Making Love to My Past

Foreign excited about this podcast because I'm about to make love to my past. And what I mean by that is really step into going a little bit backward so that not only for myself, but any listeners, they can go through the process of identifying how they can release the trauma of their past by loving the out of it. One of the interesting things about doing these every single day is that you get reactions and you get things that happen to the listeners or people that you're close to that will say some things about the podcast or love it or hate it or whatever it might be. And oftentimes what happens is they have these moments where they'll reflect back on certain versions of you. And in that, you have to either receive it, which is what I talked about on the last episode, you repel it, you run away from it. You can get into your sympathetic nervous system, or you can really, like I said before, receive it, sit in it, and love the out of it. What I'm going to do here is go a little bit backward about some of the darker sides of me, that even though maybe for myself, I've gone through the process of forgiving, there's oftentimes, and this is one of the things that I say is, why did I create certain things to love myself more? There's certain iterations of the world outside of me that will reflect areas of myself that maybe I haven't fully fallen in love with and forgiven. So now it's time to just make love to my past and do this exercise not only for myself, but for anybody listening so that we can delve a little bit deeper on the process of letting go, receiving, and what the full polarity of love really looks like. I've talked a little bit about my sexual abuse and rape. I've talked a little bit about me going to prison. I haven't gone really deep into my depression and suicide and things along those lines. And I haven't gone super deep into the space where I was just this, like, spiritual kind of vampire. As I started to step into what I would consider this work and this journey and this awakening, what I recognize is that my whole life's been a journey toward this process of becoming more awake. And even now look back on where I'm at today and say, man, that guy was not all that woke maybe 10 years from now, who knows? But it's all about the energy of now and where we are now and how we can actually do something with this moment of now. So I want to talk a little bit about my depression in my 20s, and that doesn't come up a whole lot anymore for me. But I do still have scars on my wrist where I attempted to slit my wrist. And I do have certain triggers that pop up. There was a time in my 20s where Abby came really, really depressed. And it had a lot to do with really me looking at the world outside of me. And I say this a lot. The world outside of me, I was hoping that it would love me more than it did. And I was in a pretty rough relationship. And I had basically got married for a lot of the wrong reasons. The person I was married to at the time, I got involved with her because I really fell in love with her kids, who were. Who I saw were very much so a reflection of me. And I wanted to do all that I could to care for them differently. And anytime that the threat of them would be pulled away and this whole process of feeling abandoned or rejected by this person would happen, I would go into these really deep holes of depression. And what I recognized was that I started to create this cycle for myself, because it had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with me, now that I know what it is now. But what I was doing is creating a muscle and an exercise for myself to actually see myself differently. And because I was waiting on that person to affirm me or giving all that I could to be seen differently by that individual, she basically would never give me that. Because what was my soul needing is for me to love me more. And me going through these deeper cycles of depression, anytime that I would look for any kind of window of affirmation or approval or that I'm being a good stepfather to the two kids that she had, it pulled me into these deep spirals of unworthiness. And it reflected back in spaces of my childhood where I felt abandoned. And so the little child version of me now reflected in the image of these two kids that I was caring for through the space of somebody abandoning me, threw me into this really interesting cycle of deep depression. And because of that, it created a space that I was not finding any aspect of wholeness in myself. When I look at the moment of when I picked up a knife and I made a decision to cut my wrist out of depression, it had nothing to do with that other person, had to do with me feeling like that little boy who wasn't being seen and heard from, like, 9 to 14 years old, was needing help and was screaming out. And I did not see a way to love. And when you start to bring other individuals in your Life, whether it's stepchildren or family or friends or anything along those lines, you have this really big hope and this want and this desire that they will love you more than you love yourself. And if they love you more than you love yourself, and you get this constant state of affirmation, then what happens is you never have to go within. And if my purpose in life was to be in truth and vulnerability and go within and find the love within myself, which is everybody's journey because we're all creators in this space, then I absolutely had to go through the door of shedding something. That shedding was creating enough pain in that moment to break the need of me looking to somebody else as that person to affirm me. So I cut myself and I bled and I hurt like hell and was able to get an ambulance and was able to get to the hospital and was able to get myself stitched up. And for the longest time, I had no feeling in either of my hands, couldn't feel anything. That feeling has since come back. But it was where that trauma of both aspects of my youth, the abandonment that I had when I was younger not feeling, nurtured the motherly wound that I had carried into that moment. And it was something that, from a divine aspect of things, I had to do to basically, it's almost like pinching yourself to kind of wake yourself up. And it was a horrible thing to do. And I highly would not recommend this for anybody else to do, but it was something I had to do for me to love myself. The next part I want to talk about is the last four years of my life. So in that window, I used to struggle a lot with religion. And I would look to the Bible and look to all of these different religious sources for answers. And one day when I met my fiance, Sophia, she introduced me to meditation. And she was doing a lot of transcendental work and other things on her own. And I always thought meditation was this kind of woo woo thing and didn't really understand what it meant. But I was praying like hell and nothing would happen. And that's because I was looking for this large deity outside of me to like, show me some aspect of love. I was looking to some other being, like a Jesus or something else to basically be a model toward. And none of this was me pointing any responsibility back to myself. So what ended up happening is as Christmas, her and I got deeper into that spiritual space and she was just pointing me in different directions. I bumped into this sadhguru video, and the video was really interesting. I remember I got so excited about it. I went on this deep rabbit hole of Sadhguru and got so deep into it. I remember one day I came back to Dallas and shared it with my parents, and they thought I was crazy. Like, what are you showing me this for? Why are you sharing this? And it was very much so left on deaf ears. And I was like, well, maybe this isn't right. Once again, you see me looking at the outside world to validate my inside self. And so I didn't feel validated. So I went and found another source and got on this Tom Bilyeu podcast and listened to him. It was on impact theory with Dr. Joe Dispenza. And it was on this episode where if your thoughts can make you sick, your thoughts can make you well. And I listen to this thing and I was like, wow, this guy has some really dope knowledge. And I remember I avoided this episode like crazy because I just thought that Dr. Joe was a little funny looking in the. In the image that I saw. But once I got into it, I'm like, wow, this guy was really speaking my language. Super scientific, very detailed. And I started to go down this path of doing all of Dr. Joe's work, engaging with some of his books. Didn't read the full ones, but engaged with them, got into his progressive workshops. And over the course of that next year, Covid had just kind of rolled through and hit and then ended up going to one of his retreats in November 2020 and had these really beautiful breakthroughs. And all of a sudden felt very gifted and seen, I guess you could call it, because of some of the experiences that I was having at the Dr. Joe retreats was really beautiful as I had this walking meditation breakthrough that just brought me to my knees. I cried. I had this, like, thing that tapped me on the head, my hands caught on fire, my spine kind of did this shifting thing. And all of a sudden, all the pain in my legs was gone because I had these fractured vertebrae in my spine and started to walk different, feel different. And that's where I really went through the process of forgiving a lot of the past things that happened in my life. And I felt it was a miracle. And so then when I was after that, I'm like, man, this stuff is really amazing. And even when I got back to the conference from that walking meditations like that next day, I end up getting called out and won this random raffle, you know, to get another retreat. So, of course, go to another retreat after that. I'd do it Again, and I do it again. And Sophia and I were doing this, and we ended up really growing together in our spiritual practice. Now, mind you, in that window of time, I was also living in a very awkward state because I had a son in Dallas. I was working on getting a divorce at the time because I was married to someone else at the time, who I got married to for a lot of the wrong reasons. I was not being honorable to the woman that I really loved was Sophia. And this is no excuses. I was really being a shithead here. But I was working to balance things out because I was trying to get the outside world to continue to validate me. So it was like my parents, I wanted them to see me away. My son, I wanted him to see me away. The person that I was divorcing, I wanted her to see me away. I wanted Sophia to see me away. And all of this, a lot of exhaustion spent in order to create all of these different illusions, when none of it, I was being integrity of myself or true to myself. So over the course of that period of time, what ends up happening is that your soul starts to say, you know what? I'm going to start tripping you up and making this really hard for you to get through these doors. And even though it was getting harder to get through those doors, things were still happening in an interesting way, somewhat financially, some of them good, some of them bad. The world, I was still using it to validate me in a lot of ways and creating these, like, really interesting small pockets of individuals that would affirm me. So even if there was, like, a better opportunity, I would take the one that felt better to me because I was so addicted to affirmation that I needed people to affirm me. I was being what I would consider very unloving to myself to get other individuals to love me more. And I was doing just nonsensical things where I was exaggerating sicknesses, I was exaggerating things within my health, I was exaggerating the kind of money that I was making. So I was creating delusions in order to create an alternative reality. But it was just a process of exaggeration so people would see me a certain way. And then through that process, I ended up finally, you know, going through, I think, nine Dr. Joe retreats, when it was all said and done, and prior to that, ended up doing ayahuasca at the beginning of 2022, it was New Year's 2022, Sophia and I did ayahuasca in Costa Rica. And when we did this Had a really beautiful journey. And what I find interesting about the process of doing these plant medicine was that it was me looking to find a hack to break through the delusions that I was creating for myself. If I could affirm the delusions that I was creating in this illusionary space of life, then I could basically get more external affirmation. So the interesting thing about ayahuasca is it gives you these visual aspects of things and all of this information that I was actually almost using to bastardize my life. So once I got this information from the plant medicine, I'm like, oh, well, let me not take this and do something more meaningful with it. And what I ended up doing is once what I felt like I was learning, and I knew from that space, which was really beautiful, was not necessarily jiving with the reality that I was in. And Sophia and I were starting to actually butt heads in that window of time, I found it very applicable for me to say, you know what? This doesn't feel good to me. I'm gonna go and just venture out and be nonsensical. So instead of me facing somebody that I really cared about and I loved and starting to heal that from healing me, which I didn't think, like I needed to love myself, to love her more, or I needed to love myself at all, I was like, well, let me just go find other people that would love me more. And so over the course of those next like seven or eight months, I started to create just alternative fractures in my life. It was almost like I was breaking off different dimensions. I was watching Inception the other night, and it made me think of what I was doing there. It was like a dream and a dream and a dream, and I was just picking the one that I wanted that made the most sense to me so that I could find the lane that fit the best instead of facing the reality that I was in. And that's what I did. And ended up half assed breaking up with Sophia. When I looked back on it, it was a lot out of in the way that I did it. I guess you could say that it was somewhat trying to respect her. But then I wasn't being honest with her because I was still spending a lot of time in her space and trying to have my cake and eat it too, and being just a complete about it. And in that process, what I recognize about myself now is that it was still a thing of me going through the process of really loving me more. Right. Like, I really had to find my way to myself. And so what was Interesting about her is that her love for me was so strong that she stayed so present despite the that I was putting her through. And she basically is like, I still love you. And even to the point to where she's like, look, I can't deal with you anymore because of the kind of monster and that I was being in working to manipulate that space for my own benefit, because I was working to have my cake and eat it too. And mind you, after this entire period of time, I had still not gotten the divorce right. And it wasn't like my world was that complicated where I couldn't have done it. I just wasn't courageous enough to love me enough to actually make that space for myself where I could have given all of me to somebody because I was giving none of me to anybody, really. And the little bit that I was giving her, it was really beautiful at the time that I gave it, but it was also very painful for her. When I look back on it, I see that it was, like, working out, like, with the wrong form. And I was contorting my body into a bit of a sickness and an illness. And I was starting to attract people in my life that also reflected that sickness and that illness. She ended up, like, saying you. After about eight months of me trying to, like, half ass this thing back and forth, even though we had this really beautiful and interesting deep soul connection that when we actually got into the. What I would call the present moment and then these little small windows where I would love myself, it was really beautiful. But the thing that ended up happening is I finally, you know, I did this, like, iboga journey, some mushrooms all throughout the year, and a couple of other things with this iboga journey. And that helped me see how messed up my role was in this. But I still didn't recognize that I needed to go within and love myself. So now you take that. You fast forward another three months. We had gone through the process of getting back together. And in that, I still couldn't be a man of integrity. I was still looking to find something that would affirm me. And because in that window of time, I was prior to that, I was still was seeing other people. I wasn't letting her know that she was still sharing herself with me. In that window of time, we were going through this process of not necessarily arguing, but healing in her healing. I had to deal with it from a space of hearing, like, how messed up that I was. And that was a hard thing to listen to for me. And so, of course, me not loving me. What do I do. I go back to the same addictive behaviors that I have that caused for me to slit my wrist, that went back to these childhood traumatic patterns and whatnot. And I sought out more affirmation again and went to the fastest thing that I could affirm myself with, which was just another female. And in that window I did what I wanted to do at that time in order to feed my ego, in order to feed my sickness of non self love. Finally, I pathed myself toward the Hoffman process in the end of November. And when I was in there, man, it was like a really tough time because I was sharing this aspect of vulnerability with myself that I really didn't talk to anybody else about. I told one friend of mine lightly that this was a struggle that I was going through. But I didn't really get into any details. And in this Hoffman process I got into more of the details and I knew who I wanted to be with. I knew that it was Sophia. I knew the direction that I was looking to go. But I also recognized that it was hard for me to break those habits of me needing external validation from other individuals in a place of ease. And we, I know the world is so much like this. We just want the easy thing. We want the person that's going to tell us the good stuff. This is why we do drugs, this is why we drink, this is why we do things. To euthanize ourselves is because we have something that's going to calm ourselves down. Whether it's watching television, whether it's going out and hanging out with friends and partying. The process of not going within. Whenever we go outside of ourselves, we're not within ourselves. And so I was doing that again a little bit post Hoffman. But the thing interesting thing about Hoffman is it helped me recognize my negative self love pattern. And it's almost like I casted this spell or wrote this contract for myself that I couldn't break. And everything in my life broke after. And what was really beautiful about it is that the exposure that it created within myself went from me being able to hide so much in the shadows to where now, if something is even a little bit off, it's like real time access. It's like the minute that I think something off or the minute that even something is mildly iteratively wrong with something in my life, it's like instant reckoning. So I do appreciate the fact that it's so real time that there isn't any latency in me. Like the cause and effect cycles in my life at this point, which is also beautiful on the other side because things happen miraculously. It happens miraculously in the recognition of my faults, and it also happens miraculously in the recognition of my accomplishments through that. What I see now is that the more that I just continually make love to my past, and I see it as this wildly, beautifully abundant space for me, that there is constant healing that happens, and it happens around me. My relationship with Sophia has shifted immensely. She has become significantly more patient. She has become really my best friend. We have gone through a very special process of healing. And is it perfect? No, it's not perfect, but it's perfect for us. And we are no longer in these trauma cycles anymore. And my ability to hold myself in resilience is much different. And even though sometimes we'll both have moments where things pop off or things get a little weird or things go in a down cycle, our ability to come back from that is no longer months or weeks or even days, it's hours. And in that recognition of that other person in your life, and her and I were talking the other day about this, is what I do know to be true in myself, is that we all have a cross to bear. But that cross is our blessing, and that blessing is each other. And so we are here to carry the cross of each other so that we can fully go through the aspects of healing. And the only way that we can carry that cross is if we love ourselves enough to bear it. And so in that recognition, what I encourage us all to do is anything in our past, we can see it all as the ability for us to love ourselves more. We can see it all as the opportunity for us to make love to our past, for us to look at it as this really divine roller coaster that we put ourselves on. And that even though sometimes we felt like we were on somebody else's, we had to be on that one to find the way to ourselves. And there's nothing wrong with having transgressions or issues in the past. It's not creating permanence out of the recognition of that pain, but it's creating truth out of the fact that it was there. And also how we go through the process of healing it and how we go through the process of resetting ourselves as a new whole person and not creating little micro cults out of ego, but creating abundance and openness and truth and vulnerability out of exposure and constant surrender. I thank you so much for listening to this, and I love you all.