How to Stop Making Yourself Depressed and Anxious | Andrew Daniel

What happens if you live your life like it's a battle? You are in real trouble because things are going to seem like threats. Things are going to be life or death situations with everything. And so I think a lot of us have very simplistic notions of even the word letting go and surrendering. And if you look at the other definitions, it's a stopping the fight, it's a stopping the defense. The truth requires no defense. And so if you're defending yourself or something, it's not true. Either the defending isn't true or what you're defending isn't true. And that invitation to surrender requires trust, it requires faith, requires vulnerability, it requires all of the courage. It requires such tremendous virtues. And if you see it that way, oh, this is different. It's not like I'm giving up. It's not like I'm quitting. I'm stopping the defending. I'm allowing myself to be moved by something greater than my ego.

I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. I don't know anybody who currently is kind of in the front running or actually creating a new methodology from my perspective. I didn't know what I got to make sure I say this right. Cenosomatics, Sinosomatics. Right.

Cinesomatics, like cinema and somatics, Cine Somatics, ctics.

I wasn't. So I've been digging in a little bit and. And I see a lot of little different tree branches. I'm curious to know what made you one, kind of put together a formula and two, kind of use that as a resource to help as many people as you've been helping.

Oh well, that kind of goes to my whole life story really.

I. I struggled a lot in my own life and we could go into that later if you'd like. But really what ended up happening was.

I was really big into personal development and self help. I was bullied and teased a lot as a kid, kind of black sheep sort of archetype. And I eventually got into all the classics, Think and grow rich, how to win friends and influence people. Then I started getting into different actual modalities. Let's say hypnotherapy, neuro, linguistic programming, even more far out stuff. And at that same time I started a software company. And so I ran the software company for about seven years. Fortune 100 clients, Disney, Samsung, Whole Foods, this whole kind of thing. And I was 18 years old and I wrote this particle effects and physics engine. So I wasn't a super dummy.

The reason I say this isn't to brag, but it's to kind of frame. What I'm about to say is that. So I had that sort of success, and I was getting deeper, deeper into, let's say, healing, let's say really deep personal development. Because in entrepreneurship.

I realized that ties right together. The stuff that was inside of me that was blocking me in my life was blocking me in my business, my personal problem. Right, Right. There's no such thing as business problems. It's personal problems.

It's either wholeness or no wholeness. It's one of the two.

And so I was doing a lot of work around this stuff, and I even started getting into more spiritual things. I was having these realizations, oh, my. Oh, my gosh, this isn't just business. There's something deeper here. This isn't just me trying to be a better person. There's something else besides just me and my little image of myself and what I want. And so I spent about 12 years doing all of this kind of work. And about eight years in, I ended up homeless.

Twice. And I was like, what's going on here? I've been getting all this wisdom. I've learned all this knowledge. I've had a software company. You know, I'm capable. I was teaching around sexuality. Right. Relationships and sexuality. It was published by a company called Mindvalley, which was. It's pretty big. And so I saw my name next to teachers that I studied, and I had the software company, and I was learning these things, and I was healing.

And yet I ended up homeless not once, but twice. And it was extremely disorienting to me. It was extremely confusing, and.

I just didn't get it. How. How could it be that I was healing and developing myself? I was the best person I've had ever been. That point of up until my life that I had these successes I was capable of, and yet I was becoming less and less functional in the world.

And so I realized it wasn't just about healing. It wasn't just about transformation. It was actually about becoming more functional in life. And that led me to this work that I'm doing now, which is all around embodiment. And the discovery that I made about myself was that I knew all of this stuff up here. I had it all up in my head, but it wasn't in my body. It wasn't in my body. And when I say in my body, I literally mean in my body. And so I started seeing myself on video, which is the cina part of cine Somatics. And I started seeing myself move through the world. And what I saw on video and the reflections I was getting back from other people did not match the image I had of myself.

So it wasn't aligned at all. Non congruent whatsoever.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And the, the problem with that wasn't that I wasn't trying to be authentic. It was literally how I saw myself in the world was not lined up to reality and the reality came through in my body. And so that started the entire process of, oh my gosh, there's an entire layer to living in life beyond just our emotions and mind that actually goes into our spirit and our, and our flesh and our body. And that led me to about five years of the deepest transformational work I've ever done. Shadow work, facing my narcissism, my megalomania, my insecurity, my shame, my guilt, my imposter syndrome, all this stuff. And then from everything I learned during that five years, after eight years of already doing all the other self help stuff and leadership training and all that other work, I took the things that actually made the difference and put it into my book. And so this book has all of the stuff that even after doing all of the work, these were the things that actually moved the needle and made the difference that took me from suffering and struggle and scarcity to wealth, abundance, peace and joy and beauty.

Yeah, no, I love it. In fact, it's not too far off from my story even. I know that when I was homeless, I was homeless because of pride and arrogance mainly. I would, I would dare say ego. Right. I didn't want to, I didn't want to let people know that I didn't know what I was doing. And therefore I would make, you know, dumb decisions that ultimately led to, you know, financial fallout, basically is what it boil down to. And then I didn't want to let people know that the fallout, the financial fallout had happened. So therefore, you know, I ended up obviously homeless myself. And you know, it's funny that, see, for me, that moment was a catalyst to really, really decide to work on self or within self. And I feel like the last 20 or so years, at least for me, I've been doing a very similar, very similar thing. So I, um, you know, I've, I've personally had to work on self worth, like at a deep, deep level. You know, I remember what, I've said this to my audience before. My dad said one time, skagens don't get ahead, they get by. And then I adopted that lie as part of my thing and Then with a life coach of my. A friend of mine who does a lot of. Who does a lot of work like you do. He. We did a. Some sh. Some shadow work, if you will. Some. I kind of look at it. It's almost quasi hypnotic. But you're not hypnotized. You're just kind of going. You're going in, right?

Sure.

And as we were going through there, we discovered in there that apparently, and I was able to back this up through ancestry.com which is ironic that up to seven or eight generations backwards, seven or eight generations backwards, Scoggins had been less than or seen less than poverty, labor, you know, farm. Farm people constantly buoyed and picked on by, you know, the lords of the land, if you will. A lot of the Skagens actually ended up here in the United States as part of a penal colony, Penn. Penal colony from England, because they shot a deer on Lord's land because they were just trying to eat, you know. And so it's really. It's really interesting to me that as you begin to unpeel the onion, right, Each layer leads to another layer, at least another layer of understanding in many respects, but also needs to. Another layer of work that has to be done. And I'll never forget this as long as I live. I was probably 13 years old, maybe. No, I was probably 14 years old. My father had lost, you know, lost a family home, just some bad financial decisions, stuff like that. Working as hard as he could work. Dude, dude worked his butt off. That's one thing I've definitely got from. I'm a bit of a workaholic myself because I love what I do. But the. The tricky part was, is 13, 14 years old. I feel this urging, feel this urging to leave this mobile home that we were in, walk down to the community park that's in the mobile home park and under the stars, basically and literally say these words. And only to this day, I don't know where the words came from. They just came up and out. Please let me be the one to break the family curse. And I had no idea the amount of work or the amount of adversity I was going to have to face in order to chisel away the self worth, chisel away the identity, chisel away the compassion or not the lack of compassion, chisel away the comparison and all that kind of stuff. As a result, I don't think that most of the population knows a whole lot about shadow work per se or what even shadow work really means. Would you mind taking a few moments and Unpacking what shadow work is and how it benefits for someone.

Yeah, I'd love to, but I'd actually like to comment on what you just shared.

If I may.

Sure, of course, yes.

Two things. One is the last thing you said about the chiz is about the chiseling away, and this is foundational to my work, that it's about a stopping, it's about a subtracting, is that I realized.

And it seems that you realize too that a lot of the self help and personal development work is about adding on. It's about becoming more, doing more, achieving more, becoming more than you already are. And for certain people, that's fine. In certain moments, in a certain mindset, especially when you, like myself, were in victimhood and when you felt disempowered, when you felt like there was nothing you could do.

So. Correct. I don't mean to stop you, but victimhood is historically tied directly to narcissism. Is that correct?

Well, I would suppose so, yeah. It's all about you, right? Yeah, yeah, keep going. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. And so the, the idea that by adding more to ourselves could get us closer to, to our true self, to who we really are, doesn't work. And the more that you try to fix yourself, the more that you try to.

Be enough. Even if you get there, even if you fix yourself, it only validates the lie that you were broken to begin with.

So even if you do it, if you come from that place that you weren't enough, that you didn't have what you need, that you were broken and you still. And you get there really at the level it says. See, I was broken, I overcame it. Oh, great overcoming story. But it's still a lie. You were enough the entire time. And so this work is subtractive. The work is removing all of the stuff that isn't you. So I love how you talked about the chiseling away.

Yeah.

The second thing is you talked about this curse and how it went seven to eight generations. This is one of the most fascinating things. It's a little like to some people, maybe a little woo.

Woo.

But I, I mean I see it.

It was woo to me until I experienced it.

Yeah, exactly. And, and so what we actually find, how I would define that is called the mythology. That's a familial mythology. It comes through the genetics. The epigenetics prove this. We see that there's markers from World War II, the Great Depression. The, those genetic markers actually travel through the lineage. In my work in the movement, what I See is that familial and cultural mythologies, these curses, these.

Stories, these overarching stories of a generation of a family get passed down through in the body as well. And so when I have clients move something as simple as shaking their hands, I can actually see their parents react, relationship in the way they move their hands. Wow. I can see them taking on, let's say, a martyrdom archetype that maybe five generations ago their grandmother, you know, started having to martyr herself and that got passed down through the family and then the children just soak it up. So what you just said matches perfectly with my experience as well.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Talk to me a little about the shadow work side and how we dig in there because again, I don't, I work with a lot of folks as well and I'm gonna actually, I'll just caveat super quick. I would agree with you. So I've done, I've been through and done some pretty, pretty meaningful things in my life, helped a lot of people, made a lot of money, done all that stuff. And I just mentioned to you before we hopped on officially onto the show that I had just finished up a two week sabbatical and I was originally gonna go to Scotland and go spend some time there. At the very last minute I felt something to quiet my spirit, say go to Utah. So I went to Utah instead, very last minute, right before I was supposed to pay the money to go to Scotland and to piggyback and we'll come back to shadow work. And just this dawned on me. I want to kind of bring it up while I was there. I'm one of those people that senses things, intuitive, can hear things, that kind of thing. And I've learned to be less resistant to it and more open to it as it's proven itself to be. The more I'm open to it, the more good comes out of it, if that makes any sense. Uhhuh. But one of the things that I heard while I was there and this because I was going through a pretty significant life change situation and a lot of actually three or four or five, six different things all at one time, which is me, 10, 15 years ago would have been freaking out me. Now it's like, okay, cool, it's happening for me, some good stuff's going to come out of it. It's going to be awesome. And, and that perspective is huge. But this, this thing that hurt I heard in my spirit and I'm just feeling led to kind of like maybe mention it because I I feel like you better to break it apart from. And that was this word, this one little bitty sentence. Letting go is not the same as giving up. Letting go was not the same as giving up. Out of curiosity, does that have any meaning to you as I say it?

Yeah, I actually, I have. I don't. It's funny quoting myself, it sounds very pompous. But there's a line that I have that's. Surrender is not submission. It is a let. It is a. A letting go, not a giving in.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that. That's exactly what you said.

Well, that means that. That means that there's a life truth baked. Right. Smack them into it. Because I find that people will, including myself, will hold onto things far too long. Because either we feel like somehow we're. We're giving up or we're letting someone else down rather than becoming the highest version of ourself.

Yeah, yeah. It's. If you go back to the subtraction piece, right, it's like, well, if this isn't serving you, why are you holding onto it? And a lot of it comes to ego, right? We're afraid. We feel like we're giving up.

Right.

If we have a whole mythology based on working hard, never surrender, never give up. This kind of warrior attitude, listen, if you're in battle, that is exactly what you need. That's a different kind of surrender. That's, you know, you're fighting for freedom, you're fighting for your life. That's a battle. Now, what happens if you live your life like it's a battle? You are in real trouble because things are going to feel. Seem like threats. Things are going to be life or death situations with everything.

And.

And so I think a lot of us.

Have very simplistic notions of even the word letting go and surrendering. And if you look at the other definitions that.

It'S a stopping the fight, it's a stopping the defense. The truth requires no defense. And so if you're defending yourself or something, it's not true. Either the defending isn't true or what you're defending isn't true. And that invitation to surrender requires trust.

Yeah.

It requires faith. It requires vulnerability. It requires all of the courage. It requires such tremendous virtues.

And if you see it that way, oh, this is different. It's not like I'm giving up. It's not like I'm quitting.

Mm.

I'm stopping the defending. I'm. I'm allowing myself to be moved by something greater than my ego.

Yeah, man, I dig that. That's so cool. Well, you know, when I was thinking about this when I was going back to the shadow work piece, I kind of equate to me, shadow work happens in two forms. Either, either it happened by choice, meaning you have chosen that you really, really truly want to work within and on self. Which is a beautiful thing because it takes at least for me. It took a long time to get there before I wanted to do the work. Instead, I kept repetitively having about every three or four years what's known as the dark night of the soul. Right. So to me, the dark night of the soul means you've chosen not to do the shadow work, so to speak. So now you're going to be forced to do the shadow work, if that makes any sense. So in an effort to help our audience kind of get healed further faster, so to speak. And a faster is a loose word, I use that word loosely because we want it to be done well. So let's talk a little about shadow work and how shadow work plays into things and kind of what, what that could entail.

Yeah, so let's just start with what the shadow is. At least my view of it. The shadow is the part of ourself that we've spent our entire life not wanting to be true about us. It's all of our judgments. It's all of the things that we don't want to feel. It's all of the stories that we don't want to be true about us. It's the things that we suppress, avoid, deny, judge, shame, try to get rid of. A lot of people do healing work and self help work to annihilate and eliminate the shadow. It's all against, it's all away. It's all of the part of ourselves that we feel is evil, dark and we wish were not us. And that's how we traditionally approach the shadow. And so when it comes to shadow work, a lot of people a don't really go there. They, they kind of stay on the surface. Oh yeah, I don't like this about me, that I'm late. That's not shadow work. That's, you know, shadow work is, you know, what's the part of you that wants to kill? What's the part of you that wants to, wants to annihilate yourself? What's the part of you that wants to hurt other people for pleasure? What's the part of yourself that's narcissistic? What's the part of your yourself that wants to sabotage and be a victim to it and blame Other people, these really dark things about herself. And so you'd say, all right, Andrew? Well, yeah, none of those sound like anything that we should watch out.

Very fun.

Yeah, exactly. Those don't sound fun. They don't sound enjoyable. It doesn't sound like anything that you would want to keep in yourself. Why would you want to be narcissistic, a megalomaniac, a cult leader?

Even worse. Worse. You know, the things that people are jailed for or hung. You know, I'm talking really, these deepest aspects of humanity in ourselves.

Well, it comes down to the fact that we're all of it. And when you try to deny and remove a part of yourself, come to find out you can't do it.

Yeah.

You can't get rid of who you are. You can only relate to it in a different way. And so what often happens is that our shadow is not what we think it is. We look at these parts of ourself that we hate, that we despise, that disgust us about ourselves. And so many times those very things are a distortion. At some point in our life, we. We get a distorted way of seeing ourselves. Like the curse in your family, we judge. We have some sort of distortion about ourselves. And the ego says, oh, let's throw this in the trash. Well, come to find out is that a lot of those things are the best parts of ourselves. So for me, one of them was my smile. You may say, wait a minute, Andrew. How is your smile a shadow material? Well, when I started to smile, the feeling that came up was tied into sexuality. And I was very uncomfortable with what that felt like around my sexuality. And so I would suppress my smile. And so something that in the normal world would be a wonderful, positive thing for me, it wasn't. I felt girly, I felt needy, I felt unattractive, I felt childish. And so I started suppressing that. Now, this is a very mild form, but it just goes to show how that mind and the ego can distort these things about ourselves, turn them into these vile, awful things that we cut off from our lives. And so that's two kind of forms of the shadow is. One is, yes, on the surface, it's all of this terrible, awful stuff that we've spent our whole lives not wanting to be true about us. And at the same time, if you penetrate those things, if you get into relationship with those things, all of a sudden you reclaim those resources. All of a sudden, those things don't run you. You're not avoiding them. They're now a part of you. And you know, how to relate to them. A perfect example of this is what I would call the peaceful warrior, right? He, he trains with his sword, he trains with his gun, he trains with his weapon. He fights, he knows combat. He develop to be able to protect and fight for those he loves. And he spends most of his time, maybe all of his time not fighting, but when he needs to, he's able to kill, he's able to protect himself and those he loves. But if he was out of relationship with his ability to kill, to hurt, to harm, he couldn't protect himself. And so that is a shadow aspect, right? The ability to kill and to hurt other people. But if you get into relationship with it, it now becomes an asset. You now get, you gain access to all of that power. And so that's kind of a little bit of an overview of what the shadow is, different levels of it, and why we would want to get into relationship with it.

Yeah, no, I think, at least for me, the integration portion of the things that I found less favorable about myself to the things I found most favorable about myself, I found that the less favorable things when channeled the right way and with. When worked on in the right way, actually added more amplification to the things that were good about me kind of thing. I kind of look at it like this way. The, the. You just talked about the warrior aspect. The, the warrior that popped in my mind and embodied that, that's the top of mind, is the samurai.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, the samurais, I mean, they're obviously, you know, they're training, training, training, training. But then they were the, they were some of the most beautiful calligraphy writers, right? They were some of the most powerful meditators. Like, they, they believed in a holistic warrior. And so that was the thing that popped up in my head when you were talking about that, for sure. But on top of that, it's also, it also reminded me, that led me to reminding myself of the yin and the yang. Right. You can't separate yin and yang. The yin and yang are one in the same, and they, and they balance and feed each other. So there is a wholeness approach. And I'm finding more and more people who are living someone else's life because they're not willing to integrate the wholeness parts with all of their components of their life, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, you can't have one without the other. Beauty means nothing without ugliness, right? Up means nothing without down. Inside means nothing without out, out. And so what is the point of courage if we don't have fear.

Yeah.

And so life becomes meaningless without this polarity. And in the Cine Somatic work, what I've also seen is that these polarities actually show up in the body. These masculine and feminine, these yin and yang elements show up in the body. And it's really amazing because these are no longer concepts like what you talked about, this wholeness, this yin and Yang aspect. It's no longer, how do I vaguely apply this to my life? We can actually look at the body and see if you're masculine, if you're Yang, you're in relationship with it, if it's powered up or if it's suppressed or if the feminine or the yin elements are suppressed or overdeveloped.

Yeah. I'm curious to know that.

Is it possible to have the yin or the Yang, so to speak, over develop due to life circumstances, for example? So let's say someone enters a relationship in the very beginning of the relationship. There's a very heavily. There's a very healthy masculine and feminine energy within the couple. Right. Because I'm one of those people that knows that a man has masculine and feminine energy. You know, female has masculine and feminine energy. And a lot of times women, the congruence between the two is based on that balance kind of leveling off. But then they go through a difficult season where something is kind of like, you know, the man is forced to raise his. His masculine to protect the family due to, you know, job stuff or whatever. Maybe the, the female in the relationship is. Is someone who's now struggling with a bunch of health issues and all kinds of stuff like that. Is it possible to. To be at a healthy place with a healthy balance and then get out of congruency or out of alignment? And then if so, how do you, how do you reestablish a healthy alignment?

Well, it first comes within. And so you. We. I would always have my clients and myself and anyone adjust that imbalance within themselves first. Because if you come out of balance, guess what, you're going to attract or create dynamics that reflect that. So a balanced person. And a balanced person, given that just the state without other circumstances is going to usually create balance. If an imbalanced person, another imbalanced person, they're going to create imbalance or they're going to attract the opposite, that's going to fill in that gap.

And so when it comes to, let's say, sexuality, that's very important. That's very powerful. When you have this polarized one is embodying one and the other is embodying the other. When it comes to sexuality, that's super powerful. That creates incredible chemistry and attraction and fulfillment. However, when we're living our life in ourself, what I find is the most valuable is that if we actually cultivate both, if we get into relationship with both aspects, it's almost think of it like being ambidextrous. Like, imagine how much more resources you'd have if you could also use 50% more of what was available to you. It's phenomenal. And if both people are doing that, then there can be that ebb and flow, that natural harmony that happens. It's not about sticking in one or the other. It's saying, all right, I have these developed, you have these developed. How can we come together and harmonize this? So, yeah, it's. In circumstances when you're forced to maybe take up those different roles.

The most important thing to do is to say, well, how did you create that? What was it within us that has allowed or enabled or maybe even subconsciously created this to play the situation out? And oftentimes you'll find that, oh, my God, four years into this, this just looks like my parents relationship.

Oh, my gosh.

This looks like your parents relationship.

I've married both of my parents before, not literally, but figuratively, in spouses. Totally understand.

Yeah. So what we want to do is to start penetrating those curses, as you said, those mythologies, those stories that bind us to the past. And that's what you've spent a lot of your. Maybe not a lot, but a good amount of energy ending that curse, doing the work to break those cycles, to break those patterns, to end those stories. And when we do that, we can start living from ourselves because so many of us do not live for ourselves. We live for other people's approval, validation, society, consumerism, our parents, desires, our fears or inadequacy, all of this stuff. And when you can penetrate all of that stuff and subtract and let those things go, you start to find out who you really are, who really is Stephen, who really is Andrew.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And there's that voice, that voice that you start listening to and say, oh, yeah, okay, well, the more I listen to that voice, the better my life gets. Maybe I should listen to it more.

Yeah, no, I love that. In fact, it kind of brings the top of mind at, you know, earlier this year, I began a divorce process. Luckily, my former spouse and I are still very well acquainted. Friendship, there's, you know, there's good vibes there, I guess, is the best way to say it. But one of the things that my friends and family were asking about, well, you know, when, when do you put yourself back out there? When, when do you start dating? When do you. I'm like, honestly, I'm in no rush. I want to know me as much as I possibly can and be in a healthy state because I trust that when I am in that state, then the person I'm supposed to be with will be in front of me. Like, it's that, that attraction principle that of working on yourself first. Understanding the work I still need to do, understanding the work that's already been done and being grateful for it, and actually being grateful for both the work that needs to be done as well as the work that's already been done. I find that gratitude is a huge power player in that when you're looking at dynamics within people, I know that for me, it seems like the more I work on me and I try to identify those things and I try to legitimately put into practice.

A healthy mindset towards, you know, working on me and as well as kind of lay that out with tactical practical principles that I can do on a daily basis. Because it seems like behaviors, if you, if you get a negative result, there's a behavior that's causing a negative result. If you can figure out the thought that generates the behavior, then you can change the result. That's kind of how I see it. And as a result, as I've been kind of moving through things, as I've been kind of working through, okay, well, this is a result I didn't took the care for. Why, Where'd this come from? Is there something deeper within me that's, that's not necessarily causing, but accepting some of those things because I find that as much as we self sabotage certain instances, we also don't say no to. Instances we need to say no to. So it's like you're Sabbath. In some cases you're throwing a grenade into something because you don't feel worthy. You don't, you know, that kind of thing. And other times you feel like you're kind of like working through the process of not being everybody else's yes person kind of thing. And I find that that imbalance historically is a good telltale sign of what needs to be worked on. When. Now, one of the things that I love about your work is that you, because of the video structure that you use to kind of break your. Break your way down into body language, intent and stuff like that.

I Find that very interesting, because even as a professional speaker, one of the things that we had to do when I began speaking, you know, 10 years ago, as I had to film myself speaking and then turn off the audio. So it's all about body language. It's all about connection. It's all about, you know, am I pointing? Am I clapping? Am I knife. What my. My friends used to call knife edging?

Right.

Kind of stuff. It was powerful because in certain states, I'm trying. You know, in certain. In certain speeches, I might be trying to do something along the lines of a motivational talk, which is a lot more. I would say in. More. In more of my masculine. But there's something called a story arc. When you have a story arc, you obviously take people out of power up. There's a power. There's a humor, and there's a low side. The low side, and the humor side typically is in the feminine. And. And you have to get to the point where you can call that up on demand or be an awareness of that that exists to begin with. So I kind of look at your work as being that it's kind of like figuring out kind of what needs to take place and when to actually get to the place where you can heal to the best possible way. Is that correct?

That's an interesting.

Yeah.

Elaborate a little bit more.

Yeah. So, all right, so I'll use the. The speaking topic as one.

Yeah.

All right.

A lot of the talks that I do are to a variety of genders. Variety, races. No. No big deal there.

Sure.

Yeah. However, the one thing they're all yearning for in that moment is the. The equipping or the belief that something else could change or something will change if they take the principle, the ideal, or whatever that it will change. However, in order to accept the principle, I have to tie it to a principle, to an emotional connection of something they're going through.

Sure. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So the. The big component of this work is feeling.

And so when we have people move in their body and we film it, then we play the video back, and they get to see this for themselves. They get to see their movements. What I'm not doing, actually, is not body language. What I'm not doing is not. What I'm not doing is analyze them in my head. Right. I don't have a checklist and say, okay, well, Your nose is 45 degrees this way. Your hands are doing this.

Okay.

What I'm doing is feeling. So I actually have to go down into my body, and I'm feeling The symbolic data. So I'm actually, while I'm conscious, I'm actually working more in that subconscious, unconscious realm. And so as somebody moves in their body, there's a feeling that comes through just like when you're on stage and you have to convey these emotions and the weight and the gravitas. There has to be emotion and feeling behind it and you have to be able to access that feeling. We've all listened to the speakers who are all up in their head and they're just saying, yes, this is the story, Bueller.

And it just doesn't connect. That's because we connect through feeling. We connect through symbols. And this emotional feeling place is where all of our power is, it's where our intuition is, and it's where the healing is.

Yeah.

And so if you just, if you only trace it back to the thought, you can change behavior, but you're not going to penetrate the story. You're not going to, you're not going to have healing. Yeah, you're going to have changed behavior, but you're not going to have healing.

So in other words, if you're, if you're not having healing, even though you change the behavior and get a different result, you're actually masking that the story was never affected to begin with, so you continue the same program.

Yeah, exactly. And you have to sustain it. In this work, there's no sustaining because you penetrate it, you integrate it, you subtract it. So you don't actually have to use willpower to every day constantly fight against yourself. You free up all of this energy. In my book, I have an analogy called Bob's Ladder. That's where we basically say you start at zero in life, Right. You're just ground level, everything's fine. And then what happens is you say, I'm not worthy, I'm not enough trauma, I'm incompetent, I'm ugly, nobody loves me. And then you adopt all of these beliefs. You got a lot of proof, right? There's plenty of evidence to say all these are true, even though they're not. But you believe them. And then you spend all of this other energy, Right. So let's say that's negative 500, you're down. Then you try to expend another, let's say 400 units of energy to counteract and to heal and to fix and to move away from that. You still never really end up back at zero. You're still kind of not really, which.

Is probably leaving you feeling overwhelmed and anxiety ridden consistently.

Exactly.

And because the negative energy is never dispelled.

Exactly. And so you've used 900 units of energy, or let's say you do get there, and it's perfect. Use a thousand units of energy just to get back to where you are, just to get to peace. So you're constantly having to use this energy, fighting against yourself to invalidate the lies, to revalidate. I mean, it's just chaos. And so what happens is people spend their life and they're exhausted. They're just stressed out, overwhelmed, and exhausted. Even though they're fixing themselves and improving themselves, it never ends, Steven. It's like it never ends. And though. So this is why I realized this is not the way. Just changing behaviors change. Just thinking about it, just fixing it never realizes peace. It never realizes peace.

Even if your life improves, you never get to peace.

Well, it's. It's crazy. The new book's out. It's amazing. The, you know, this entire podcast has kind of been really. Answers one question. Why did you. Why did you write the book? Right? And we've. We've been. We've been all over the place, and, And I apologize, I've been a little bit of a squirrel chasing different nuts around the conversation. But I always found this intriguing because I've been doing a lot of work on. On Stephen for probably the last three to five years, intentionally. Like there's. I've been through several dark nights of the soul where it was less intentional and more forced. Right. You know, but this next season of life, one of the things that I'm super passionate about is being able to operate in a true flow state. And when I went to Utah to just to spend, you know, two weeks by myself, and, and that. And I know in and of itself, that sounds weird, right? I went to Utah with no agenda. Me. So on day one, Monday morning, I wake up and I'm in a cabin at the top of a mountain. 700 square foot with a running stream. I was forced to see Stephen. Right? Forced to. Hey, Stephen. How you doing? All right, Stephen, how do you feel like. How do you feel like the last decade's been for you? Hey, Stephen. Have you. Have you noticed this before? Hey, let's, let's, let's. Let's work together, Stephen, to. To. To figure out where this route goes, right? And. And began to kind of rebuild. And I came back feeling freer.

I actually, for the first time in my life, I don't really have an expectation. Like, I've. I've. I've realized that through that entire Season of growing self worth that I've already achieved most everything else that I set out to achieve to begin with. And there's. I still have a lot of life left to live. You know what I'm saying? And I also realized that even though I got to a place where I could, you know, have enough resources to do pretty much anything or buy anything that I wanted, I wasn't happy. I legitimately wasn't happy. I'm happy when I'm pouring out in other people. I'm. I'm happy when I'm. When I'm making a difference, a measurable difference in the. In the lives of someone else, which is. I know a lot of why you do what you do.

But I couldn't get to the place to even enjoy those for feelings, because before I used to just fix or, like, help, and they would say, thank you, thank you. Like, you know, they go through the whole thing like, okay, you know, cool, thanks. You know, you're welcome. I never even allowed myself to feel the gratitude that was being expressed because I didn't feel like I was worthy of the gratitude.

Well, what's, what's really cool is that even so, as you were talking about it, you were moving your body, you're moving your hands, and so even in what you just showed.

Right.

You were pushing away people, you were keeping people away.

Yeah.

And. And it feels like that shift shifted because, you know, this. And then you. You brought in for gratitude. So these are the, the kind of things that I see. And then there's stories under all of that. And so that awareness that you had comes from.

Actually taking that time for yourself.

Yeah. And.

And so many people. So many people have so much anxiety. This is. At some point, it's going to be a really big thing that I work on because I've really discovered where almost all anxiety comes from.

Oh, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's, It's. To me, it's energy that's bottled up that has no place to go. I kind of. I kind of see it in my mind's eye as it's a helium balloon that's full of helium, but somebody lets it go, and it's just zipping around the room. Right. And once it lands, it's completely spinning, exhausted, and then it starts all over again until it's actually dealt with. Yeah.

So I like that.

The way that I've seen it through the cine semantic work is that it's an avoidance of feeling.

And that kind of matches a little bit of that helium Balloon. Because what's in that helium balloon is all of the things that we don't want to feel. And so then we're running from it. And so it goes over the entire room, but it never goes inside to actually face and feel what's, what's filling it up.

Yeah, because the toxic helium wasn't there and want to zip around the room, it would just float and flow in place.

But anyway, it would. Well, it would be still.

Right?

Yeah. And that's.

Right now one of the most difficult things that I struggle with as, as. And this is changing now in this new season of life is this next phase. And I kind of look at your life as, you know, a lot of people look at lives as one and done, like they, they, they do something dumb or stupid or harm themselves, you know, harm themselves, relationship or business or any number of things that they judge themselves for to create more guilt and shame. And they don't realize, at least from my perspective, that's one piece of the story that's actually setting you up for the lesson you're supposed to learn. You know what I'm saying? And once you learn the lesson, you don't have to repeat that particular lesson again. You know, you get to do the next lesson. Right. Unfortunately, we don't have to go, lesson, lesson, lesson, lesson, lesson. There's less than a breather. Less than a breather. Less than a breather.

Yeah, it's.

Life's quite remarkable. And I think you said this in the beginning. Life is working for you. Life is working for us. And again, this is one of the things I realized. I've seen clients and one of the most simple things I have them do is just walk around the room. I just say walk around the room, relate to the space. And you can see the people that think life is a battle.

It looks like they're walking on a battlefield or they're walking over landmines. You can see people that think. And for myself, the world was attacking me. I was bullied as a kid, and so I related to everything as a threat that tried to attack me. Well, guess what happens? You go through life expecting and validating and seeing things through that lens. And so guess what?

You're gonna get more of the same.

Exactly. That's gonna be how you see life.

Yeah.

And what I found is that when we can shift people's way of relating to the space, to life, the world.

And we get them to do that through the body, it's not a 50 page essay that they have to write. It's not two years of therapy that we talk about. We literally have them move in their body in a different way and feel different.

Right.

You just don't think about the space. Because I could say, oh, yes, the world's for me, not against me. Ha ha ha. And then, you know, five minutes later, I feel like you're making fun of me and I'm a piece of crap. So it requires us to actually do what you said, to get still, to get quiet, and to actually see this stuff as lessons, as things that are here to move us forward, to support us. And that comes back to what you said also in the beginning of letting go, of surrender, of trust. You have to trust. If you can't see the world is this way yet, that's where faith comes in. And I think this is a huge part of spirituality and religions that I think is incredibly beautiful and beneficial is faith is the trust in something you have no logical reason to trust in, but you know and feel that it's there to support you?

Yeah, no, I think it's super powerful. And in fact, I'm convinced that that's why. That's why I am where I am today. Is it. There's. There's going to be questions you can't answer. There's actually going to be questions you.

Should thank God, you know.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know. But, you know, as I'm looking at that, I was just thinking too, as you're talking to two things. First of all, it's been scientifically proven that physiology changes can do a new anchoring or change an emotional state in a. In a blip. Second, which I think is so powerful in the fact that what. The work that you do helps recognize that so early on and begins to, you know, kind of work on that aspect. The other thing that jumped into my head was you talked about people being in a room a long time ago. Someone, you know, I was trying to. I was trying to help people understand how the resonance of a soul or some would call it frequency is a thing. Right. You know, there's, you know, you can go into a room and you're drawn to certain people. You go into a room, you're repelled by certain people. You can go into a dark room by yourself. You'll know if somebody else is in the room with you or not. Like completely, you know, completely darked out. And it's because I believe we can pick up on each other's signals. One of the things that I've learned since I've been on this journey myself is I'm more at peace than I've ever been before. And as a result, for some reason, I draw people in a whole lot quicker than I ever did before. Like, I can go into a room full of crowd of people and It's. It takes 10 or 15 minutes and you have five or 10 people surrounding, just talking to you about, you know, random stuff. And I, and I. And I asked myself during the sabbatical, I said, what, what changed? What changed? And it goes all the way back to something my grandfather said. He said, be still. I was finally still. And because I was still, I was able to work on some of these attributes that I was mentioning before that were impediments before. So if you look at the, you know, you think about a magnet, it'll either snap together or if you turn them over, they'll repel aside. Right. I kind of looked at it as that scenario like I wasn't at peace. So everything that I wanted was actually repelling from me rather than coming to me. And then I began to work on me. I stopped chasing things and stopped and started allowing things and everything started to come to me.

Yeah.

The stillness, that silence, it is.

I.

Think, a lighthouse, a beacon. You know, it's. It's a. It's a. It's a rock. This is what.

Helps get us centered. It calms us down.

One of the things that I find a lot of people are doing, again with the anxiety, is that they're also not feeling. And when I say not feeling, they're being hysterical.

Right.

So there's chaos, there's drama, there's hysterics. There's not feeling and reacting to the feeling. There's acting the feeling out and not feeling it. There is the ups and downs, the roller coasters. There's the addiction. There's all of this noise. There's all of this drama and chaos in most people's lives.

Yeah.

It is.

Very exhausting for most people. It is very confusing. It is very normal for them. And so sometimes what happens, you may have had this experience too, is that now there's probably people that.

You thought before, used to want to be around, you no longer do because. Because now you're still. And now you're at peace. And what happens too, you've probably had this experience, as I have, is that when you're still, when you're quiet and you're not consumed with your own drama and noise, you can start seeing other people's. And so now you actually have more room for other people. You can actually show up and serve other people more and see what's going on for them. And that's healing just to be around, just being that space where you're not adding to their drama. And you're inviting them. You're inviting them. You're not judging them, you're not forcing them, but you're inviting them into more peace, into the stillness, into this place where things are okay.

Yeah. No, I think that's. I think that's. That's so cool. I mean, I think one of the things that I realized on this journey is.

Every time I leveled up, my inner circle changed every time without fail. And the first two times that happened, every time my inner circle would start to fail, I would start to grasp for my inner circle to keep my inner circle not realizing that they were not on the same journey I was currently on. But I later realized that because I was willing to go on that journey, they were willing to come along later. Right. It's like you give them the belief that transformation is possible. So they had this many of these uncomfortable situations where, like, all these people used to hang out with and maybe everything from barbecuing to working with and all what. All of this kind of stuff. Different, you know, different levels of relationships. The interesting thing for me was, is when I was going through that transition, one of the things that I would see on a regular basis is, is the depth of conversation changed before the absence of someone's presence. So all of a sudden you went. You went from like really collab and vibing on whatever, and then all of a sudden you're like, this doesn't make any sense. This doesn't. I'm. Let's talk about something deeper, right? And the people would be like, deeper, right? Kind of thing, you know? The reason I say that is because I want to give people permission, especially as they start on the work and they. And they read more about your work and get the book and. And do stuff is I want them to understand that this is part of the subtraction process.

Yep.

Right. You, You. You've. It's taken a while for me to fully understand that the relationships that have been brought into my life in so many ways, I called them in because of what I needed to work on. In many ways, they were already set to help develop. Right. There's a reason that, you know, every boyfriend or girlfriend you have, until you meet a spouse or a significant other, every. Every time you go through that, like, that, that person's preparing you for that person. Right. And then it's A matter of everybody wanting to do the work and everybody want. Because I think they say that the. The soul's frequency and the. And the physiology changes about every seven, eight years. Like you. You chemically change your DNA changes about every seven, eight years. Or there's different components of it. And at least historically, that's kind of been the life cycle. Right. It's. It's about a seven to eight years. There's. There's something different and there's something new. I'm. I'm definitely not the same homeless kid that I was. I know you're not. Right. And I want to encourage everybody to go ahead and get on the journey. I also want to encourage everybody to find out more about your work. Where can they get the book and find out more about you? Yeah.

Andrewdaniel.org so if you go to andrewdaniel.org I have links to my book. There's also the center for Cinesmatic Development's website, a link there which is just cinesmatics.org that's more just about learning about the specific modality that I do. Andrew. Daniel.org has my book and ways to. To work with me.

Awesome. Well, and guys, just so you know, Andrew's book has already won multiple awards, so it's definitely worth a read. It's definitely going to enlighten you quite a bit. It's probably when you're going have to get a pen and a highlighter and probably go through chapter by chapter a few times to fully grasp all the concepts and identify it. But, Andrew, dude, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show, man. I really. I really appreciate you spending some time with me.

Thank you for having me. And I really enjoyed the depth that we went to. This was.

I didn't expect anything less. And I'm pleasantly surprised at how enlightening this was.

Ditto, man. Ditto. All right, guys, take it easy.

All right, Thanks. I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you.

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