How to EMBODY Higher Frequencies to Live Your Purpose | Josh Trent @WellnessAndWisdom

There's a difference between learning and experiential learning. Experiential learning, you go through life, you get knocked down, you get kind of bloodied. Maybe you're an addict for a while. Maybe you go through broken relationships and blame it on other people and wake up one morning like, hey, the past three didn't work out. Maybe it's me, you know, maybe it's my stuff that I'm. That I'm bringing in. So I think in order to have true purpose, there has to be three or four things. There has to be emotional inventory. There has to be self awareness. There has to be a connection with a higher power of some sort. Doesn't have to be mine, just your higher power. Whatever you believe. And there has to be the curiosity, humility.

Awesome. So we have with us today, Josh Trent, CEO of WellnessForce. So, yeah, we love to start with, like, a little elevator pitch or just give the audience your rundown of who you are.

Well, who I am today, hopefully, is way different than who I am a year from now. But today I'm the CEO of Wellness Force Media. So it's a company, we produce audio and video content that helps people, men and women, discover this physical and emotional intelligence so they can live life well. And intelligence is not how smart you are. It's your ability to gather, apply, and most importantly, embody. So that's who we are as a company. That's what I'm all about personally. And so we just create a great ton of media that helps people with.

That very cool physical intelligence. Man, that is awesome.

Thank you. Thank you.

In my language, it's called wisdom.

Yes, yes. Intelligence gets thrown around a lot, but I think its true meaning is different with the etymology. Likes to present.

Good. So you are driven.

Yeah, you would say that. You did say that. And I would say that, yes. And I really enjoyed taking your assessment. I think it's wonderful. I'm looking forward to diving in more to this PDF and understanding my. It almost looks like a spider web. So I'm really, really excited about that. Yeah, I'm driven. That's the short answer.

When did you first realize that you were maybe a little bit different from peers?

I always had a really hard time taking orders from people that I didn't respect. And I always wondered why people didn't have a problem taking orders from people that they didn't respect. Now, when I respect someone, that's different. I definitely enjoy taking wisdom and steps from them. But I think I was probably six years old, seven years old, when I Didn't. I knew I didn't like school. I knew I didn't like being bullied. I was bullied a lot when I was younger, and I really. I really started to drive towards unhealthy things because a personality that's driven, that doesn't have an outlet, that's healthy, can drive really fast into addictions and to things that aren't of Service. So from 6 all the way up until 25, that was a big life learning curve for me to then find what I was driven about, and that was wellness. And that was where I really poured myself into something that was good for me and was good for other people.

How did your parents deal with that? Were they driven to, like, did they understand kind of the learning curve you were going through? Was that difficult for them?

My mom's contract here on Earth, her sole contract, was that she had a bipolar disorder. And so she never really had a lot of driven qualities because she was struggling to find her center. Now, she's a very loving person. She's a very wonderful person. My dad was very driven, but I think a lot of his drive I never really understood. He was a operator and then worked his way up to be the director of operations for San Diego Transit, which is the major city service in San Diego. So it was a pretty big deal. I would say he was driven, but I think he always had an extremely challenging time managing his health, his relationships, and his emotional and mental health. He kind of paid the price of those to be driven to drive up the ladder in his company. So they. They didn't really have. My dad left when I was very young, two months old, and so they never had a cohesiveness together, so they weren't able to really deal with driveness as a couple. They dealed with me individually. My mom dealt with my lack of channeling from my driven energy by me probably being a pain in the ass. And then my dad dealt with it by, I think, just working all the time and I think, just not really being present.

Wow. So do you know my story a little bit?

I don't, but I'm excited to drop out.

Lived in a car. So I. Yeah, I went down the path of addictions early, and I'm readily grateful I did because it forced me to make some decisions about really owning my own behavior and that internal attribution that there's something going on with me that I can do something about. True for you?

Yes. Something going on with me that I can do something about. I think the. If you look at David Hawkins work and you understand the frequencies of each emotion and how we embody an emotion. The lowest possible frequency in the entire world is shame. And so as you climb the ladder from shame upwards to love, there's many rungs of the ladder that we have to grip and we have to learn how to climb on. And so it's not until about 250 on a frequency basis that we actually get to courage. And so I think some of us, maybe me and you, Doug, we had to kind of rifle around in these lower frequencies so that we became so uncomfortable that we'd actually get to the frequency of anger. Because anger, to quote Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2, Anger, is more powerful than despair. So we have to be in despair for a while. We have to be disassociated from self. We have to be addicted to things that aren't loving so that we can feel the deep dark contrast that then leads us up to anger, that then gets us to courage and then moves us closer to love, closer to purpose. But for some of us, we. We stay there for a long time, you know, and I stayed there for a long time myself. And I. I think it's just because it's a way to feel safe. When we're addicted to something outside of ourselves, then we don't have to inhabit our own body.

It's familiar.

We don't have to. Yeah. When we don't have to inhabit our own body, then we can always have a perceived safety. But safety is an illusion. There's no such thing as safety. So that's a whole nother philosophical podcast we could do. But long answer to your short question.

We should talk about safety a little bit. You said that safety is an illusion. Can you say more about that?

In my experience, when I've white knuckled or overcontrolled or tried to make my life and my work and my career and everything as safe as humanly possible, that white knuckling and that excessive control for safety, there's a cost that's paid for that. And maybe it's my health, maybe it's my physical or mental health, maybe it's my relationships. But anytime I'm trying to stick things in a square box that we're designed to be round because the earth is round. Relationships around everything moves in circles. We're around life, we're around humanity. We live in a world that's round and we have square thinking. We're always trying to put things in boxes all the time. And so that causes friction. And so I Think that safety is an illusion. Because, yes, there's certain proactive things we can do to be safe. You know, we can take care of ourselves. We can buy firearms, we can take firearms training. We can know how to operate in communities. We can be an asset instead of a liability. But also, we have to honor the mystery. We have to honor God. We have to honor higher intelligence, not some bearded dude in the sky. But we have to honor the mystery of life. And the mystery of life means that we're not always safe. Why do babies die? Why do terrible things happen? We just don't know. We have to honor it. We have to honor the mystery.

Beautiful. As I teach, safety is an external thing, and it's only present in one place. You know where.

It'S going to be either heart or mind or both.

No, it's right here, right now.

Yes.

And it's Nowhere else. And 99.9999999% of the time we are in this present moment, we are safe. It's a state of being which frees us then from whatever frequency we're inhabiting or happening in our central nervous system is then allowed to actually match reality, which is wonderment and safety and roundness. As you say, the circular. Yeah, we can go deep. This is. So at 25, I'm dying. What was your wake up moment?

It was actually at 21, I was drinking at a party. Just 30 second story here. I found football in high school. It was a way for me to get out my aggression and my rage. But then when high school was over, I didn't have another space to get that out. And so, to no surprise, without the right tools, without the right intelligence, without embodying the things that I didn't even know I needed yet. I was £280. I was in this job that I hated. I was a Mercedes Benz technician and working on luxury automobiles. And I was in a relationship where she didn't love me. And I was just lost. I mean, health, wealth, relationships, career, everything was like this beacon. Like, pay attention, you know, just a flashing beacon. And I was at this party, Doug, and I was drinking, and I looked down and I saw my belly pouring over my waist. And I just. I became so angry and so sad that I slammed the cup down and I ran home drunk three miles. And I typed in something on the computer like, how do I be healthy? And that was it. That was the turning point for me where I was sick of being in pain, I was sick of being tired. I was sick of not listening to My soul's voice. And so that was really the massive turning point. And then, of course, it took me three years. It took me three years to go through many diets, some emotional intelligence training, some books just really scratching the surface. And then at 24 years old, I sold everything I owned and I moved out to Hawaii and I found the feminine energy of the ocean and I experienced Hawaii, and I cooled off. A lot of resentment and anger and just things that I didn't know how to process. And then at 25 years old, I came back to San Diego and spent the next 10 years as a personal trainer, as somebody in the fitness industry. So that was the beginning of my. I don't know if you'd call it awakening. I think we're all awakening slowly, but that was a big one.

And that process of the three years of trials, tribulations, and wallowing around in hell, the hell realms, is so needed to. It is kind of form us into what we're becoming. So what happened at 25? You came back to San Diego and then what?

I came back to San Diego. I still had a lot of demons that I was keeping in the shadow because I was shining light on other people. And this happens a lot in the fitness yoga health space, where with good intentions, myself and a lot of people will be there and be of service to other people because it's a really secret and sinister place for our darkness to hide.

Oh, that is powerful.

And we see it a lot. And I reflect on that quite a bit. You know, I was a personal trainer by day, but I was chewing tobacco, smoking weed, and drinking by night. And yeah, I looked healthy on the outside, but I didn't really love myself. I didn't even know what self love was. And I sure as hell didn't know to help people through that kind of a lens either. So it took a good 10 years of me slowly gathering. In my company and on my podcast and with my clients. We talk about the gather, the apply, and the embodiment model, which I think is the model of intelligence. I gather, I apply, and then I embody. But sometimes we all get stuck, and I did for sure stuck in the gathering phase, where I'm just going to, like, read all the books and go to all the conferences and do all the things and get a degree and get a certification, but I'm not actually going to apply it. I'm not actually going to do it for myself, and then if I don't do that, I can embody. So that took about 10 years of gather Apply. And then I would embody certain things. And sometimes that embodiment can only really be felt by others by practicing. So if I'm not walking my talk, if I'm not eating my own dog food, if I'm not having hard conversations with my partner, Carrie, if she and I are moving through a threshold in our relationship and I fall back into old patterns, I don't think it ever stops, is what I'm saying, Doug. I don't think the learning ever stops. I just think that we slowly become more aware, we slowly become more embodied because we're committed to the cycle. You know, we're committed to constantly gathering and applying.

That is spoken truth for the drivens.

Yeah.

And you've obviously surrounded yourself with fellow driven that share this passion for personal growth. I mean, it's amazing to watch someone else on the driven path that is speaking. This talking the talk, but walking the walk. What is your daily practice? What do you do every day? I promise the audience that we're going to try to define embodiment.

I. I could probably help you with that. It's a really. I mean, embodiment is kind of a spiritual term. We'll save that for a moment later. So in the morning, I'm fortunate enough I have a sauna and I have a cold tank in the garage. And so I have my gym in the garage as well. I have my squat rack, I have all my stuff. And so I start my day. I hydrate. I actually use a product called Element. It's really good. I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but it's basically just sodium. It's just salt. Salt and water. You could do salt water and lime. I built a practice for people and for myself that I do too. And I'll tell you guys exactly what it is, is. And people can get it for free. You wake up, you make your bed. That is the first thing. There was a Navy admiral that has a YouTube talk. I think it's got like 10 million views or 15 million views. And he did all. What's that?

That's McRaven's. Yeah.

Okay, McRaven's. So he said that in the limbic system, when we get a little. A little reward for hard work, if we start our day like that, it primes the brain for, for achieving, but not in a frenetic way. Like in a self loving, self compassionate way. So I wake up, make the bed. First thing. That is number one. Then I hydrate, I get a big glass of water. This is like 32 ounces. And I put the element, or if I don't have element, I do salt and lime. That's number two. Number three is I do my breath work. And I do my breath work before I do my movement, before I do my journaling, before I do anything else because. Or my meditation. Because breath work is something that has just changed my whole life. Like it rocked my world in 2016. It changed everything for me and for my company and just for my path. So after the breathwork, then I do my meditation, then I do my movement, then I do my journaling. And those practices that I shared with you guys, I do them most likely in that order. I always do the breath work before the meditation. Because when I started to learn from all these people in these 400 episodes on wellness Force, I was like, what are all the world class people doing? Like, what are they actually doing? Like, what's the. What's the most distilled wisdom I can hold from these people? And it was these six things. And it's things that get thrown around a lot, but are we actually doing them? So I built a way for us to do it in about 20 minutes, 21 minutes exactly. And that's what I do for my day. I also incorporate cold therapy. So there is an additional piece I put on that when I'm done with my six practices, then I do my workout, I do my training, and then when I'm done with my training, I'll sit in the sauna. If I don't have time for a big sauna, I'll do like 10 minutes and then I'll do three minutes in the cold tank. And then I shower and start my day. But I love myself first, so I can love other people and love other things and love what I do. Because on the days where I miss this, like, let's say the baby keeps us up really late and I miss my morning, I notice it. It's like somebody. It's like somebody put a thorn in my side. It's really interesting.

So.

But that's how I start my day most days more than not.

What time you have to get up to love yourself that much in the morning?

I like seven.

That's not bad.

I like 7am yeah. If I go earlier than that, I feel really groggy. And I've played around with this a lot. There's sleep doctors that talk about sleep archetypes and I feel like I'm. I think it's the dolphin was my archetype. Because when I've done the really early morning, even if I go to bed super early, I just can't wake up. And I think also, Megan, it matters with the seasons, because if you look at circadian rhythm and circadian timing of all creatures on Earth, most creatures, unless they're underworld creatures like bugs or cats, cats are pretty crazy. They follow the cycle of the sun. So whenever the sun comes up is a good time for us to wake up. It's a good time to love ourselves.

And so before embodiment, I will ask you very simply, and this is a deep rabbit hole, but it's a good one for people like you. What is your concept of God? Good answer.

My concept of God is an energetic being that loves and nourishes all things, but it does not lord it over them. And when I first heard that, it was from Alan Watts and he took it from. From the Dao, from Lao Tzu's work. You know, the great Dao loves and nourishes all things, but it does not lord it over them. And I really felt that. And I. I give credit to that text because I don't want to plagiarize it and claim it as mine. But the energy of that is really what I believe God is. God is an omnipresent, everywhere, everything. And God is actually everything and nothing at the same time. Because you and I, all of us, we are points of consciousness in my brand. We have a fractal graphic that we use a lot. We are all unique. Billions and billions and hundreds of billions of points of consciousness that have come into the world that will be here. They'll never be another Doug, ever. There'll never be another Doug Brackman. There'll never be another Megan. There'll never be another Josh. So we get this really special point of consciousness that's made in the image of God, but we are not God, right? We're made in the image of God. So we have a deep connection to God, to the omnipresent universe, but we are not God ourselves. So that can be a very challenging thing for nihilists to deal with or even for Christians to deal with to know that we are both God, but we are also not God because we were created in the image of God in that omnipresent energy. So religion tends to divide people's thinking into two camps. You're either a believer or non believer. I don't agree with that. I had a lot of anger towards God when I was a child. I actually, I don't know if we can curse on your podcast, but I said F U C K God. Like F you God is what I said. And I was so angry because God couldn't fix my mother's illness. God couldn't make my dad come around. God couldn't make people stop bullying me. You know, people put all their faith in God. But what I had to realize over the course of time that's related to your answer is that I am God, not that I am the creator, but I am made in the image of God, therefore I am God, but I am not the creator. So that's my long winded definition of God.

Possibly one of the best answers I've ever heard. And that's saying something. I ask that question to a lot of people.

Thank you.

The foundation of really our core sense of identity. And it's the solution to shame, which I could have called my book the Shame Based Personality Type. As a driven person, we're wired to do a couple things. One is take way too much responsibility for our lives. We believe the world is happening to it. Like you said, there must be somebody in control here doing these things to me. And eventually it folds in on ourselves. The other thing is that we're wired to be constantly searching or seeking. This is a bridge to embodiment. How does your concept of God meet with embodiment?

That's one of the deepest questions I've ever been asked.

I hope that's a compliment.

Yeah. And I like to clear my mind. That's why I do the breathing. And I have been involved in breath since 2015. So I was introduced to it by Mark Devine at one of his events. And so whenever I used to actually train myself to answer right away, like, Doug, you asked me a deep question. I'll just start talking to fill space in my past without ever having the presence to truly answer you from a place of calmness. And I actually, I promise I'll answer your question. But I was at a men's retreat and we were shooting a long gun and I was shooting 800 yards and I've never shot a long gun in my life. And I was able to just truly relax and pull through the trigger and let the shock of the gun go through my body. And I hit the target three times. And I'm like. And they were like, that's rare. And I said, great. But it's because I paused and I. Because when I take something seriously, I really want to respect it by slowing down. So I want to respect your answer like I would respect a gun. Or I want to respect your question like I would respect a gun. So how do I. How do I take my definition of God and juxtapose it or dovetail it into embodiment? I have the sense that curiosity and honoring those two things, if I can be curious about my life and curious about what's going on from a place of wonderment, almost like Jesus would say, I'm not a religious person. I just quote a lot of the Bible because I think there's some really great stuff in there. Jesus said, come and learn with the heart and mind of a child and I will serve you. So really opening my heart and saying, well, what can I be curious about in this world? Like, why is this stuff going on? Or what is going on? And, like, make my life more of a prayer. Besides, when I talk to God in the morning, like, make my life a prayer to the best of my ability, which I'm not perfect at all. I'm not going to BS you. And then also, can I honor the fact that I won't always get an answer? You know, I've done an ayahuasca journey many times and I've asked ayahuasca, like, how do I make sense of this life? Like, what are we doing here? Like, what the hell is going on? Like, what is this? What is the meaning of all this? And the answer I've gotten back is, you don't get to know. Like a playful. Kind of like, you don't. Yeah, like, you don't get to know. So I think the way that I would. That I would dovetail my understanding of God and my understanding of embodiment is to take that curiosity and that honoring of the mystery and really offer those up to myself and to other people and say, can we have conversations about these two things? Because I think that's what allows us to gather and to apply wisdom and intelligence. And I think it gets embodied by us being able to talk about it without my way being right. You know, someone's embodied when they don't have to prove to you that they're right.

Oh, the connection between body embodiment and humility.

Yes.

Yeah. Humility is a state of being, Dan. That is, it's an embodiment of God is humility. I like that.

And when we're humble, that's perceived sometimes with the wrong teaching as weak. Oh, so and so is humble. They're weak. This is why you see Instagram where it's like everybody's spray tanned and women having to show their butt for likes. It's like, what we've lost Our mind. We've literally lost our mind. Like, those. Those things don't make us valuable at all. Like, what makes us valuable is. Is this what we're doing? This is. This is val. This is true value because we can feel it. You know, it's not something we need to pretend. So I. I really think that true embodiment is having conversations about those two things and doing it in a way where I don't have to prove to you guys then I'm right. You know, I'm curious what you feel, but I feel strongly about what I'm saying. But I'm also. I'm still curious about what someone else feels or what someone else has to say. That's embodiment.

Yeah, it's fantastic. And you mentioned medicine work. You comfortable talking about it?

Sure, sure. Yeah. I might have. I might have a different opinion.

I'm a licensed psychologist, so I'm always careful because I'll take my little stamp a paper away.

Yes.

But I am a huge advocate for. And I want to get your take on. What does integration mean?

The immediate visual that snapped into my mind was in the Yucca Valley in the desert. There's this huge dome called the Integratron, and it was made by, I believe, an astronaut or a physics. A physics scientist, a PhD. And when you go in there, if you sit in the middle of it and you. And you sing or you speak, every single note or every single sound inside of the entire dome can be heard just as powerfully as if you were sitting anywhere else. In other words, it is a fully integrated, completely sealed capsule where all resonance and all frequency can be felt and experienced and heard from anywhere within that container. The same. And I think integrity is the same way when someone. And none of us are perfectly integral. None of us have perfect integrity and word thought. Indeed, none of us have perfect integration. But I think to take wisdom from a ceremony or to take wisdom from a psychedelic experience and integrate it here in the 3D reality or here on Earth takes an incredibly mature person and takes a lot longer than most people think. I don't know if you guys have followed Jordan Peterson at all, but he quotes some of the mystics that he learns from. And one of the big cautionary tapes that he shares with people before they do any psychedelics is be careful of unearned wisdom.

Oh, powerful.

Like, be careful of unearned wisdom. Because when people go into ceremony, you are opening up your psyche to energies, to entities, to realms that they are not to be messed with. Like, the reason why we have a collective shadow. And a personal shadow is because all these things are an aggregate of every human being that's ever lived, lives now and will ever live. So we have to be very cautious about who we sit with in a ceremony, what kind of medicine we do. I like to describe that there needs to be a preparatory phase for sitting with any kind of medicine, even if it's a micro dose or a macro dose. I'm talking breath work, loving kindness meditation, float tanks, vipassana meditation. There's a lot of things that have to occur, in my opinion, before somebody runs to a ceremony. And even these ceremonies need to be facilitated in a more safe way as well.

And I have seen tragedy happen by people who believe it's spiritual sightseeing. And there's no, no cost. I mean, you are waking up your deep shadow stuff.

Yeah.

And, you know, it'll show you how much work you have to do. And if you don't know how much work you had to do before, it is a nightmare trying to figure out what work you need to do to actually deal with some of the shit that comes up. And yes, so audience hear that.

One more. One more point on that too. So. So as a professional in mental health, we also have to be aware if, like, for example, my mom was manic bipolar. I'm the only person in my family that at some point hasn't taken SSRIs. And I, and I attribute that to epigenetics, both emotionally and physically. It always fascinates me when people say, oh, if your dad had cancer or if your mom had diabetes, then you'll have it too. I think that's complete horseshit. I don't believe in that at all. I think that genetics. Load a gun and then, and then we pull the trigger by either either exercising or eating crappy foods, blah, blah, blah. Well, I think the same.

Or unload the gun.

What's that?

Or we can unload the gun.

Or we can unload the gun. Or we can just put the gun, locked it, lock it away and never use it. You know, like. So I think epigenetics play this out emotionally. So when it comes to a ceremony, we have to be really cautious of am I taking the unhealed wounds and the unaddressed traumas of my father, my mother, or my grandmother or my grandfather, Am I taking that unconsciously into the ceremony? Because that stuff will come up. I had a very deep connection with my grandfather in ceremony. I mean, it brought me to tears. You know, he was an Italian American general in The Marine Corps, he was a brigadier general. And I just, I felt the suffering of what he and so many people went through that are in the military. And I'm just like, I wasn't ready for it. You know, it took me a long time to integrate that and the richness, the power of these emotions. Just be prepared. If you go to a ceremony, pretend like you've never surfed and you go and you hit 12 to 20 foot breakers and the next thing you know you feel like you're drowning. That could happen to you in a ceremony, emotionally, psychically, if you're not prepared. So I really want to tell everybody, from a safety perspective, make sure you prepare yourself in multiple different ways before you go sit with any kind of medicine whatsoever. Because I had an extremely terrifying sit on my 12th set of ayahuasca and I don't think I will ever go back ever again.

Wow. Was that the last time you did? I.

That was the last time and I'm still integrating it now. And that was almost two years ago.

Saw something you're not ready to see yet, huh?

I saw something that was necessary for me to see that I wasn't ready to see, that I needed to be slapped by so that I would truly see it.

Yeah, that's. That's a. Sometimes it's a feather, sometimes it's a two by four, but it's going to hit you.

Yeah. And it's funny because in the moment I reflect it with you too. Now I really am grateful for it. Like, it almost brings up emotion. Like I feel my throat constricting, I feel it in my eyes. So I'm grateful for the slap, I really am. And also, if I wasn't more careful and I didn't do any preparatory work, it may have fractured my psyche. I may have had true soul loss and there could have been a permanent psychosis if I didn't do some really preparatory work. And it happens to more people than you guys think.

Yeah. There's a injectable form of DMT that's no joke.

What are your thoughts on ketamine? Has this ever come up in conversations for PTSD for veterans, or what are your thoughts as a mental health professional when it comes to ketamine?

Yeah, the map stuff I've done, the trainings I've done, I think the potential of it, like any other tool in our toolkit, is amazing. I think there's a lot of Hammersmith going on out there that, hey, we have this new hammer. Let's see everything as a nail. And so I think it's still figuring out its way to be used. It's a profoundly helpful dissociative. I mean, it can really help turn off that default neural network in the brain so you have an opportunity to. To experience something that your ego or your normal function wouldn't allow for. What you do with it, I think, is where all the magic happens anyway.

Sure.

Breath work is a. I've been just as deep on the craniosacral table doing breath work as I have in any medicine journey I've ever done. So, I mean, there's many different ways to get those tools. My terror of it is that it's going to fall into the Western medicine model of here's a pill to fix it. And that, that I think would be a same thing with psilocybin, same thing with EMTs. Any of them are. That would. And I feel that. And see that happening with a lot of people that, oh, you got to go do this, where, you know, make sure you understand that it's just not a. It's not a remedy for anything. It's not a remedy. It's a tool to help you do the work.

But it's not the work that's powerful. That's powerful because anytime I think of something as the golden ticket, I'm putting the power to change outside of myself. And I'm. And I'm hoping, I'm willing it to be the thing out the external locus that's going to help me. It's going to help me change. Meanwhile, I am the only one that can evolve me by the awareness that I attract. But if I put my power in psilocybin or if I put my power in ketamine, then I think there could be some real trouble there. I think there could be a disempowerment, actually, with that type of situation.

Yeah. And that, that I share that concern. And I've seen it do miracles, though, literally.

I mean, yes.

Ibogaine in particular, I've seen that's usually an experience people don't want twice. So it's.

I've heard it's 24 hours of just brutal hell realms.

Yeah. You are taken to the deepest. You're facing your own death. And so it's a very powerful tool to bring humility to someone.

I'm not called.

No, I'm good.

I'm not called.

I'm good on ibogaine.

Yeah. But for those that have no hope, it's something that can actually really powerfully be used as a tool to put a wedge into their ego that allows them to see some daylight. Yeah, so fantastic. So breath work and embodiment, how are they connected?

You know, it's really beautiful. Is yesterday I did a live with a gentleman named Ben Stewart, and he was the director for the Psychedelica series on Gaia. And he asked me something similar. He was like, why? Why breath work? Like, what is going on? Why is there this resurgence in breath work? And I, again, because I've been pouring myself more and more to the King James Bible. I really. And again, I'm not a religious person. I don't. I have to give this pre frame. I don't think God is a bearded dude in the sky. I'm learning from these religious texts because I want to take the wisdom that applies to now. So what I'm about to say is, you know, in the beginning, there was the word. That's the opening passage right to the text of the Bible. But guys, think about this. Before there was the word, there was a breath. You can't speak if you're not breathing. Like, if somebody cuts off my airway, I can't speak. So before there was the word, there was the breath. So literally, truly, figuratively, any way you want to see it. Breath is life. And we sacrifice the way that we breathe because we develop these coping strategies to stress. We all become, as Dr. Belisa Vranich calls, we all become vertical breathers instead of horizontal breathers. So we have a society of people that have tight scalenes, tight sternocleidomastoid. Their pecs are rolled in, they're kyphotic. They're not breathing through their diaphragm. They don't know anything about how to take a 360 degree breath. They don't know what a belly breath is. And if that they most likely a lot of people are reverse breathing pattern people where on an inhale, on an inhale through the nose, their belly will actually go in instead of go out. I've seen this a lot. And in our breathe program, which I got really cool clearance, I did Dr. Belisa's training. I've done a lot of different trainings in breath, but I, with her blessing, created a program called Breathe, Breath and Wellness. And that's at Breathwork IO because it's changed my life so much. It's helped me so much with my anxiety. I have a tendency to be anxious. I'm a pretty tightly wounded wound dude. And so I need to really be.

We're wired for a sense of impending doom.

That's what it feels like. It Feels like that at times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Greatest I've ever received.

To that awareness.

To the awareness that it's that impending doom feeling. Experience in my body can be met with other feelings besides impending doom.

Sure.

And the contrast between that depth of hell allows me to actually see heaven, more importantly, embody it, feel it in my body. And I think that that breath work, that I really want to get into your breath work more. I mean, how do you. How do you watch somebody become more embodied? Or how have you experienced yourself become more embodied?

I'll flash back. I had a gentleman here a couple months ago and I have a. I have a PEMF mat here in the studio. I have hot and cold and then I have my. My catharsis training, which is the longer, more circular breathing. And I watched him come in kind of as a bundle of nerves where he was going through a divorce at the time. And he was really just traumatized, really sad. But he never had a channel or a way to articulate his emotions. Kind of a. A type. Just everything always on the phone. Everything has to be perfect within a good 45 minutes. I found that he had an improper breathing pattern. So this is what I do with everyone for embodiment. I lay them on their back, I place a towel on their stomach, I put a five pound weight on their belly and I just cue them to breathe. And right away, and it's about half the people I'll notice that when they take a big inhale through their nose with their jaw rubber relaxed, their belly will actually go in. So they're just. They're used to breathing up and into their chest. And so it took about 10 to 15 minutes, but I eventually trained him to breathe and cue his abdomen to go outward as he breathed in through his nose. So inhale, belly goes out. Exhale, belly comes in, belly button to spine. And that was like embodiment that I could see. You know, I could actually physically get quantitative results from seeing his image embodiment process. And then later on we did our hot and we did our cold and we went back in the hot. And I'm cueing him and I have a certain way of talking to people to where I really can just intuitively ask questions, much like I'm sure you can too, Doug. Where I'm not a licensed therapist, I'm not a physician of any kind, but over the course of my life and working with so many people, I just know how to pause and ask the right questions. And he cried. And I think. I think tears and breath are Steps towards being truly embodied, truly strong, truly integrated as a human being. Because he shared his love for his wife, he shared his sadness for what they're going through. And it was really like a huge catharsis moment for him. And then of course, when I brought him here on the PEMF mat, the catharsis continued because we had already had that safety that was established. So that's, that has happened for him just like it's happened for me. I've trained with Gwen Payne and Anahatananda and Neeraj naik. I spent 30 days in Thailand. I've done a lot of things to where I feel really confident and really, really calm about, about teaching others about breath because I've had so many experiences myself of out of body experiences. Lots of crying, lots of shaking. You know, as you know, we get the clam hands, the hypoxia that happens when we do these longer styles of breath as well. And so all this does is it moves the chi, it moves the prana, it moves the energy in our body that was essentially stuck, you know, all these meridians in our body, all the energy flow in our body. We don't get massaged, we don't get touched. There's not a safe space for men to share. Women feel objectified. Society makes money off of how we feel insecure about ourselves. Everything is so backwards, everything is so disgusting to me at times that it makes me want to be even more driven. Like that's, that's really the quotient for me is like, there's so much heartbreak in the world. Ever since I was a little kid, I, I knew that adults treated each other so poorly and I knew the world was really messed up and I couldn't figure out why.

Yeah. And my, my experiences are driven is, is why don't other people see it the way I do? I don't get, I don't get sitting in fourth grade, third grade. It's like, why don't you get how stupid this is, guys?

Yes.

What is going on here? And it's that profound kind of humble question of really, no, wait a minute, what are we doing? Yeah, in that though is incredibly motivating into purpose. And it is this. How do you embody purpose? How would you talk about that?

I think if you want purpose, you have to have self awareness. And if you don't have self awareness, you might live someone else's purpose and call it your own. So I think in order to really have purpose, you have to know enough about yourself. You had to have gone through enough experience. There's a difference between learning, experiential learning, experiential learning. You go through life, you get knocked down, you get kind of bloodied. Maybe you're an addict for a while. Maybe you go through broken relationships and blame it on other people and wake up one morning like, hey, the past three didn't work out. Maybe it's me, you know, maybe it's my stuff that I'm, that I'm bringing in. So I think in order to have like true purpose, there has to be, there has to be three or four things. There has to be emotional inventory, there has to be self awareness, there has to be a connection with a higher power of some sort. Doesn't have to be mine, just your higher power, whatever you believe. And there has to be the, the curiosity, humility that we've talked about. Like all those things have to be present because life is so complex. I'm looking at this behind you, you know, this, this bridge and maybe it's New York. And look at all the complexity of this bridge. I mean, to do anything in life, there's so many things that have to be welcomed in and have to be allowed space for. Otherwise it goes back to what we're talking about where I'm just white knuckling and you know, my, my drivenness actually hurts me. It actually becomes a disease that I, that I'm unaware of. So I think for us to have purpose, there has to be an honoring and a welcoming of all those aspects. And I also believe that purpose can shift. I think that purpose can change over time. Some people are lucky. Some people wake up and they know from three years old they're going to be a fireman. I was never one of those people. Some people know that they're going to be a doctor, they're going to be an astronaut, they're going to be whatever, and that's their purpose. Some people call it the God given purpose, but I think that purpose can shift. So the answer depends on a lot of different variables.

And the embodiment piece of when you're in your purpose, you'll stop looking for your purpose because, you know, it's just, it's finally embodied. So you're man. Anything you'd want to say to people like you at 25 years old before their awakening, or 21 years old. Excuse me.

Yeah. Or say they just had it. You know, they're driven and they're listening to this podcast and it's just occurred to them that they have that, you know, internal locus of Control, and they can do something about it. What would you say.

If I were to talk to myself at 25, I would tell myself, slow down, take a really deep breath. I would hold my own belly. I would teach myself how to breathe at 25. And then I would say, once you do that enough, you'll know the right path. You'll learn what knowing actually is. You'll learn what intuition actually is. Because at 25, I didn't have intuition. That was. That was razor sharp. My intuition was blunted by pain and unresolved trauma and addiction and all these different things that, like, you know, literally, you guys, if intuition was a samurai sword, it was like somebody had made the edge to where it wouldn't even cut. And so we have to, like, resharpen our intuition with life by letting go of what's blunting it. So that's what I would tell myself. And then also I would give myself a hug, and I would tell myself, it's okay to be angry. It's okay to be sad. It's okay to feel all these things. You're okay. There's nothing wrong with you because you're feeling this stuff like, it's all right. We all feel these ways at times. Because I never got that. My mom didn't have it. My dad didn't have it. Even school counselors and just people in general, they don't know how to treat the cause of unwellness or unrest. Most people only know how to treat the symptom. And so if a child is doing bad in school, what do we do? We put them in detention, we isolate them even more. Rather than having real emotional intelligence for children.

Or we give them a label and a pill.

We give them a label and a pill, we further blunt their own intuition. And we wonder why we have a society. Well, you and I don't wonder. Megan doesn't wonder. We don't. We. We don't have to wonder why society is the way it is. Because ever since we are brought into this world, we are programmed and blunted, and we are homogenized and packaged, and we are taught to buy things that'll make us better because we're not enough. I mean, that's really the undercurrent of our society. And I'm disgusted with it. I won't take part in it. And my mission, and I think all of us were here to make a difference in that way of being.

Yeah, I will say I've noticed, like, small little seedlings have changed, particularly in schools. My son is 4 and he's in preschool. And they actually have, like, an emotional intelligence curriculum where they call it zone, they call it zones of regulation, and they teach it by color because they're so little. So my son will say, I'm in the red zone, which means he's angry. And they teach them to recognize the zone, to pause and then talk with somebody about how they act, like, what to do next. So I thought that was a vast improvement from a lot of the school system stuff that even I had.

That's wonderful.

In the early 70s, it was. I mean, when I was raised in it, I mean, add, adhd, all of that was just. I mean, we were shamed into behaving.

Yes.

And, you know, that. That brokenness that I felt at 17, 18, 20s, you know, of really embracing my brokenness as the greatest gift I've ever received, that is that process of embodiment for me. And it's. It's beautiful, man. You are. You are. You and I are kindred spirits. We need to talk about driven's taking back the world. People that think like us, that get it.

Yeah.

I mean, creating a movement of people that, you know, we're biologically. And as you. I'll send you a bunch of books, you'll dive into my book. And it did. We are different. We are wired different. We have a different brain structure. We have a different genetic encoding, different reward system, and most importantly, we have big picture thinking, and we're forced to develop insights. But as you said, At 21, at 25, we hear that insight moment, and what we do with it is what matters.

Yes.

I love your. I mean, I love your model. And we are kindred spirits. And you are. Yeah.

Do you feel like. Do you feel like. Because I haven't read your book yet, but do you. Do you have a sense from your work that. That it plugs into Joseph Campbell's hero's journey? You know, separation, initiation, and return. Because I've heard that the hero's journey is literally for everyone, whether they're driven or not. But do you have a. Do you feel like when people are more driven or when people have that epigenetics or their brain is wired a different way? When somebody is born into a driven being, is their hero's journey more intense than others?

We have to go on it or we die.

That sounds simple.

Yeah. Because at 21, at 18, living in a car sucked. I mean, it blew bad.

Yeah.

And that moment of, I'm not this fucked up. I know I'm not this broken, and I'm not blaming anyone else anymore because the common denominator was me throughout. But then I put it all on my shoulders for the next 15 years and tried to prove my worth by education. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it wasn't until I got into the breath work of really, this embodiment piece is really what I want to have you on for. And you've done an amazing job showing that it is a work in progress and that curiosity and then being able to relinquish control whole and trust that the body knows what the hell it's doing way better than I do is. Yeah. And so, yeah, we. We will talk again after you read my book.

Yes, I'm excited.

We'll take on a topic of how that. How do we get more driven together that actually get the joke embodied and then really to start a movement of us to. Because I think we need to take back the world from the people driving it off the clip.

And you know what's crazy is they're driven in a different way, you know, these. These people. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist. You know, you guys, I've heard this joke. I think we'll all like it. You know the difference between a conspiracy theorist and a normal person? It's about six months because all the things that we were told were conspiracy and weren't going to happen. They've all happened. All of it.

Well, it's the way I talk about. About it and scary that it's going out on the podcast, but I'll say it anyway. There's three kinds of people in this world. And this is from Navy SEAL land. I know Mark Divine too, but it's. There's sheep, which are most people, and then there's wolves preying on the sheep, trying to get power. And then there's shepherds that actually have heart and are actually really trying to help the sheep. So I think the battle between. I think there are drivens on the outside that are doing really scary, unhealthy things. And, you know, I don't know, they really know it. That's what scares me the most, is some people believe they're really doing good things for the planet when they're, you know, doctors are giving pills to people because they want them to get better.

Right?

But when they're told, hey, there might be a better way, and they don't listen, that's when I want to choke people. So that's my own. So getting people to listen, I strongly support everything that you're doing.

For that alone, there's one person that I love so much and I always follow his work and I'm just constantly devouring his notes and his teachings. And that is Alan Watts. And he talks about in one of his lectures, I think he said something like, beware of the goody goodies. Beware of the goody two shoes. Because they're the signaling of their virtue. And the way that they know what's best for all of us isn't always pure. A lot of times people like physicians that prescribe pills or you know, people that say, hey, if you're not wearing a diaper on your face, then I'm not safe. You need to be safe so I can be safe. This type of thinking, it comes from fear, it comes from control, it comes from a contraction. And so we have to be aware of this and see it for what it really is. Because the greatest place for the devil to hide is in the church. The greatest place for self righteous people to hide is in a lane of righteousness.

Exactly.

So we really have to be aware of what's going on in our world and take a slow right now, especially cautionary lens on who's delivering what content and how are they being paid and what's the motivation, what is the come from as to why people are going out into the market and selling things and doing things. It's a really wild time to be alive.

Really is this world that we're not designed for but is forcing us to wake up. It's forcing us to wake up. And I think, you know, as driven people, we have internal issues that force us to wake up. I'm hoping that the external becomes loud enough that it wakes up even more.

But I trust in that. I do. I know it's not that I believe there's hope, it's that I believe that God won't implode on God's self because it's impossible. So we, we, we have to move forward. There's no choice. I mean, nature hates a vacuum. So we're either going to suffer this much or suffer this much. It's just really up to us to come together or not.

Right?

You know, Right. Josh, if people are interested in some of the breathwork stuff that you do, what's the best place to send them? Is it that breathwork IO?

Yes, you can if you, if you want it. I built a three week program out of all my travels since 2016 and all my hours working with myself and clients because I felt like in the breathwork world there's a ton of woo and I love Woo. I'm into Woo. Woo. But a lot of the nomenclature and a lot of the ways that people were being taught in breath didn't really gel with the. The everyday person, the practical person, that needed to know how to calm themselves, that needed to know how to deal with their anxiety or their depression. So I built a three week program for that that's Breathwork IO. And I would love to give a gift if you're open to it. Just a discount code. So if anybody wants to start on this path, they can do that. And it's just podcast 20. So if you use the code podcast 20, you can get 20% off the program. Just. Thank you for having me on your show. I feel like. I feel like I want to take this and I want to take this audio and share it with my community as well. Yeah. Because it's been such a great conversation and the questions you asked, I mean, two of them were like bomb drops. I'm like, nobody's ever asked me something like that.

Yeah. The intuitive in me doesn't know why I asked them. So we're good to go.

Excellent. Excellent.

Thank you so much, Josh. We appreciate your time.

You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

Have a good one.

You too.

Sam.