Addiction Mindset: Don't Be A Slave to Dopamine (How To Escape)
A long-form podcast-style conversation (Josh Trent hosting Ronnie Landis) exploring addiction from neurobiological, psychological and spiritual angles. Key claims: dopamine drives motivation/anticipation (not pleasure), accessibility×dopamine-release predicts addictiveness, many modern addictions reflect cultural overstimulation and spiritual disconnection (the "God-shaped hole"). Pornography is framed as particularly harmful ("equal-opportunity toxin"); recovery combines nervous-system regulation (dopamine reset, lifestyle, supplements, hormesis practices), psycho-spiritual work (forgiveness, addressing trauma/wounded ego), and relational/accountability repair. Practical interventions discussed include semen retention, breathwork, cold/heat exposure, exercise, and a multi-week program (Pornography Recovery Roadmap).
Chapters
The probability of something becoming addictive is how much dopamine it produces and how easily accessible it is to you in any given moment.
Sounds like Instagram.
Exactly. Dopamine is produced in anticipation for a future event. I don't get dopamine from the pornography itself. I get dopamine from the anticipation of a particular experience that's posed in the future. But once I have the experience, that dopamine baseline goes down. Kind of like you do the drug or you do the thing. You get that little bit of a hit upon moment of arrival, but then the more you do it, the less of the pleasure that you get. And then you need to do more of it to keep the dopamine baseline steady. When we understand that dopamine is responsible for the motivational neuro networks of the brain, how motivation functions, what we're motivated by, and why we're motivated by it, chemically speaking, we can start to retrain that pattern.
My brother, thank you for being here. We're finally getting it done.
Finally we're here.
The podcast.
Yes.
We've got some history. Yeah, we do. And I. 2016, we lived together when it was like this really special time in both of our lives. We were both going through, I guess you could say, one. One phase of the dark night of the soul. And it's just been such a pleasure, man, to see your growth. And the new book, the Addiction Free Lifestyle, which. Thank you, man. You put me on the back. That's really cool. I'm going to talk about the impact of this book on my life, and we're going to go deep into all things addiction. But let's start right here as we jump into this world of like, understanding exactly what addiction is beyond just the definition. There's a esoteric and really a quantum meaning to this entire phrase, addiction. You know, Gabor, mate Kay talks about addiction as being the opposite of connection, either with myself or others. But it's so curious to me why so many people are addicted to things and people and relationships and drugs and just, you name it, like addiction. I think right now maybe you can quote some of the research that was from the book, but I don't know a time in human history where we have been more inside of an onslaught of addiction. And I wonder before we even start to define it, before we dive in, I wonder, just from top of consciousness, top of heart for you today, 2023.
Yeah.
Why do you feel the existential threat or the existential stress of the addiction complex is so high? Like, what is it about the Time we're in right now where addiction is pretty much on the top of the tongue for most media outlets across the world. What's up with that?
Wow. Yeah, let's dive right into it.
Let's go.
I mean, you're so right.
There.
There's an esoteric interpretation, there's a neurobiological interpretation, there's a psych, emotional, spiritual, metaphysical interpretation of addiction. And all those things deserve their own conversation. And that's what I attempted to do in the book, is to integrate these different. These different meanings of addiction, because addiction is not one thing. But if we were going to just start from the basics, I do like what Gabor Mate says about chasing pleasure to avoid pain, or I don't know if it's Dr. Ann Lemke or Dr. Gabor mate. One of them talks particularly about that. And there's actually. In the brain, there is a pain, pleasure seesaw. So when we chase pleasure to avoid pain, or we chase comfort to avoid discomfort, tension, friction, stress of all kinds, essentially, we're setting ourselves up for a cognitive, psychological and emotional and also spiritual imbalance. And so to answer your question, I think that's what we've done culturally, unconsciously, without actually recognizing the downstream effects, the gradual effects that are only now starting to manifest themselves as the symptoms of an addicted society. Right. And that's. That's, you know, we can. We can obviously go deeper into that. We're dealing with a spiritual crisis right now. If you look at all the different health issues. And I have for the last 12, 13, 14 years as a professional nutritionist and holistic health practitioner and really a spiritual therapist in a lot of ways. A lot of the work that I do, aside from the. The addressing the physical body, is addressing the spiritual and metaphysical root causes of things. We're dealing with an existential and spiritual crisis of meaning. And that's where. That's where that conversation starts.
We were joking before we hit record, and we were talking about the fucking cosmic joke. Yeah, we're in.
Yeah.
And there's a meme that we'll put on screen right now which kind of is the perfect place. Not kind of. It totally is the perfect place for everything you just said and probably everything we're going to dive into in this pod. And there's a man on a train and there's another man on a train, and they're both going the same direction, and one's looking at a cliff and saying, there's no meaning to life. I don't know if you've seen this meme before, I think so. And on the other side, the guy is turning his head. The power of choice. Turning his head and looking at all the greenery and the sunshine. I think that's really it. The cosmic joke is that you have to be, have, you have to have the spiritual courage.
Yes.
In order to accept that it is a cosmic joke. And I think so many people are addicted to society's trappings and addicted to the Matrix, the machine, whatever you want to call it. You talk about this in the book quite a bit. Breaking free from the Matrix. Yes. In order for us to break free from the Matrix, we first have to have the courage to accept that the power of choice is ours.
Yes.
And I got a chill on my arm just saying that because it's exciting, it's liberating. And it's also very frightening for people once they start to essentially red pill themselves and remove themselves from the place where they are disempowered, where they have no choice and where the agency doesn't exist. In other words, it's the guy looking at the cliff saying there's no meaning to life. Or it's the guy in the same train looking out the window saying, wow, there's no meaning to life. Let me just express myself. So let's start there before we even get into the definition of addiction.
So Charles Dickens wrote that great book the Tale of Two Cities and that, that's a classic in American literature.
Yeah.
And when you open up the book, it says there is the worst of times and the best of times all at the same time. And that's kind of a philosophical underpinning of the times that we live in and probably the times that we've always lived in, certainly in the advent of the industrial civilization, but certainly right now it's the best of times, it's also the worst of times happening all at the same time. And it's a, it's a choice. And what you just said is, is really so important. Agency, autonomy, sovereignty, the liberation of the Matrix within our own mind. That that essentially is the antidote to quote unquote, addiction. Because an addiction is essentially, it's a form of, I don't know if I want to call it a form of slavery. But, but, but there is that, that sense and certainly can feel like that, that we are enslaved to a compulsive pattern or repetitive cycle in our life. And there's an external coping mechanism that we've chosen to numb, sedate or medicate the God shaped hole within our soul that, that's my loose interpretation or my definition of what an addiction actually is, spiritually speaking. Right. We'll get into all the other stuff that that's going on with the brain and the body and all that. But I think that's a great place to set up the conversation.
Think about the way that people tried to deny that we're a human being, but a spirit that inhabits it.
Yeah.
And the way that people fight against that. And I probably fought against that for a long time, man, when I was a personal trainer and maybe even your years in martial arts. At some point in our lives, we essentially throw up all these lies that we've believed is truth. And the main lie that I think most of us believe, and I definitely believed, is that the body and the mind, or spirituality and life path, they're totally separate. I went to the corporate America path and committed spiritual suicide. Talk about an addiction. And in that place, I really had to reconcile within myself. Am I going to go the path of disconnection, which, by the way, was fueled by my own addiction.
Yeah.
Or am I going to go the path of opening my heart to the possibility of my dream being real? I mean, it makes me emotional just talking about, like, we're here, man. We, you know, this is a really special moment. Like, we used to live together. We were roommates almost 10 years ago now. Your business, multiple six figures, helping people across the world. Mine too. And, like, it's so exciting to see what happens when you have the courage. And it's not guaranteed. It's not like things are always going to work out for everyone. But. But let's juxtapose what you just said about the spiritual quotient.
Yeah.
If we're in this, I guess you could say existential, collective spiritual malady, where we've forgotten who we are, we've outsourced our power. We've gotten rid of the agency of choice. And there's probably so many ancient and contemporary masters that you and I could quote and that you actually talk about in the book. I'm going to read one later. What do you think? For people that have never even explored what addiction truly is, we could go definition or we could go definition as it applies to the spiritual malady that we're experiencing. How would you define in a modern world, in modernity, what addiction truly is? Because it might be different than how science thought about addiction in the past.
Okay. There's two things that come up for me. I downloaded and it and just kind of came to me in the shower last night. And I thought I'd write it down just because this question I knew was going to come up. So my personal definition from Source is an addiction is a compulsive habit or repetitive pattern that has become such because we have developed a maladaptive relationship with an external coping mechanism as a way to numb, sedate or medicate the God shaped hole inside of our soul. So that's kind of just refining what I said earlier. That's my personal definition for personal experience and also anecdotal and observational. And then Gabor Mate has an amazing quote as well, which is addiction is not your problem, it's your best attempt to solve your problem. So this is where we take the shame and the judgment and the guilt and the phobia and the fear and the emotional glue that sticks us to these external coping mechanisms. That the psychological stickiness that we feel from the shame of repeating a pattern that we know does not serve us, but we don't know why we keep doing it, doing it, or we just keep doing it because we're neuroplastically dopaminergically stuck to it because of the pain, pleasure cycle. And we don't have a better coping strategy to deal with the sympathetic overload, the stress, the distress, the trauma, the things going on inside of us that society certainly doesn't have a better solution for or in a more adaptive solution. So we've developed maladaptive coping strategies to, to deal with our own humanness. And so that, that right there helps to start to autoregulate the, the, the sensations of distress that we feel within ourself. And that's what we have to address. That's the actual problem, the spiritual Crisis. Or again, Dr. Gabor Mate, I'm going to quote him again, his interpretation of trauma is that it's not something that happened to you. It's not the story that you have, it's the impact that the experience created within you. It's the internal disconnect that you feel within yourself that is the actual trauma in the story. The narrative, the monologue that we have about it is actually a distraction. It's getting in the way. And that's, that's what we're trying to cope with a lot of times is the story. Yeah, so we do talk therapy and you know, psychiatric processes medicate it. We try to medicate it and numb it or explain it away, analyze it, but that's actually a scapegoat. It's covering up the real issue, which is that I feel disconnected. I don't feel connected, which is what you brought up in the beginning. So there's a disconnection that I feel so existentially. There's, there's something inside of me that, that's needing connection, it's needing support, it's needing coping. But it's not come going to come from these external temporal therapies or modalities or substances that can help to medicate the symptom but don't deal with the actual problem.
It was like maybe they get us close to it, but there's no like Willy Wonka golden ticket that's going to be the ultimate savior of our soul. I want to ask you, you said earlier a God sized hole, which like that hit me for some reason, like I, it actually, it brings up love for me and it also equally brings up grief and sadness because I've dealt with that in my life and I think from a high level, this, this malady, this existential crisis you speak about that we're in. I really feel like it comes down to exactly the two people on the train, this agency of choice. Like how would you explain that God size hole? What is that?
It's interesting, you know, my relationship and my connection with God, capital G O D, not the universe, not the holographic, you know, virtual reality simulation that we may or may not be in, but actually God like, like the being or the, the sentient innate intelligence, whatever that is. What's, what's interesting is like the more it's like the sun, the closer you get to it, the harder it is to encapsulate or touch it. Almost like it, almost like is it's unnameable, untouchable, but you know, it's there and the closer you get to it, it becomes omnipresent. You realize that this actually is all there is all there was the alpha and the mega and it exists within us. And that's the point, right? And so the God shaped hole, I actually got that term from Richard Rudd, the founder of the Gene Keys, who wrote the foreword for my book. And so in the foreword that's actually what he says about reading the book and I didn't. So that actually helped me connect deeper to the deeper meaning of the book as, as I was writing it and as I gave it to him and he wrote the manuscript, read the manuscript and wrote in the foreword for it, he actually said that, you know, essentially what Ronnie is doing is that he's trying to help us connect to the God shaped hole within our soul. And right when I read that, I Was like, wow, okay, it connected for me. I got it. And so I've been using that term ever since I heard it. And, you know, I think it really just comes down to regardless of what your religious background is, your spiritual background, your sociopolitical background, your whatever, your human normative, you know, definition is of being human, how you associate that in our world and spirituality, ultimately we're all trying to feel that connection to the one, to the All. There is that that thing that we all know, that we all sense, that we all hope is true. Even if maybe we've developed a sort of atheistic, nihilistic, hyper materialistic, scientismic worldview and we got caught into the theater, the theatrical production of, you know, everything going on in our world, even if we've gotten caught in that, and we believe that there is no innate intelligence, deep down, existentially, most people hope there is. They may not want to admit it because it might be too painful to do so. Just like admitting that, hey, I actually have a problem that the things in my life that are happening, there's a common denominator. The relationships that have not worked out in my life, there's a common denominator. My health challenges, there's a common denominator. And all points back to the man or the woman in the mirror. And that's. That's it.
Listen, if you're trying to tell us that it might be our objective reality that is causing our addiction, that would mean that we would actually have to take full, radical ownership of our lives, which goes against, paradoxically, the cogs in the machine. Because the cogs in the machine, whether it's the pharmacist medical insurance triad that feeds itself on the tears and unprocessed wounds and unexplored darkness of human beings that go to that system seeking relief. Which is maybe why earlier I felt both the grief and the happiness of the cosmic joke. Yeah, I wonder how you'd feel and how you explain this. If all is God and God is experiencing God's self in unlimited ways, and time does not apply to God, and God is not some bearded dude in the sky, right? And God is this zero point field that we are from, we are literally made from God, then some people might say, well, then you and I are Gods. We're God. But I don't. I don't agree with that. I wonder how you feel about that.
No, I'm glad you brought that up and I'm right there with you.
There's a lot of wounding around the word God.
There's a lot of wounding and there's also a lot of hyperbolic, almost ego projection. So it's kind of both. It's right, you have the religious wounding and then you have like the pseudo spiritual self exalted or ego exalted sensation or interpretation of oh, I am a God, like I am a God versus I am a child of God, lowercase G, capital case G. My awakening and my truth and my humility has shown me that my personal relationship to quote unquote God is that the father, the mother, God, goddess, divine right, I am, I am a child of God, but I am not God. And thank God for that because if I was God, we'd all be in trouble. But the God spark does live in me. Because if I am a child of God, if you are a child of God, that must mean that God lives within me epigenetically, like psycho, spiritually, physiologically, like, like all of it. Right? So then it brings up this interesting, kind of like this interesting razor's edge, which is that I'm not God. So it keeps my ego in check. That's always the thing. Because I operate in a human avatar, I have a human ego and it's impressionable and neuroplastic and all the things. And I have more access to information than, than any human previous to me in human history. So I can get blown out and, and exaggerated on all kinds of trips, non, non, psychedelically induced and also otherwise, which is a whole other thing. So I have to keep myself in check. I have to know my limitations. But I also have to be honest about the fact that a lot of the limitations that have been imposed upon me or that have been self inflicted are also based on a wounded ego too, if that makes sense. So it's like, like Walter Russell, who's a great mystic, he had a beautiful quote that I think sums up what I'm trying to say, which is that mediocrity is self inflicted. Genius is self bestowed. It's not, it's not something or someone outside of me that is self inflict, that is inflicting or bestowing the, you know, genius or mediocrity upon myself. It's something that I'm doing within myself. It's a choice that I'm making based on my own autonomy and agency and how I choose to interpret my experience, how I choose to navigate my human experience, and how I choose to direct my life force energy from thought, emotion, word indeed. And direct that energy into action, that's all on me. And that's the greatest liberation and it's also the greatest facing of one's fears.
Oh, this is a big one. Because in the book you said freedom from addiction is freedom to be your most authentic self. And authentic self doesn't mean that you're perfect. It doesn't mean that you have it all figured out. Authentic self could mean you stumble around for a while, but at least you're on the path, you're authentically opening your heart to, stumbling around and finding that divine spark and really writing that divine spark to create whatever it is you're brought here to create. Then why, why do people turn their cheek to that truth where they actually, and I believe maybe this is part of the roots of addiction, they turn their cheek to having the agency, having the power, and really believing in oneself. Because of what you talked about with the wounded ego. I know for myself for sure, the wounded ego definitely drove my pornography addiction, definitely drove unconscious sex with women that I've done forgiveness process around. Right. But at the beginning of it all it came from me in school, being bullied, being overweight, being made fun of, not feeling enough, not feeling included.
Right.
All these things have a residue.
Right, Right. They have a residue.
So. So I wonder how you would explain that. And maybe you do talk about this in the book the wounded ego and tracing down to the bottom of the wounds how to do that without actually getting stuck down there. I think that's why so many people don't go there. And I think that's why traditional talk therapy, you could do it on a merry go round for fucking 30 years.
Absolutely.
And never get any progress at all.
Absolutely.
What do you think about that?
What comes to me just practically, it's the avoidance of self responsibility. Right. That's a bit of a rabbit hole in terms of just unpacking the parental programming, the religious programming, the wounded ego, as you said, or the, the wounded inner child that never got caught up with the adult self. So let's talk about something around trauma real quick because trauma lives within a timeless space outside of time and space in our three dimensional kind of orientation around time. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that you can have a traumatic imprint that happened to you when you were a young child or in your formative. Remember your, your brain doesn't neuroplastically fully form until around the age of 26 to 28, typically. So you don't fully become an adult neuro cognitively until you're around like 28 years old. Right. And we'll talk about that. Again, when we talk about pornography and all the, the how the dopaminergic system wires and rewires and shapes the brain and causes us to seek immediate gratification versus long term fulfillment and all these kind of things. Now when someone has an impact, a psycho emotional impact when they're young, their brain doesn't have the ability to properly process it. So this could have been seeing your mom and your father get into an argument. It could have been your father or your mother snapping on you or saying something, a particular way, the intention, the circumstances around it. That's not really fully processed or understood. It's just the impact of the experience is what it is. It's different for different, you know, different people, for, you know, all kinds of different reasons. A lot of that's unknown. So when that happens, it never gets fully processed or resolved. There's like an imprintation that's left over. And if that doesn't get resolved or it gets reinforced or re triggered through different circumstances in somebody's formative years into adulthood and they can physically develop into adult, but emotionally there's a piece of them that's stuck in time, it's stuck in the past. I think we can all relate to that, especially if we've done a lot of childhood trauma work. We've gone back into the recesses of our subconscious or gone back into our childhood or constellation work or whatever, plant medicine, ceremonies. There's so much stored there, it's unbelievable. But that's, that's a really important piece because we might find ourselves medicating ourself doing things that are objectively pleasurable, even though maybe they're not really good for us long term, and develop like a compulsive pattern to repeat that, that, you know, person, place, thing, substance, drug, food, whatever it is, quote, unquote, addiction. And that can also be a way to sedate what has become a crystallized like emotional impact. And so the idea is we want to unhook that or, or relieve that aspect of self. We'll just call that the inner child for, you know, easy way to think about it. And when you, when you relieve that or, or pop that open, all of a sudden the human being can. All pieces of the human being can come online, can, can up, update if you will.
Crystallize is interesting because I think of like in massage therapy and I think you, from what I remember, you do have a massage therapy.
I do, yeah.
Yeah. So with the striations and literally the, the knots that get formed in our sarcomere.
Yes, Right.
The actin and myosin hooks tear, and that's where the lactic acid comes from. And. And then, you know, without the proper blood flow and actual manual work, things crystallized, things get stuck. So I flashback to what you said because I really want everybody to feel this. Like you just dropped probably one of the most important things we'll talk about on this show. And that is when something gets imprinted. When something, as you said, crystallizes without some kind of movement applied to the injury, whether it's physical or psychic, without some kind of movement applied to the injury, the injury will stay there. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can be only be transmuted.
Yeah.
So literally the energy sticks there until someone comes along. Or really, maybe I'm curious how you feel maybe just before somebody gets so tired of the weight of it that they are open to having the courage summoned inside of their soul so they can actually receive the energy movement that they deserve. What do you think about that?
Everybody's journey is different. Everybody has a different karma. Everybody has a different. Yeah. Set of circumstances and lessons and initiations that they're faced with. One of the things that came up for me, I don't really get to talk about this too much, but it's related to this idea. So, you know, in like cardiovascular disease, there's atherosclerosis, where the arteries, they get blocked up and things like stroke or different, like heart attack and cardiovascular maladies can form. By the way, heart disease and cardiovascular disease is the number one cause for death worldwide, especially amongst men. And there's different reasons for that. But I spent a lot of time studying various forms of disease and disease reversal and. And you know, heart attacks is just kind of one of my fascinations. And in studying that, I also. In calcification. So the, the striations and the, the, the. The knots that form, we also become calcified. So physically we become calcified. The, the spinal column, our neck, our nervous system, our. Our musculature. There's calcium deposits that form and create literal crystals all throughout the body. And that's one of the main issues with longevity, is calcification. Now, the reason I bring that up is because there's atherosclerosis, which can block the blood to the brain and create a stroke. But there's also psychosclerosis, which maybe these things are related. But psychosclerosis is essentially the hardening of our psyche, of our personality, of the ego identity construct. And so when this happens, we become very rigid, we become very Fixed. We become very immovable. Like, oh, no, this is my position. This is where I'm at. You know, this is. This is how it is. Become very stuck and very calcified, and we become like a golem or a gargoyle within ourself. And so you can see, like, there's the. The psycho spiritual kind of metaphysical interpretation of that. But then there's a symptom that manifests itself physically, which, by the way, talking about addiction influences the choices that we make in our proclivity towards certain choices, certain foods, certain substances, certain sexual partners, certain media consumption. So. So the things externally that we gravitate towards aren't random. There's actually a one for one energetic vibrational frequency connection to how we feel within ourself and the things that we're choosing and the effect that the things we choose has on our. Our body, our consciousness.
Wow, that was one of my favorite little blurbs I've ever heard on the show, because I've never heard that term. This is why I love podcasting. Like, especially learning from a friend who's been so deep decades in this work, like the. The atherosclerosis that. That causes our brain to literally have a seizure and, and take our life away. We perish. Why wouldn't it make perfect sense? And of course, it does that on a psychic level. We could have psychosclerosis, where then my choices, unconsciously, I'd be like, reaching for the things that just back up my position of hardness.
Right?
Which really is sad. Like, wow, everyone take a stock. Take a breath of your pantry right now and just ask yourself, where am I so firm in my position? With my woman, with my man, with my kids, with my job, with myself, with God? Where do I have the most resentment, anger and stiffness, stuckness in my emotional body, in my psychic self, that I literally could be hurting myself. And that in its. In its own way, is an addiction. And I wonder how that plugs into the existential question of addiction. Like, that's just one fragment. I feel like addiction could be a huge wheel.
It's a huge wheel.
Huge wheel.
I have to do this for myself. One of the reasons I. I write books the way I do, like, this is my eighth book. I'm working on my ninth book, which is the dopamine solution. So it's a book all on dopamine, which I'm really stoked about. The reason I have to write these books is for me, fundamentally, first I have to organize all this information, these perspectives, and these kind of frameworks that are. That are emerging through my own, like, obsessive fascination of these things. And then finally, it's put together in some sort of map. And so when you said, like, addiction's a wheel, it absolutely is. And it's starting to really unveil itself to me. I think it's my particular dharma. Also. It's been my karma to go through the addiction wheel. Because as I wrote the book, as I'm talking to you, this is not something that's foreign to me, you know, just because I'm. I'm a health practitioner and nutritionist, and. And, you know, have been doing this for so many years. And maybe I'm perceived a certain way or put on a certain pedestal or taken off a pedestal because of my humanness. And I've gone through the whole journey of dealing with addiction. You know, I've seen my mom recently. I just saw my mom go through her addictions to see that fully symbolized and manifested in front of me. Not just her as an individual, but her as a karmic reflection of my own process, my own karma becoming my dharma through healing. And I talk about this in the book. There's an entire chapter on karma and Dharma, and this is a huge thing. When I look at addiction, spiritually and philosophically are. When, you know, in. In. In Eastern mysticism, Karma is. A lot of times, I think it's very kind of cartoonishly interpreted or very simply interpreted, as in, like, karma is the. Is the response of things that we did either in a past life or this life. And now we're just. We're paying the debt of our actions through our karma. I don't think that's. That's the true meaning. Yeah, that's a part of it. It's like the wheel of samsara, right? The wheel of suffering. Yes, Certainly we give over to that wheel of suffering by the repetitive cause and effect cycle that we're on. But the way that I interpreted it is that karma is our addiction. In other words, the. The effect that we. We have from the addiction, like the smoking or the drinking or the, you know, the sexing or the pornography. The effect of that is just basic cause and effect. The actual karma, the suffering, is the wheel of addiction. It's actually the addiction cycle we're in is the karma, if that makes sense.
Can you expand that a little bit more? Because if you look at cause and effect, like, if I move this book, then it displaces the energy of that book over here, because I need a little more clarity. And maybe everyone else does too. Like so.
So in other words, the suffering is the living of the addiction. The fact that I'm addicted is the karma. The fact that I'm addicted is the wheel of Samsara itself. The, the, the effect of. The long term effect of that is, is just basic cause and effect. Like, yeah, that, that's, you know, you could wrap that in there. But to me, that's not actually the suffering. That's just the effect of it. The suffering is the addiction cycle itself. And that's what needs to be faced, embraced, and erased in the healing process from karma becoming Dharma. And Karma is the inauthentic self. So the addiction is the reinforcement or the compensation of living an inauthentic life. So when I said that an addiction is a compensatory strategy to numb, sedate, tranquilize, or medicate a deep disconnection. The disconnection is because I'm living an inauthentic life. I'm not authentically myself. I'm not fully expressed. Therefore, I need something outside of myself to medicate that internal disconnection. Because I'm living on the wheel of Samsara, I. E. I'm living a karmic existence. And the healing antidote to that is to become fully expressed and liberated, which is the Dharma. The Dharma is the true self. It's, it's, it's the path of purpose. And it's not something we do, it's something we become.
The true ego death of which you speak has to take place. There's no way that I could ever break an addiction or, you know the title of your book, have a life that is free from addiction unless I free myself. Yeah, but if I take the chains off, then I have to actually realize that I was the one that put the chains on. And this might be waxing poetic to some people, but the shit's real. And the more that I'm on this merry go round, which is another analogy, and I feel like years ago, many years ago, we had. I'm actually having a really cool time machine moment with you. Many years ago, I remember you and I were sitting, eating lunch or hanging out, and we were both acknowledging the roller coaster of stress in our lives. Why we unconsciously or consciously choose these partners or experiences or stimuli or, you know, fill in the blank that draws this lack of breath, presence of breath, lack of breath, presence of breath. Like a seesaw, like an emotional roller coaster that just takes us everywhere. And I, and I think the meaning that I created in my own life And I wonder how you feel, and I wonder how your students feel across the world as to why they're in that loop, no matter how long it takes to get out of it. Like, we're in the loop. We get a kink, we get a reward. We get something from being in that space. And for me, it was really like throwing up in ayahuasca ceremonies. Throwing up, actually doing some disassociation work, watching a screen of pornography, having my own voice in my ears. Yes. You know, shout out to David's episode. That was really powerful. Feeling the nausea, feeling the purging effect of me being attached to, really, the cowardice with compassion, the cowardice of my lower self and not chasing my dreams, not stepping into my full potential as, you know, a father and a creator. And the meaning that I made from it was, well, this is the only way I could make myself feel alive. The only way I could make myself feel alive when I was in the throes of my addiction was to just feel that much like people that jump out of an airplane or these thrill seekers that go chase huge waves and stuff. And there's a time and a place for that. But how did you see that play out in your own addiction and maybe in. Even in the addiction of your students across the world? That breath gone, breath received, that. That vicious cycle that, in a way, my little boy inside just needed to feel like life had meaning. And the only way that he could create that meaning was to feel alive in any way he could.
It's a really important question, and there's a lot of. There's a lot of, like, constellation of ideas. What comes to me very simply is that I was way too overstimulated. And this is really the. This simplicity that I'm distilling in a lot of my messages around this idea of a dopamine reset and, you know, getting off stimulants and regulating and optimizing your autonomic nervous system and emotional intelligence and all these different things and these things that we all know. Everyone listening to your podcast knows this and so much more.
Knowing and doing are separate.
That's right. We're drowning in information, but we're starving for wisdom. And the wisdom is the integrative, embodied translation of the knowing into action and physically embodying that in our. In our nervous system. And, you know, that that's so much of what I feel like is the remedy and antidote for so much of this. But I realized I was just overstimulated, and because of that, I was chasing A lot of different, I guess, pseudo antidotes or trying to figure out the problems to my. My maladies and doing a lot of plant medicine ceremonies, which is its own thing. And I. That's a part of my, like, mystic shamanic path, or it certainly was. And it's something that I revere, and that's a whole other subject in itself. But I can also see where the feeling of being lost and not. And feeling displaced within myself, and then the manifestation of my external location, whether it been in different living situations. I mean, you've seen me hop around, you know, leaving the apartment and the situation that I left from and when we were living together, leaving Encinitas and getting out of a. A relationship that went sour and then kind of my dysregulated, sympathetically overloaded, emotionally malnourished nervous system and then hopping on a plane, ditching everything, hopping on a plane to go to Hawaii to reprieve and rebalance, to get connected back to the mana of life, the mana that I felt was missing within my own soul, and get connected back to the land and, and all that I've. I've gone on this. This particular track for. For many years. Well, let me just backtrack. So again, overstimulation. Let me just get back to that for a second. We live in a culture that values stimulation, overwhelm, stress. Like, these are. These are things that are both, like, they're. They're symptoms of. Of a deep problem that we all are starting to acknowledge, but nobody really knows what to do about it because we're also addicted to the compounds, the substances, the patterns that. That produce the symptoms themselves. And it's very. For me, I noticed it was very hard for me just to pull back. I knew I needed to. I knew I needed to step away from relationships and from coffee and caffeine and from my laptop and my computer and take a week to just completely reset. And I promoted this and preached this, but for some reason I couldn't get myself to do it because, oh, here's what it is. This is where I'm doing, you know, this rabbit hole I'm going into is trying to get to. Because deep down, I didn't believe in myself. The reason I didn't believe in myself is not because I didn't actually believe in myself. It's because I had been repeating incongruent patterns of operating my life that were out of alignment and out of integrity with who I knew I really was. And the message that I. That I preach, certainly the message that I'm preaching now, which is why the addiction message is so paramount for me is because I had to go through that cycle and I had to uncover what was really going on for me. Why was I so heavily caffeinated when I don't even promote coffee? I'm not even a fan of coffee. You know, what was it? Well, I think what ended well, truthfully what happened to me was the coffee thing didn't come into the, into the game for me until I got to Encinitas. I was in Hawaii for years, went to Encinitas. I focused on building my business. I'm around a lot of people in the health culture that is very different from the health culture that I came from. It was very much more like supplements and paleo diets and kind of felt a little more pseudo, pseudo modern interpretation of something like, of a naturalistic diet. I was a vegetarian at the time, so I came from like a raw food background is much more connected to like agriculture and, and biodynamic farming. And being in Hawaii and then going back to the city and Los Angeles in San Diego, which is like hyper tech, and then being in the coaching world and then being around coaches and everyone's building their like six figure businesses, that was a little different than the world and the mentality that I came from. So I think for me, I tried to compensate for a lack of maybe I, I got into comparison syndrome. I think trying to compare myself to all these like entrepreneurs and coaches and be like, okay, well they're making all this money. I need to make all this money. And I started getting into that and I developed some weird association with coffee and work at the cafe. I start working at the cafe on my laptop and then I have my cup of coffee. Everyone else is doing it. Okay, yeah, I made the. And then bulletproof came out and the whole thing. So like, oh yeah, I'm associating coffee with productivity. But strangely enough, the more coffee I drank, the less productive I was, the less able to focus on my, my work I was, the less creative I was, the more strung out I felt, the more stressed I felt, the more displaced and disconnected within myself because my empathy circuits were being numbed and blunted and overstimulated. So then I would have to close down the laptop, go for long walks along the beach to figure out what is wrong with me, and listening to podcasts all the time, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. And I look back and I'm like, you knucklehead. You knucklehead. You're off on some esoteric quest trying to figure out what is the. The mystery of your malady. Your nervous system is hyper dysregulated. You're not. You're. You've lost touch with who you are, what you're passionate about, what your authentic message is. And by the way, I say that with deep compassion because apparently I needed to go through that in order to be able to have this conversation with you and with everyone listening.
Otherwise it wouldn't have perfectly worked out the way it did unless it was perfectly meant to happen. And that can be hard to swallow for people. People.
It's a little hard for me to swallow, and I mean, it's a little vulnerable for me to actually share that with everyone right now.
Yeah, but how much more believable is that? Because even though you have this beautiful godlike presence, you are not God. You're a child of God. Just circle back to the very beginning. Nobody. I don't care who it is, freaking Oprah or Ed Mylett or all of these people that like the media through ad spend, by the way. Not to hate, but a lot of ad spend there, the media loves. They praise these people. They pedestal these people. And I guarantee fucking to you, if you were to just go backstage or go into these people's homes and sit at their coffee table and have a conversation with them, no matter how much of a body of evidence of success that they've accumulated, they still have their stuff. They still have their shadows. I had something that happened a couple years ago during the pandemic where I just said, I made a. I made a completion circle in myself. And I said, I will never, ever, ever choose to pedestal someone ever again. Because I don't care how many followers they have or who they are. There's multi, multi millionaires that have sat in this chair. And they are just human beings like you and I. And I think we put so much pressure. There's a part of the psyche that puts so much pressure on us to compare ourselves to people that are making 7, 8, 9 figures. To compare ourselves to people that are in a beautiful, perfect relationship. To compare ourselves to fill in the blank. What do you think that is? I mean, you went so deep into the roots of the tree of addiction. I think it's beautiful, too. You have for all Y' all on YouTube, there's this incredible flower on the COVID and it's right at the pineal gland, and there's a hummingbird, and there's all this beautiful artwork on the front of the book to Talk about nature and the roots of this that actually we choose to attach to. What is it about the psychology of the mind or the subconscious mind that makes us compare ourselves to others? Because I think in a way, that could be some of the fuel for the monster of addiction, this comparison theory. What is that?
I remember when I was on Ben Greenfield's podcast, we were talking about this idea of living vicariously through, you know, like in movies, for example, and, you know, the impression, the impressionable, like I said, the neuroplasticity of the brain growing up. Think of all the movies and the mythic characters and. And all the impressions of certain archetypes or role models, whether they were really role models or not. They. They play a role and they model something within us. And a lot of us grew up in broken homes, didn't have a father figure, a mother figure, didn't have the. The prototypical archetype that would have given us the developmental kind of structure psychologically that we need as a young boy becoming a man or a young girl becoming a woman. So there's archetypally and psychologically a certain subconscious structuring. And that also has to do with our physical nervous system as well, how we engage with that growing up and how we've developed our neuromuscular psychic structure. So that. That's like a foundational kind of frame that I would put there for people to. To consider. And then. Yeah, so. So we were talking about when you're watching a movie, a lot of times people don't realize there's a sedative effect. This happens through the dopaminergic system as well. There's a sedative effect that causes us to relax and lean in and kind of open ourselves up to the journey of another, you know, individual on the. The movie screen. Right? And a lot of people end up living emotionally vicariously through the characters in the movie or their, you know, the sports figures or the music icons or whom. Whomever it is. And so the tell Live Vision is projecting a spell upon our impressionable subconscious. And what ends up happening is that we develop reference points, like data files in our subconscious mind. If you. If you can imagine, this came up for me the other day. You know, when you're. You have a video on your computer and you delete it, there's a shadow file that's created, right? It's like a catch file or something. I remember I had this happen because I was, like, doing a bunch of media editing on my computer is getting backed up, and I was Like I deleted all the files and then the guy's like, oh no. But there's like a whole list of like shadow files that never got deleted. And so the, the storage was getting stagnated. I couldn't upload any new programs onto it and it was, wasn't working right. It was, it was the. Everything was completely slowed down and stagnated. That is also what happens to our operating system and our subconscious data stream. And so we have these, these shadow files that need to be synaptically pruned so we can do that consciously through different modalities. Right? And then there also is these, these old phantom files that need to be exorcised out of the subconscious repository of all these impressions that have been made along the way. So okay, what does that have to do with why we get into comparison syndrome? I don't know exactly, but I have a sense that all these impressions that have made their way into our, our psychology, our identity structure. If we haven't developed a solid self concept, a solid identity of who we are, what we're about, our moral and value system, our moral compass. If we haven't either had that modeled or we haven't had structures to give us that, and we haven't practiced that in real time, I. E. I have an impulse, but I choose not to do it right. We literally practicing the art of, of my values in real time, my morality in real time. Not just having the concept of it, but actually practicing it to strengthen those neuro networks that all has to do with our identity and how we identify with ourself in the world outside of us. I don't know if that was a little. If that was. Is it following along with all that?
I loved everything you just said. Somebody's watching this for the third time because they wanted to go through the entire process. I love that because when you talked about the imprint and the shadow file and the phantom file, what came to mind for me was an analogy that I always make a lot. And that is, you know, our psyche when we're growing up and our nervous system and just us as a soul, we're like a rose. I remember I was at the Leucadia farmer's market once and I bought Kerry Michelle this tank top with a rose on it. Because I was like, you know, my goal is to touch the center of that rose, but I know that your goal is to be able to trust me to do so. And I bought her that because I was like, okay, I see what this is about. Like a rose takes time to open. And a rose is very gentle. So when you're talking about the Shadow files and the Phantom files, it's a clear connection in my mind as to why we might compare ourselves to others, because we do that. But we completely forget all the imprints and their fuel source that drives those people to be successful in the first place. In other words, we look at the results of their success.
Yes.
We don't know their story. We don't know their pain. We don't know their fucking Phantom and Shadow files. But we just kind of like, conveniently forget all the things that have happened that damaged us as a rose, as a soul, our nervous system, our psyche, our heart, and then take into mind, you know, the different generational ways that epigenetical expression happens. We have epigenetic emotions where trauma is transferred from five generations back. If you look at some of the research with rats, like, it's real. So now we're at this point in the conversation where I'm like, okay, there's so much momentum and so much energy that drives people to compare themselves, to forget how powerful they are, to sever their connection with spirit. All the different ways that really create almost a tidal wave, Ronnie, where eventually there has to be reprieve, there has to be relief. There has to be.
That's.
You know, you talk about this in the book. People had to have coping strategies. Yeah. What is one, two, or three of the ways that. With everything we've discussed, this buildup of stuck energy, you know, the crystallizations you mentioned and everything else, it feels to me, I can actually. I can actually. Like, it's palpable, like, from surfing, you know, I can feel this wave collectively gathering on society. And some people, it's already started to crash on. What are some of the ways that. That somebody with us can self identify with the coping strategies that they're doing rather than just look at the cause of the wave in the first place? What are some of those things that they can identify right out the gate?
Like, identify that playing out in their life?
Exactly, Exactly.
I feel like a lot of it's obvious. That's an interesting thing for me to say too, though. Right. Because that's the whole paradox of addiction is like, what's obvious doesn't seem so obvious because we're caught in the. The momentum wave of our own life. So the tobacco or the cigarettes or the hoppe or the chew, the alcohol, the psychedelics, the plant medicines, the marijuana, the cannabis, the pornography, the dating apps, the video games, the gambling, you know, the Social media, the drugified phones, all of these things, they're not necessarily good or bad. Some have a net negative. Like pornography, I would say, is completely net negative. It has no beneficial utility on the brain, the nervous system. The emotional and psychological development of a boy or a woman has nothing but negative downstream effects. That's my personal feeling and conviction. And a lot of these other things have. There's a spectrum, right? You have to pay. So I'd say you have to pay attention to the momentum that each thing has in your life. And does that momentum take you out of center? In other words, what's your relationship with the external person, place thing? Because this can happen, our relationships. Like, I know this because I. I've been in relationship boot camp, Spiritual Dojo 101, and I know through my own personal experience, as I know you do too, the most beautiful relationship with your soulmate can turn toxic. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a toxic relationship. It just means there's toxicity, there's codependency, there's a maladaptive kind of component that's developed through potential trauma or shadow surfacing, whatever it is. And. And the relationship that I currently have with that thing or that person, that relationship needs to be reset. And this is why I talk about the dopamine reset. It's not about, you know, being an abolitionist or being a. Being a empiricist in terms of like, oh, this is an addiction. This is all bad. Nothing is all bad or good. That's actually part of the problem. That's what creates the. The shame and guilt that glues us to these things. Paradoxically, the more shame and guilt that we have about the thing, the less power we have over it and the more power it has over us and creates that pressure. And that reprieve that you're talking about is like the pressure release valve. Yeah, the. The climax when you watch pornography, which that's a really interesting one too, that we definitely need to get into. And we're going to go so deep into that because that. That particular phenomenon, you know, we both know Koot Blackson. He's a. He's a dear brother of mine. Just had him back on my show. Amazing human being. He brought up this whole point about, like, the orgasm is like, it's a mini death death. And I thought to myself, I was like, let me see how far I can take that in my own mind. Let me see where I can go with that. And I realized, oh, how interesting. Yeah, it is like a mini death. But There's a deeper implication to that. It's actually something in me every time I orgasm with the wrong energy. Particularly to pornography. There's an element of shame, there's an element of guilt, and there is something that dies. But I don't think it's my ego. I think it's actually. There's something authentic within me that dies. And that's why I feel the shame and the guilt upon that climax. But there's a momentum that builds up as a precursor to that. There's a certain momentum. That's what I want people to pay attention to. Where is the momentum in your life? And the challenge is a lot of times we have to take our foot off the gas and we have to reset. Because that momentum, the more we build up that momentum, the more it has a hold of us.
Man, there's so much here. And I want to, like, slow the pace of the conversation down because, like, I so enjoy. I feel like you and I could riff for literally an entire day at the beach. We could just sit and talk about this stuff, and all of it would essentially be helping us evolve and helping consciousness evolve. Because one of the things I've always loved about you is you can just go there. A lot of people, they have a lack of vulnerability, but they're incredibly successful. And you talk about. In the first part of the book, you talk about your own journey with drugs, with sex, with porn. Like, all of these things are. I guess you could say your mess became your message.
Totally.
And I've heard that from many different people. Look at what I'm doing. I want to be well, I want to be wise. That's why we're here with wellness and wisdom. Because that is my true spark. That's my spark calling me there. And one of the things since we're on this topic of pornography that we absolutely have to address is one of the quotes that's in the book. And it is profound. And it's by Dr. Mary Ann Layden.
Yeah.
And she said, pornography, by its very nature, is an equal opportunity toxin. It damages the viewer, the performer, and the spouses and the children of the viewers and the performers. It is toxic miseducation about sex and relationships. It is more toxic the more you consume. And I love that because you went into the practical nuts and bolts for people that are suffering with pornography. I'm also super stoked, like, so excited about your program to help men and women that are actually struggling with porn. I think if I had that, I could have suffered less. Honestly, Me too. It took me about 15 years to break the cycle. And 15 years is a long time. I wonder if you could share why this quote. There's probably literally thousands of quotes that you could have picked when we address this topic of pornography. And I would say that even though the data shows that it's like 50 to 70% of men and, you know, 30 to 40% of women, those are all numbers of pontification.
Yes.
I actually, if you took a real stock, an emotional stock, because remember, people reporting on those data sets, those are only the people that are courageous enough to report that they actually watch it.
Yes.
But I bet you if you went into the households of every home in America and you looked at even breaks my heart. Children 4 and 5 years old, teenagers just budding into sexuality, the poison of the snake that comes in through this medium of pornography that has been commoditized and monetized. I definitely fell prey to it when I was 13 years old. Yep.
You know, it was a lot different than it is now.
It was a lot different, but it still had the same sinister Snake energy, 100%. And, and I'm not here to demonize erotic art. I think that erotic art can be very powerful. But key point, I said erotic art.
I was going to say not pornography. Yeah, those two different things.
There's a lot of people, I promise I'll round this out here. There's a great, there's a lot of people that they, they're afraid to actually have a decisiveness and a bifurcation. They don't want to, you know, demonize pornography. I'm actually here to fucking demonize pornography. Like I've been through it myself. I don't see it having any positive ramifications at all. And if you look at the data or just check within your own heart and soul on planet Earth, there's nothing good that comes from people watching a screen climaxing. Fake energy, fake connection, fake living. And then that turns into a bunch of further disconnected souls that grow up to wreak havoc in their relationships, to bear children from a place of ungrounded sexuality. It honestly wasn't until I came to God in multiple ceremonies where I got to get my knees bloody on the ground and ask for forgiveness and go through a three year, four year, three to four year forgiveness process where I took stock of everything that I had seen, all the micro traumas from the pornography. So I am here, I am here to say that pornography is demonic. It truly is. And anybody that tries to, like ride the coattails of being in the middle on pornography. You're just fooling yourself or you're just ignorant or you're just ignorant. So why that quote, this bridge between, you know, what's good and what's bad? And she talked about being an equal opportunity toxin. Like what was it about that quote in the book that, that really made you select?
I mean, it really just summed it up. It really was the perfect leading quote for the rest of that chapter and really is a direct reflection of my conviction in my research and my knowing. Just like what you just said. I'm glad you said it because I wasn't sure if I was going to use that terminology just because of the can of worms that it would inevitably open up in this conversation.
Let's open them.
I have no problem with, with. It's just like time and energy. It's like there's so much to get into. But I do too believe that it has a demonic energy. I know that I can say that on your show because I've listened to different interviews you've done with like Paul Levi, who I've studied his work since 2000. Before you and I met, I was reading that book Waitiko, and there is a chapter in the book where I, I quote him and I, I talk about this idea of Watiko. And so when you, if you understand the idea of Watiko, then I want everybody to look into a spiritual term called loosh. Loose is essentially the negative energy or the hyper obsessive energy or the hyper aroused energy that has like, it has an addictive component. Let's use, let's, you know, this basically is an addictive energy. Whether that's from drugs, that's from sex, that's from negative thought forms, trauma looping, emotionally getting into arguments and trigger rages with our partners or people in our lives. You know, that sensation that you feel, that hyper sympathetic arousal that can be from pleasure or lust, or that can be from anger and agitation. It's all just different spectrums of the same kind of arousal stimulation. That's basically spiritually speaking, that is a form of what's called loosh. And that loosh energy is said to be hijacked and said to be fuel for Watiko. Like entities that exist in our, you know, our reality beyond the veil. So that's spiritual maturity, that's spiritual sobriety, and that's really important. Without going too deep into that, I just want to make that like, I just want to validate what you said because I needed to hear it that way to understand the neurobiology of how Dopamine works and neuroplasticity and neurogenesis and okay, synaptic pruning and all these different, like, neurological and, and biological factors. That should be enough. When you study the, the effects that pornography has on your brain. Yeah, that should be enough. But for some reason it wasn't. That's how strong, that's how much of a stronghold this particular spell has through these digital screens, which causes us to become disembodied in our brainwave states. Get hyper spell cast, they get, they get like, really hijacked and we become disembodied. Our sense of morality and integrity kind of like, becomes very slippery. And the best of us as men. Yeah, I'm not calling any of us out. I'm calling us all forward right now. The best of us as men are all susceptible, and we've likely all been through this.
It's not an excuse either.
No, it's not.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but, like, I have to say this. The, the, the way that we operate as men, we are primarily visually dominant.
Yes.
And so, and I remember I was talking with someone on the podcast here, and I'm, I'm. Forgive me, I forgot their name. But there was one source of data input for men that was shown in research that was fundamentally different for women. I think it was something about women that multitask. They're done.
Their corpus callosum is bigger and they can.
Yeah, okay, so, you know, so maybe you can jam on this. But, but, but the take home was men are more susceptible to visual stimuli like, you know, breasts or looking at a girl's butt or things like this. This is why there's so much rise of kind of soft core porn on Instagram. I don't know if y' all have looked at your phone in a while. Looks like it looks like a fricking porn site. It's just pretty ridiculous. So I'm always on there and I'm like, hide, hide, hide. So there's this aspect of us being visually dominant as men, and there's this aspect for women being more susceptible to, I guess you could say the clutches of multitasking or paying attention to many things at one time.
What's their brain?
What's the science behind that? When we look at pornography? I know it's mostly men. I mean, the research shows that it's mostly men that are hooked. But women get hooked too.
Women do, yeah. Surprisingly well. Just on that, like, women have a bigger corpus callosum, which is the, the mediator bridge. So it's actually the physical bridge, bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. So there's just more data streaming going between the two. So they have more of a nonlinear aspect. And that's kind of part of the feminine, right? The feminine is like the, the nonlinear energy that requires quote unquote structure. And so men have a smaller corpus colossum, we're more linear and we get more focused on one thing at a time. So the ability for a man to multitask is a myth. It's, it's not really, it's not really real. At least I know in my experience. I, I try to multitask. I'm not effective at all. I need to focus on one thing at a time and get one task in laid out after the next. As far as pornography, I can't say for sure what I can say though, which is equally if not more interesting what is happening to the brain and psychologically when we watch pornography, when we watch a movie, when we watch social media, but mostly when we watch pornography because it induces a hyper normal stimulation of dopamine. And dopamine is like a tracking system in the brain.
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It's really fascinating. Now the brain doesn't have context between what's real and what's not real. And this is something we all need to come to terms with in our techno centric, digital, drugified, dopaminergically driven world. When we're looking through a computer screen, there is a barrier of entry, there is a disconnection. And so when we're watching pornography, a number of things happen. First, the brain doesn't actually register like the reality of a situation. Like, oh yeah, I'm just watching a movie, I'm just watching something on my screen, right? It registers it in chemical signals and because of the sensations that are flooding the body and the stimuli, then the body interprets it like a real experience. But there's a hyper elevation of arousal and of dopamine, which means that over the duration of time of doing this, the chemical signal or the electrical signal from the brain to the genitals becomes blunted. And then something called porn induced erectile dysfunction starts to happen. So you know that shame and that guilt that you and I and most men have felt at some point in their adolescent years or their young adult years or their later adult years when they're with a real life woman and maybe they love this woman, maybe they really truly love this woman and for some reason they're not able to perform. And then there's equally, there's shame around that. But then, but that ain't the real shame. We all know because somewhere inside of us we know that if either we're still doing that or we did do that, somewhere in our subconscious there's a reference point for that. But we may not want to bring that up because there's shame, there's guilt, there's embarrassment. So we do the, the, the penis pills and the different testosterone supplements. Maybe we get HRT or bioidentical testosterone or human growth hormone or we try to do 100 squats every day or you know, change our diet. And all these things are, have merit and are valuable. I've done all of them except like H HRT and all that bioidentical testosterone through like pine pollen is a great thing, you know, Tonkat Ali, all that's great. Tribulus. But what I didn't realize is that I actually needed to put myself through a psycho hormonal physical recovery process for all the damage that was done to me or that I, that was self Induced through this. This non contextual exposure to Internet porn.
Non contextual exposure. What exactly do you mean by that?
Well, again, it just. What I mean is that the brain doesn't distinct between what's real and what's not through the flickering lights and the stimuli of a computer screen.
Okay.
Yeah, so it's. So again, it's interpreting that. It's interpreting that as if it's a real thing. Not just because it's happening and we're seeing it, but because of the chemical cascade and the. The sympathetic arousal that is mimicking, or I should say exaggerating what we would normally feel in a real life situation.
Wow. Okay, so I'm gonna link a resource here. Obviously, everything's linked for Ronnie's book. And we're like really just getting started with this topic of pornography because it is such, unfortunately a rabbit hole. If you look at, I believe his last name is Thorndike. Dr. Greg Thorndike. We had him on the show and he brought this concept to me that I think we could really go into and really suss out some wisdom on. And he said that for a lot of men, when there's a wounding from an early stage from the feminine. For me, it was Lana Johnston at Murray Manor Elementary School, right? We all remember our first heartbreak. So I had a crush on her and things like that. But he said that as men, we go through different heartbreaks at different stages of maturation. And later on, if those aren't actually processed and those wounds aren't flushed out and we don't have wholeness and completeness on an emotional level, on a psychic level. He said that we eroticize our wounds. So we eroticize our wounds because that's what keeps pointing us towards what needs to be healed. In other words, this is why there's so much disgusting. It almost makes me nauseous to talk about it. Like the slapping, the biting, the animal porn, like just the gross stuff. I'm like, no wonder people do that. And this is what's interesting about the narrative of society. It's not only normalized by people, it's sensationalized and monetized. This, the really taste for like the. The super gnarly Kinks and. And the way that it's normalized makes me not angry. I'm not angry about it. It makes me sad, but disturbed. I'm disturbed by it. But at the core of it all, I'm sad that we've gotten so far away from what real connection is, real sexuality is. And the question I might really ask you here is this when we eroticize our wounds, and essentially that eroticizing of the wounds is our subconscious seeking out the very thing through sensationalistic, you know, non contextual exaggeration of our hormones, that is actually the protector. It's driving us towards the healing that we need. But in true paradox, it's also subsequently harming us as well. So talk about the brain chemistry. I noticed in the book you quoted Gary Wilson, your brain on porn. And I know you've gone deep on this, this paradox that I'm presenting to you with the eroticized wounding where our psyche is driving us towards what wants to be healed. And at the very same time it's also wounding us and driving those synapses that are the very things that disconnect us from another human being. Right.
There's like a few things coming up, but it's the reference points, the data points and the, let's call it energetic storages that have been deposited in our conscious and our subconscious mind. And so these, these impulses, these cravings, these arousal states that get triggered or stimulated, these are, these are all symptoms, these are all indications or indicators that there's something deep within us that's seeking to be heard, felt, resolved, integrated, obviously classic like trauma language. We all understand that idea. Yeah, but then this is the whole, this is the whole pattern recognition and the pattern interruption idea with not breaking an addiction, but identifying and pattern interrupting the stimulus and the response. Right. And so one of the things I was thinking about too, when I think about these shadow files, these catch files of the subconscious mind, another thing that's really insidious about porn as well, because dopamine, although dopamine is such a powerful motivational, it actually runs your motivational neuro networks. So the reason why you're motivated and what you're motivated towards is because of dopamine and how dopamine has been primed and how it's been taught to seek out either pleasure and immediate gratification and external validation or long term fulfillment, discipline, willpower, work ethic, it can be trained either way. And that's a whole interesting thing too. So a lot of this does have to come down to as far as like talking about solutions. It does come down to how to retrain the dopaminergic system. But before I get too much into that, I want to come back to a lot of this bypasses the conscious mind. So I don't know if you've noticed this. I certainly have noticed this in my deprogramming process because a lot of the things that I. I do for myself and for clients is I help to jailbreak the matrix of the mind. The. The stranglehold, whether that be through addiction, that be through negative thought forms, false identities, trauma loops, whatever it is. We all. We're all running some sort of, like, poverty programming, scarcity software, some kind of inauthentic, like, identity programming about who we believe we are and the different experiences that we've accumulated that have reinforced these stories and narratives that we have about ourselves in something like pornography. Similar to, like, movies, but to a lesser degree. A lot of that slips through the conscious mind, and it develops and accumulates like, almost like a movie reel of different snapshots, like scenes in the movie that had a particular arousal point. I mean, really detailed here. So people that know what I'm talking about, you're like, okay, I get what he's saying. And you may notice that you're going through your day and you see an attractive woman, A scene comes up in your mind. Now, if you're conscious, you may try to, like, okay, no, like, close the loop, close the tab, right? I went through this for quite a bit, noticing this would come up, and then I would just suppress it or just click it away or just try to pattern interrupt, try to ignore it. But I noticed this kept coming up, right? And what I picked up on was this is also affecting my ability to. To manifest my reality because it's almost like a stop sign or it's like some kind of, like. How do I explain? It's like a tab. It's like an unresolved tab on my browser screen that's, like, popping up. It's like. It's like blocking.
It's an attention leak.
It's an attention consciousness leak. That's it. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah.
What's interesting about that is I've had that exact same experience. I will never forget the strongest one I ever had. I actually had to pull over on the side of the road. It was after I had my psychic break down in Costa Rica, and I had some OCD thoughts that were coming up so strong that it literally took over my body. Granted, I went through the process, and I'm actually in true paradox, grateful that it happened. Right. Because I wouldn't be sitting here with you, man. Just like your healing had to happen in the exact way it did. Otherwise you.
I wouldn't be.
Wouldn't be sitting here. And so you might have real, true mastery over this. You know, your podcast is life Mastery Podcast which is Ronnie Landis. Like, mastery is something that is ongoing. It's not like, okay, I got it.
Licked, and I'm good.
It's like, no spirit is going to bring you something else. God is going to bring you something else. But I pulled over on the side of the road. I remember I was right in front of the Whole Foods in Salana Beach. I pulled over off the freeway. You know, where that, like, bread factory is? And I sat there and I just did breath work, and I just prayed, and I just said, okay. By the power of God invested in me, I ask you to leave. You're not allowed in my inner sanctum. You're not allowed here. If you're here to teach me something great, then teach. But you're not allowed to penetrate my psyche and to live within me. And I just kept praying over and over again. I did some more specific prayers as well. And it wasn't until I really had to meet the darkest part of myself that was seeking the validation, the even. Honestly, I can't believe I'm saying this, but, like, the. The hatred that I had towards. Towards, like, women in my teenage years and women in my 20s, because I was so angry at not being accepted, I had to, like, really look at that and have kind of, like a ceremony in the parking lot with myself to then go home and feel so much lighter. And then took me on another trajectory towards going down to a different place and doing some real work on myself that didn't involve just plant medicine. I know I got a little sideways there, but the point of the story is this, like, everything that I watch gets stored somewhere. And whether I look at it now or later, eventually I'm going to have.
To look at it, right?
Eventually I'm going to have to look at it. I can push it under the rug for a while, but the rug might have a huge bump in it with all the shit that I haven't looked at. And so I wonder how you see this playing out with. With students and in your program where there's been 5, 10, 15, 20 years of subconscious trauma from pornography and even the way that that plays out with sex with partners, right? Unconscious sex with women and men, if there's such a massive buildup, I guess you could say, of these shadow files and the Watiko and the darkness inside of oneself. I could see why some people with compassion would never want to look at it at all, of course, and just live their lives completely disconnected from their heart and never have real intimacy or real relationships. But for the chosen ones the people that like, I can feel them now with us. Because you and I are those people too.
Yes.
For the chosen ones that want to take a look and want to clean it out, because they want true connection to themselves, to others, to God and be loving. How do they even begin that process?
It's such an important pivot in our conversation. I mean, this entire conversation has been profoundly important on so many levels.
Yeah.
This particular piece, I feel such a deep calling in my soul. And that's why. And by the time this comes out, the program will be out. The Pornography Recovery Roadmap. It's a self study course. We'll talk about that at the very end.
What is the link now? We're going to drop the link now before we even get into.
I don't have the link yet because.
Okay, we're gonna put JoshTrent.com forward slash, porn free.
Perfect.
JoshTrend.com forward slash porn free. That's where you can get all the goods from, from Ronnie. Because if you're here with us now and you're feeling this, it's because there's something in you that wants the healing, that wants the reprieve. I know that's how I was. It just took me a decade and a half to get there. This is something where you can get people there in less than a year.
I mean, you can get there literally, you can get there as quick as you want. And so here's the. Here's the thing, too. With that said, when does suffering end when you want it to? When does addiction end? When you want it to. So that's actually something we have to deal with within ourselves. Oh, do you mean that I can be successful when I want to? Then I have to address everything in me that doesn't actually want to be successful. To be happy, to be healthy, to be free, to be vital, to be prosperous. You mean that there are energies within me that are opposing my freedom? Yes. There's the governmental parental system, there's the, you know, there's all, all the things I don't know. I'm diverse from going into my ABC alphabetical organization of all the external control systems that oppose, you know, the ivory, ivory towers of society that oppose freedom. But, you know, the metaphysical and spiritual responsibility is that I actually am the common denominator in all my experiences. Nobody makes me addicted other than me.
Yeah.
So we get to address that first. Right.
People say it's disease. People say that. Alcoholism, pornography, sex addiction. There are people that create the DSM 5.
Right.
That say all Addiction in some way is a disease dis ease, which, you know, energetically. Yes, it's the body in dis ease, it's the mind in dis ease, but it's not a sentence where you are locked in a jail and throw the key away. Right. So the beginning process of people actually taking an honest look of what has accumulated.
Right.
Is the most potent yet honestly most challenging steps. And this is why traditional medicine, traditional psychiatry, this is why Kelly Brogan's work is so powerful. Like there's no real mainstream way for the spiritual malady that creates the addiction in the first place to honestly be addressed. Maybe in this pod we can talk about 12 step and the pros and cons of that from your experience. Yeah, but, but let's go to the beginning place here. Yeah, I'm, I'm ready to change. I'm ready to actually change.
Okay.
I'm ready to learn how to change. I'm ready to learn how to access my courage. How exactly do I do that? And we already gave the link, so let's go into that a little bit. I know you can't describe the entire program. It's one.
No, but, but it's very similar to everything. I mean in the, in the book there is a 21 day. It's more of like a 30 day to six week program, realistically. So let's, let's frame in like a six week process minimum. And it's a dopamine reset. We, and it's, it's all inclusive by the way. So when I look at, just talking about pornography and then I look at all these other subdivisions of addictions that we struggle with. For me, what was, was tobacco. It was, I never really got into alcohol. That was never a thing. Cannabis here and there, on and off, coffee, caffeine, social media. And then there's just like the psychological addictions to control and stress and overstimulation and in these different things, these are all branches on a tree. So we can deal with the, the main thing, the subcategories and then the underlining kind of issues that that Parabond or one thing leads to another. The caffeine leads to tobacco, that leads to the cannabis, that leads back to the tobacco, that leads to the, the pornography that leads to needing to masturbate, that leads to, you know, these things have a, the spiral, if you want. There's a spiral. Yeah, so, so you want to address like the actual spiral. You want to get really clear about the spiral. And then it's helpful to write it all out on paper. So it's out of your head. Because I think that's a big issue, as we're two in our head. And writing it out is the first step towards consciousness sobriety, meaning that I'm getting very conscious. I'm taking the initiative to get honest with myself and put it out on paper so I can see it in front of me. That's step number one. If we're talking specifically about pornography, here's what I would say to all the men listening. Regardless of what habits, patterns, addictions you are dealing with in your life, I promise you, if you learn to master and cultivate your sexual energy, every other addictive behavior in your life will sub, subcumb succumb to that. What I mean by that is that you can try to do all. You can address this, the substances and the external things, but if you don't learn to master your sexual energy and go into a process of semen retention, and that's a whole thing in of itself, but start redirecting the energy, then everything else will have a hold on you. As men, I'm not speaking as a woman, but I'm speaking as a man. Our vital life force in our prana, like our primordial energy, is concentrated in our sexual fluids. And there's a psychological, emotional, spiritual, and a physiological reality to that. What I've learned through practicing semen retention is that the more I do it and the more I practice breath work and meditation and healthy habits and training, lifting weights, exercising, structuring and organizing my life, creating order in my life, that energy starts to manifest positivity in my life. I actually feel more stable, more grounded, more anchored inside of myself. The. The OCD thought forms the scatter brain. The overstimulation starts to. It starts to become more harnessed and grounded. I noticed when I was releasing my seed, I felt more ungrounded. I felt less anchored, I felt less confident. I felt less embodied because literally I was. I was releasing part of myself that's. That's a whole deep dive in of itself.
Like the French have a phrase, it's called like Le Petit and then whatever.
The word is for little death.
Little death, whatever it is. You talked about that earlier, right? There is something so different, and this is why the whole. We've done multiple podcasts. We just did a big solo cast on gender dysphoria and how I believe it is ocd, because OCD is a fixation on things that you cannot control or intrusive thoughts. And so I think about this narrative in Society where people say there's no such thing between a man and a woman. Which is a complete fucking psyop. It's a complete psyop. To disrupt the family. To get people watching more porn. To get people watching more gross porn. To have educators in Schools teach 4 year old kids about dildos. Like, this is just an insane world we're living. And this is why my children will never touch public school ever. And I recommend that no one puts their kids in regular school. The roundabout thing that I'm going to ask you though and what this is all about is if we know exactly all the negative things that are happening to which you speak, why exactly are we continuing to choose to do them? Because in your program I know there's an unpacking of the nuts and bolts of how to change. Is it, is it as simple as semen retention or is there something else? Because it seems like that's powerful.
That's a major component.
It's powerful. But what, what else is there, man?
It's, it's such a simple question, but it's a, it's a big answer. But I'm going to simplify it when I'm just like. Semen retention for men in particular is an initiatory process.
Yeah.
It's actually a rites of passage process because almost none of us went through this. Just imagine when you started masturbating when you were a kid. When I was. And just my orientation around it, it kind of felt awkward. And it was like as I guess it would because I'm. I'm 11 years old and I'm releasing a part of me and I'm like, oh wait, that actually. How do I feel about this?
But I was just with myself. I wasn't looking at a screen, I wasn't looking at a magazine. I was literally just with myself.
Right.
There was nothing else coming in besides whatever was in there already. That's the magic, that's the difference of pure, pure masturbation.
Right. And that's a whole other thing. Right. But we're obviously we're talking about like what most people are actually dealing with, right?
Yes.
And so it's actually. So I guess the best way to, to contextualize everything that I'm trying to articulate is that we, we get to take ourselves through a self mastery process. The antidote to any addiction, whatever it is, is that we have to, we get to rephrase. We get to. Some of my self talk is coming out because I just. That's, that's how I operate yeah, get. No, get your ass up. We're going. Yeah, it's like that works for me most of the time. We get to bestow genius upon ourself upon by choosing to master our impulses, our reactions, our triggers, our stress responses. And the way we do that is identifying, okay, what are the ways that I'm coping and sedating and medicating the physiological sensations that I am experiencing that a part of me is uncomfortable with experiencing because it brings up an existential threat to my ego of the unknown, of fully feeling what has never been fully felt or doesn't have a empirical meaning or definition. It'd be easier if somebody just had a user's manual and told me, okay, this is what this means. This is what, when you're feeling this, this is what this means. This is about, okay, the story in your childhood. I think this is why we sometimes over obsess and analyze about our, you know, okay, like what was the thing? How did this, what was the story or the meaning? Just give me the answer already. But the thing is I actually have to do that for myself. So that's a bit of a confrontation, but it's also a bit of a liberation too when we realize, oh, I can rescript and rewrite the, the meaning of any experience. But in order to do that, I have to create some space. I have to, to create a gap between stimulus and response in order to feel the space, the sensation. And then once I've done that and I've made my way through that little bit of a crucible, it's just a moment in time really if you think about it. And then I get to imbue meaning upon it. But I can't do that if I haven't crossed that bardo. And so when you mentioned the whole existential thing, this really just came up for me in the most practical way. There's these little micro moments of existential threat that we, we don't, but they're all subconscious. When I explain it, if this makes sense to people and I'm explaining kind of like the, the tracking, the phenomenon of it, it's probably like, oh yeah, that's silly. You mean I'm spending 10 years of my life coping and compensating with deleterious habits that are ruining my brain chemistry, my relationships, my financial stability, my health, because I'm unwilling to feel like a few moments or a few minutes of discomfort. Like that's crazy, but that's like the subconscious self protective mechanism that is always threat detecting. And so it's like, there's so much I can, I can keep wordsmithing around, but that's so.
It's so good because I've always told people the same thing. And I, I found this out through my own podcasting journey and my own research journey. The brain does two things really well. It protects you and it gives and receives information. I know it's very reductionized, but the brain literally just gives and receives information. And it also keeps you very safe. Now it's in control of the other organs that have their own synergistic feedback loops that keep you safe as well.
Right.
I'm not saying that the brain can live without the body. Obviously it can't. Right. There's many other systems. But that's the part that blows me away about your work and about the. How. How simple it actually is. It actually is real simple. But just because simple as a light switch does not mean it's going to be easy to have the courage to go over and flick it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Just because it's simple don't mean it's easy, man. And that's really a big take home from your work.
And you have to. And I'm glad you said that because, like, hopefully everything I'm saying is landing. And it's. And I'm giving a very.
I'm giving a. Oh, it's landing.
I'm giving what feels like a very, like, maybe elegant or sophisticated explanation of something that is so simple. But we've all heard it so simple. I needed to understand it psychologically, neurobiologically, like, spiritually. I need to understand how this all worked from a human operations perspective, because ultimately what we're talking about is upgrading the operating system of the human experience. In order to upgrade the experience, we have to upgrade the hardware and the software. And that's where the advent of neuroscience, nervous system optimization, nutrigenomics and nutritional sciences, supplementation, herbalism, hormone therapies, cleansing, detoxification, breath work, regulation practices, so many other things. Epigenetics, emotional epigenetics, psychological epigenetics, you know, on, on we go. That's why all these things are bearing out right now, in my opinion. Yeah, because they're all necessary. Not to say that, not to overwhelm people, not to say that you need to understand all this. But if you like to geek out on this stuff like Josh does, and I do, and so many other people do, these are all access points for learning how to upgrade the human experience. And we've been so disadvantaged through so many different means. Like we're pointing out right now that, that that's the, that's the quote unquote negative or challenge. But there's an incredible opportunity here, which is the, the awakening, the realization that you can actually upgrade your software set. You can upgrade the hardware set of how your nervous system and your brain and your physiology performs and functions and the epigenetic factors of that. And you can actually upgrade the programming of how everything operates and functions and self regulates without needing external mechanisms to self soothe or self regulate.
They're fun when they're used with a baseline of self care and self awareness that you teach in the book.
Right?
Because that's like an interesting paradox, isn't it, where some people think as long as I have the red light therapy, as long as I have all the things on the, the outside that'll somehow point light towards me. And they're great things like don't get me wrong, I love my sauna space, I love all my tools. It's so good because I sit in there and breathe and I sit in there and be with myself. Yes, that's part of the therapy in its own right. So one of the things that I cannot let you go unless we talk about this concept, this is one of the most fascinating parts of your work is right here. Flipping the dopamine and also flipping the serotonin triangle, getting the reward in the reverse pattern. So like having, having a part of, of our heart that gets lit up when we make love, when we eat good food. These are all natural things that, that upregulate serotonin and dopamine, which is amazing. But when we get into the clutches of addiction, and I know, speaking from my own experience, and I know you speak about yours too, when we get into that groove where the, the dopamine and the serotonin is being released when we're exhibiting the deleterious behavior, that's actually nature working against us because we are ignoring nature. Yes. So how would you describe this? And this is one of the key components of the book, like flipping the triangle, flipping the reward system so that it's the delayed gratification that actually gives us the dopamine, that gives us the serotonin. Talk about that.
I'm so glad that we're able to go here. So dopamine is not the pleasure or reward molecule. That's the first thing to understand. A lot of people associate dopamine as pleasure. You stimulate dopamine, you get more pleasure. Dopamine is the motivation and, and Future anticipation molecule. Amongst many other things, dopamine also regulates time dilation. So our interpretation of our, of time, meaning like the past, the present, all that in our, our experience of it, how it exists in our present moment, is based on dopamine regulation as well. So for example, if somebody finds themselves stuck in the past, ruminating over the past, it usually. Which is kind of like a depressive state, right? Yeah, that usually means they're a low, they have a lower than baseline amount of dopamine. For whatever reason, if they're hyper fixated on the future, they're, they're super aroused or, or just anxious about the future. A lot of times that can be an upregulated or hyperregulated amount of dopamine above their baseline. So we want to find that Goldilocks position. And so I find that super interesting how time dilation or our experience of time affects us in every present moment. And that can be regulated through just basic neurochemistry.
One of the things that's most fascinating to me, I was looking at this for light therapy and photobiomodulation, the superchismatic nucleus and the way that it dictates our, our basically wake hormones and our sleep hormones from a light source. So that's. That that is weaved into this conversation as well. I know it's like maybe a secondary point to this, but, but we can actually train ourselves to, to flip the triangle that you talk about to invert the, the dopamine, the serotonin, by doing the things that nature intended for us to do, which is like not have blue light at night and not sleep in a room with a bunch of sound going off. And you know, I had to add that in there because it was something that just rocked my world when I learned about it. And so please continue because I know there's a core difference between the serotonin and the dopamine. And it's freaking fascinating if we can flip it to be more delayed rather than instantly gratifying.
For sure. And I mean this is, this is a, it's a lot to unpack. But that's a really important point too because light exposure is really important for both your dopamine and serotonin system. And direct photonic exposure, meaning light packets of light from the sun through biophoton metabolism, is really important for serotonin production and for dopamine production. And when, so when you're looking at your screens obsessively, especially at night, then you're going to deplete your dopamine storages. You might get that through the flickering lights, especially on social media, and just kind of the, the reward centers being triggered. I don't know if I mentioned that, but that's the thing with dopamine is that it doesn't, it doesn't give you pleasure. It tripwires the pleasure and reward centers of the midbrain. And that, that particular system, what you're getting to is like, how are we motivated? Based on stimulus and response, based on motivation and reward. Right. And so what we want to do to, to kind of flip the paradigm that we're in, where we're seeking out immediate gratification essentially like pornography and like these other things, we've, we've bypassed the initial work required to achieve something to get the pleasure, to get the sense of reward or achievement. We've taken out the middleman, we've removed the work and the exertion of effort, effort required. And now we just get pleasure on drip stream. It's just on tap. We just get it whenever we want. What defines an addiction is interesting to me. It's something that produces dopamine in the moment and it's also easily accessible. So something that's going to be the probability of something becoming addictive is how much dopamine it produces and how easily accessible it is to you in any given moment.
Moment sounds like Instagram.
Exactly. Yeah. Right.
Like the little search button. That's the one we all must be cautious about.
Yes, a little.
You could just sit there, I've done it before for like 10, 10 minutes will go by and I'll think it's 30 seconds. It's fascinating.
Time dilation, time dilation.
Please continue.
Yeah, so. So what we want to do essentially is that when we understand that dopamine is responsible for the motivational neuro networks of the brain, how motivation functions, what we're motivated by and why we're motivated, motivated by it, chemically speaking, we can start to retrain the, that pattern. So when you're working out, maybe if, for me working out comes natural, but if you notice like there's the, the anticipation for the reward. So the experience of working out the pump that I get the positive reward stimuli or the result that I want to get. Certain amount of dopamine is produced in the brain as an anticipatory response. So in other words, dopamine is produced in anticipation for a future event. That's really important to understand. So I don't get dopamine from the pornography itself. I get dopamine from the anticipation of a particular experience that's posed in the future. Right. But once I have the experience that dopamine baseline goes down, it's right. It's kind of like you do the drug or you do the thing. You get that little bit of a hit upon moment of arrival, but then the more you do it, the less of it, the less of the, the pleasure, the reward that you get. And then you need to do more of it to keep the dopamine baseline, you know, steady. Right. So we want to retrain that from immediate access to delayed gratification. So things that actually produce health tend to take time. Things that produce success tend to take time. And there's a little bit of work behind it. So when I go to work out, I don't always feel excited. Most of the time I do because I enjoy working out, But I've worked out all my life, so it comes natural to me. But it doesn't mean it's not without effort. I work harder every time. There's a point, though, when I work through the limbic friction, the resistance, There's a point where I actually experience a dopamine spike because I've worked through something that's difficult. So in other words, I've worked through the friction or the emotional resistance from point A to B. And once I've worked through that, then I get a little spike in dopamine, which is this little signal that says, good job. I just got rewarded for the effort I put in, not the reward of, like, the outcome or anything like that. I got rewarded for the work, and then it motivates me to keep going. And then I'll get these little, these little milestone moments of dopamine as a reward for the work I'm doing, not for the outcome. And I think that's ultimately, that's a long kind of drawn out way of kind of getting to. What you brought up is that we want to train our brain to seek out novel experiences based on the work. Because another thing with dopamine is novelty. A thing with learning is about novelty. Our brain likes to learn based on novel experiences. So dopamine seeks out novel and new experiences that can be trained negatively. Right. In pornography, it's like, okay, it's not just the one type of pornography. Now I need to look at the other kind and the other kind and all this, and it just gets really weird really fast. Or it's not just this drug. I need to do this drug or this, this sexual partner. I need another one, another one, another one. Dating apps are a Great example of that. Right. So we get to train that novelty seeking mechanism towards things that are productive and life affirming.
You know what's interesting is when one like in an intimate relationship, when a partner starts to up level their life. I've seen this and I've been through this myself. And maybe everybody can relate to this on some level, whether it's conscious or unconscious. When one takes an honest look as to why they've wired themselves to live their life in a way that they have, there can be a instant change point. Like you said, when you stop addiction, when you're ready to stop it, when do you stop suffering? When you're ready to stop it. It's the light switch. It takes courage to get there. I'm not spiritually bypassing the work here.
Yeah.
But when someone. This is why many relationship teachers out there say that sometimes when a man breaks up with a woman, he actually doesn't even have to grieve because he's already been grieving for the whole relationship.
Totally.
And when he's ready to make the chance for change, he just jumps on the chance. And so there's not a long grieving pattern or grieving period that's required. The whole point I'm getting at is like when we, when we really decide that we want something new, we also have to face maybe the partners that drove some of our addictions in the first place. Maybe the relationship that someone is in, they go drink all the time. Or maybe the relationship that someone's in, they get high every night together or, and it might be something that's poo pooed or you know, pushed to the side, like, oh yeah, we're just drinkers, we're just partiers, we're just this, we're just that. But when somebody really wants to go on the true spiritual path, which if they do, they must read the book. When they want to go on the spiritual path, they're going to have to take an honest look not just at their own dopamine and serotonin systems, but at the very fabric of the essence of their relationship with their intimate partner, with themselves. And I think that has to be included as we round out this conversation.
Agreed, agree.
What are some of the ways that that's happened in your life for you?
I mean, relationships have been the number one teacher and mirror and lesson giver in my life. And your intimate relationships have the biggest impact on all areas of your life. Your success, your consistency, your momentum, your health, your vitality, your longevity. Nothing has a greater impact. And Influence than your intimate relationship. I can track all the times in my life included when I lived in your apartment. You know, we, we both know what some of that looked like. The relationship I was in, it was. There was a lot of love in that relationship. I, you know, we really loved each other. But we were also very maladaptive and we didn't know what we didn't know. And there was some, you know, there's some codependency that was playing out and a lot of shadow wounding that was emerging that neither one of us had a road map of before. I certainly didn't. And there was some compensating going on. And so it wasn't because of the relationship. The relationship was a mirror of the entire phenomenon of me being in an over stimulated state, be being disregulated, me feeling disconnected with my. The authenticity of my path, my purpose, money issues like these are all kind of like compounding. Compounding situations. But the relationship really. I remember when things were good, everything was great. It didn't matter what was going on. When things in the relationship were good, I felt amazing. When they weren't, everything took a nail, a nosedive from there energetically. And so I say that just to say that we definitely want to recognize the influence and the impact of our closest relationships. The time, the energy, the momentum that we're investing of our life force.
Yeah.
Into other people. And is it reciprocal? Because some of us are great givers. Not all of us know how to fully receive or know how to keep the checks and balances appropriated in our relationships. Because like I never had a father in my life. I only have my mother and my grandmother. And so there's a certain, there's a certain affinity that I have with the feminine. There's a certain love and care and desire I have with the feminine. But then there was also some wounding there too. And the masculine, there's like some wounding and some displacement there that I had to learn and integrate as well. And that played out in a lot of imbalanced relational dynamics and me over giving and you know, not. Not having a lot to give back to myself.
What do you think that most people get wrong when they start the journey of being addiction free?
Certainly the judgment, the way. And that's kind of like a reactionary state that I think a lot of us have. Is the, the judgment that we have about ourself or about the, the addiction itself, the person, the place, the thing, the substance, whatever it may be. And not really taking a deeper inventory of how we're Operating in our daily life. This is how I'll say it too. One of the really important pieces around all this is that addictions essentially are a form of regulation, strategy. We're trying to regulate our internal state. We're trying to regulate our mood. We're trying to regulate our sympathetic nervous system. They're. They're a way to regulate our energy. So a lot of times we give too much power to the external mechanism, and then it becomes kind of like a Chinese finger trap. I know I went through this with, like, tobacco. It just had a hold on me. And then I realized, like, I'm creating this, this whole, like, the stranglehold within myself and I'm imbuing power onto this little rolled up, you know, organic tobacco. Yes, right. And. And so we, we can knot ourselves up in. In this, like, you know, psychological Chinese finger trap. In. In the judgment, the shame and the guilt are, again, as I said a few times, the glue that holds that together. And to the degree that our nervous system is integrated is the degree that we as a human being are embodied and in integrity. Or I'll say, let me reverse that. To the degree that we are in integrity with ourself thoughts, words, actions, values. Is the degree that our nervous system is integrated with itself to the degree that we're not integrated is the degree that we are going to experience any variation throughout our day of a sympathetic response, a stress response. Dr. Ann Lemke says that any deviation from neutrality is a stress response. So essentially what we're trying to do is we're trying to regulate all of these. These micro to macro stress responses that we're having within ourself. And that's really where we need to take our attention.
There's the eustress, there's the distress.
Yes, exactly.
I remember when I first learned about the concept of hormesis, right. Where the body is actually restructuring itself to deal with the imposed demand. Right. Whether it's an internal demand of like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to speak on a stage that's. There's really no reason to be nervous about that. Right. But we make it. I'm sure you and I have heard this, like, the fear of death and the fear of speaking on stage, they're like, equal for some people. It's like, how could that possibly be? How could that possibly be?
I mean, I felt that. And then times through this interview, it's come up in my body.
Hey, well, that's honest, right? And then when we shine light on it and we talk about it, it's like, okay, it goes away because I'm going to do the thing regardless of how I feel. So in a way, what a beautiful conduit for you and I to always lean into our edge, for all of us to always lean into our edge, because it's actually that you stress making us better. But I think there's this fine line that maybe this veil we could talk about before we actually let you go into the ether and we can start doing the real work and getting the book and joining the program and take like, that's one thing before we go is like, I really want everyone to feel this, like, truly, like almost 15 years of my life, I struggle with porn. Like true struggle. And always self induced, always. And it doesn't have to be that way. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. So if anybody can just take home this one thing before we go into the next last part, Allow yourself to receive the support that these little nudges in your body are directing you to. And I don't mean your mind like, oh my God, this, like, don't do this program. If you're somebody that's like, this is going to save me. This is going to heal me. This is going to be the one thing where I don't have to take responsibility and I can just rely on Ronnie and leverage his expertise. It's like, nope, you ain't going to succeed in this or anything else.
Yes.
Only do something when you get a somatic experience that points you in that direction. That's what I would say. Because if I came across your book and this type of work and I wasn't running and chasing podcasts trying to figure out why my mind took me on trips, therefore taking myself on trips on podcasts and doing all those things, I probably could have shortened the learning curve so much. I mean, it wasn't until really 2018. 2018, 2019 was when I had the ultimate psychic break. And it honestly wasn't until 2020 where I really came to terms. So it's only been three years, man. Came to terms with exactly what I'm sharing with you and what I'm sharing with everyone here. So the last portion, let's address whatever you think we haven't addressed. Let's address whatever the elephant in the room might be, whatever something that you've been wanting to share from your heart, whatever. You know, something in the book that somebody hasn't asked you because we covered so much vital ground. What is it about, you know, this addiction free lifestyle and really this path to true inner peace and self mastery that maybe we didn't cover.
There's, there's a few things coming to me. One thing I want to share with people and it goes back to your last question, like what are people getting wrong? This is really about forgiveness. Like the, the actual antidote. The, the. The kind of. The piece that cuts through everything else. The resistance, the limbic friction, the, the. The knots that we get ourselves tangled up in. The, the should I, should I not? What do I do? All this kind of stuff that can be disassembled automatically by self forgiveness. By forgiving ourselves for the indiscretions that we have caused to ourself. The self induced mediocrity, the parental attachment injuries that have been laid into, in our psyche and our nervous system through our parents or our caregivers, the different relationships that we have been in. Both, all the ups and downs, the part we played, the part others played in our own experience. Ultimately healing is a self forgiveness and a rectifying of all the quote unquote mistakes. As Michael Bernard Beckwith says, a mistake is actually just a mis take and it's just bringing you into a closer vibratory alignment with your true self and with your true path and purpose. And that's really what this all is. And so like there's moments of grace that just manifest in our life. You can't predict it, you can't plan for it. You can't get all your ducks in a row to set the structure for the grace of the feminine to just emerge. Sometimes grace just emerges in the. It just emerges in the muck. It just emerges in a, in a. The most unpredictable and the most unplannable spaces. And that's, that's when you realize like oh God is real. Because you know, I, we can't complete this conversation without bringing it full circle. The antidote for the God shaped hole in your soul is what the, the, the. The shape of the hole. I don't know what the configuration of that is. I don't know what the shape and the dimensions and the bandwidth and the height and the, the. The. The crooked edges and all that is. It's unique to the individual. But I bet you it had. It looks something like the snowflake unique fingerprint that is uniquely yours because it's the reflection looking back at you in the mirror. That's what that, that that hole is. It's that rectification, it's that, that reclamation of self. That's the journey that we're all on. That's what all health is. And by the way, all the nutritional, all the biohacking, the supplements, the self regulatory practices, the self mastery practices, there is no point or purpose of doing any of it like authentically for, for like a higher purpose unless it is to truly like, be the best version of me. And that's easy to say, an almost trite, commonplace thing, but it's a deep meaning and a deep why behind that. Why do I want to be the best me? And what is going to be the motivational, like generator for that to actually be the case? Because there are so much oppositional forces in my reality, both external and internal, that are working against me being the best me. So then why do I want to be the best me? That is a question that each one of us gets to explore continually. The, the riddle that we get to continue to decode and, and what that looks like for us at each junction of the, of the journey. I don't think that any of this is possible by ourself. And I, I want to make sure that I mention that too. With pornography, anything that create, with addiction altogether, anything that creates and elicits shame and guilt causes us to isolate. And so not only do we need community, not only do we need brothers and sisters, we need God. Like, literally, like that's a huge thing I talk about in the book. And God is not, not sequestered to some religious framework, right? Because the devil can be found in the church just as easily and often times more. So the case, whatever that is for you who's listening to this right now, that is your pathway to your liberation and your, your quote unquote salvation. That is what the addiction free lifestyle is about. It's about creating and crafting a lifestyle that is based on purpose. It's based on mission and it's based on aligning your habits and your behaviors and the way that you self optimize for a particular mission. And it doesn't have to be grandiose. It doesn't have to be some business or some podcast or some outreach. Although I bet you, I bet you if you tap into your Dharma and your true purpose, I bet you it's going to have a lot less to do with you and it's going to have a lot, a lot more to do with helping others.
Others.
That's, that's what I found to actually be the, the, the key and the lock for liberation is when we get out of our own self interest or like, oh, I need to heal myself. Oh, I'm healing. I'm Healing. I need to grow my business, I need to heal myself. Sure, fair enough. However, that's also, that's also the finger trap. The more I narcissistically focus on myself.
Yeah.
Oh, it's my healing. Oh, it's, I just need to be in alignment or, or whatever the, you know, where the spiritual mannerism is or the, the thing.
Yeah.
The more I actually flip that. It doesn't matter about me. Yes, I matter, but it's about, it's about service. It doesn't matter if I woke up and had bags under my eyes.
And the joy is found from what I found in the service. Yeah, my joy, it might come like temporarily through doing fun things for myself, which is cool. I like that. I like celebrating myself, self care, things like that. But anytime I've ever been around a hypochondriac, I'm always like, kind of disgusted by them because I can feel their selfishness. And it's not to put down anyone who's struggling with a disease, like full compassion. I understand things are hard. Like I'm dealing with things, so are you. We're all dealing with certain things at certain times. But the more there's this hyper focus and intensity around my healing and my process and me, me, me, me, me.
Right.
That's when the, honestly, the ringmaster, it pulls the attention to the circus so that you're the only character and you're the audience at the same time, you're literally having a show for yourself that yourself is watching. And that's the part of this entire quotient that is to round it way back to the beginning, the big cosmic joke. Ronnie, thank you for allowing us to focus on the things that we can control. And really the things that we can't control, we can just give that to God, you know, in whatever way that God resonates with people's hearts, with people's souls. One thing we didn't talk about that we can talk about on Another podcast is 12 Step. You know, I, I, I think that there's some merit and some value in that, but a lot of it to me seems heady and it's not a judgment. I've known a lot of people that have had success in that way and I've known a lot of people that have lost the program. So maybe we'll direct some people to resources about, you know, your approach versus 12 step, the ways that it is, in your opinion, more effective and the ways that 12 step has some holes.
I can just say I mentioned real quick, without getting into 12 step, I'll just share kind of like the very basic idea that I'm approaching. It's very holistic. It's integrative and holistic. It addresses the, the cognitive challenges through nutritional and supplemental and herbal frameworks that are very specific to everything we're talking about. So actually how you organize your diet and your supplement routine is in your exercise routine and your holistic lifestyle as a whole is critically important. I think that's one of the things that almost no addiction recovery programs even talk about. It's all just very psychological. It's like, okay, maybe you feel your emotions, you connect with other people, but it's, it's very strange to me when I think about. There's no, there's no expert guidance on nutrition or supplementation on brain chemistry outside of like psychiatric and pharmaceutical. Yeah, adjuncts. Yeah, I'm trying to get people off that stuff. I'm trying to get people to become fully optimized human beings. So that's, that's, that's one of the main things that's very different about it is that not only, yeah, there's a withdrawal process and that's what people are kind of afraid of. And fair enough, it's not easy, especially with like a lot of hardcore drugs and things. It's very uncomfortable. However, if you understand the dopamine reset and a lot of people do now. But the way that I teach it isn't just about resetting from the dopamine inputs cold turkey. No, let's get you on the right supplement routine. Let's get your hormones balanced and topped out. Let's get you working out and lifting weights or doing yoga, doing saunas, doing cold therapy. Let's get you optimizing yourself so that you can replace the old inputs with new inputs that actually balance your chemistry set out. So now the withdrawal is not this arduous thing and you don't have to just stick it out and go cold turkey. You can actually feel good and heal yourself at the same time.
That sounds so much better. Where are people gonna go if they wanna learn more about you? I know there's many different places. The book is linked right below. Wherever you're watching this, wherever you're listening to this. So it's the addiction free lifestyle, the true path to inner peace and self mastery. What an absolute gift this book is, man. Like, I know it took a long time for you to really get to the bottom of the truth about addiction in your own life and helping others. So where do people go? I mean the book is a great place to start.
Yeah.
But we've also linked joshtrend.com forward/porn free. Is there a place where they can engage with you one on one or how does that work? What is, what does it look like to on ramp into the world that you've built?
Yeah, if people want to connect with me, they can go to Instagram, Facebook. Those are the easy to access mediums. I did go through some shadow banning, as I think many of us did through the the theater of 2020 pandemic, y'.
All.
Yeah. So that, that's real.
When you go against the plan Demic, you might get censored.
Yeah. So, you know, I've been working my way through that and I'm easily found on those mediums. You can easily reach out to me. I'm very accessible. I love connecting with people. Especially people are interested in my programs working with me. If people have genuine questions about anything that we talked about in this conversation, send me a message on Instagram or Facebook. My website currently is hhphealth.com I'm going through a rebranding, but the web link should be the same. If anything changes, it'll be in the show notes. The pornography recovery roadmap is going to be launched between when this is this podcast comes out. So by the time that this comes out, the program will be fully launched, the link will be in the show notes, and then there will be some sort of significant discount for everybody that decides to do the program from Wellness Force. Think something like a hundred dollars or something off the off the price will be available for everyone that wants to do that.
Awesome. Thank you, man.
Yeah.
And like Ronnie said, that's all down below. So before we go deep on your podcast, which is going to be amazing, give people a shout out for the podcast and answer this question that you've already answered a couple other times. You know, this is your third time on the podcast and you know, it's funny you had mentioned Wellness Force and I, I really want to presence this.
Like I wellness and wisdom.
Right. But it's cool that you said it because it brought up a lot in me. And I, and I. It brings up a lot of me every time somebody says that because for so long I was known as a certain way. I was experienced as, oh yeah, that's the Wellness Force guy. Or it's a heuristic. We all do it. You know, it's a shortcut in the brain. And in 2022, going through a massive death and rebirth and really being public about all the stuff that I was going through and why I'm transitioning the name and what this is all about. It's a beautiful reminder, man. So thank you for that reminder. Like, you know, to be able to go back in time with you almost 10 years now and touch the essence of who I was, of who you were, of the stuff that we've battled with and overcome because we just decided that the battle was over and stepping off of the roller coaster that was taking breath and giving it. Like, it's just been a true honor to be your friend, to know you and to see you in the world explode, like really explode in a way where I think once the stars and the fragments and the pieces come to the ground, people are going to really see that the whole time you've been on this path, the whole time you've been walking this path of being of service to others. And that is really unique. And I think that that's something I can really acknowledge publicly for you about you because I think I see some of myself in you. Vice versa, I know that you see some of yourself in me. And that's the true character of a friend. So as we say goodbye, how do you define it now? You know, four years ago, five years ago, I think I asked you this question, this ultimate question of wellness. So what is the wisdom that you can provide to us today of how we can live our life? Well, how would you define wellness now from the lens that you see life through?
Thank you. I'm going to go back to that quote, which is my favorite quote of all time. Walter Russell. Genius is self bestowed. Mediocrity is self inflicted. To me, the optimal definition of wellness is the ability to. To not only choose but to fully live in one's own self bestowed genius. And to me that really is a. I suppose that's a manifestation of just being in total alignment and congruency between our thoughts, our words and our actions. Not only do I think that that is the definition of wellness because to be a fully integrated human being means to be fully integrity, which means to be congruent between your thoughts, your words and your actions. And that is also to me the definition of self mastery, it's the definition of true health and vitality and wellness. Because to the degree that we're blocked between that coherent line of energy within us is the degree that we're not producing our full genius or we're not living fully healthy, we're stagnating where we're. Yeah, we're inhibited in some form or fashion. Right. And so, yeah, I think that to me, that's my personal definition of wellness, because that's been my journey. And that's also the antidote to addiction. To live an addiction free lifestyle is essentially to live a life on your terms, to do what you want, with whom you want, when you want, and to feel how you want at any given time.
It's so good, man. And it reminds me of this quote that I've mentioned many, many times. Don't you love saying quotes? It's like we all borrow wisdom from everyone and hopefully we do justice to that wisdom that we borrow. And I'm sure that Tony Robbins borrowed what I'm about to say too. He probably borrowed it from Confucius or someone. Right. And he defined freedom as the ability to say no to anything that the heart does not align with. The ability to say no to anything that your heart, your soul does not align with. That's freedom. So if anything, today, I hope that we brought you closer. I know we did. Closer to true freedom with this addiction free lifestyle. So, Ronnie, from my heart to yours, thank you for being on the show, man. What a time ride we've been on. Yeah, it's been an ultimate time machine, man. I'm looking forward to the one that we do in the future that we're already reflecting on, because time is an illusion.
Absolutely.
So thank you for being on the show and until Ronnie and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you love this video, hit subscribe. That way you'll be automatically notified when no videos come out new episodes. And also share this video with a friend. If you loved it, they're gonna love it too. Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based on the video you just saw. Make sure you follow me and I'll see you in the next video.
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