think that's crazy, you know, so I'm with them like I'm with the people of antiquity. I'm gonna, I'm gonna learn as much from their wisdom and their life ways and try and, you know, kind of infuse as much of my lifestyle with that as possible and then set it and forget it and go have fun and know that, like, I'm gonna die at some point and I'll be stoked. I'm sure I'll be happier. Probably be the best moment of my life floating out of my body and going, oh, cool, now I don't have to worry about my sore foot anymore or whatever, you know, or paying taxes, you know, wherever you go, I'm sure it's beautiful. I have a sense of that because I've come close to it, I think, a few times. So, you know, that's that's the foundation for me. Is that stuff.

Yeah. That's so helpful. And you're inspiring me to take cold showers. I was taking it at the beginning of the year, and then I was like, oh, it's so cold. And. But I. I do go to a natural hot spring, and they do have cotton cold plunges, and that was great.

So do you go to the Wii Spa? No, we spa. No, not we spa. Beverly Hot Springs in Koreatown. Oh, I missed that place. I used to go there all the time for years, especially when I lived in Koreatown. Yeah, it's. People wouldn't believe me. I'd be like, hey, you want to go to a hot spring? They're like, where, in Joshua Tree or whatever. No, it's in Koreatown. And they would think it's just a swimming pool. I'm like, no, this is geothermal, like, real spring water. And they have a really cold, cold plunge. Man. That was like, my saving grace. I miss that place so bad. We don't have. We don't have any springs like that in the Austin area. There's one little hot spring outside of town, but it's. It's. And it's nice. I'm glad that it's there, but it's just kind of a warm spring, and they don't have a cold plunge. That. Yeah. The Beverly Hot Springs is a great reset.

Yeah. I actually go there every week and I get a massage. It just. It's so calming. You can't think about anything else when you get to that really hot, hot spring. And then when you plunge into a cold, forget it. You are, like you said, you know, norepinephrine, you know, the, you know, endorphin kicks in. So I do that three times, and I feel like my whole body is vibrating.

It's the best.

Vibrating.

It's the best. Like, as someone who used to do a lot of drugs, I'm telling you, if you do hot and cold contrast therapy, you would never need to do drugs. It makes you feel so good. And there's no side effects. I mean, other than being uncomfortable. Maybe when it's cold, some people, you know, have a really hard time with that. But if you can even do, like, one minute, you know, it still has huge benefits.

Yeah. I remember when I was in China, that was my first exposure. You know, I was just a kid because I lived in China for 20 years. But they were talking about swimming in the winter. So they literally break the ice and people jump in, and I was like, oh, my that's so crazy. But people were saying this is the most incredible thing for your health. This is just, you know, like, people were raving about it. So that was my first exposure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very, very brave people.

Hey, I want to ask you. I want to ask you a question because you, you know, I left LA a couple years ago. I haven't been back. Did Beverly Hot Springs open the outdoor section yet where they have the outdoor pool?

No, they have an outdoor one.

They started to build it about two years ago, and it was taking forever, and I would, you know, ask them when I went in there. When's it going to be done? Oh, it's going to be done in a few weeks. And then it just never was. But they built like, a whole pool, like the size of the indoor men's and women's. But this was going to be a co ed hot pool outside. Yeah, yeah. And I was like, that's so cool, because you could go out there and get sun and, you know, actually just be outdoors and get some fresh air. But I don't know, maybe they never finished it.

Well, I'm grateful it's open at all, because in the beginning, I think for a year during COVID it was. It just closed. It was so sad.

Right.

So the world has changed a lot since.

Go figure. Like, the one thing that's good for your immune system. Getting hot and cold. Nope, can't do that. And taking a sauna.

I know. And gems. Yeah. Anyhow. Yeah. So these are really, really helpful tips. The meditation. I want to ask you, how much do you think meditation has helped you? Like, what did it do? Because I actually just recently started to meditate again. I was using brain tab and, you know, guided meditation, light and sound. It was great. But I. I found when I actually just do quiet meditation, even though it's not that dramatic, but I think it's making a big difference for me, and I. It's just really, really fascinating.

So, yeah, you know, I've gone through. I guess I. I started, like, in the late 90s, and I've gone through a lot of different phases of trying different techniques and different styles. I. I think the one that I probably did for the longest was Vedic meditation, which is similar. Kind of comes from the same lineage as Transcendental meditation. And that's 20 minutes twice a day. No headphones, no props at all. It's just you and your mantra, kind of in, inside your mind, gently and slowly repeating the mantra that was given to you when you got trained by your teacher. And I Think that was like the thing that really moved my meditation forward because there's just something that happens when it's just you and it's just. I mean, in Vedic meditation it doesn't even have to be silent. I mean, I used to meditate in the middle of a park in New York City or wherever. I mean, I still prefer that it's quiet, but it's. It's more about the silence within. So I think there's a lot to be said in that because there's nothing other than your mantra distracting you from your presence. Right? So I use Brain Tab all the time. I love it. I have it at home. I use another thing called New Calm, which is it doesn't have the light show, but New Calm is like really powerful for restoration. And it's kind of a forced meditation. It just knocks you into theta and it's just a really restful. It's an app and these little bio signaling stickers you put on your wrist. And you know, I've done all kinds of different guided meditations. I love Joe Dispenza's meditations. I've tried it all. I think sometimes out of just laziness, I'll end up doing a guided meditation. Like this morning I did an hour long Joe Dispenza meditation with some from his breath work before and it was great. But it took much less discipline for me to do that than to sit and do my Vedic meditation and in silence within myself, with no props and no, no gadgets or anything and just me, myself and I. And dropping in. To me, that requires much more discipline because it's like nothing's happening. You know what I mean? I think it's a harder practice. And so like when people ask me about getting to meditation and say that they struggle, I always say that, you know, you start with the low hanging fruit, which is where you have something to listen to, to engage in. And then as you start to derive benefit from that and you enjoy that, then to actually be trained by a proper meditation teacher, that really gives you a practice such as Vedic meditation or something of that nature. So I would say for the past couple years I've been more in a phase of actually listening to things and kind of going on journeys in my meditations versus the many years before. Before that, that I was very committed to once and oftentimes twice a day of just the 20 minutes of silence and just really being with that presence. That said, I think anything we can do that gives us a reprieve from being engaged with the Mind engaged with the ego engaged with the intellect. I mean, even five minutes, even just on the way over here, I was meditating at a red light. Coming to do this interview with you because I was really kind of. I mean, I agitated in the sense of being upset, but I was just busy and running around, and it's like, oh, it's almost five. I got to get to the studio for joy. And. And I was like, whoa, slow down. Take a breath. And it was a long red light, and I just had a little meditation sitting right there. And then that's all I had to do to change from, like, running the guys building my fence, and we're doing all this stuff at the house, and just a crazy day, just very active, really busy, Just. I mean, how long is a red light? I mean, they seem long when you're in a hurry, but what was it, 10 seconds or something, right? And that totally reset me to walk in the studio and have a different degree of presence. So for me, meditation, there's not a right or wrong. There's not a good or bad. It's like whatever's most effective for you at the stage at which you find yourself in your life and your level of consciousness and your level of development. I think for me, the main benefit, just as an overarching recommendation, is just beginning to have a relationship with that part of myself that is other than the thoughts that I'm having, the feelings that I'm having, the emotions, the sensations in my body, to actually be in touch with consciousness, which is what we really are, and to give ourselves the gift of having some time to connect with what's real, so that when we come back into the 3D realm, as you and I are now, we can participate in it. Yet we know that there's much more than that going on, right in. In going into that quantum realm, which is the energy field that exists before the particle, before matter, before solid objects, the physicality, our body, the way we think, the way we feel, all those things. That's real to a degree. But then when you go into a deep meditation, all that disappeared, where did it go? You're. And you're still there. Who's the one that's still there? Who is the one within me, or who is the version of me that is able to sit there and witness, wow, I'm having a lot of thoughts right now. There's a me, and then there's the thoughts. And that gap of separation is where peace exists. I believe that's what we're all looking for. Is that gap now, to live there permanently would mean you'd probably have to leave your body, right? Or be enlightened, I guess, self realized. But to be a participant in one's life and be active in the physical, material realm and still kind of have one toe in the water of consciousness and awareness that it's all kind of a game that we're playing. Meditation is one of the main tools that I've used to be able to live like that. And when that becomes useful, especially is when one is up against adversity. And the adversity that one is facing seems very real and concrete to the point where it's causing you to be unhappy or very afraid or angry, right? To really be in suffering. The suffering is because we start to believe that the reality being projected by our mind and by our ego and all of the things that our ego is doing to keep us safe and alive, we start to believe in that too much. We buy into the story, and then we begin to suffer. When I've learned over time to take breaks and step out of being Luke and being the one who's watching what Luke is thinking and feeling, that is where I found the golden key that opens the door into being able to take life less seriously. Then I go back into something, I encounter a problem and I'm like, I don't know, Wait, wait, wait, wait. This is not real. Or the thought that I'm having. Say somebody does something and I think they're doing it to spite me or to hurt me, or they're trying to cheat me or they don't like me or whatever, right? Let's just a mind game. Your mind makes up some narrative around some event in one's life, right? Without meditation, for me, my mind would go, yeah, that person's a jerk. And they did that to you because they don't like you and they're trying to hurt you or they want to cheat you or whatever, right? And it would make up a story. And I would at no point question that. I would just believe that, and I would go with that. And then my behavior toward them and toward my life in general would actually be motivated by thoughts that weren't even true, that weren't even real. It was just a story that my mind made up because it was all flustered about something. But in meditation, I might be able to look at that same situation and go, well, it seems like this is what's happening, but maybe I'm wrong. You know, maybe that's just thoughts that I'm having about the situation. And maybe those thoughts aren't actually accurate. Maybe they're not true. Maybe I'm buying into a falsehood that's been made up because I'm hurt and I have some feelings that I don't know how to contextualize. And so my mind's going to start creating and unraveling all of these stories that are actually fake. It's fake news. I don't know how anyone. I mean, because I've never could do it. Could begin to solve problems for themselves instantaneously without learning how to step back from the mind and out of the mind and actually witness the thoughts that are proliferating in one's experience. You know, having that witness observer, it's like. It's like, you know, you're inside your house, right? And you're running around doing in there, and everything seems very real, and you're having all these problems in your house. It's like meditation is like going, boop. And floating above your house by about 100ft and watching your little self run around in circles like a rat in a maze and go, oh, man, you don't need to work that hard, you know, and give oneself some. Some love and compassion and understanding and. And get a reprieve from those things that often drive us unconsciously, you know, that's the gateway to the unconscious. Well, there are other tools, too. But speaking of meditation, you know, there's things in our subconscious that are driving us sometimes into negative or even destructive patterns without our even knowing it's happening. Because we don't know how to detach and create that gap of separation between ourselves as consciousness and ourselves as the doer and the actor and the believer and the thinker and the feeler.

Yeah.

The opportunity to step out of that game and just watch what's going on for a few minutes, a few minutes a day just to go, okay, I'm going to step into another realm where all of this is less real. I know it'll be here when I get back, but when I come back, my perspective is likely going to be dramatically changed in a positive sense as a result of having done so.

Yeah. And I think, speaking from personal experience, it does take a level of discipline and, you know, to fight the compulsion of staying where you're at. Because sometimes people are so addicted to how they're thinking, how they're feeling. They want to stay angry, they want to stay obsessed, they want to stay anxious because you are right there. And it's better to just stay right there because it takes too Much energy to get out. But at what point are you going to try something new? Because you are stuck. You're stuck in your mentality and your unhappiness. So that's when, you know, I think that extra effort is very much worthwhile. That little discipline. Just like how people have to be disciplined. Exercise is no different. Totally brain exercise, right?

If I could only take some of my discipline, which I'm quite disciplined about. Meditating. I meditate every morning. I very, very rarely ever miss a morning exercise. Now, on the other hand, I mean, I just. I really just have never enjoyed it. I mean, I work out a couple days a week, fairly hard, you know, I mean, I'm 51. I don't, you know, I want to stay young and feel good. So I do it reluctantly, but I do it. But, man, finding the discipline to, like, get on my freaking AI exercise bike and, like, really exert myself, it requires probably a hundred times more discipline than me going, all right, I'm going to sit here and just be quiet for 20 minutes and just go within. I mean, I don't know, just the way I'm wired.

I guess I'm the reverse, I think, because I found, you know, like, legree, fitness, Pilates. So I just sign up automatically. I sign up for every day. So if I don't show up, they're going to penalize me. So I'm just going to show up every day. So I ended up working out every day. But I need.

Yes, that's a good tactic. You remind me when I was. When I was still living in la. This a few years ago, I was living in the Hollywood Hills, kind of up behind the Chinese Theater. And they built a new gym down by the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. And so I'm like, yeah, I got to get in shape. I gotta. I gotta start to work out. So I went down there and I got a membership. Was like, LA Fitness, I think it was, and got a membership. Had the membership for over a year. Never once went in there, except because I had to go in, in person to cancel my membership. They wouldn't let me do it over the phone. This is like, I went one time to say, like, all right, I quit. Yeah, but that's. I did exercise during that time, just to be fair to myself and to be honest, but I just also just hate gyms. I just. I can't stand the lighting, the smell of the plastic. The music is horrible. Like, I just. Too many people, it's too loud, too bright. It's just. It's Too hard on my nervous system. So like I usually work out by myself. That's, that's. Yeah, but that also requires unfortunately like way more discipline than like having an appointment at a gym with a trainer. My little brother owned a gym and he was a trainer and I would commit and pay him and I'll supposed to be there at 7am tomorrow. So if I didn't go, he would be pissed at me and I would lose the money. So then I would go, you know, so it's, it's funny with that building habits probably much more, much more difficult to have someone hold you accountable to meditation though, Right. Because it's, it's free. Like once you learn how to do it.

Yeah.

You have to go see a meditation trainer every morning to meditate like you would a personal trainer, you know.

Yeah, yeah. So I, I'm, you know, I think the benefit, just how calm I feel during the day and you know that's priceless. Right. So you know that I think once people start doing it and they start to notice the benefit, they're, they're really going to, to treasure that time for them to detach from this chaos. Right.

So true. I'll give you, I'll give you a real life example of the benefit. Well, that was strong. I just. If you're wondering what I'm doing, anyone watching the video, I just went like my friend John that I spoke of earlier, John Laurence, Dr. John Laurence in Florida. He makes this stuff called Zen spray. It's a meditation mist and it has these sacred herbs from the Amazon and tobacco herbs including a really strong tobacco and essential oils and oxytocin. It feels really good, but it's quite strong. Maybe I shouldn't do it on video. Anyway, back to a real life example of how meditation benefits me. This morning I knew I had a lot on my plate today. I mean it's just non stop. So I did my Joe Dispenza breathing exercises and then I meditated. And the dog groomer shows up at 9. Got to deal with that. Then shortly after that this huge crew with all these trucks and all these fencing show up, pull up in my driveway. Excuse me. I was hella strong. I should have done that when you were talking. So dude pulls up and we have to go plan where the fence is going to go. And I have to make all of these really. I mean they're not big decisions in the big scheme of things. But I'm going to be looking at this fence and paying with the way, you know, supply costs are now Paying a lot of, like, what some people make in a year. I'm paying for this freaking fence. It's like, for me, it's very high stakes, and it's a quality problem. I acknowledge that. I'm. I'm grateful to have this problem, but I went out there and he's like, okay, we're going to put the post here and the gate here and the thing. And I'm just like, whoa, thank God I meditated. Thank God I meditated. Spending that hour made my day so smooth. And then I had a number of other things go on that I won't bore you or your listeners with, but it was a very full day. High pressure, full on. The only break I had after that was the five minutes at the red light on the way to come do your podcast, for example. And that's great. I love being busy. I'm a productive guy, have a lot of energy. So that meditation set up the Runway for my entire day. So had I not meditated, who knows what have happened? It's a hypothetical exploration, but I bet you, based on my 25 years of meditating and missing it some days, that I would have been way more stressed out, made poor decisions. Some of them could have actually been financially costly had I not I had to go speak with my neighbor about our property boundaries and be diplomatic and, you know, kind of make compromises with him and his wife. And all of that went much more smoothly. I was not only diplomatic, but I would say pretty considerate and caring. And I made some concessions that I might not have made. If I would have been stressed out and agitated or maybe conversely, I would have people pleased and went like, yeah, yeah, because I just couldn't deal with the conflict of that negotiation, then I would have been kicking myself in the ass for the next 10 years of living in this house because I. That one day I didn't stand up for myself and say, no, the fence is going there. You know, I mean, this is real life stuff. This is what meditation does for me. It helps me cope with life in a way that makes life seem friendly rather than adversarial. It's like it sets the position of my mind and my emotions going out into the world and facing all this that we all face with looking at the world as if it's in cooperation with me and I'm participating in it and with it rather than me fighting against it. And just like, I got to get through this day and talk about all these people and do all these things. It's like, no, I Have the privilege of being a busy guy, having a busy day, and I'm going to see how much grace I can execute the things I have to do with, you know, as I live my life.

Yeah. I love how you put it, you know, the world, a more friendly place. That's. That's a beautiful way of thinking about it. So I think we have, you know, just a few more minutes. I want to ask you about your spiritual pursuits because I know you were also very adventurous when it comes to seeking more understanding in the spiritual realm. So can you share some of the.

Yeah, I mean, that's insights. That's what it's all about. And I'll also just add the caveat that I do acknowledge that really, truly committing oneself to spirituality, to having a relationship with God or with a higher power and all the practices that go into making that possible are exceedingly difficult when you feel like crap physically. Right. I mean, it's just if you're terminally ill or you have. You have, you know, not terminally ill, but even worse. So then. But let's say you have Lyme disease or metabolic dysfunction or Crohn's or whatever, you know, are you going to get up and be like, wow, I'm going to read this deep spiritual book from a mystic in India and really take notes and highlight it and apply the things I learn in my life today? No, man, I'm trying to survive. I'm trying to get up and go to the bathroom, you know, without falling down or whatever. Right. It's like. So that's where the physical part comes in. The physical part is about having the energy within your physical vessel to use your vessel as an instrument of your spiritual growth and expansion. So to have the vitality to raise your consciousness and have an actual vehicle to travel the earth plane with that is functional and doesn't hold you back from your mission, which, to me, the mission of life in my personal life is self realization and enlightenment to achieve the highest level of consciousness I can possibly achieve until the day I check out of this body and there's no more Luke story. That's. That's what I'm here for. And along the way, what that includes is taking as many souls along with me that are also sharing that same vision for their life. So my journey with. With spirituality, and I wish there was a better word for it because that always. That word always kind of rubs me the wrong way because it's. It has so many connotations. It's like the word God, right? It's Such a loaded word. But let's just say let's frame it as just being in touch with the part of myself that is beyond just my. My physicality, just beyond me, my body, my mind, my thoughts. Like there's. There's a spirit that exudes through all living things, and some might even argue inanimate objects as well in our. In our universe. But my journey was so slow and so piecemeal. Just little baby, baby, baby steps at becoming a little more enlightened over the course of a long swath of time. And that started for me primarily being motivated by the understanding that when I was in active addiction and I could not get out of was. It was so painful, and it went on for so long, and I couldn't make it stop. I mean, I could feel it right now. And I'm not. I'm not getting emotional because I'm still in pain. I just like, wow. It's the gratitude I feel.

Yeah.

That I don't have to live like that anymore. So it was made clear to me when I finally surrendered and just said, I have to get clean. I can't live like this anymore. I got to do something. I mean, I was finally willing to listen to all the people that had been suggesting that I might. Maybe you should be sober. Right. Which is everyone in my life, even my druggie friends were like, man, you got problems when that happens, when your lower companions and people like your drug buddies are telling you, man, you're going too far, far. You've gone too far. And that's where I was. And, you know, when that treatment center that I checked myself into, I mean, with the help of my mom, it's not like I just walked in there. I really needed. I needed that to be facilitated by other people because I was totally incapacitated and couldn't manage anything like checking myself in anywhere. But what happened was they made it clear to me that their model at this treatment center was based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so the 12 steps are a spiritual program designed to align someone with the spiritual way of living by practicing spiritual principles. And the goal there being. And quite a proven track record of this being true, is that as one awakens spiritually and becomes more conscious of their truth, that the need to do drugs and to drink alcohol and to participate in addictive behaviors goes away. So it's like the drinking and using, our symptom of. Of what's going on inside, which is a spiritual sickness or a spiritual disconnection. And so that's how it was framed for me. And I started to understand that. And so I started to follow the tenants of the 12 steps, which is a group of extremely powerful and well organized truths or universal laws or principles. And all of them are designed to provide a spiritual way of living your life. And so in the beginning, it was like praying to God, like I would see in the movies, like putting my hands together and saying prayers. In the beginning, my prayers were like, don't let me die today, don't let me do heroin today, and I win. You know, I mean, they were just meager prayers, Just the bare minimum of survival. And then what happened was really quite instantaneously is that when I started to offer those prayers in that treatment center, my prior non stop, chronic obsession to do drugs and alcohol, those nagging cravings that were driving me close to death at times went away. And they were just gone, really, in one day. When I woke up the first day in that treatment center, I prayed my ass off because that's all they had to give me. I tried to get strong medication and they said no. They said, go to your room and pray. I would have preferred Dilaudid, but I guess now I see that they were right. So I started just praying. And I didn't even believe in God. I wasn't raised with any spirituality, no religion. I knew nothing about it, which is probably a net benefit for me because I didn't have to work through kind of negative dogma. I wasn't raised Catholic and hated it. And so I hated God because I hated the church. I didn't have to go through any of that. I was really quite open. And I was in such a desperate, humble state that I was willing to try anything as ridiculous as prayer sounded. I tried it and it worked. So from that day until the 25.

Years later, how did you know it worked?

How did I know it worked? Because I woke up the day, the first day in my rehab and I said that prayer. And from that day until this day, I've never once ever considered or wanted to or craved any drug or alcohol ever again. And the prior 10 years to that, I literally, I'm not exaggerating, trying to be, like, edgy. I couldn't go one hour without doing drugs. Like, impossible, impossible. Like not at all an option. I had to be high. Anytime I was conscious and not asleep, I had to be high. And I would even wake up in the middle of the night and do drugs and go back to sleep just to make sure I didn't breathe the sober breath I was really, really in it.

Just that one session of praying.

Yeah, well, that was the first indication to me, the first verifiable proof that there was something out there that cared about me and had the power to do for me what I couldn't do for myself. It was like an undeniable, irrefutable fact that the only thing that had changed from one day to the next is I had asked God that I didn't even believe in to help me. And it did. And so when I say, like, it started from meager beginnings on the spiritual path, I mean, that was. The prayer was just like, help me stay clean today. And then it was one day, then it was two days, and so on. Now, that said, if I hadn't continued with my work in addiction recovery after checking out of that treatment center, I'm sure I would have relapsed and I would probably be literally dead by now. I mean, at the very best, a mental hospital or a prison. But I was. There was no successful path laid out for me because of my choices and because of the unhealed trauma within me from my childhood that was driving me to constantly self administer very harmful and addictive medication. Heroin, crack cocaine, crystal meth, alcohol, pills, whatever. Whatever was around, you know. So back to the point when I realized that the key to my freedom was the adoption of practices like prayer and just reading spiritual literature, just digesting truthful content that was based on developing a relationship with God. Over time, I started to go from where I was in a state of belief or consideration. Like, yeah, I believe in God. I believe there's a God. But moving from there over the course of some years into actually having a faith in God. So not a belief where, yeah, I think it exists, but a faith that I know it exists. I know in my core that it's true that there is a God. Not only that, that if I petition this God for help, it will help me because it loves me. I say it because I don't have a. I don't have a, you know, biblical sense of God as a grave beard guy in the sky. I mean, it's just. It's an. It to me, it's not a he or she. It's. It's a he and a she and everything. It's infinite, right? Omniscient, infinite. Not impotent. I was impotent, actually. I was. Because I was on so many opiates, to be honest. Let's get real here. But anyway, back to the serious spirituality. So joy, for me, it was like okay, wow. If I've got this degree of reprieve from my problems, maybe if I apply the same process to my anger, if I apply it to my fear, if I apply it to my sexual behavior, if I apply it to my financial life, if I apply it to my relationships, what if I could start inviting, let's just say, consciousness, more consciousness into all of these areas of my life and over time, incrementally begin to surrender more of my will to the Creator. Meaning, like my plans, designs, what I want, how I think it should go, all my little hair brain ideas and my clinging and attachments and obsessions. And what if I could just start to let some of those go? And so why I say it was piecemeal, it's been very slow and it's an ongoing process to this day because I still, of course, as a human, hit up against things that are troubling and I have to find solutions that are in the spiritual realm. That led me then to go to India and do a 21 day silent retreat and do a pilgrimage to all of these ashrams in southern India and got deeply committed into the practice of Kundalini Yoga. And every spiritual book I think I've ever heard of, I've not only read but like highlighted and then during my day go, oh yeah, remember that thing you read this morning? Do that. Right? So it's not like, it's not not assuming knowledge and amassing more knowledge of spirituality. It's actually practicing it in my life. And that's what I learned from the teachings of the 12 steps. I mean, you can give an alcoholic the Alcoholics Anonymous book and say, hey, read this book, memorize all the information. They'll be drunk in short order if you give them that book and say, here's this book and here's how you actually do the things it says to do in your life. I'll probably stay sober. So it's the, the only thing gained is actually just acknowledging and getting somewhat of an intellectual understanding of spiritual truths and then ingesting them and applying them in my life, Right? So even for example, just again, to the reference I made earlier of driving over here, I'm at a red light, having a little self awareness to go, whoa, you're a little agitated. Now would be a good time to meditate for 10 seconds. That's a spiritual principle meditation, self awareness, going like, I'm a little dysregulated. Let me remember who I am. I'm a spiritual being that's pretending to be a person. You Know, why am I like in a hurry? So I'm five minutes late for the interview. Okay, so what, you know, make amends. That's another principle that's spiritual is, is making restitution when you've done something morally wrong, or if you've harmed someone or cause someone a grievance or inconvenience, to take accountability and responsibility for it. All of these are spiritual principles. And so what the journey has been mostly for me is not so much about adding more, quote unquote, spirituality into my life. It's about discarding and letting go of falsehoods that I previously believed to be true. In other words, like, a spiritual life isn't a matter of addition, like, oh, I need to add more spiritual stuff. It's that I actually need to just let go of hurts, traumas, negative emotions, negative thinking, negative patterns of behavior, relationships, codependency. All that shit has got to stop. And the more effective I am at getting rid of all that stuff that is actually not true or that's causing my life to be less fulfilling or even at times self destructive, then when all of that is sort of moved out of the way, what's there is a spiritual being having a pretend to be a person experience. You know, it's just like, it's like say you clear fear from your mind, what's left is courage. It's not that I have to go out and get courage, I just have to eliminate the fear. And what's left is bravery and courage. Right?

Yeah.

So, you know, years and years, and as I said, continued into my sobriety, it's going deeper and deeper and deeper into all of that really could be blanketed as surrender. Just going like, okay, I'm teachable, I'm willing to learn. I'm just going to humble myself and be a student of life and do my best to avail myself to God in whatever form that shows up for me. And at 22 years sober, I. There was a huge turning point in my life, and this is one of the most fascinating and absolutely surprising experiences for me is that at 22 years sober I found myself. I mean, I had evolved a lot, I had changed a lot. I was doing pretty well, I mean, especially outwardly in my life. I had had a number of successful careers and was doing great. I mean, if you looked at me at 26 as a very broken man or a boy really, in all true sense of the word, into a pretty functional, successful man, that felt pretty good about myself. But there were still areas in my life in which I Was very stuck, especially around romantic relationships, sex, dating. Just could not figure it out. And it was causing me a lot of problems, very dysfunctional. And here I am, this really for the most part functional person, yet there's this area of my life I just am clueless. I can't figure it out. So that led me into my curiosity around the intentional and devotional and very reverent approach some people in the world are taking now and I guess have been probably for all time of plant medicines and psychedelics. And I kind of use both terms because they're not always interchangeable because some plant medicines aren't necessarily psychedelic like the African herb Khana for example is definitely a plant medicine, but is not psychedelic. And also not all plant medicines are plants because you have the bufo alvarius toad which produces 5 Meo DMT. You can't really call that a plant medicine. Maybe you could call it a psychedelic. I digress. I went to Costa, I went to Costa Rica and participated in a four night week long ayahuasca ceremony. And the level of healing that I experienced in that week was, I mean it's hard to even describe how much that changed me and how unstuck that got me and how much deep, deep healing, especially in the trauma that I had been unable to reach through all the forms of therapy, emdr, hypnotherapy, I mean all the things group therapy, experiential. I tried everything and as I said, there were just things I couldn't, I couldn't heal. And so that set me on a journey which has continued really to this day almost you know, four years later of very intentionally and periodically when I feel the time is right and the, the ceremony of sorts is right for me at that right time. And I've vetted it and I feel in a place where I'm able to further explore and further grow or further heal. This past four years, I would say my spiritual life and just my general sense of well being and my functionality as a human has just grown beyond measure. And that was very interesting to me and continues to be quite a phenomenon in the sense that for most people in recovery from addictions, the the most proven and effective method of continued sobriety, lasting sobriety throughout one's life is complete and total abstinence from all mind altering chemicals. Because of something that is referred to in the textbook. Well, I call it a textbook because it's like a manual for life. But in the book Alcoholics for Anonymous by which that organization was named, they uncover something called the phenomenon of craving. And this is something that's prevalent and I would say pretty universal with addicts and alcoholics. And that is if you are able to achieve abstinence from all chemicals, as long as you don't use any of them, you're safe and you can stay on the wagon. But let's say you were an alcoholic that drank beer every day and you couldn't stop and then you quit and then you start smoking weed, you're probably gonna start drinking again. And that was my experience over and over and over and over again during my years as an addict. So the fact that I've found so much healing and so much growth by my exploration into extremely altering chemicals of the mind is fascinating to me. And I could do five hour podcast on this and I have done many, but. But I think it has a lot to do with the healing capacity of how these medicines allow one to get deeply into the subconscious mind and to just go places where you could never go in any waking state safely without probably further harming yourself emotionally, especially in terms of trauma. And then also the exalted levels of consciousness that one has the opportunity to experience in ceremony that have a profoundly healing effect on your entire being. Or in my experience, you know, I'm not saying this is for everyone and I always give the, the disclaimer like, I'm not telling anyone to go do plant medicines. I'm just, I would be dishonest to not include that in my journey because, yeah, every metric. Let me put it this way, it's just so interesting to me, going back to the proven principle that if you were once an addict, you're always an addict. And then if you ever do any drugs or alcohol again, you're going to go right back to where you started. Which is true for anyone I know that's ever said, oh, I could have one glass of wine, I'll be fine. No, you're not. Then you're in jail a month later and you lost your family and your job and you're back in an AA meeting, right, on a relapse. But if I think about what would happen to me today, let's just say I leave this podcast, I leave the studio here and I just get the hair brain idea. You know what, I'm going to go to the bar and just have a few drinks and see how it goes. Because it's been 25 years, right? I'm probably fine. I could probably control it if I did that. I can almost guarantee that within a very short period of time, I would be drinking incessantly, I would be doing all sorts of illicit drugs. I would find myself totally addicted again and my whole life would completely fall apart. I would lose my business, my wife, my house. It would all be gone. Because that's what I used to do. I know I've lived it many times, however, with the, again, intentional and very mindful use of these categorically unaddictive substances, you know, psilocybin, all the things. Right. Ayahuasca, whatever. If I step back and just really, honestly, objectively look at the results in my life, because I've had to explain this to a couple people that have been concerned about me. And, you know, I want to make sure I'm not in denial also, because addicts are great at that. No, I'm fine. I'm just doing ayahuasca every weekend, you know, but if I look at just, just, you know, let's do an inventory of my life. How are the finances? Better than ever. How are. Is my romantic relationship best I've ever had. It gets better and better every day. How am I as a father to my dog and cat? Better than ever. What does my home look like? It's the nicest home I've ever lived in and I own it. I've never owned before. How am I doing in my business? What's my state of overall well being and happiness? Better than ever. You know, it's like any area of my life that I look at has dramatically improved in that timeline of the past four so odd years, you know?

Yeah.

So speaking of, you know, back to your original question, I'll wrap it up. I get enthusiastic about this particular thing because it's just so.

Love it.

It's so paradoxical and it's just astonishing to me. I mean, just look at my life and I go, oh my God. Just four years ago, I was still acting out my abandonment, neglect and sexual trauma from when I was a kid. Like I was still unconsciously being motivated by the ways in which I had been hurt when I was young. And I'm sure those things motivate me in some ways today that I'll later become unconscious or conscious of. But the fact is I feel very healed, very whole, and really for the first time in my life. And it, you know, comes and goes in various degrees, I'd say. But overall, I really like myself and really just love myself. I think I'm so awesome.

That's beautiful.

Yeah. And I mean that in a healthy sense. Right. Don't mean in a, you know, egotistical grandiose sense. I just mean within my being. When I look in the mirror, I don't feel shame about who I am. I look in the mirror and I go, yeah, you got a fat stomach, but you're, you're doing pretty good, kid. You know, like, you got a little work to do here and there, but overall, you're killing it. There's a, there's a daily thumbs up, like, man, keep it up. Keep going, keep going. You're doing good. You're helping people. You're. You're making an impact in the world. And my life has meaning in my life, has purpose. And I'm. And I'm not being driven by those unhealed parts of myself that were formerly, you know, so subconsciously and unconsciously motivating me into failure in different areas of my life and also just not, you know, in some cases, even having a negative impact on other people because of my hurt. You know, just. Even if it's just a negative thought or a brief moment of resentment towards someone because I'm judging them and all those kind of things, it's just everything in my life, and not just from plant medicines and such, but the culmination of just committing myself to surrendering my life to the God that created me and finding, continuing to find ways in which I'm still clinging to control and having attachments to things and ideas and preferences and just letting go, letting go, letting go, letting go. And really feeling like now that I have a true relationship, an ongoing communication and relationship and an awareness that there, there is something that created all of this and created me, and it's totally here and it's totally available and it absolutely loves me.

Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing such an inspirational journey. I mean, you came from really, you were looking at going down the hill, probably toward demise, and now definitely completely, you transformed yourself to become, you know, a positive force to help others and healing yourself and loving yourself and I mean, how incredible. And it gives so many people hope. And I love the fact that you're weaving, you know, physical wellness with spiritual wellness and, you know, and showing people how both are really important. I think it's such an incredible message. Yeah, I just, I'm really enjoying speaking with you and just love what you've done for yourself and you're inspiring me as well. So I'm going to implement some of the things that you have done. I hope other people are also going to do that to enhance their own physical health and then start practicing meditation, however small the step is. And Gradually getting connected to something that's greater than just this little, you know, little piece that's temporary.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So. So you're going to get on those cold showers?

I will. Oh, my God. Now I'm set it on air. So I can't. I. Yeah, I can't.

You know, it's funny, when I lived in L. A, I used to be bummed out because in the majority of months in la, the showers weren't cold enough. And I'd be like, kind of annoyed. I turned the water all the way cold. I'm like, I gotta go get in the ice bath. This isn't cold enough.

That's funny. That's true. Yeah. So anyhow, so how can people find you and follow you and learn more from you?

Yeah, I'm all out there. One thing that I would mention again that I alluded to before I'm really excited about is my blue blocking eyewear line. I should keep them on my desk so I can show them when I'm on a video. But I worked in fashion for a long time, as I said, and when I started getting into like blue blocking eyewear, I found that a lot of the frames on the market just were kind of just not cool. Like, I just didn't like them esthetically and I felt kind of weird wearing them in public, and so I wouldn't a lot of the time. So I decided to take the best scientifically backed lenses that really work in terms of limiting the spectrum of light that you want to avoid. And I designed a whole line of glasses and we have prescription and readers and even kids frames now, so you can find those at Gilded by Luke Story. That's G I L D E D. So that's my little sales plug. And then the rest of the rest of my stuff is on my main site, which is lukestory.com and, and then, you know, my podcast that you spoke of earlier is called the Lifestylist. And that's, you know, that's kind of my. My main channel of communication with the world and the place where I. I sort of aggregate all of the great things that I discover and explore and experiment with. And I just put anyone and everything that I find to be really useful to humanity on my show. And that's something I've been having a lot of fun with for about six years now.

That's wonderful. Yeah. Oh, maybe you can talk about your favorite skin cream.

Oh, my God. Chara Omni. Chara Omni. I'm not even saying that because you're here, but it is, like, it's super next level. I mean, I'm not like, someone who really worries about my aesthetics that much. I. I think for 51, like, I'm. I'm doing all right, but at the same time, I do like to get a lot of sun. And I've seen people that live in areas where there's a lot of sun and they get out in the sun a lot. And it can be. It can put a lot of wear and tear on your skin. So I think I'm more mindful about, like, facial skin care and really, like, I'm willing to spend money on the really good stuff and stuff that's, you know, like, you have your peptides and stem cells and like all this next level kind of biohacked skin care. I really love that because that's, like, one thing I know I'm kind of cheating on a little bit is, like, getting a lot of sun on my face for many, many decades. And so I think that's why I'm kind of motivated by that. Whereas, I don't know, I'm not worried about, like, oh, I need a good haircut or something. I don't really. I don't really care about, like, my hair and things, but I would like to have a youthful face. And so, yeah, I really. Your product is amazing. It is. I have it on my website@lukestory.com a lot of people buy it. I get great feedback on it. So, yeah, I'm a huge fan. You, you definitely went, like, full on with that. Thank you.

Yeah. So beauty and health. I mean, we're all, you know, we want to have the full package, right? Beauty and health and spiritual development. So we want to live happy and well and, and, and, and, you know, of course, skin health is important, so. But I am definitely going to check out your blue light. And I love it that you're using your designer eyes now. You're providing this health enhancing device. Yeah, I'm going to check it out.

Well, it's one of those things, like, if instead of just complaining that no one's making something you like, just do it yourself. And that's what I did. You know, I'm just like, I want blue blocking glasses that are actually really cool and stylish and, like, funky, you know, like, I want, I want to have frames that are match my. I wear some crazy clothes sometimes. Like, I want the whole package, so I don't want to wear something that looks like I'm wearing, like, welding goggles or something. You know, I want, like, some cool sunglasses that happen to be amber color, basically. Yeah.

Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure and likewise appreciate you on the show and sharing your life story. It's going to help a lot of people.

Awesome. Well, it's great to see you again and thank you for the invite. It's been really lovely to have the opportunity to catch up with you.

Yeah. Thank you again. And for everybody that stayed with us for this long interview. Thank you so much and hope you really enjoy it. Please like the video and subscribe to the YouTube channel. And thank you so much.