Adam Roa | 3 Pillars For Radical Life Change: Poetry About Life, Love & Freedom | #Podcast

That's where I was when the whole Covid thing started. And if you remember that, no one knew what was going on initially. So we stocked up on supplies and just said, I'm going to be here for a while, it looks like. And then there was this day where I walked down and there's these train tracks. And so I was sitting on one of the benches there watching people walk. Right? But for whatever reason, and I'd done this two days earlier on this day. That was the day that everyone was starting to wear masks and just looked around and everyone was wearing masks now. And I don't know what had happened in those three days, where must have been something maybe the president said or whatever. But the thing was, I had this thought, I can't see anybody. I can't actually see anyone. And then I had the next thought, which was, if they weren't wearing masks, we would you have even noticed them? And that got me thinking, how much do I really actually see people? How much do I really see someone? Even if they're walking down the street and I notice them, do I really see them? And I think that in society, people are craving authenticity and yet at the same time, putting up their own walls around the truth of how they're feeling with them.

Adam Roa, welcome to my house. Welcome to Wellness Force, man.

Yeah, Josh, I'm so excited, bro.

So excited.

First. First podcast in this new space. Face. Thank you. Thank you. Blessing it up. We're gonna leave it, you know. Impregnated with the force of wellness.

Impregnated with the force of wellness.

That's it. I'm gonna say that for months.

That's a really. That's the coolest thing I've heard about.

We should make shirts.

We could.

For all your guests who have been on the show. I've been impregnated with the force of wellness.

I love your energy. I met you in person. We were doing this workout, and I was like, I feel like I know this guy.

I feel like.

I feel like I've seen him somewhere. And you did this incredible talk. It wasn't a TEDx talk. It was at Kyle Ceases event, which I'm trying to make the connection if I was there or not. But anyways, you talked about, like, loving ourselves for who we are. Women don't need the big boobs and the nice bra. Men don't need the car with, like, six zeros in their bank account. And it really hit me because I was like, oh, I made the connection when I saw you. That that was the message I had already received. And then I was even more inspired by this talk about masks. And I just want to read a clip for people that don't know you. It's really cool.

And what I will say, because this is actually an important caveat or nuance to it, is it's a poem, it's not a talk. Because. And the reason why is because I believe that art is the highest leverage way that we shift human consciousness. And the reason why that poem did so well is because people didn't think it was a talk. If you think it's a talk where I'm talking to you about self love, it's like, oh, it's this another dude talking about self love. But because it's a poem and it's art, people just receive it. They let it in. And that's why I think it's. And so that's just a nuance that I want people to know.

It's a great nuance. And it was really cool because you started out. Everyone is wearing masks now, but is it really that different than before? It feels like the fabric on their face is just a physical representation of the mask they already wore. And I don't even blame them anymore. Living in this world that's lined with stores, ads, convincing them if they simply walk in the door, they can leave with something new that makes them better than before. So I think this is incredible because I have taken off probably hundreds of masks in my life, and there's probably still some to take off in the future. Do you remember where you were when that came through?

I do remember exactly where I was. I was in Encinitas, California. Shout out to North County, San Diego.

Yeah. My own home.

Mine too. I can't believe we didn't know each other when we were there, man. And that's where I was when the whole Covid thing started. And if you remember, no one knew what was going on initially. So we stocked up on supplies and just. Just said, I'm gonna be here for a while, it looks like. And then there was this day where I walked down and there's these train tracks. And so I was sitting on one of the benches there watching people walk, right? But for whatever reason. And I'd done this two days earlier on this day. That was the day that everyone was starting to wear masks and just looked around and everyone was wearing masks now. And I don't know what had happened in those three days, where. Must have been something, maybe the president said or what. But the thing was, I Had this thought, I can't see anybody. I can't actually see anyone. And then I had the next thought, which was, if they weren't wearing masks, would you have even noticed them? And that got me thinking. How much do I really actually see people? How much do I really see someone? Even if they're walking down the street and I notice them, do I really see them? And I think that in society, people are craving authenticity and yet at the same time, putting up their own walls around the truth of how they're feeling with themselves. So many people are not being honest with themselves about the fact that they're unhappy in their marriage or their job or where they live or they feel really lonely or whatever it is. And so I. I sat there, and I had my poetry journal with me, and I just. I wrote that. You know, so many people are wearing masks now. Is it really that different than before?

Yeah. I love the microcosm of, like, the physical mask, the emotional mask, because taking off the mask can be fucking confronting.

Oh, that's so good. I know. I know I can cuss.

Oh, yeah, you can, totally. Because I think about, like, one of the biggest masks that I wore in my life was if my physical body isn't perfect, then I'm not worthy, because I came from, like, this fitness background. And how confronting that has been for me to just be like, hey, I'm a human being. I have my own experience about loving my body no matter what's going on, no matter how much stress I have. And I lead this movement of wellness force. And so it's full, front and center right now. It's the most weight I've ever carried, dealing with myself and Covid and you know, what mask I'm taking off that I have to be perfect, that I have to be, like, this soldier of truth 24, 7, 3, 6, 5. It's just not real anymore. So I'm curious for you, man. Like, was there one moment that jumps out the most? Like, what comes up for you when I ask you, when did you wear the biggest mask, and how did you take it off? Wow.

That'S a really good question. I would say that for me, the biggest. What pops into my head right now is that growing up, I was the son of Asian immigrant. My dad's from the Philippines, immigrated to this country when he was, like, early 20s. And I was. I didn't get a ticket to puberty at the same time as everybody else. I was late to the game. And so when I entered high school, I weighed 73 pounds. My freshman year of high school, I was 5ft tall. I weighed 73 pounds, and I looked way more Asian. And so I just had this thing and where I so badly wanted to be seen as cool and popular and sexy and all of these things. And I just didn't think that was in the cards for me. You know, my dad is 55 and my mom is 5 foot tall. And so I am nearly 6ft tall. And my mom says it was sheer willp that I just willed myself. I refused. But I, at that time went, I'm gonna be the tiny Asian kid forever. And so I was retreating into my mind as my superpower at that time. And I went, but I can win this game of being popular, like high school's a game. I can win that. And so.

And in some ways, social media is the same.

Similar, right? And so I, by my senior year, fast forward here. My senior year, I was multiple varsity sports. I was the president of a club. I was elected a student body. I was scholarship to college for academics. And I then went homecoming king. And winning homecoming king was my holy grail. That was the thing that I thought meant that I had won high school. You know, I was the most popular person, I thought, you know, varsity blues and all these movies, not only will all the girls want me, all their hot moms will want me. That's how this works, right? And I remember winning homecoming king and the next day waking up and feeling no different. All of my insecurities were there, all of my fears, my doubts, all of the anger was there. And even worse, actually, I didn't have another mountaintop. That was the holy grail. And it seems like common sense, but I really want this to land for people. Because for most people, while you could hear, well, of course winning homecoming king is not going to change. Yes, but what is that thing for you, the person listening to this right now? What is that thing? Because most people have something that they think is going to change their world when they get it. And so at 18, the mask that was coming off was whether it was nature or nurture. I don't know what it was. I'm so blessed to have the mindset. Instead of going, okay, what's the next thing that I need to do to satisfy this? Oh, that must have just been a fluke. I went, what if everything else they've told me is a lie? And that's when I started questioning. You know, they tell me, go to college, get a career, get the thing, and then you're happy. Well, I started questioning that at 18, I hit a mountaintop. And I feel so blessed because so many people don't hit that until they're in their 40s or ever. And that's a big part of who I work with now is one on one clients are these people in their 40s who have hit their multi million dollar businesses and things and are going, I'm feeling empty on this mountaintop. What's for me here? And I got to have that experience at 18. And I feel like that was the first mask that I got to take on because I had all of these masks that contributed to me being able to be the one at 18 who had all of these things and all of that.

One of the other things in your poem, your spoken word that I loved, it was towards the end and you said, if I'm concerned about. If I'm concerned about you hurting me, then certainly there's bound to be a poor connection surrounding me. Because what you found isn't actually me a clown, my frown painted into a big smiley, I'm good, I'm fine. I'm doing okay. It's this narrative, like, we're good. We can be resilient. We're not allowing ourselves as a society to even have a moment where we give ourselves permission to take off a mask. Expand on that because that's a huge part, not just of your poem, but the poem that's living out here for us in society. It makes me sad. I was feeling it today anyways, and then I watched your video and I was just like, it hit me. I've been going through personally and I know everyone and the Wellness Force community has been feeling it too. Like, we can't go on like this anymore. We're being forced into a choice point where we're either going to show up without wearing a mask and take full accountability for what that is, AKA all the people I've hurt, all the ways I've showed up where I'm fake, all the things that I've lied about, like a full radical emotional inventory. Or we're not. We're at this choice point. So what do you feel about this?

Well, I feel it's. It's so prevalent in, for men, especially on. On this planet, which is this man up, you know? Don't let them see you cry. Don't let them see you fail. Don't let them see you hurt.

There's even a book called Man Up.

Is there?

Bedros Coolian. Sorry, Bedros. He's got a good heart. But I'm like, you need to pick a better title for your book. Dude, man up. Come on.

But what does that even mean? Man up? What does that even mean? I know what it means when someone says that to me. Man up. Like, don't be a baby. Don't be a little girl, don't cry, Whatever that is. But that's not what it means to me to be a man. In fact, you know, fun fact about how we even. Excuse me. How we even connect in the workout. But then we went to breakfast, and what dropped me in with you was hearing your vulnerability in your share, because I posed a question to the table, which was, what is the thing right now that is at the leading edge of your consciousness? What is. What is it that your having to work through and move through and is taking all of you to stretch yourself?

Not the typical breakfast conversation.

It's typical for me.

Is it normal?

Yeah, because. Because what the hell else are we doing here? Think about this. We're sitting here now, and I believe that this podcast is going to be valuable and hopefully change lives. That's why I'm here, is because I believe this will do that. And why are we here? Because of that breakfast. What was powerful about that breakfast for me was we weren't just talking about sp or like, a new car that we wanted to buy or whatever we were. We were five dudes sitting there and saying, this is the thing I'm struggling with right now. And. And. And being there for each other. And I think that, you know, with the. The masks, when we talk about that and. And put on your. Put on your smiley face, it's. To me, I. I'm, in a way, I'm known for my authenticity and my vulnerability and how willing to put all of my shit out there for people. But the reason why I do that is because I'm also like, I'm doing things at a high level. Right. I know that some people look up to me, and I want those people to understand that I have my battles. You know, I've struggled with depression. I was molested at a young age. That was a repressed memory. I was late to puberty, and I didn't think myself as being attractive, which was something that when you believe that in ages, you know, 10 through 18, that becomes the identity structure. So it's taken me. Even now, there's aspects. My bracelet, right now, my intent bracelet says sexy because. And these bracelets shout out to my buddy Chris, who started this company, my intent. And you set an intention for a chapter of your life. And I put sexy on this bracelet and I wear it as a reminder. I get to embrace that side of me because it's something that I didn't for my entire life, basically. And so for me, if I can put all of my rawness, realness, ugliness out there, people can see that and then see where I've gone with it. And hopefully that's the thing that inspires them. Not that I'm there, but what I did to get there and what I still continue to work through to be there, that's what I want people to understand.

Because most people see somebody at the top of the mountain, they're like, cool, cool. They have all the things. But how did you get there?

And what does it look like in the moments when you're alone?

Were you being authentic to yourself to get there? Or were you changing masks almost like you were on a play just so you could have the money and the success which we're gonna have to drop in and share with everybody. This million dollar client that happened, we'll do that later. But I want to circle back, man, because this, this big question of like, where we're at as a choice point in society, which you pre framed and you laid out your own self and are you being authentic to what you believe and what's coming out of your mouth? Is there actually like a togetherness there? But in society right now, I think most people are so like stuck at the root chakra or the sacral chakra where they're like trying to take care of their bills, trying to take care of their family. They don't exactly know how to like, first of all, take that deep breath or pause or be present to someone else or themselves. So how do we begin in this choice point? From your experience, people know you as a speaker of truth. So how do we, how do we go there? How do we actually begin that process of I'm going to choose something different, I'm not going to be happy if I don't feel happy. I'm not going to be this shining light if I feel dark inside. I'm going to give myself permission to actually just be myself.

I think the. There are three pillars to what I personally believe will shift someone's life and what I stand for. And they are consciousness, creativity and community. And consciousness you can gain from podcasts like this, you can gain it from books. The consciousness is just awareness. They're synonymous to me. And so having awareness of new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of being, that's what you get to have. Because awareness gives us choice. So now you've opened up the choices that are available. Creativity is the thing that isn't attached to the result. Creativity is just the part of you that gets to express. Creativity is the purest expression of your soul. It is the most healing frequency that you can bring through your body, is your, like, unadulterated, unfiltered creative expression. And it doesn't have to be tied to this is how I earn my living or anything like that, but it gets to be a part of your life.

It can be, but 100. There's a unique blend, and then the.

Third one is community. And I think that's the most direct answer to your question specifically is we. It's very important for us to have a community that supports us along the way. I mean, you've moved to Austin. I'm in Austin. Both of us are here because of the tribe and the experience of being able to go to breakfast and sit around with a bunch of other dudes after just being with, like 30 other working out, but come with five guys and just be supported. And. And for me, I know, like, this conversation, sure, it's being recorded, but in a way, this is what we would be doing anyway. We would be talking about this anyway. I cannot stress enough how much community has changed my life, how much my friendships, my relationships, my tribe has changed my life. And it's why I started my online community, the create community. That's thecreatecommunity.com is because I believe without community, you're trying to do it alone. And I don't think the game's been designed for you to be able to do it alone. I don't. You know, we idolize the lone wolf in our mythology and in our movies and all of that, and yet there's not a single successful person that I've ever met that says they've done it alone. In fact, they all say no. I had a lot of help, had a huge team. I had a bunch of help. And so at some point, to take off the masks and actually move through that, people just need to feel safe to do that. And I think the greatest safety is found in tribes and communities where you're accepted, where you feel seen and heard and loved.

And in those places, people are free. They have permission to be all the things. So if you want to cry, I'll hold you while you cry. I'm cool with that. I mean, I know we're just getting to know each other, but that's really the emotional intelligence we need. But yet it's just not taught in school. This isn't something that, like, is given to us on a silver platter. So there was a point in your life, you said it was 2015. You were like, I sold everything. I gave it away. And I. And I realized, I think you said I had gone off the deep end. This is on your website. And I can't think of a better starting point for all of us to be like, I'm actually just going to burn everything to the ground, because whatever was there isn't working anyways. And I'm craving something else. I'm wanting something else. But there was something about that for you that also was super confronting. Like, you didn't know what you're gonna do. You weren't a coach really yet, right? In 2015, like, this was a space where you were figuring it out. And I think that's where a lot of people are right now. They're straight up figuring out where they're gonna go. 75 million, 100 million Americans are either bankrupt or out of work.

Is that. That's the.

That's the data. So they're in that choice point that you were in in 2015, did you have the community in 2015 like you did now? And if not, how do we. How did you build that? How do we build that? What's that all about?

That's a great question. And I would say that for me, that moment that you were talking about my partner at the time and I. We just felt that it was time, actually. Let me. Let me rewind even further than that for the whole.

Actually.

And do we need to. I'm like, watching over here. We're good.

We're good.

So I had a spiritual awakening in January of 2013. And that word gets thrown out a lot. You know, spiritual awakening. But there's no better way to describe it because you don't know that you're asleep until you wake up. And so the feeling of going, how. How did I not notice this or feel this before? What just happened felt like I had been asleep my entire life. And so in January 2013, I had this awakening. And before that, you know, I had a personal training business. I was private personal trainer. And I. My days would look like going and training at the gym. Coming back home, I would smoke weed with my partner. We'd eat dinner, and we'd watch Netflix Grey's Anatomy, or I've added up the hours of episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I've spent a week of my life.

You could have watching Launch Four more programs.

I have literally spent a week of my life on this earth watching Grey's Anatomy. That's how many episodes I watched. But the shift, and this is why I'm telling this part of it was I still would go to work, I would come back home, I would smoke weed. But now we were watching spiritual YouTube videos. We were watching videos about the law of attraction. We were watching Bashar and Abraham Hicks and these different things and lectures and stuff every night, listening to podcasts, reading books. I just dove into spirituality as a study, as a subject. And so remember this because we're watching a YouTube video and one of Tai Lopez's ads came up. The one, the lamb.

Look at my four flags.

Yeah, exactly. And they're long. I mean, they're 11 minute ads or something. And it said, he said, in that ad, you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. And I went, let's actually do this. Let me actually take. And I took out a piece of paper, Posit took out a piece of paper and wrote, who do I spend the most time with? And then it was one of those things where you could click on it and it took you to his free webinar. And so did like 45 minutes of his webinar. And in that was another really key piece, which is the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 rule, which is you want one third of the people that you spend time with to be people who look up to you. You want one third of the people to be peers, and you want one third of the people, people that pull you forward, that you're looking up to. And I realized by writing this out that I. Not only was I not spending time with people that I found to be inspiring to me, but I didn't have a single person. There was not a single person in my life that I spent regular time with that fell into the category of someone that was pulling me forward. And I, we made a conscious decision, said, okay, we get to change that. Fast forward. We go to Costa Rica on a personal development retreat, the first one we'd ever done, and meet Preston Smiles and Alexi Panos and became instant friends. And they invited us to come on the road with them to Australia and help facilitate their workshop with them. And that was us saying, not only are we going to do that, but. But this is the start of a whole new chapter. And so we gave away 75% of everything that we owned and text friends and said, hey, come over. I gave away snowboard, snowboard boots, surfboard like just gave it away. And that was the beginning of what I would say was a true full surrender experiment that I still live.

But that was by choice.

That was by choice.

And, and the contrast is right now, people aren't choosing. I mean, they're literally being forced to lock down, even though the essence is the same. You, you chose because you were following divine intervention. Most people are choosing right now because they've just been shut down.

Well, the, the difference. Here's where I will will disagree that the context, right, like what's happening in our environment, we don't necessarily have control over, but we always have choice on how we respond. We always have choice on how we respond. And I think that that is the essence of our free will. When we talk about free will and manifestation and all of that stuff, how you choose to respond to the context that shows up in your life will create the content within the context. And so, yes, in that circumstance, nothing was forced upon me, and I chose to surrender into it. And with this context, for example, I also experienced all of my plans out the window. I was going to go on tour for my poetry show. I had hired, invested a lot of money into hiring a company to help me plan that tour. And there were all the travel plans and all of this stuff and speaking opportunities where I get paid very well. Well, for what I do. All of that stuff out the window. And I don't want to downplay the people who literally have lost their jobs. And it's like, how do I pay my rent? I'm simply reflecting that how I choose to respond when everything I thought I'd planned for was gone. That's what's going to create the content. And similarly, for people who have are experiencing, just what the hell do I do? What the hell do I do? My advice is to really look at the energetics of how you choose to respond to this. Because the moment that you decide that this is going to be the thing that pushes you out of the nest and causes you to take action that you've thought about taking or have been curious about or go search for the solution to something that you've never thought you'd be in this time is the context, you decide the content by how you choose to respond. And I, and I believe that no matter how difficult someone's situation is, there's an example of someone who's been through it or been through something worse and turned it into something inspiring. And so what that means is it's not easy. And I think a lot of times what Happens is when someone hears me say shit like this and they go, yeah, that's easy for you to say. It's easy for you to say.

Must be nice.

Must be nice when you, yeah, the COVID hit. But you didn't have to worry about how you're going to pay rent. Well, yes, totally, 100%. And you can continue to hold that energy and then write off what I'm saying and stay in your victimhood. Totally. Go ahead, do that. Or you can hear the words that I'm saying. Search for the evidence in your reality that someone's been through something even more difficult and has made it and turned it into something inspiring and use that as fuel and shift your shit. And that's the thing that, you know, I live in the world of manifestation. I know you talked about wanting to talk about the million dollar client and stuff. The. I live in that world. I'm where I'm a big into wizardry and esoterics and all of that. And there's a groundedness of. It's up to you. You will have to choose how you respond. How you respond will create the energetics of the next opportunities of your. Those next opportunities will give you a chance to respond again. And like Legos, you just stack them on top of each other. And the longer that you continue to sit there and say, this was out of my control, this is unfair, this is not what I asked for. The longer that you stay in that you are stacking Legos of victimhood. And in my world, it doesn't matter what you're going through. That's not supportive. It's not supportive. And you're gonna have to unstack those at some point. So spend less time stacking them up. You're just gonna have to clean that shit up. It's like people when they get in fights and they just like, destroy their room. I've never understood that. You gotta clean that shit up later. You know what I mean? And so similarly with our internal world, what are we. How are we treating it? What are we doing? There's nothing more sacred than this body, this mind, what's going on inside of me. This is my temple. And I don't want to fill it with a bunch of shit saying that I have no control over my reality, no matter what happens. And the thing is, the reason why I am in this space where I have this thing, like, I didn't come from money. My dad was an immigrant to this country. I didn't come from money, I wasn't in poverty. But I didn't come from money in that way. I've battled ptsd, from sexual abuse, I battled depression. I didn't have a safe, loving environment growing up. My dad hit me with belts and things, so I just didn't feel safe. I was cheated. Like, I have my stories too. And the. The reason why I think I'm in the position I am is because every single time when something happens, I'm going, how do I make this into a gift? How do I turn this into a strength? And that mindset is what everyone has the ability to have.

It's literally a muscle. It's like when I hear you talk, I was thinking about, like, if our brain had arms and we were choosing to be loving, we were choosing for this to be for us instead of against us. My brain actually has muscles, and I'm growing the musculature. I'm changing the neuroplasticity in my brain so I can see things through a lens of, oh, this is actually happening for me. Instead of me just regurgitating it from, like a social media meme that I wrote. Oh, yeah, it's happening for us. It's happening for us, but it's not if we don't believe it, if it's not embodied in truth. Like, it's one thing people can. People could just listen to the past 20 minutes of you and be like, writing notes. I'm gonna do all these things. But do you feel in your body that it's real or not? That's the kind of intelligence that we're all looking for. This embodiment phase I talk about in my programs, like, we go gather, we apply. And then really what we all want, deep down in our hearts, we want to embody these lessons.

But how do you do that exactly?

That's my question to you. Tee it up.

Repetition.

How do we embody that? It's repetition. But also we can be rowing in the wrong direction and putting in the reps in the wrong direction. So there's repetition and guidance.

Well, so embodiment. You can embody unhealthy patterns like we're embodying it. So when you say the wrong direction, I'm going. You're. No, you're embodying the direction. You're rowing. We make it the wrong direction based on. You say you want this thing. You say you want to feel healthy, and yet you're eating bunch of fast food every single day, but you're embodying someone who values whatever that fast food is giving you. It could be just sedating the depressive feelings that you are having. So you're eating that thing to give you those chemical releases in your brain, right? So you are embodying someone who values that more than that, more than the healthy feeling healthy you are in everything that you believe. Because what is embodiment? So let's break that down first. So embodiment to me is what your unconscious mind has accepted as truth, okay? And so if you want to be someone who embodies infinite possibility, that believes anything is possible, right? That has to get to a point where you have consciously chosen to believe that over and over and over again, even against the part of you that's like, no, no, no, no. You just do it over until it gets to a point of muscle memory when you think about learning how to walk, right? You see, the kids, they learn. They're. They're figuring out. They're figuring it out at a certain point. Now we don't think about how to walk. Sure, we just get up and walk.

Ride the bike or drive the car, but that.

So walking is now embodied. Learning how to ride a bike embodied. Learning how to talk, embodied repetition. We repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until there's no doubt in our mind that we can do it and we just do it. And that's how every single mindset that I'm talking about right now is for me, gotten to a space of embodiment. Because, like, I'm not scripting this. I have no idea what you're going to ask me. And I'm talking from this place. And I. But that has been work. I used to be the person who everything was black or white, it was right or wrong. And you. And I thought I had life figured out and this is how to do. And I was humbled. I was. In 2012, what led to that spiritual awakening was a complete humbling of. To the point where, you know, they say that the cracks are where the light gets in, right? Roomie love, Rumi. Poet.

Thank you, Rumi.

Yeah. And just getting to that space of maybe I don't have this life thing figured out. And in that moment of humility was the opportunity for me to say, if that's true, where can I go outside of what I previously would have accepted for help? That led me into an Ayahuasca circle that led to my spiritual awakening. That led to me sitting right here. And so I encourage people. You embody all your limiting beliefs.

Right now.

You're an embodiment of the part of you that thinks you're not Able to make a million dollars. You're an embodiment of the part of you that doesn't feel like you can have a healthy relationship. You're an embodiment of someone who doesn't believe you'll ever be able to make it as an artist or a painter. Whatever it is that you dream to be, you're embodying that. So what? So what? You once embodied someone who couldn't ride a bike, and then you embodied someone who could. How did you do that? You worked on it and you practiced it till the point where it became embodied. And I. And I think that's something that people get to let go of. The idea that you are how you are.

You know what I was feeling too. The ego is so strong. I've done so much work around my ego. I have a strong ego. I don't know how your relationship with your ego is, but the ego is the amigo. It's not something that we need to fight yet. The ego is if it's not integrated properly. If you have an unintegrated ego, it is what blocks what you're talking about. The conscious repetition of you actually embodying love, belief in oneself. Fill in the blank. So this relationship to the ego. You've died a couple times in ceremony, maybe more. I've died as well. I don't think. I'm not recommending that everybody just go to a plant medicine ceremony. But are there other ways besides plant medicine where you have found either with yourself or with clients, where you can actually bring somebody to that space of healthily dissolving the ego? Integrating the ego without plant medicine?

Yeah. I believe that anything that can happen in a plant medicine ceremony can happen without it. It's not a necessity. That's plain. As someone who's a huge fan of plant medicines and feels like they are actually a regular part of my life, I want people to know that what plant medicines are, are a gateway to altered states of consciousness. And I believe that altered states of consciousness are a necessity. Because what's happening in an altered state of consciousness is that your neurology is shifting in a way where now you are seeing this reality in a completely different way than you'd previously seen it. Because the vast majority of our thoughts that we're having on any given day, like 98% of them are the same. We've had those thoughts before. And so 98% of our thoughts we've had before, most of them are unconscious. They've just happened. The vast majority of them are what you would call negative actually coming from a space of what could go wrong. That's biological as a survival mechanism, all of these things. And so if I want to see possibilities for my life that I've never been able to see before, then I need to shift the actual neurological neuron firing that is happening in my brain. That is mostly on autopilot. That is so important. And I think that. So we could talk about breath work, we could talk about yoga, we could talk about just a hard workout, we can talk about a long run, we can talk about meditation.

Does it always have to be biological though? Because think of your art form. Spoken word can hit people in the heart deeper than almost anything. Same with music. So does it always have to be a biological lens of healthily integrating the ego, or can you use art word creativity to do so?

Well, I, I believe that you can as well, like freestyle music or art.

House, help us integrate ego. It's an interesting. I've never even thought of that before.

How does. Ask the question again, like how does.

Art, spoken word, music, how does that vibration get into our system and help us integrate our ego? I've never thought of it that way.

But I believe art is a technology. And here's the reason why is because everything that you're saying, everything I'm saying to you right now is filtering through the lens of your conscious mind, your logical mind. And basically it's a combination lock of do I agree with this? Do I not agree with this bullshit detector? And then. But the more things that I say that you agree with, we build what is called rapport and trust. And therefore more of what I say, you let pass by easier and quicker, right? And she's like, yeah, you're saying that you're going to take a lot more of what I say is true as opposed to someone when we just met. As we develop trust with art, okay, it doesn't matter how shut down you are. It doesn't matter how closed off you are and how much you're protecting your heart. When you go into a movie theater, you're going because of how you believe that movies gonna make you feel. You put on music because of how it's going to make you feel. Art is. We give it a permission slip to make us feel. And in personal development, you learn true change. And shifts happen at the emotional level. When. When there's a actual shift that is sustainable and embodied and where you go that I'm never going to be the same. There's a massive emotional component to that. It is whether it's sadness and a deep release or it's ecstatic state of oneness and bliss that you've never experienced before. There is some sort of heightened emotion that's going in there that's reprogramming your mind. And so here we have this, this technology of art that's like going, yo, even the most closed down person who was not going to listen to anything that you have to say wants to feel when they think it's art. And that's full circle back to the very beginning of this podcast of saying that it was a poem about self love. And that's why it went not a talk, because that is giving people permission. They're going, oh, I'm just listening to art piece, a poem I'm willing to feel. And now the message about self love is hitting them at an emotional level, which at that level I believe is the answer to your question about how is art actually bypassing so much of that ego mind. It's because we've given it the permission to do that already.

How many people, like hear a song and it reminds them when they were younger and then they go and call their mom because they heard the song? Energy in motion is what moved them to take the action. It was literally an inspired action. So this inspirational thing, like, you know, it's funny, I haven't thought about this before, like healthy ego integration and taking away the power of the unconscious, the 98% or whatever that runs our world. The beautiful thing to just allow ourselves to go into like a musical space or play a guitar or do these things. Like, how could that be part of that choice point that I asked you earlier? Where we are at a society where it's like, hey, can I use music? Can I use art to take off my mask? How do you see that unfolding, especially with the community you have, which I haven't had a chance to check it out. I'm totally stoked and inspired to check it out. But I'm sure in that community there's artists, there's musicians or maybe aspiring artists and musicians. There's something in them that wants to take off some kind of a mask and integrate their ego through the creative form of art.

And I would say it's very directly. I have a non profit that I started called surrendered artist and surrendered artist.org for anyone who's interested. We have one major tenant, we have a couple of them, but this one that I want to speak to is specifically pointed at the youth and teaching the youth how to use art as a healing technology. Because for me, and where this is very personal for me is I love the idea of. We've all heard hurt people, hurt people. I love the idea of stopping hurt people from hurting people.

Yes.

And at the same time, that seems to me like that may take a bit. And so in the meantime, how do we equip humans to deal with the inevitable hurt and specifically the youth? And my personal relationship to this is being molested at the age of five. That was a repressed memory until I was 30 years old. And that is because my consciousness said, you don't have the capability right now to handle this. You don't have a way of processing this on your own, and you don't have the environment where you feel safe enough to be able to process it. So we are going to lock this away and. The process of healing from that, of. The process of looking back at my life and realizing there were 25 years that I was responding from deeply wounded trauma stored in my body that I didn't even have choice on. Like, it wasn't a choice for me to respond the way that I was. It wasn't a choice for me to be afraid of intimacy. It wasn't a choice for me to be in relationship with someone who wanted to just, like, hug me and hold me, and for me to physically not be able to take it. If we can equip our kids with a way of processing the emotions that come up when they are bullied, or if they, God forbid, are abused in any sort of way, it doesn't have to lie dormant in their system and repress. And even if it's not repressed, just something that they act out on out of anger or whatever it is, because they don't have a way to process it. Art is a safe space for people to process. You can say things in a poem that you might judge yourself for, just, like, saying them out there, but you can say it in an abstract way. You can put your emotion into it. It's okay for you to cry when you're doing a poem or something, or to feel that deeply when you're watching a movie or listening to music. There's a safe space there to be with emotion. And I'm so passionate about helping people understand that and how to use it.

Wow. I love your heart, man. Thank you for sharing that. And I think about the very first time I ever got cracked open myself in a ceremony, and I finally got to look back at my life and be like, whoa, those were all the things that I was feeling that I just Wasn't allowing myself to feel. I literally didn't know what to do with them. And a lot of them were around like belief in myself. Like, do I actually love myself regardless of what my body looks like? Which is why I'm full circle now in this moment with you, you know, like carrying what I'm carrying. And God, everyone goes through this. And you talked about it in your poem and the exact sentence you said was, the healing can't happen unless they're willing to be seen. So unless you're leading with compassion, you won't change a thing. Like, yeah, hurt people, hurt people. I think we all understand that on an intellectual level in our head. But God, where does the healing begin? You know, it starts with you. We, we see these platitudes. It's like, oh, the healing starts with you. Be the change you want to see in the world. Yeah, but are you doing it? Are you actually doing it?

Yeah, it's for me. So unless you're leading with compassion, you won't change a thing. I believe that compassion is the external manifestation of self love. I believe that compassion is our way of externalizing our self love. Because when someone shows up with anger or jealousy or judgment towards me, if I haven't resolved that part of myself within myself, if I still judge my anger, if I still am ashamed of my jealousy or whatever, when it shows up in my experience, I'm going to fight it, I'm going to reject it. It is going to trigger the hell out of me. And if I've learned to accept and love that part of myself, then when it shows up externally, I can extend that love to that person because I understand what it feels like to have that and to harbor that. When, when I think about my. I had my last relationship was really difficult to deal with the breakup and everything because a huge part of it was about how open I am. They, they were not their family and, and themselves. Even herself was not exactly comfortable with how much I put out there on the Internet. And in large part because that wasn't okay for her. Like it wasn't okay for her to.

Do that and within herself or sharing.

It, being that open in general, it wasn't a safe space. Growing up in an environment where that wasn't safe to do. And if you revealed certain things, if you talked about, if like you were, if she had been honest, it was not okay. She would have received, she would have been guilted, blamed, shamed, etc. And now as a very public figure that different than myself, hers was there are things I can't say. There are things I can't do. There are things that I am. I'm not able to share. And why I'm bringing that up in this moment is because I. After the breakup, I was so angry. Like, there was some anger that came up. And underneath that anger, I got to a place of realizing how much that must hurt. Like, how would that feel if I felt like I couldn't actually fully be me to my parents, on social media, to my friends? Like, if I felt like actually being completely honest would mean that I might lose everything that I'd built that dropped me into such a level of compassion. And I think that to truly be compassionate to other people, we have to find the compassion for ourselves first. We have to. And I think that you tell me any problem out there that anyone's going through and we can trace it back to self love. I really believe that's where it starts.

All roads lead to self love of any kind. And the reason that I think when you have a plant medicine experience or a deep breath work experience is because it just reminds you of the truth. It reminds you of who you are anyways, when you're a little kid and you didn't know all the things that you know. Now, a buddy of mine here, Cal, he has this podcast called Unlearn. It's a beautiful phrase. We're unlearning all this that we've learned that cuts us off from true self, from loving self, from compassionate self.

Do you remember what I told you in the garage?

I mean, you told me a lot in the garage.

Okay. The last time I was here, the last time I was here, we were talking about becoming worthy of the thing that we're calling in.

Yeah.

Feeling like we are worthy of it.

Yes. Yes. So for full transparency, Right. Because why the hell not? I charge a certain amount for coaching clients. Adam was offering me a different view.

Yes, right.

Based on self worthiness and self love.

And what I said to you was, you have a baby on the way, and when that baby comes into this earth and you are now able to shower him or her with abundance. Abundance that you're working your ass off to be able to provide, not just financially, but being the person who can love as deeply as you possibly can. Yeah, absolutely. So you can give him or her everything. Does that little creature need to do something to be worthy of the infinite amount of prosperity and abundance that you want to shower on?

No, he just bees.

He just bees.

He just bees.

And so at what point do you convince Yourself that you need to do something to be worthy of infinite abundance from the universe. Where does that shift happen? Why are we sitting here literally right now or a week ago, having a conversation of all of the things that you need to do to convince yourself that you're now worthy of X? Like that is a tricky, tricky thing. Because this whole game, when we talk about manifestation, this whole game is about what are you willing to allow in because the universe is there, just going, yeah, open up the reservoir, let it in the water pouring 100% it's there. So manifestation is becoming a match to that thing. But most of the time what becoming a match means is actually like letting it in and saying, I now feel like I'm worthy of that thing showing up.

What happened for me was this realization pre our talk and then also in our talk things, this deep seated belief. I mean we're talking like super young, maybe five, six, seven. Things have to be hard. I gave a talk once at a mastermind. Expect the worst to happen. Money causes pain and people can't be trusted. Very three powerful, deep beliefs that are not of service to self and love. But. But it's taken me from 2017 to arrive here in 2021 and know that they don't hold the same charge. Like I can feel that in my body. Yet there is some residue of that charge, which I'm open and honest about because there's so much more I can be doing, there's so much bigger ways I can be serving. And so where, where have you been at that kind of a choice point for yourself, where you're like, okay, residue has been cleaned. I'm now aware that those things that held a charge simply aren't the same. Or I've deleted them. If so, how did you do that?

Well, this is one of. You're now at one of my most leading edges of what I'm discovering about myself and the stories I'm rewriting around my worldview of life. And that is that I don't believe that we ever actually conquer them. Like, this is the funny thing I thought, okay, how many ayahuasca ceremonies do.

I need to do?

Or how many personal development workshops do I need to take? Or how many coaches do I need to hire to break through my scarcity conversation or my this conversation or that? And I went to a cabin, I got a cabin in Asheville, North Carolina. Shout out to Asheville because I love that place. So beautiful. And I got a cabin for five and a half weeks. Out, out, out. 40 minutes from town. Most days I didn't see another human being. And I brought every journal that I've kept since 2007, and I started reading them chronologically, and I noticed that I'm still writing about the same shit that I was writing about in 2009, 2010. And it's deeper, it's more nuanced, the stakes are higher. You know, it's not how do I pay my rent, it's how do I pay my payroll for my all. You know, I mean, like, there's all these things, and yet the themes are still there. And that was really humbling and eye opening. And I sat with, okay, do I feel like I haven't done it? You know, have I not cracked the code? Is that what I feel? I said, no. So what is going on here? And I realized that my view of karma. Did I explain this to you? What I believe my view of karma is, which is that I don't believe in karma, in the kind of cosmic scorecard thing. Like the idea of your.

If you kill someone in a past life, in this life, you're going to be tried for it.

Like the idea that your unborn child is going to come in here and if they had done something bad in a past life, they deserve to be punished in this life just doesn't compute for me. That doesn't make. I don't resonate with that. Karma, for me, is what your soul has agreed to as the particular limiting beliefs and wounds that you will take on in this lifetime that will become the edges of your comfort zone. So that every time you're ready to expand, you run up against those familiar edges. So for some people, that might look like they feel ugly. And it's always something about feeling attractive and desired and wanted. For other people, it might be scarcity and the literal fear of losing all of their resources. For other people, it might be an actual fear of death. Like that's their particular thing. And what's going to happen is at each level of expansion of consciousness, they are going to feel the familiar tinge of that thing. And what happens is, okay, this is my karmic pattern. But instead of seeing that as, wow, I'm just back at the beginning again, I now view that as, oh, okay, this is now the test point. Like in school, it's the end of the semester. Here's finals. I'm hitting that scarcity conversation again. I'm hitting that thing again. Okay, that means that this is the moment where the universe is saying, have you taken all of the lessons from this last Semester and are you ready to apply them to this scenario and graduate to the next?

Do you see the universe as a protector for you, to bring you the challenge again to see if you can pass the test?

No, I don't. I don't see it as a protector. I think that, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of, maybe it's religious dogma or whatever around the idea that, that God is benevolent. And this might be incredibly tricky for people, but I think God doesn't give a. I think. I think God loves it all. It all just is. And, and all is God, all is God. So that means that that's what Jesus said in text, right? Like the murderer is loved just as much as, as the, the priest or whatever. Like it's all just love. And so if that's the case, then God doesn't have preference. God doesn't give a shit whether you're a millionaire or you're homeless, because he's gonna. It's him. Her divine spirit is. It's all love. It all just is. And I believe that all of those realities actually exist on top of each other in a singularity point of infinite possibility. That's my belief. And, and so where does preference come in? At a certain point, that's where we as expressions of God, as fractals of divine spirit in this world, get to exercise our desires. And what we want. And where our work is, is in aligning and doing the work so that those desires and wants aren't coming from a place of scarcity, wounding and trauma, but are coming from a place of actual alignment with something that's greater than ourselves. And being a part of a collective and recognizing our role as one puzzle piece of all of that. And so if we can be in that and do our work to be there, then we can trust in our own desires. And when we can trust in our own desires, we can align with them. And therefore we're going to manifest them so much faster and we are going to be excited to take the action to make them happen. And we just create this feedback loop. And then when we hit those edges of oh my God, I'm worried that this is all going to fall apart and everyone's going to judge me and think I'm not cool, which is part of min. Like my deepest karmic wound I'll share openly is that there's something wrong with me and that's imprinted from being molested at a young age to all these other things that I've experienced that there's something wrong with me. And specifically, I can't see it. I'm blind to it. I'm ignorant to it. And every time I've had experiences where, like, someone's cheated on me out of nowhere and I'm going, what? That's reinforced that deep, deep wound. And so that's one of my deep, karmic edges. And so what happens is when I get into certain situations, I can feel that familiar thing. And it doesn't mean I've regressed back to the beginning. It just means the universe is saying, hey, this last chapter that you were in, where you weren't feeling this, you developed this skill, and this skill and this skill, you gained this knowledge. And this knowledge, now's where you apply it to move through this again, and you will burst through, and you will be in that space where you don't feel that until you do again. And so that's my view of karma as just our unique curriculum. And the way that that curriculum happens to be encoded into us is typically through wounds and something traumatic. Traumatic just from how it shapes us. Wow.

Everyone watching, Rewind. Watch that again. That was awesome. The reason it was awesome is because it reminded me of three passages. I'm not a religious man, but it reminded me of three passages in the Bible. One of them, Isaiah 45:7. I, the Lord, create the light and the dark. I, create good and evil. I, the Lord, create all these things. Shout out to Paul. Check from our series all is God. Three hours of podcasting about this topic where we're everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You remind me of this because you're right. God really doesn't give a. But God wants you to choose because God gifted you that power of choice. And so it is that power of choice that you're talking about, where we are literally choosing or not. Could it be that simple? It is that simple. But it's not always that easy, because underneath is beliefs that have been encoded, like you said, either at 5 or any age, that block us from that power of choice. You have a friend, Marci Locke, and I've never really met her, but I have another, our buddy Ronnie, he's done a lot of work with her, and one of her key phrases is like, the power of choice is yours. The power of choice is yours. And I think in the same way that we talked about earlier, where somebody's, like, looking at someone that's on the top of the mountain and they go, oh, must be nice. Must be nice. It is simple, but it's not easy how does that play out for you now compared to 2015 when you gave everything away? How can you see that as more truthful now compared to when you had less?

I, I still do the same thought experiment. I recently actually was sitting and I just faced off with my deep fears and I said, let me play this out. And for anyone listening, here's another exercise that you can do is write it out. I'm a huge fan of writing. I'm gonna be releasing a journal actually with writing prompts and stuff for people calligraphy. It's going to be. Writing is one of my, obviously one of the biggest ways that I process. And I would suggest anyone listening go ahead and write it out. What is the absolute worst case scenario that you are afraid of right now? What is that? And so I started playing that out when I was in this cabin, going deep into my worst fears and emotions, saying I'm worried that I am going to run out of funds, have spent all my money on things that don't make sense. You know, like my reality show that I gave away for free and didn't want to monetize. Starting a non profit and putting a ton of money into that. And just like my online community which I funded for the first several months just completely for free and just these things go, okay, let's say that that happens and then I have to fire everyone. Great, I'm gonna fire everyone. Awesome. Then I have to shut down everything that I've done. Okay, then what? I have to move in with my parents. Okay, I'm gonna move in with my parents. Then what? I'm probably gonna go social media dark at that point and just, just stop everything. And people are gonna be wondering what the hell happened now. And I'm gonna have to tell people, you know, I'm broke, I don't know what to do. I'm living with my parents at 36 and I just played this out, you know, sat with it and really asked the question, can I be okay with that reality? Breathe into that and said, you know what, fuck it, Fuck it. If that is really what happened. You know what I actually believe? I believe that I've done everything from a space of alignment, every choice that I've made, I've been listening. I feel very much like I've surrendered myself over to spirit. And therefore everything that I've been doing has come. I've meditated on decisions, I've done plant medicine, ceremonies around decisions. I have given my absolute best to everything that I'm doing. And so if that's I. What, what happens then? It's part of some bigger thing, but it's in alignment to the mountaintop I'm headed towards. It just looks different than I thought it would or wanted it to. And so I accepted that. And then I started thinking, okay, let's look at it through a different lens now that you've accepted the resistance to it.

Then I went, what is the absolute worst that could happen?

Worst, Worst.

That was the worst thing, Worst thing that could happen.

And I went, well, let's look at that through a different lens. I'm moving in with my parents in a house that I bought for them that I technically own. Okay. I would go social media dark. Great. And when I come back, I have, I don't know, at this point, 350,000 followers or whatever across the different platforms. So, like, I'm not starting from zero. I have an. A non profit that is doing good work on the planet that is still gonna. That has an executive director that would still be doing it even if I. Right. Like even in my worst case scenario that I was envisioning because by the way, there's way worse ones, you know, illnesses and things. But that was the one that I was most resistant to. It's not that bad. And so what was it that of that scenario that I was actually most worried about when I realized it's not that bad, why was it. So I realized it was because of how I thought people would view me.

Yes.

I thought about all my friends and I thought about all the, like, how much of a fraud I would feel like. I thought about what everyone would say behind my back about whatever that was what made that scenario so fucking scary. And when I realized that, I went, bro, do you want to live your life that way where your greatest fear is what people will think about how you've lived your life? And that was freeing. And I think that for again, for people, if you really go into your worst case scenario of what can happen and just make peace with that possibility, what we resist persists. Right. And so you're no longer in resistance to that. You're like, okay, if it happens, it happens. I'm gonna still do everything I can to not go in that direction. That's not going to change. But the energy changes. I'm not, I'm not running away from that. I'm running towards the vision that I have.

The energy changes because there's more energy to give, because there's not enough energy being wasted on trying to resist the thing.

Yeah, resistance requires energy. There's A part of me that is literally part of my bandwidth resisting that. And that's the very thing that makes that a ball and chain that I can't actually run away from.

Wow. Let's just pause right there. Think about how many topics we've covered. But also the big one that you brought up a little bit, that, with respect and reverence, I want to ask you about, and that is capital T trauma, right? There's lowercase T trauma, which is neglect. Maybe you move around a lot. There's trauma there from moving. But, man, when you talked about, like, the repressed memories, a lot of people have these. There's a guy, JV Crumb, he's a podcaster. He said it was like 55, 60 years old before he had the memories come up. I've done so many sessions. I've screamed to Ayahuasca, like, if I was sexually abused, tell me I'm okay with it. Right? And I went through all my family and everything else, and it was all a clear no. But you know what the big trauma that came up for me was? It was. I didn't actually know what loving myself was for real. Like, I just didn't know what that was. It wasn't modeled. It wasn't talked about. Love was something that you put on instead of feel. And I'm committed to doing the deep work because I'll be damned if I'm giving any of this to Nova. Nova is gonna be clear. He's gonna be loved. My projections won't go onto him. But for all of us that are just curious, like, curious about what is that like for a repressed memory to come up? How does that. How does that capital T or lowercase T trauma integrate as a blessing in your work? Right? Because without it, you couldn't be you. So it's a gift. Yet it's so hard to recognize sometimes.

Wow. There's so much in that question. In that question. Something. Something that I think is a starting point anytime that this comes up in conversation is. It's not needed. That may sound simple, but I want to unpack it. Because in personal development, there's a common axiom, which is the breakdown to the breakthrough. And it's one thing to turn your breakdown into a breakthrough. It's an entirely different thing to assign your breakthrough to the breakdown. The moment that we tie our strength to our trauma, we are going to call in more of it. We are going to consistently, collectively continue to create a pattern of deep, deep trauma, because we think that the trauma is how we create Our strength. No, that is. That is not in any way, shape or form what I believe you just.

Flew in the face of like 95% of spiritual bypassing spiritual world babble.

100%. And I know that. I know that because it's a way of making sense of it and giving it meaning and making it okay. And I understand why that's important because the idea that it doesn't have some greater meaning, it's not the reason why I'm so strong, means that it just fucking happened out of everybody else. It happened to me and that fucking sucks. And that's not fair. And to think that there that is, that it's part of some bigger reason that I can give it makes me feel special about it and it makes it okay. But in that is the tiniest little thread of victimhood. In that mindset is the tiniest, tiniest little nuanced thread. Because the need to understand it, the need to give it that value is resistance.

This happened so I could do this.

100%, but just full acceptance of this thing without any attachment to what it wound up doing for me, just this happened, and I'm okay with that. On its own, in its own bubble, 100%, that's full acceptance. Full acceptance to tether it to my strength, which so many people do. And I understand, and I did it initially, and to do that, to create that tether, is. There's is, in my opinion, still harboring the tiny. And it's. This is a very nuanced thing, but this tiny energetic of a resistance where if that tether is gone, how do I feel about that? How do I feel about that event? If we're watching the movie of someone's life and we see the scene of that person being raped and we don't know that that winds up being the thing that creates this whole thing and inspiring millions of people. If we don't know that and the movie ends there, are we okay with that?

Absolutely not.

So the resistance is carried through that tether. And so when we can understand that it's not necessary, we actually allow ourselves the space to truly love it, to truly love it. Not I love you, child. We're still using this, and I think it's a appropriate metaphor because one, you're about to be a father, you were already a father. But also, this is all about our inner children. You know, at the end of the day, kids insane. And so we have this. This thing, this child is like, I'm going to love you no matter what you become or do or don't do. And so the event itself gets to be loved and accepted, no matter what it becomes. And I think that that goes in the face of a lot of what is said, but in it is also then the true empowerment of, you know, you're not strong because of your trauma. You're strong because of how you responded to the trau, which was your inherent birthright of divine strength and spirit. The human heart, the human spirit is fucking unbelievable. So why the hell am I going to tether my strength to that trauma? I'm going to say, no, I brought my strength to respond to that trauma. And that is what turned me into this person. Because I used my spirit, I used my strength, I used my courage, I used all of me to work through that shit. And it shaped me in this way. But I didn't need that. That didn't have to happen for me to be inherently strong and capable and worthy and all of those things. And so if that were the case, we would be intentionally inflicting it upon everyone because it would be a necessity. But it's not. And I talk about this, and I'm so passionate. I've used, I don't know, five minutes talking about this specific thing, because it is a perspective that I don't. A lot of people have. And I want to make sure that the insidious nature of assigning our strength to our traumas and our wounding stops. Because that's the reason you're calling more of it in. Because if there's that part of you that wants to be stronger and grow and expand, and you think that the way to do that is by breaking down, guess the fuck what. The rest of your life is going to be full of breakdown after breakdown after breakdown, because you think that's the only way you get the breakthrough. You can find the breakthrough differently. And so my process of being with that has been to get to that point where I can even speak to my new perspective is going in it and seeing all of the ways when I had that repressed memory come back, bro, it's like I built this tree, and here's all these branches. And you have financial. You have relationships, you have friendships, you have whatever. And every single one of them had grown from a rotten trunk. And I had to retrace every single way and see all the ways in which this particular traumatic experience and the PTSD in my body, because that was something that I had to learn how to work. How do you work through the somatics of that stored memory in my body? How was it affecting me financially, in business, how was it affecting me in my male friendships? How was it affecting me in my relationship, my family, to my partner at the time, in intimacy, in sex? How was it affecting me in all of these areas and retracing those branches and it was exhausting, man. I could imagine it was exhausting. I wanted at a certain point and anyone, you know, I think that more than half of the world has experienced some form of sexual abuse. It's one out of three children and that's what's reported. I'm an unreported case. Most cases, I think, are actually unreported. I would more than double whatever the numbers are. I would more than double it. And for me, when I think about that, one of the hardest things to be with, one of the hardest things to be with around sexual abuse is like, it's not fucking fair. It's not fair that that man got to do that to me. And I'm the one that has to work through that for years and years and years. That's not fair. There's nothing fair about that. And so to be going through depression, to be having suicidal thoughts, to be. To feel like I'm broken and I'm wounded, I'm never going to be able to love someone they want to be loved or allow love in, and I'm always going to fuck things up, like all of those thoughts to be in that space and realize that I didn't do anything to be in that space. Why am I the one that has to work on that? Why am I the one that has to hire therapist to work through that? Why am I the one that has to do this PTSD work? And that's not fair. And I think that a lot of victims of abuse hit that point and what do we do in that moment? And that's what I mean when I say that breakdown of going, this is not fucking fair at all. But guess what? It is. It is. And so how I choose to respond to this context, going full circle again, how I choose to respond to this is mine. No one can take that from me. And I will turn this into a strength by bringing my strength. This is going to reveal my strength. It is not going to give me my strength. And that is the difference that I want. I want anyone listening to this who has been victimized to understand it is revealing your strength. It is not giving you your strength.

And also it is not law of attraction. You did not attract abuse. Yes, we get more of what we energetically are a match to. But Law of attraction does not operate on the same frequency of law of reciprocity. I used to misquote that. Like when I love you, or I give you tea, or you come to my house, or I do something for you, there's a natural, organic, kind of like, oh, well, how can I open up to you? That's just friendship or relationship in general. We just, we come to the table, we give, we give when. When something's not a match. And law of attraction doesn't play into that because I do see another. Another sinister way that the spiritual world describes. Oh, it's happening for you, Adam. It's happening for you, it's happening for you. It's like, yes, but sometimes no. Like, how do you unpack that? Because we're living in a world of utter bullshit. I can't name the person this week, this week, someone who I put on a pedestal, and that is the last time I will do that. So it was obviously a lesson I got to learn. I put this person on a pedestal. World class speaker goes all across the world talking about medicine, health and wellness. And I just had a conversation with him about some business and it broke my fucking heart. I mean, it just broke my heart because I was like, wow, I'm actually seeing that so many people are one way on a camera and different not. I can attest to you being the exact same way right here versus off. It's the same thing. There's no ambiguity. Yet I find that in our world right now, in our spiritual world, in our personal development world, in our conscious media world, there's so much bullshit and there's so much bypassing and memes and reductionism and do this, to have that coaches coaching coaches to coach other coaches that want to coach coaches. I mean, I could go on for a long time. My question to you is this. How do you. Have you ever worked with people? Or how would you work with someone, either a group or one on one, that was dealing with capital T trauma? Maybe it's sexual, maybe it's emotional, maybe it's physical, whatever that you knew if you could just guide them through that, so it truly was for them without bypassing, how would you begin that process? How does one even begin that process to work with someone, to work through capital T trauma? Because, gosh, if you get rid of that or if you integrate that, I get rid of it. If you integrate that, so much is possible.

Yeah, I agree with you that, you know, a lot of the spiritual teachers and gurus and coaches, celebrity coaches, it.

Honestly feels like it feels like half.

Well, they're, they're, they're actually just great marketers. Is more, more than their, their actual whatever they're recycling, repurposing and great at marketing.

Yeah.

And it's always sad to, to meet those people and, and you and I have probably gotten the opportunity to meet.

People, especially after knowing people for a year or two years, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, that's who you are.

It's, it's tough. It's a tough one. And I, I feel. Yeah, let me just go, let me let that one slide. And I'm going to go into what you asked about with the trauma, which is I believe that our, our bodies and our souls and everything will heal on their own in direct correlation to how safe they feel. I think that this vessel, all of it is so, the technology of it is so beyond anything that we can really comprehend and if we just feel safe enough, enough for. Because what happens there? Let's talk about the physiology. Your nervous system will relax when your nervous system will relax. Now the emotions that were previously being held and stored in the body that that nervous system was like tightened around are going to start to rise to the surface. And then we, if we feel safe, we'll feel them. We'll allow ourselves to feel them. Have you ever had an experience of something happening either as the. Where you either give someone a hug or you're hugged by someone and something has just happened and there's just some, a breakdown. Like I've had that moment where giving someone a hug because something had just happened, their dog had just died and I'm like, bro, and I give him a hug and he just starts crying.

Sure, of course. I mean, definitely with my lady. Yeah, 100%.

There's a safety in that moment and in that moment there's a release. And in that release is the healing. And so I think that facilitation is incredibly beneficial and can be pinpointed. And you know, I'm a facilitator, I'm a coach. I do that work and I know how important it can be and I overvalue my role in the process. My first and primary role is to help that person feel safe enough for the healing to happen. Then from there my role can be maybe it's question asking, maybe it's hands on, maybe it's certain exercises that I'm taking them through. Sure. But first and foremost, if I don't create the safe container, the healing is not going to happen anyway. And so when someone's dealing with that capital T trauma. The first thing that I'm saying to that person is how and where do you feel most safe? Where is that? Is it by yourself? Do you have anywhere like you talk to a 7 year old child about where they feel safe when they live in the home with their abuse abuser, which is something that people is not a story that's talked about enough about this pandemic. You know how many kids are at home with their abusers?

This is why I was so inspired by your video take off the mask so we can all see what's really going on. Because that shit's going on, it's rampant.

Say you know how many women are at home with husbands who are abusing them because the husband's now home from work or has lost their job. Like, like this is some of the results, vaccines and quarantines and all of that shit aside. Like we will be dealing with the mental and emotional health damages of this thing for a long fucking time. And what is the government doing about that? Like where is the government program for how to help people with their mental health around this? As we see suicide rates skyrocket, the.

Government'S not going to help us. But we're helping now.

This is how we're doing now. This is what we're doing. And I think that, so coming back to it, where is that safe space and how do we create it? And from there the facilitation can happen. Right? But that's the starting point. Anyone who's dealing with trauma, if you just get yourself to a safe space. And a lot of times nature is that place, place, you know, getting out into nature and you just sit, go out into nature and just sit with the trees and just be with your feelings. But for a lot of people, they feel so unsafe with the emotion itself because they, they, they can feel the intensity of what's behind that door. Yes, that they don't even want to open it because they're, they're worried that if they open that door, they're lost in the darkness, they'll never come back.

Talk about this because most people, they don't give themselves permission to feel something because it feels so overwhelming to both the nervous system and the mind that if they allowed themselves to feel it, they literally think they would either get stuck and die or they'd be trapped and they'd never come out.

And so that is where the facilitation is important, where you have someone with you. You know what I mean? I trust that you got Me, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna let it all out because you're there with me. Me. You are going to hold my hand through that process. And that's one piece. The other piece is in just starting to develop a relationship with it. And so something that I've given clients before is, okay, you're so scared of opening that door. Let's start with five minutes. And what you're going to do is five minutes of each day, you're going to set a timer, you're going to press start, and you're going to let yourself feel that emotion. You're going to open that door for five minutes. Go as deep as you. You want to, you feel comfortable with for five minutes. When that timer stops, you're done. There's no, I'm going to be an overachiever today. There's no. Whatever that is, the container, you will stop no matter what you stop. And what happens is you develop this ability to go in and know you can pull yourself out. You develop a relationship where you understand what that feels like. So it becomes less scary just by.

You begin to trust yourself.

You begin to trust yourself and your emotional experience. And so that's another just tangible exercise for people listening here. If you want to start working on that. Because the goal, the goal is not for you to move through all of it in one moment. There's so Peter Levine, if you're familiar with Peter Levine's work, Waking the Time Tiger, incredible when it comes to PTSD and trauma and somatics. And he kind of coined titration. Titration, which is this idea. So in chemistry, titration is where you took, like, take the acid in the base and you, like, you put in a drop over here and it goes. And if you were to pour all of it in there, there'd be an explosion.

You take a drop, titrate from supplements. Like, you start with 10, you end up with one. It's like this gradual.

And so it's like, like a drop at a time, and eventually it, it neutralizes, right? But if you poured it all in at once, there's an explosion, there's a reaction. And so it's the same thing when we look at yin and yang energies on the planet as, as the balance, right. Most traumatic experiences that create PTSD in the system are going to be catalystic experiences, which means that they happen in heightened emotional things that, that, that cause that experience, right? Which, which most people then are trying to approach the healing from that same energy of catalystic, like Purge in the bucket or whatever. That's what I was doing was how do I approach this warrior? Let me get it. And yet what happens is because that's the energy that imprinted it, that can create a defensive. Like it gets into its shell and so there's no balance there, there. So if it's yang energy, if it's fiery catalystic energy, that implant, implanted it, then the yin energy, the nurturing, the softness is how we treat it. And it's just over time, over time, gentle. When I started working with a therapist, one of the first things that she did to me in our very first session, she asked if she could just put her foot, her bare foot on top of my. Barefoot, while we were sitting speaking. That was it. And so we had the same conversation and she just asked if she could do that. And she sat close to me and she just put it there. And it's amazing how uncomfortable I got. Amazing how uncomfortable.

It's kind of an interesting request though, like, can I put my foot on top of your foot? Because we don't normally do that in life. It's not something you normally think about.

No, but. But part of that was co regulating the nervous system, right? Is by being in each other's field. But specifically, even with physical touch, allowing my nervous system to co regulate to hers and to calm itself. And so to get in that space of wow, that's how I treated it today, like that was it. And the part of me that went, I want this to be done and whatever, but part of the reason for wanting to meet it with that warrior energy is wanting it to be done immediately, which is another subtle form of resistance which is holding it in place. And so part of me moving through depression and I feel as if I have turned the corner and I will never again drop into that depression.

And if you do, you have the tools so you won't stay as long in hotel depression.

And I think that I have the tools and awareness to spot it before it becomes depression.

So you're not even checking in?

Yeah, yeah, I'm not even checking in. Yeah, no, I'm driving by and I'm just being like deuces. Yeah, I'm way over here to the.

This is what I respect so much about you is your ability to talk about the bandwidth instead of just the compartmentalization. Because a lot of things that you're saying, people might want to intellectualize. Especially the piece when you talked about trauma and how if we can just like beat it, then we'll be done with it or if it happened for us, then that's why it happened and I don't have to heal it. This is really important for people to get is healing is a lifelong job. There's no like Disneyland, which isn't even open anymore because people wearing masks and they close Disneyland. There's no fast pass for healing. Like you can't get like an accelerated version of healing. Yeah. You can go do a ceremony, you can breathe. There's a lot of ways to get you there. I guess you could say more succinctly, but I don't know if the speed of healing, healing is something that we should be focusing on at all.

I wonder if it. How much changes if we just stop calling it healing.

How so? What do you mean?

Well, when we say healing, because there's this, this innate kind of context that's created around the idea that we're healing a wound. We're healing something that is off, that's wrong, that is sub optimal. And what if we just like literally, if everything we were saying was just learning because there's nothing wrong with you, you've shared openly and vulnerably. And I wanted to acknowledge it because you share it in a way that one might not know how much it impacts you because you're a jovial dude and you're so like open hearted and just generous in the time that I've known you. And I asked, I text people listening. I text him 15 minutes before I showed up and she said, hey, yo, do you have any coffee or anything with caffeine? He goes, would you like, yeah, I can make you coffee, but I also have matcha green tea. And I'm like, yeah, that'd be great. I'm thinking it's gonna be just as much thing. I walk in, this dude's got it on the stovetop, he's like whisking it. He's asking me what sort of this collagen creamer to put in it. And I'm going, wow, he's actually intentionally making me this matcha. And that's like. It might seem like a small thing, but that's not lost on me. I appreciate what that is.

It's the small things in life that really stack up to matter.

And so I want to acknowledge like you mentioned that you are in a space in your life where you're carrying more weight than you've ever carried. And you've shared certain feelings around that and especially even some of the hints that people may have caught onto about what you've associated with your Value. And so where those tie together, all of that stuff, I want you to hear from me like, there's nothing wrong with you. You don't need to heal that. You're not broken. It's not. And so we use the word healing. But I wonder what happens when we. If we were to be speaking about that consistently as my learning, like, this is what I'm learning right now. I'm learning how. What has. I'm learning, I'm unlearning, or whatever we want to call it around what allowed me to put on this weight, what allowed me, why do I want to remove it? What's actually the intention for it? How much of my value am I assigning to this thing? And, like, all of that is actually learning. We're just calling it healing. And the healing implies something else to it. And I think that that's another kind of trap that we can get into. Because if we place a value on healing, which is what personal development is all about, like, let's heal your wounds and all this stuff, if that's a value, how much of us unconsciously is calling in healing and therefore needing the wounding once again, where if we're just saying, no, I'm calling in more learning. I'm excited for what I'm learning right now about depression. I'm excited about what I'm learning right now about the PTSD in my body. I'm excited for these new things that I'm learning because it means that I won't carry it anymore. It shifts the energy. Because once you've learned something, you let it go. Once you heal something, a lot of times there's scars. A lot of times, how many scars is like, oh, yeah, I remember that. I'm still kind of holding on to that, you know? And these are the types of things that I just pontificate on and wonder about for myself, because I was that shadow ghostbuster of going, what's wrong with me? Let me work on that. Okay, great. That feels like I moved through it. What's wrong with me? Next? Let me go work on that. And I was just one thing to the shadow. One shadow to the next shadow to the next shadow. And the thing is, I now believe in play as a path of personal development. I believe creativity as a curriculum for your soul's evolution. Notice the alliteration. I'm a poet. I like doing that.

Yeah, that's that marketing background coming through right there.

And so what the thing is, if you are giving yourself permission to be creative and express and play all of the parts of you that don't feel worthy of doing that or don't feel capable of doing that or don't, whatever, those will rise to the surface. They will come up. You don't have to seek them out. The difference is when you're seeking out all of the shadows for what you can heal and resolve, when you resolve one, you're still in the shadow. You're still in the shadow. But if you are playing in the light, you're in the space of how much fun can I allow myself to have? How much can I allow myself to receive? Let me be creative and expressive. And that stuff comes to the surface and you work through it. You're in the playground.

It's like learning how to dance. You see people when they're awkward and dancing, and it's like. Like they don't really know how to dance. Make somebody dance, it's medicine. It's legit medicine. And it flashes back to, like, the old shamans. I mean, if you go in the history books and, yeah, I've heard this from mentors, but I think we all can feel it's true. The things that block you from learning and. Or healing, which is a fascinating dichotomy. I've never thought about learning versus healing, but either way, you want to look at it, like, when we stop learning and healing is when we stop having community. We stop dancing, we stop singing, we stop telling story, we stop sitting around the fire, and we stop, like, wondering in awe about the mystery of life. You know, like, we just. There's so many things to focus on that are in that creative, playful space, yet there's these hooks at times, I think for many people, myself included, that are just things that I'm. And we get to be aware of that are like leaves in the wind. These thoughts, they're leaves in the wind. That is it. And so I'm curious how you could speak to someone as we. I mean, I could have two more hours with you here.

I don't even know how long we.

Gotta wrap at some point. I mean, it's fantastic. But for someone who has been with us the whole time on this, like, awesome spaceship, it's not like we were going through many galaxies. Speak to them right there. Somebody that's dealing with, like, recurring thoughts, OCD voices in their head, things like this that I think this mask wearing has really brought up full front and center for so many of us. Can you start that dialogue with them?

Well, I want to be really careful with things like when we're talking about OCD or voices in the head, like schizophrenia. There's like a fine line. And I. And I. Adam is not a doctor. Well, one, I'm not a doctor. And two, mental illness and mental health is something that's very near and dear to me and important. And so there are people that are struggling with levels of OCD and schizophrenia that the brain, chemically and neurologically is doing things that I will never experience. I don't understand. And so for anyone who's in that space, you know, that's where I say definitely get professional guidance and professional help around it. And I believe that mental health is just so mistreated in Western society, I feel, you know, in indigenous cultures, the ones who heard voices became the shamans.

Yeah.

You know, they were told they had the gift. In our culture, they wind up homeless, on the streets, or put into, you know, put into lockdown and given lithium and things to just completely numb them out. And that's really tough because what is actually real, you look at the. If you were. Just look at the brains of myself and a schizophrenic and the schizophrenic's brain, when they're hearing those voices, it's responding like they're hearing a voice the same way that when I'm listening to you, my brain is responding to what you're saying. So. So on paper, it looks like someone's talking to them. Right. Or, like in their brain. So what makes that not true? Because I can't see it. So therefore my reality is more true than their reality. I can't see who's talking to you. So yours is, there's something wrong with you. I'm normal. But if it's just me and that person on an island, who's to say I'm not the one that can't see reality in the way that it actually is? We don't actually know that. And so in when I'm looking, like, when I see someone that's living in LA as long as I did. Right. Such a huge homelessness problem. And you'll regularly see someone on the street just, like, yelling and having some sort of conversation with someone that I can't see. And yet I've had crazy experiences of direct dialogue with spirit. You know, angels, specific angels have come to me. Mary Magdalene has come to me, like, direct conversation where what makes that normal? What makes that something where someone might hear that story and feel inspired by it, but looks at the person on the street and feels pity or feels. Or feels like there's Something wrong with that person. I like, I have voices in my head. They're not. You know what I mean? What is that voice? What is that voice in my head that says I can't do it? What is the voice in my head that says I can? What is that voice in my head that says this is a bad decision, don't do that? What is. What are those voices? What. One practice that I just actually gave this to a client recently is journaling in a way where you specifically call in a certain type of conscious, like your ancestors or your. It could be a cosmic thing. You know, people love to channel from Pleiadians or whatever, or it could be Jesus or the angelic realms or whatever and allow yourself to write as a vessel for that. And so when I journal, I have three ways that I journal. One is sort of factual, where it's. I noticed that I was doing this and yesterday this happened and I thought that. And I'm just kind of going through it. A second way is sort of just philosophical exploration where it's more objective and I'm exploring some concept and it doesn't really have to do with me. It's like, what does it mean to be a man? Like, whatever, right?

That's an interesting one.

And the third one is where I open myself up for something else to move that pen and speak to me. And those are more often than not the most profound. I have a book that was written entirely in that way called Cosmic Philosophy. People can get it on Amazon because I went to Egypt. I had this crazy experience in the pyramids of Egypt. Egypt. The next day I met this man from Brazil who was there with his apprentice. And he had been gifted at the age of seven or something, had this near death experience or whatever and now was able to activate people's channels. And I heard about this and I went, yo, you gotta like, let's do this. What do I ask happened? He came with his apprentice to my hotel room. They gave me a two hour session. Basically like hypnotized me, opened up my channel. This whole thing every day for the next month I would call him up on WhatsApp in the morning and he would take me through a five minute like re. Hypnosis meditation. And then I would write with my eyes closed in this journal with whatever was coming through. And on day 15, 16 of that, it came through. This isn't for you. Only put this out into the world. And so I put it into a book called Cosmic Philosophy and released it. But those. That was my deepest initiation into what does it look like to just let it. It flow through me from wherever else coming through. And I think that how this all ties in is if you're hearing voices, if you're experiencing the vulture squawking on your shoulder or whatever, name it, give it, acknowledge it. It's consciousness, just like everything else wants to be seen, heard, and loved. And give it a space to speak, create dialogue with it. The trouble is when we resist it. The trouble is like anything else, the trouble is when we fear it and go, ah, something's wrong with you. Whatever, you go, no. All right, man, you won't shut up today. All right, here we go. I'm gonna drop in. Got my journal. What do you want to say? Why are you here today? Why are you so fucking loud? What do you want? And boom, boom, boom, boom. That's how I. That was one of the deepest ways I started to manage my depression. I gave it a voice.

Have you seen the movie A Beautiful Mind?

Yes.

What an incredible movie. It's exactly what you're talking about. And I've dealt with this too. I had a ass kicking. PTSD from OCD from Ayahuasca. Took me two years to handle it. And it was a beautiful gift, but I was consciously curious. That's the thing I want to tell everyone. Just be curious about it too. My mom had bipolar. I'm the only one in my family that hasn't taken in SSRIs in some way. And so I'm no stranger to this. And with full respect, I totally agree with you. Like, why do we treat homeless people as if they're the bane of society? And then people that have ayahuasca journeys where they connect and talk to Jesus are somehow glorified. To me, it feels similar. But going back to that initial question, it's like I just wanted people to understand from where you are now and where you've come from, from, if you were to just give them some wisdom or give them a gem as a starting place, that journaling seems like it's the best spot to do. It's like, create that dialogue. Is there anything else that you think we missed when it comes to the health of the mind? Like actually having. Cultivating a healthy mind?

I think that. So people ask me about what self love is. That's a very common question I actually get, like, what is self love?

How do I look like an intellectual? Tell me with my mind.

Yeah.

What is what your heart means?

And so at a certain point, I said, I'm going to come up with an answer to that. What is it? I believe self love is the byproduct of your relationship with yourself and you and I. I have unconditional love for everyone in this room. I have unconditional love for you because you are. And I've gotten to a place where I legitimately, I love everyone from a human, human place. Even from just being human is fucking hard. It is not the easiest thing to do. It takes a lot of courage as a soul to say, I'm coming and I'm being human like that. Like, kudos, you know what I mean? You signed up for this. You enlisted in the human journey, and I love you for that. Fuck yeah. And I can love you and not like you. Right. I don't have to want to be friends with you in order to still love you. And what is it about someone like you where I go, oh, this is like soul brother. This is immediately soul brother. We could sit here and talk all day long. What is that thing? And how do we now cultivate it? What happens? Okay, we just can even look at the love languages, right? Acts of service. You made me a matcha. I'm so great, right? Quality time. We're spending time. We spent time the other day. Actual quality time. Gifts, right? Gifts. That. This. I mean, you said matcha is a form of that as well. Actually, you gave me. You gave me herbs.

Well, also shameless. Plug the feel free.

Oh, yeah. The tonic that I have because it's so amazing. They're good.

They're good.

Yeah. If none of this has made sense, it made sense in my head. Blame the tonic. That was so gifted. Gifts. Words of affirmation in this, every time we've hung out, we said, I'll let you know. I'm like, bro, I really enjoy hanging out with you. It's awesome. So words of affirmation and then the physical touch, you know what I mean? Like, we hug it out or whatever or that sort of thing, right? Because we're doing those things. Our love deepens. Our love deepens. How many people are taking that approach to the relationship with themselves? How many people are actually looking at their relationship with themselves and going in those five arenas? What am I doing? Am I giving myself any sort of gifts? Am I giving myself physical touch? Like, am I actually loving upon my body? Am I spending quality time with myself? Because there's a huge distinction between being alone and being with yourself. Those are two very different things. Are you actually spending time with yourself? Words of affirmation. Most people, those thoughts going in are saying negative things. How much would you and I like hanging out each other if we just insulted each other all the time? And yet that's the inner dialogue for so many people. Well, how many? What about saying some nice shit to yourself and then acts of service? What are you doing for yourself as an act of love on a daily basis? What are you doing? And if you do that, if you look at those categories and you do that, you are going to, as a byproduct of investing in that way, start to love yourself more. It's not a switch. There's not a do this thing. And now you love yourself. The more you invest in your relationship with yourself, you will love yourself more. That's how it works with any relationship in your life. And so when we talk about that mental. Anything that I want to leave people with, it's your external reality is reflecting back to you. Your internal belief structures and systems. And what you. The lens that you see the world. And this is why I'm so passionate about art. Because. Because. And supporting artists is because artists are who see the beauty as the layer on top of the reality that most people are stuck in. When you hear noise, the musician hears music, where you see a bunch of whatever, the artist, the photographer sees the light, hit it just in the right way, the beauty that is actually here right now, the artist is seeing that lens. And so if we can start to shift our lens, we shift the reality because all of that is available to us. It's there right now. And for all of you listening, the best thing that you can do is start to invest in your relationship with yourself so that you can develop more love for yourself. Because that's going to be the lens that you look at the world through, which is going to allow you to show up with more compassion for other humans and more excitement for the life that you have already ready, which is going to attract in more of the life that you want. Because the energy of gratitude and appreciation is expansive and magnetic. And the universal abundance that is always available to us will flow into the space that is created through the expansion of your heart. And so that's what it's one of the cool.

I love how you ended that. You're like, so. So. Because that was the coolest. It's funny, I had all these questions for you and then I was like, I'm not going to ask you any questions. I had pre planned. I just want to connect with you. And one of them was about manifestation. That was the coolest explanation of manifesting through an Actual practice, tactical and practical of self love. So thank you, man. Thank you for showering these gifts. We have to do another podcast at some point.

We didn't even get into the million dollar story. That's gonna have to be another time.

That's the cliffhanger.

Next time is I manifested a million dollars in five days.

Okay, we're going to talk about that at some point this year. We're going to do round two. I don't know if you're going to be in Austin, but you're definitely.

Let's do it. When I release my book.

Fantastic.

Because I'm going to do another podcast. What is the book I'm going to. Well, I'm working on two books simultaneously. Specifically around. I'm going to leave it with just what it's around. How to heal from heartbreak. I think that heartbreak is something that derails people more than. Than maybe anything else. Yeah, more than anything else. Some people never get over a divorce or a breakup or being cheated on. They never get over it and they're never the same. Some people, it takes years. Takes them out of the game completely. And yet in the moment of heartbreak, when something like that happens, it has. Now part of why that's so difficult is because your entire projection for your future has just been white and what you thought has been wiped. But that means that you're in this. You're like in an elevator and you don't know what floor you're gonna get off on. And so those doors are gonna open and you're gonna get off on a new floor. And what you do in the elevator determines the floor that you get off on. And so it's simultaneously the biggest opportunity to shape yourself into a match for the future you actually want. There's a massive opportunity there. But the PA so debilitating and the judgments and the shame and the guilt and the everything that comes from that. And I think that so few people know how to move through it because when you're in it, it's just all you see is pain.

Yes, definitely.

All you see is hurt. You can't, you can't see anything because you're just blurry eyed from tears. And so I think that my journey over the last three years, we didn't even get into any of that story has been, like I said, I went to the cabin and just had been reading these journals. And my last three years has been a journey of how to heal my heart. And I'm sitting here today as someone who feels like I've turned The corner on depression that is more empowered than I've ever been. That is someone who is loving life more than I ever have and has done that process. And I believe that I can help people through it. And so I'm designing. I have two different books. One's going to be about poetry, and I'm going to take actual journal entries from my journals and put them in there and do something really cool with it. And then the other one is going to be specifically taking people and helping them heal, Heal from heartbreak.

So many gifts we got. One big gift that I got was about using creativity as this healing, learning thing, whatever it is, healing and learning. So thank you for that gift and give us this one last gift, too, because it's the question that I always ask. It's the one that I'm most curious about. What's the recipe? What is the true meaning? What is the definition of Adam Roa living his life well? What is wellness to you when you feel that to live well? Wellness? What is that for you?

Happy? My. My. Most of my life, I have been trying to love life. The vast majority of my life, I've been feeling like I see people and they figured out how to love this person thing. And for me, it's like, maybe I have moments. And then the other time, like, God, this is just hard. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to give up. Like, what's the point? And that oscillation and. That has shifted for me. And so wellness for me is just being in love with life, Just actually being so grateful to be here, to be doing this thing, you know? Like. Like all of it, man. All of it. Yes. Was it yesterday or two days ago? It was a hard day. I had all this emotion come up. I what's going on? And. But I wrote about it in my. In my journal, actually, the next day. So I'm really proud of how I showed up with that emotion because instead of thinking there's something wrong with me, what, Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just said, this is what it is right now. What does it want? And I leaned into my practices. I did breath work. I got out literally in the sun. I brought out journals, I wrote, you know, I went to the gym. I moved my body. I just did the things that I know are supportive. So I showed up for myself in excellence. And the things that I've learned are supportive to me. And I didn't judge myself, shame myself, or guilt myself for what I was feeling. I started to and caught it. And that's the game. Like this whole thing, I say it all the time. Awareness gives us choice. This entire personal development thing is about helping people gain the awareness and then shortening the amount of time it takes to gain that awareness. Awareness. So it may have taken me six months to be wow. I judge myself and blame myself and guilt myself when I feel sad. Yeah, it took me six months of inquiry to realize that that was happening. Okay, now the neck. Now I'm in a space where wow, I'm catch. I'm catching myself doing this within five minutes of it happening and going, nope, not going to do that anymore because I'm going to choose something different. That's the entire game. Game is you. Whatever it is that you're working through, being able to catch it quicker so it doesn't eat up more Legos of a foundation that you're building in a direction that's not in the direction you'd like to go. That's it.

That's the code to exit the matrix right there. So thank you so much, man, this has been really fun. And round two. Let's do round two. I don't know when that's going to happen, but share with people where they can go for step number two, you know, to really connect with you. Like maybe it's in the community, maybe it's just going on YouTube. I mean if you type in your name on YouTube, there's like a feast there. You can feast on Adam if you want. If you want more Adam, go to YouTube. But the create community.

Yeah.

So that's the most exciting thing.

Yeah. TheCreateCommunity.com is my online personal development community. Because I want. I saw this thing, I've charged a million dollars for coaching and that's a rare thing.

We're going to talk about that story in a second.

I feel like what I saw was this is like a button wrap up. So I don't want to take too much time on this. However, what I believe is in order to avoid the issues getting worse that we're seeing on this platform planet, it's very important for us to bring the highest level facilitation and bring it to everyone, make it accessible to everyone who wants it. And so the second piece of that is personal development gets to be a lifestyle choice. It's not something that you go and do for a month and then you come back to your life. It's how do you make this? This is just a part of my weekly way of living is personal development and community, consciousness, creativity, community. And so I started this online community community so that people can turn personal development into a lifestyle and have it be from the highest level facilitators and make it affordable. So that's a huge passion of mine. My podcast, the Deep Dive with Adam Roa. For anyone who's resonated with what I talk about, my dives into that realm are done on my podcast. And then you can find find all my socials, you know, just Adam Row, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and then my non profit surrenderedartist.org wow, man.

Thank you for sharing space in this home. You're the first guest. We have the new studio.