How To Love Your FEAR + Unlock Your Full Potential - Akshay Nanavati

One of my many mantras is, fear propels you to prepare. So when I have a big quest, like writing a book or going to Antarctica, I'll write down, what am I scared of? What's the worst case scenario? How do I prepare for the worst case scenario? Astronauts actually do this, and they call it negative visualization. It's important to actually visualize all the things that can go wrong, because now you can prepare for that. So I am terrified, and I want to be scared. When you play on these edges in nature, you get to experience that in a very visceral way. For example, in Antarctica, it is the most humbling place on Earth. It's massive. You are nothing out there. Out there on those edges, life is amplified. The volume of life is dialed as high as it can go. So the highs are as high as possible, but the lows are also as low as possible. And so you get to experience the intensity of the human condition at its rawest, at its most amplified. Out there, everybody has their own version of an Antarctica to cross. So if you really want to know the heights of awe, the heights of bliss, go play in the depths of the abyss. Go play in the pain cave. Go there, because it'll amplify the intensity of the human experience. It's how you feel more awe.

Okay, let's begin. Akshay, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, brother. Appreciate you having me.

Wow. So this was an awesome intro from our brother, our friend, Mike Dillard. And so I just love and respect Mike so much. And he climbs his own mountains. You're about to climb an ice cap at the center of the world. Let's begin there. How do you keep yourself inspired to do something that literally, which is like, no bullshit, no other human being has done? Let's just begin there. People are seeing this on the screen right now. You on the training regimen that you're doing.

Yeah.

Where in the hell does this type of motivation come from? Because I don't get from you. I told you when you walked in the studio, I don't get from you this, like, angry, ungrounded kind of like, you can't hurt me attitude. There's no knock on David Goggins. We all have our journey. You seem very different than that. Like, you seem very calm for somebody that's an ultra, ultra, ultra endurance athlete.

Yeah.

What's that all about?

That. So the birth of this desire to play on these edges, is it. It started when I was in the Marines. I joined the Marines, and that taught me the gift of suffering of Pushing myself onto an edge and to see my ability to transcend it, not just in service of my highest self, but in the Marines, especially. Living for others, living for the mission. The mission that transcends you. Right. And from there, I then started getting big into outdoor sports. So I got into every outdoor sports you can think of. Because before this, I was scared of everything. Scared of heights. So I went rock climbing, mountain climbing, skydiving, scared of tight spaces. So I went caving, cave diving, scuba diving, kind of, you name it, Every outdoor sport you think of. Deployed to Iraq in 07, struggled a lot. After the war, it was. Hit rock bottom from drinking heavily, ptsd, depression, was on the verge of suicide, and I'm kind of jumping steps. We'll come back to it. Just to answer the. Answer the question.

There's a big history behind a lot of history, the weight of this question. And I want to respect all that history. Slowly.

Yeah.

But I know I can feel the bolus of that history as to why it fuels you to do what you do.

Yeah. Because that was where it started. And then after hitting that rock bottom, you know, I started delving deep into neuroscience, psychology, spirituality. And I found salvation playing on these edges, pushing myself, especially in the most extreme environments on the planet. Because out there, especially in nature, when nature acts out of hostility, it is not with intent or malice. The hostility in nature simply is. It's not attacking you, it just is. And the purity of that, that isness, it allows you to be a mirror to your own soul. And so I go out there to essentially, initially, especially. And now it's just taken a deeper and deeper form and. But to open doors into my own soul, into even the human soul that haven't been open before, and to see what I would find, you know, in, like, in the movies and the legends, you have to battle the dragon to find the treasure. The bigger the dragon, the greater the treasure. And to me, out of all the outdoor sports, have been blessed to experience. And I've really. It's been a privilege to have tapped into kind of every one of them. Polar travel is more suffering than any of them. It's negative 30, negative 40, negative 30, negative 40.

Yeah.

But even more so than often, it gets compared to, let's say, climbing mountains or Everest. And when you're climbing mountains, you know, as you go up and down the mountain, the views change, it's dynamic, the. The terrain changes. You take rest days to acclimatize. Often the environment forces you into flow. Like when I was on Denali, there's a Ridge at 16, 000ft. It's so thin, you're putting one foot in front of the other and there's a thousand foot drop on each side. So your mind can't wander. Yeah, it's right in front of you. In that next step in polar travel, you're doing the same damn thing over and over and over again in empty white nothingness. For the most part, other than a few sections of Antarctica where I'll see some mountains, Antarctica is empty white nothingness. So the monotony of that, it, it, it allows your mind to wander. And that's both a luxury, but it's also a burden. Because when your mind wanders, time can feel. One minute can feel like a lifetime out there. So the draw, and especially now, why, to do this full crossing of Antarctica that's never been done before. Part of it has never been done. So you're playing on the farthest edges, right? It's. It's the last great unaccomplished feat in Antarctic exploration that hasn't been achieved.

Why hasn't it been?

It's very, very daunting to do a full crossing coast to coast with no kites or dogs. People have crossed it with dogs and with kites, but I mean literally. The expedition manager at ALE has said, ALE is Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions. They track and manage the logistics for every adventure in modern history. The expedition manager there has said anyone who attempts this will probably fail. It's that big to. To. To. To pull off a 1700 mile crossing and I'm dragging all my own food, all my own supplies, right? So I'm dragging £400 worth of food with fuel, all the supplies out there covering that distance, and 110 days of complete isolation for sections of the journey. I will be the geographically the most isolated human being on the planet with.

No ability for contact whatsoever to other people.

There will be contact. I have a sat phone, okay? So if things go horribly wrong, you know, you call them. Like when I was in Antarctica two years ago, I lost two fingers to frostbite. And when I got frostbite, we called, called a sat phone to evacuate me. So that option is there for most of the journey. There's only one glacier or where they, where they can't pick you up on that glacier. But other than that, evacuation is a possibility.

Okay. Akshay, why?

Why?

Like why? There's something in your heart and soul. I don't know if you plan to wear this, but it reminds me of Carl Jung's tree in his quote, where he says, you can't reach the branches of the tree to heaven unless the roots grow to hell.

The back.

No, I don't know if you plan to wear that.

The back of the shirt is one of my Fearvana shirt. It says, the greater your demons, the greater the divinity required to rise above them.

Yeah, and there's even a yin yang.

That's the Fearvana logo.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I. Yeah, you really breathe and walk your brand. I can feel that. And. But still, the ultimate question is why? Why would one go to the depths of hell like that?

Every big goal, I believe, should have two motivations, selfish and selfless. Selfishly, for me, it is an access point to enlightenment. When you go into those spaces, the depths of solitude, the depths of suffering. In that level of silence, you really start to hear. You hear God, the universe, consciousness, whatever you want to call it. You hear the things you don't get to hear. In the distraction of the world, especially at those depths right out there on those edges, life is amplified. The volume of life is dialed as high as it can go. So the highs are as high as possible, but the lows are also as low as possible. And so you get to experience the intensity of the human condition at its rawest, at its most amplified out there. And that while extremely hard, because, as I said, the lows are so low, it is a privilege to experience that out there in these playgrounds. You also, when I say enlightenment, to me, what that means is you get to see the oneness of all that is coexisting in nature. And here's what I mean by that. In life, there's a series of dualities that encompass the human experience, right? Life and death, masculine, feminine, pain, pleasure, ego, humility, contentment, discontentment, suffering, play. All of these, right? The fear and nirvana, even fear of honor is essentially two seemingly contradictory forces that do in fact coexist. Now, in. In the world, in conventionally, in society, we often demonize one side of any duality as bad. Ego is bad, the darkness is bad, fear is bad, pain is bad. We have a negative relationship to one side. They're not bad. Every side is neither bad or good. It simply is. True mastery, spiritual awakenings. Enlightenment is the recognition, and I don't just mean the conceptual recognition, the inner knowing that two of these forces can coexist and must coexist as one. Neither is bad, neither is good. You can be with and live with and embrace both simultaneously. When you play on these edges in nature, you get to experience that in a very Visceral way. For example, in Antarctica, it is the most humbling place on earth. It's massive. You are nothing out there.

When you breathe in the air, it's like, do you have to have like a certain temperature increase? Do you have to wear gear that increases the air temperature?

No, it is cold. Obviously your lungs just adapt. Yeah. You deal with it. You can manage it out there. But it's so humbling because it is so powerful. So powerful. You're small thing out there. When you're being hammered by winds, I mean, hurricane force winds. Right. Unforgiving cold, it makes you realize how small we are. But at the same time, you feel all powerful out there because you simply by stepping in that playground to control your reality, to be there, to survive, to thrive out there, you feel more powerful than you've ever felt. It's an experience of both power and surrender, control and surrender, ego and humility. All these forces. So selfishly, it's that tapping into that.

Yeah.

Selflessly. It's to bring back the wisdom from the edge. Because everybody's battling their own polar storm, everybody has their own version of an Antarctica to cross. And because I get to go so far out onto the edge and it is a privilege. Right. I get to, I get to choose my own.

It's not cheap. It's like a million dollars.

It's like 7 or 8007 58.

That's what this entire campaign is about.

Exactly.

To support you. People can actually sponsor each part of the trip. Go be with you energetically.

Exactly.

Pretty amazing.

Thank you, brother. Thank you. So it's not cheap. And again, I get to go there. But by going there, as I was saying earlier, right. You're opening doors into the human soul that have very rarely been opened. And that gives me access to wisdom. I'm simply a messenger for this wisdom. Like I wouldn't be here with conversations, having this conversation with you and many others. And when I speak without having access to this wisdom. So as a messenger of this wisdom that is, that is that you can receive from the edge. It's my responsibility and my role to bring it back and help others navigate their own polar storms.

Okay. How do you. So you're on this edge, right? And it's a pretty serious edge.

Yes, it is.

I mean, if nobody's ever done something, you have got to be feeling natural, human, rational fear. There's, there's a rational fear, right? Like, oh my God, is she going to like me? It's like, well, that's irrational. Oh my God, there's an edge. Oh, my God. I'm out in the middle of nowhere and there could be white caps that devour me or a polar. Polar bear come and eat me or whoever the hell knows. Like, that's. That's rational fear. How do you deal with the rational fear of your spiritual quest?

You use your fear to prepare. I actually. And with all due respect, I actually don't use the term, or don't like the term irrational fear, because fear is a. Fear is a response to stimuli that you don't control. So you can't just as you won't judge the liver, for example, as rational or irrational, it simply is. The subconscious is mostly beyond our control. It's entirely beyond our control. So when the brain responds to fear, I don't deem it rational or irrational because it simply is. Is assigning a judgment to. It has. In. In my experience of navigating it on some of these edges, it demonizes the experience of that fear. So whenever fear shows up, it just is however it shows up. Right. So for me, whether it shows up. And to be clear, you met my fiance. I was more scared going on a date with my fiance than I am doing all the crazy that I do.

Yeah, we're gonna talk about that.

What's not like kids, it's not exaggerating.

Okay?

But I use fear to prepare. So for the. With the fear for Antarctica, it is a reasonable fear. It can kill. It can. I mean, it's not a huge chance of death, but it's very scary. I will suffer. There is obviously a possibility of death, but I use that fear. One of my many mantras is fear propels you to prepare when you engage it. So one of the things I do, like even writing my book, fear of honor, I was terrified, scared. Is it going to be judged badly? People think I'm stupid. So when I have a big quest, like writing a book or going to Antarctica, I'll write down, what am I scared of? What's the worst case scenario? How do I prepare for the worst case scenario? And that's the ticket there, you know, in. Astronauts actually do this, and they call it negative visualization. Visualize all the things that can go wrong. Yeah, this is not just about like, oh, everything is sunshine, rainbows. It's not. It's important to actually visualize all the things that can go wrong, because now you can prepare for that. So I am terrified, and I want to be scared if I actually, every once in a while, if I start getting complacent in the day to Day, I will, like, activate the fear by reading a book about polar travel, watching some videos to remind myself what is coming. The storms, the horrors.

Yeah.

So I use fear to prepare.

See, the vibe that I get from you is different, though. Like, I've had on a pretty big handful of, like, endurance athletes and even extreme athletes, and they run around the Austin community as well. And some of them, I get the essence from them that they're almost like addicted. They're fear junkies, where they just want to feel that. That roller coaster, that high from, like, doing the thing thing. I don't get that from you yet. I liked what you said. There's no such thing in your nomenclature about irrational. Irrational fear.

Yeah.

I think to juxtapose both of those, it's like this. I think to feel fear is to be human. Exactly. Otherwise, why would the creator that created us, whether it's God, universe, spirit, whatever you want to call it, why would that be something that we all universally feel?

Exactly.

So there's a universal lesson for us, and I think we put different words on fear, like irrational and rational, just to understand it. Maybe from my NLP training or whatever I've done with behavior change and just understanding how the mind works.

Yeah.

It's like we want to so badly use our mind to understand the mind self, yet really, in order to understand the mind, we have to allow it to be connected to the body and the heart. There's no way around that. And I think we've intellectualized the shit out of this. We've intellectualized fear so much that it actually perpetuates more fear. What do you make of that?

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. It is a very just. It's a human emotion. And all these emotions, fear, stress, anxiety, guilt, sadness, anger that we label as quote, unquote, bad. Yes, it's the label of bad. It's the assignment of the judgment of the emotion that causes more problems than the emotion itself. The second you accept the isness of the emotion, become aware of the emotion, accept the isness of it without judging it, without deeming it bad, and simply embrace the isness of it, then you can use any emotion as fuel to drive you into something better. Because the truth is, there's no bad emotions. There's no good emotions. There's only emotions.

That's right.

It's up to us.

They're literally just guideposts.

Exactly.

They're just trying to get our attention.

And they all have value, all of them. Any emotion, when you consciously engage it has value to help you, drive you forward. Like, for example, even coming back from the war, I struggled a lot with survivor's guilt. And I had lost a friend to the war. Like, when I was in Iraq, my vehicle drove over an active bomb that didn't explode for some reason. My friend's vehicle, when he was in Iraq, drove over a bomb, it exploded and he died. Who knows why that happened, right? And I struggled with that for a long time. And everybody told me, don't feel guilty. It's not your fault. And I get it. In war, bullets fly where they fly. Bombs explode as they explode. You can't control that. Yeah, but the guilt wasn't the problem. The only reason I felt guilt was it was an expression of love for my brother. And even though rationally I understood how war works emotionally, that guilt was my love. Right. It wasn't a bad emotion. So instead of demonizing it or trying to make it go away, when I went kind of deep down this path, after hitting that rock bottom to heal, to figure myself out, I reframed it. And I actually, for a long time, put a picture of my friend up on my wall. And it said, this should have been you. Earn this life. My guilt became my ally. My guilt became fuel to drive me forward. And any emotion can.

But guilt and shame, if you look at Hawkins scale, are at the very bottom. I mean, they vibrate at like 50 or 100. So how do you take something that vibratory energetically actually isn't a sustainable fuel source? How do you. You obviously had to transcend that guilt and. And morph it into something else, because guilt is not a sustainable emotion to drive you forever. That's how people actually get sick and cancers from guilt and shame. How do you do that?

It's about using it as you need it. So as I said, right, like, for a long time, I had that picture of my friend up on my wall, and the guilt served me. Until it didn't.

Yes.

So it worked for me. It helped me sober up. It helped me write my book Fearvana. And then it became too much. And then I had to take that down because now it was too much. So any emotion, when you transcend it, so the way you kind of make it work for you, I'll explain it. You had a picture of Buddha. So let me quote Buddha for you. Buddha said, we're all stabbed by the two darts of suffering. The first dart is the one we don't control. So let's say, for example, somebody comes into this room with a gun I'm gonna feel fear. I'm not choosing it in response to an external stimulus. Yeah, yeah. I don't control that response. Right. I was working with a client, for example, who was going to Iceland on his own. He was feeling fear because he had never traveled on his own before. And the problem was not that the second dart is what we do with that first dart. The second dart of suffering is the real cause of suffering. That's when instead of. So instead of just feeling the fear, for example, with my client in. When as he was traveling Iceland, he looked at all the things I do and be like, what's wrong with me? Why am I scared? You do all this crazy shit that you do and you're not scared.

Comparison.

I'm a piece of shit. Literally, his words. I'm a weak piece of shit. Why? What's wrong with me? I shouldn't be feeling this. Demonizing the emotion, all of these things. The second dart of suffering is the real cause of suffering. And this. And what happens is unless we pause that spiral, right? And we all can relate to this, we feel an emotion. And even the biggest names in personal development say, anxiety is bad, stress is bad, fear is bad. That was what even inspired me to. Right. Fear.

Vana.

And to get down this rabbit hole to rec. To help combat the demonization of these quote, unquote, negative emotions. Because that's the first start. We don't control most of what happens in our brain. We're driving down the street, Cut. Somebody cuts me off, I want to murder that person that I choose. That thought. It arises. Most of our thoughts, most of our feeling, they arise without our awareness. That's the first dart. So guilt was the first dart. It was an expression of love. It's the second dart that gives us power. And if you don't step in consciously with awareness, with purpose, with intention, then you go down that rabbit hole of what I call second dart. S Syndrome. It's just that inner dialogue we can all relate to, Right? That negative spiral. Instead you pause. Got it. I'm feeling this emotion. It's not bad. It's not good. What do I do with it? You then transcend it. You then use it as fuel to help you. But just like you said, you can't use. You don't want to stay on that edge only. Right. I was talking earlier about the dualities. So if you look at the duality of pain and pleasure, or any duality, if you live too far on that duality, that's when it gets unhealthy. Even pain and pleasure. We all know comfort, too much of it is a bad thing, but comfort inherently is not a bad thing, right? I want to be comfortable when I'm not suffering extremely. I enjoy my comforts, pain and pleasure. Pain is not bad, but too much of it can cause problems. Too much pleasure can cause problems. So it's about even the way I navigate and prevent myself from going too far on the edge. People have asked me, right? Doing what I do. People who go too far down the edge in the world of adventure, they often die doing what they do because they push that line so far. Especially in Everest, especially in mountaineering. So about solo climbing, things like that. Exactly. The way I make sure I don't go too far down that edge is if I find myself playing too far on an edge of any duality, I'll go play on the other edge of it. So even with guilt, even with pain, for example, like, there was a few years ago, I went on a run, and I saw this sign that said 5k fun run. And I had visceral disgust at the idea of a fun run. Not even, like, a conscious choice. I was like, you don't run for fun. This is bullshit. Everyone should be suffering. That wasn't healthy.

What year was that?

This was a long time ago now. It was a while ago. I've kind of navigated that since. But every. Every run to me was. It has to be suffering. I felt like suffering was the. Was like I had gotten so comfortable with suffering that I was bringing it in all areas of my life. And I was like, this is not healthy either, right? So now I started playing on the edge of fun. Playing on the edge of play. Like, I would go to a retreat, for example, and they'd be doing dancing during breaks. I would be. I would like. I would rather do 100 burpees in the corner than dance there. So now I started doing fun things, light things, playful things, singing and dancing while I'm in the car. So to your point about why I came in and why I'm also light and not because I'm playing on those edges. So as much as I am about embracing the hard, my fiance will tell you I'm the softest person you ever. She was like, dude, you're way more romantic than I imagined. I thought you'd be, you know, some hard ass. But she was shocked at how romantic I was, how soft I was.

Where'd you meet her?

We met. Funny story. So a mutual friend introduced us.

Like, we met on an icy snow cap.

She so the first time we got to spend any one on one time together was on what we've now named the death march. She had just moved to Arizona and I invited her on this hike. And I hadn't eaten food in five and a half days because I was doing this extended fast while training every day. So after five and a half days of zero calories, I went on a five hour hike in like 102 degrees. And needless to say, things got bad. I got lightheaded, I got dizzy, I was nauseous. I threw up a bunch and eaten single calorie, right? She ended up having an allergic reaction. It was her first hike in Arizona and her eyes were swelled like, mostly shut.

She's like, what did I sign up for exactly? What is this?

So we got to go pretty deep with, you know, in that first conversation. And she actually heard on a podcast, she had heard that she's a big fan of Dave Asprey, kind of one of her mentors, and she had heard I was on his podcast. So she went and heard the podcast. And in the podcast I said, I'm more scared of asking a woman out than I am of going to war.

Can we, can we talk about that? Because that almost deserves a big breath like that to me. Even when you talk about dancing on each side, you know, the yin yang, the love, fear, like there's something in your, I guess you could say either epigenetic coding or life experience that is imprinted you to make you have such an extreme. And maybe that's something that you continue to work on, I'm sure, as we all do. But how could it be humanly possible that the fear of death by war, which is really just, I think, love trying to find itself through the ultimate form of chaos, that's ultimately what I think war is. War isn't poetic. War is the most gut wrenching, visceral, bloody, graphic thing, I think human beings, the suffering of children, what's going on in Palestine and Israel, and just the insanity that war is, there's still love trying to come through that. It's just a very low form of maturity. So how could that possibly be less scary than being intimate with a woman emotionally, physically, spiritually? Unpack that for us.

I had gotten very comfortable on the extremes of the human condition because as you said, war is. It reveals the humanity that's absolute worst, the darkness of humanity, the absolute darkest closet. It also reveals human beings sacrificing their lives for each other. Like love at its highest expression in a way. Right, Viktor Frankl talks about this in man's search for meaning. Where people in the hell on earth at concentration camp, cold, suffering, darkness. They would give away their last piece of bread to help somebody else. Like that level of love, the level of compassion in that darkness of hell. Right. So you see that and. And I had gotten very comfortable thriving on those absolute edges. Yeah. And the mundane was harder. So that's what. You know. It's not to say I wouldn't be scared going to war, but I'm much more comfortable doing that because that's an edge I play in. That's an edge where I'd gotten. I wouldn't call it addictive, but I. There's something very raw and pure about seeing humanity without the masks we wear in normal society.

Yeah.

And not just war, but even these experiences like Antarctica, when you see that the masks get shed and you see the essence of the human spirit, for better or for worse, rising. And it's pure and it's true. And there's a powerful nature to that, to experiencing that. That's what drew me in now. Going on a date. There's vulnerability to that. As you said. Right. There's a lot of. You're no longer as in control. You feel a lot less in control. There's somebody else now.

It's not just you and your brothers laying your life on the line for each other anymore for. For a greater cause. It's actually the deepest penetration of your soul and the essence of you as a human being that could ever possibly take place. If you're doing it right.

Yeah.

Which is what these ladies want. That's what they want from us anyway. So. So bring us through the stages of in. In intimacy with a woman versus war. Can you go in deeper into that?

Yeah. You know, I think part of it also stems when I was in high school. I was quite the goofball. Not very good at meeting me too. I was.

I was like voted class clown in the yearbook.

Got you. Okay. So I was similar. A lot of drugs as well. Just doing a lot of dumb shit in high school. Still have cuts on my arm. Burns from a cigar burn right there.

Oh, wow.

So very self destructive. Lost two friends to addiction. And I was like the way to prove myself because I'd moved around a lot. Moved from Bangalore to Bombay to Bangalore to Singapore to Austin at the. By the time I was 13, four different cities, three countries. As a result. I became very adaptable. But the shadow side of every strength. Every strength has a shadow. Right. Is impressionability. So not to Blame anybody. I take responsibility for my actions. But as a young, impressionable kid, I got very heavily into drugs. So my, My avenue for expressing myself was I was the crazy one doing the most hardcore drugs, doing all this crazy shit like cutting myself. Wasn't very good with women at all, you know, and so that there was a remnant of that, I think, even throughout the years that lived with. But also just nerve wracking, the nature of being, like you said, vulnerable on a date. And then there's this kind of this, this dance that happens with the other person. It's no longer just you kind of controlling your own fate. When I do the things I do in Antarctica, running ultra marathons, I control my own fate. If I. No matter how much I suffer. And I've even joked with this with my endurance friends, if I could just suffer in dating like I do in Antarctica, I'd crush dating, you know, because Antarctica, it's. It's on you. No matter how bad things get, if you put one foot in front of the other, you keep moving forward.

Yeah.

It's on you to navigate that. I have an iron will. But you can't apply that same iron will in some of these other settings.

No.

So it's a realm that I was much less comfortable playing in. And that's, that's the gift. I mean, when I got into this relationship with her, it brought up a lot of beautiful things that I wasn't confronting. You know, now I had been married.

Beautiful. You also mean painful.

Beautiful. Challenging. Yeah, absolutely. But that's the beauty, right? It opens up new doors. Yeah.

Okay. Because, you know, I've always heard that love can be like a rose. At times it's beautiful, it's budding, but there's thorns. So when you, when you hold love. Love. Love is not always meant to be this like puppy dogs and candy canes thing.

Absolutely.

Yeah. I'm curious when it comes to your fiance too, and, and she's here in the studio with us too, so it's, you know, you can't lie. Not. Not that, not that you would. Not that you would. Yeah, but. But seriously, for. For everyone who's with us, who's actually even trying to conceptualize the proposed dichotomy we're talking about, but it's actually not a dichotomy. War and love. There's. There's elements of humanity in both of them.

Very much so.

And so when it really came down to it, in your deepest heart, in your deepest core, with your fiance, how did you actually transcend or Push through or put whatever words you want to on it. That fear of vulnerability, that fear of maybe a place that in war you were comfortable, but in love you were not. How did you transcend that or push through that or morph that into something more of service?

As simple as it may sound, is. Is the way out was through. You know, like, even driving up to her on the second date, I had anxiety in my stomach. But her creating a safe space to navigate, that was also helpful. The second date, we talked about me going to Antarctica for four months. I was actually scheduled to go this year. Right now, I wouldn't be having this conversation with you. I would be in Antarctica. So we. This was. We've been only dating now four months and second date for like two, three and a half months ago, whatever it was. We. We were talking about me going away for four months. Do you kind of want to go down this ride together? Right? And I told her on that second date, I was like, I was googling what to talk about on a second date. She found it adorable because the only way out was openly sharing that this is how nervous I was.

So you told her that on the date? Hey, I was Googling what to talk to.

I was Googling. I mean, it wasn't like the first thing I said, but it's. It came up later in the day. Like, I was, like, telling her how scared I was. I was telling her how nervous driving up to her, I had anxiety in my belly, and I do some crazy things, and this was more anxious. And I told her, I just shared it with her and that. That sharing, she shared with me the nerve she felt, it created that space for just pure openness, and the fear got alleviated. If I got so scared and I feel that anxiety and I didn't step into it, I wouldn't have drove to pick her up. I was that nervous. I drove to pick her up. She could tell I was nervous when she first got in the car. We went for a walk in a Papago park in Phoenix, and I was so nervous initially. And on that same car ride right then, we were chatting because I'd been up a little bit, navigating some fears off Antarctica and dating the two nights, I think the night before, two nights before, and we got talking about it before we even got to the park. We just went all in, started talking about Antarctica, started talking about what we both want from this thing and going deep. And that allowed us to move through the vulnerability, the authenticity. You know, I can't tell you how many dating Coaches were like, you shouldn't go that deep that soon. And I think that's nonsense. That's nonsense. We went deep, and that's what allowed us to move through is pure sharing. This is who I am. This is the essence of my being. This is what drives me. This is what I'm scared of. This is what you're scared of. And we open that door and that, that, that's how we move through.

Well, it seems to me that a lady is not going to be able to go shallow with you if she's going to be with you. Not so much so you. Because you know the depth, the depth that you take yourself to physically and spiritually and also emotionally. Yeah, I mean, in every way. You know, the, the teaching that we have in our brief program is about the wellness Pentagon. So we start with the physical, then it's mental, emotional, then it's spiritual and financial. It's the house that we live in. Right. The, the two sides of the roof, the walls and the floor. But we start with the floor. Because you push yourself physically so hard. And I've, I've touched that essence. I mean, I don't have it. It's not my dharma like it is yours. I got you to push yourself in the way you do, to be an example from physicality and creating an entire movement around where, where can you take yourself physically so you can rise spiritually? It's incredible. And my dharma, I touched that a little bit. I did mark divine's 20x the seal fit the overnight where you do Murph with soaking wet clothes.

Awesome.

Kicking dirt in your mouth and people putting their boot on your back. And like, it was very intense for me. And. But when I was done, it wasn't just that the pain was gone as to why I felt so good. It was that I had learned to carry other men and I had learned to depend on other men around me and just like be in true community like you said, with the mask removed. Because when we're all suffering and when like 300 pull ups or whatever we did, I think it was a hundred pull ups soaking wet. After 300 air squats and 200 push ups, I thought to myself, why am I even doing this in the first place? My soul was guiding me for that deeper connection with other men without the fucking mask. And I haven't thought about it. It's 2017. I did it. And I haven't thought about it till now here with you. What do you make of that for a person who's feeling the call it doesn't have to be through 20x. It doesn't have to be through Antarctica. It can be through, you know, whatever their threshold wants to be.

Yeah.

What do you. What language could you put around someone touching the depths of their physical limitations that drives them to grow spiritually or heal in some way? Spiritually? Surrender, if you will.

Yeah. I think if you're. If. If you're feeling that call for that edge, go seek it. Like, Antarctica is not the only path to enlightenment. I cannot stress enough. Doing what I do is not the key. But play on your edge. Find an edge and play in that playground. Approach it with curiosity. Curiosity and courage are some of the core virtues. Right. It will take a lot of courage. The. You're not gonna. The fear is not gonna go away. I'm terr what I do. But go play on that edge. And it's not just physical. Go play on the mental edge, on the emotional edge. As you, I think you may know. I don't care if Mike told you this, But I spent 10 days in darkness, sitting in a dark room. That's right, seven days. The first time. Ten days in the dark room. You know, even emotional edges. To this day, I will watch scenes from war movies, knowing they make me cry because I struggle with that feeling still. But I go play on that edge because it's a valuable place to go. So if you're feeling that call, go play. Because when you know the depths of one edge, it amplifies the experience of the other as well. So if you really want to know the heights of awe, the heights of bliss.

Yeah.

Go play in the depths of the abyss. Go play in the pain cave. Go there because it'll amplify the intensity of the human experience. It's how you feel more awe. Like, as a very concrete example of this, when I came out of the darkness retreat the first time, Thailand. The first time was in Germany. The second was in Mexico. Okay.

Complete darkness, no sound. Literally pitch black.

You can't even see. You cannot see your hand in front of your face. There is some sound. You could hear the outside a little bit. Okay. But complete darkness. Darkness. Can't see your hand in front of your face.

Are you eating and drinking at this time?

I chose to do a juice fast. Both for the seven days, it was a seven day juice fast. For the 10 days, it was eight days of juice and the last day, zero calories.

So you're like, I want to go to the biggest edge I can. I don't want to jump through darkness. I want to juice fast.

Exactly.

While I do darkness, I want to.

Add some hunger to the experience as one does. Okay? Okay. But when I came out the first time in. In Germany, it was in Black Forest in Germany. They took me out wearing a mask after seven days sitting on the deck. So whenever you're ready, take off your mask. I took off my mask. And the way the world looked in those few moments, I had never seen the luminosity of the light in that way, moved to tears. And I remember thinking in a very visceral way, this deep sense of gratitude for all the suffering I've ever experienced. Because I realized then, in a very concrete, not just a conceptual, but a deep knowing what kind of way, that you cannot fully understand the power of the light unless you've first been in the dark. So the point is, whatever the edge, play on it. It's like coming. When you come out of a fast food, tastes a million times better.

Yeah.

Come out of a cold tub, a hot water taste feels that much better. To this day, I look at a night sky and I appreciate with so much gratitude. Because in Antarctica, I don't get night skies. There's no darkness. It's 24 hours daylight, a sun, sunset and sunrises. Night skies are some of my favorite times of the day. That's gonna be gone for those four months. So when you know what it's like to be without, it'll amplify what it's like to be with.

Dude, let's put a pin in the dark retreat. Cause that deserves a little more time. But before that, I'm just thinking and feeling what everyone else is probably thinking and feeling. There's something about your Dharma mixed with your physiology, your nervous system, that has allowed you to move through addiction, moving around. I don't know exactly what your relationship was with your parents. If you feel called to share that because it may have brought learning to you, then by all means share it. But anyways, there's this. There's these two folds of like. Okay, this is a contract for you in some way. Otherwise it wouldn't be playing out. So this is your Dharma. And you also have a unique physiology to be able to adapt to war, addiction, fear, in many facets. What do you make of those two things? Like, how does that play out for you now? And how have you seen that unfold for you to get you to where you are? It's fascinating. Not. Not every physical body, because of the life it's been imprinted with, either epigenetically or just coming from like let's say you were born with type 1 diabetes. Right. It'd be harder for you to do what you do now.

Yeah.

So there's some contract and there's some physiology at play here.

Yeah. To be clear, I'm not physically gifted. I actually have flat feet. I have scoliosis. I have a blood disorder that transports 25% less oxygen through my body that two doctors told me would kill me. In Marine Corps boot camp, it took me a year and a half to get into fight my way into the Marines because they wouldn't let me. It was a disqualifying condition.

What was the condition?

Thalassemia.

Thalassemia.

Thalassemia. So my hemoglobin is significantly lower than it should be. And hemoglobin transports oxygen through the blood. The doctor who cut my finger off when I got frostbite said almost certainly that contributed because you have less oxygen flowing through your extremities. So I'm not physically gifted by any stretch of the imagination. I'm far from special or superhuman. The thing that guides me is one, is a will that I've cultivated. I wasn't born this way. When I, as I said, when I was a kid, I was scared of everything. Scared of everything. And the spiritual journey of systematically working my way up an edge one step at a time. Right. I had great parents. They gave me a gifted life. We weren't extremely wealthy at the time when we were, when I was younger. Now they're doing very well. My dad's mom worked hard, but they had a middle class upbringing. Whatever suffering they might have endured, I didn't know it. So I sought out suffering. The Marines was the first birth of that. Right. And even the inspiration to do that. I was doing a ton of drugs at this time. I lost two friends and was heading down the path. I watched the movie Black Hawk Down. You ever seen that movie?

I've seen clips.

Clips, yeah. So there's a scene in the movie. Two Delta snipers, Gary Gordon and Randy Sugart, they're in an air relatively safe. They volunteer to go into the ground to set up a defensive perimeter to protect the second Black Hawk. They knew that hundreds, if not thousands of armed enemy personnel are heading their way. They had no idea when reinforcements would arrive. Both of them died. But the guy they died protecting, Michael Durant, is still alive today because of what they did. They received the Medal of Honor posthumously. For what? For their actions. For their valor. And that was the trigger that got me out of this selfish, meaningless, worthless existence. Watching the movie that Movie planted the seed. I read the. After watching the movie, the day after I read the book, Black Hawk down devoured book after book on military life in combat and decided to join the Marines. Gosh. And so it set the stage and.

The stage that you're about to talk about. I feel like this is why we all love movies, because we all see the villain and the hero in ourselves when we're looking at the screen.

Yeah.

I just have to say that right now because. Please continue. But, like, that is such an important thing. The reason we feel emotion, energy in motion when we're watching a villain or a hero or a story arc.

Yeah.

It's because that's our life. We're wanting to connect with that essence and remove this mask from society. We want that. We want to touch that. We want to breathe that. We want to feel that.

Yeah.

So please.

It touches our soul.

It touches our soul in a way. That's why movies are amazing.

They are. I love it. I mean, other movies, like Hacksaw Ridge was Braveheart. Braveheart.

Come on.

One of my favorites.

One of the best.

It's epic. But that movie. Yeah. It changed the trajectory of my life, you know? And so point is to say, to answer that question about the Dharma, like, I was not gifted. I started playing on the edge. And as I. Because when I first joined the Marines, I wanted to go career Marines, that path changed. So it's. It's an evolution that happened because I don't believe there's a self defined. I believe there's a self to create. And the. And the journey you take then creates that self. But through this path. Right. I've been through hard times like all of us have. And I took all those lessons, you know, to coming back to the duality, one of the most important dualities, kind of a meta duality. I call it the darkness and the light, you know, So I took that, like, how I now do what I do is I use the light. The gift that I've been gifted. I feel tremendous gratitude. Just a friend the other day, Prompt pointed out that one of your superpowers is gratitude. I didn't. Never thought of it as a superpower, but, like, I'm constantly grateful for life because I've also seen on the other edge of it, you know, but where I also use my darkness is I have not only been to war. I've worked with survivors of sex trafficking. I've worked with former child soldiers. I've been in a leper colony. Have people seen, you know, extreme poverty? I've volunteered in these places, I've volunteered in post conflict zones and all these things I've seen it. It made me feel like when I look at my life, I was automatically blessed with a million times more opportunities simply by being born where I was born to great parents in India. Look at some kid in Liberia that I went to who wanted to go to medical school. He was living in a tiny village. His parent has been. His father had been killed in the war, his mom left or one of the others, one of vice versa. But. But the odds of him actually getting what he wanted were damn near zero simply because he was born where he was born. I didn't do shit to deserve what I was born. You know, and as I mentioned in Iraq, there's many other times I should have died but didn't. So. Point of this is to say I believe there's a debt I owe for this life. I've been gifted and the things I do to serve humanity now to instead of wasting my life away drinking and being on the cusp of death on that point is to start paying off that debt. Now I'm not saying this is just a healthy quote unquote way to think. I'm not saying it's a right way to think. The point that I'm making, and people have said like friends, mental health therapists have, like that's not a healthy way to think. But the point that I'm making is the reason I've now gotten to where I can do the things I do is I use the depths of my darkness and the, the gift of my light as weapons to drive me forward. We've all been through darkness so you don't have to think the way I think. But whatever darkness you've been through, whatever trauma, whatever struggle, whatever suffering, when you choose to view it a certain way, it becomes fuel. There's that, that drive, that, that belief that I have a debt to owe. I can't tell you what a powerful place it is to go when I need it. Like as an example, I mentioned Liberia. I was doing 167 mile run across the country. It was about a marathon a day for one week to help raise funds to build a school and we run across the country. Day four of the run, I have this aching pain hit my shin and I'm about 17 miles in, try to stop it wasn't going away, so I started limping my way forward, battling not only the physical pain, but the psychological pain. Like shit, I have a long way left to go.

Yeah.

And then suddenly after about a mile and a half or so of walking, I start sprinting. And the whole time I'm saying things to myself, like, remember Neil? Neil's my buddy who died in the war. It should have been you that died out there instead of him. Suck it up. If you quit now, you deserve a coward's death. People are suffering all around you, like the people in Liberia. They've been through war, Ebola, poverty. Who the hell are you to complain? Earn this life. Earn it. Those last five, six miles was the fastest mile. A few miles I ran the entire 167 mile trip. Now, I don't always talk to myself that way. To be clear, there were other times it was just celebrating the gratitude, acknowledging the beauty, seeing the light, looking at how beautiful life is. But the point is, both those places are valuable places to go. And if anything of now that gives me the ability to do things that I do, it's by playing on all edges of the dualities of all dualities. That's why I'm able to embrace fun as much as suffering.

What I get from you is you're talking about emotional range and emotional capacity, mental range and mental capacity. So you can take yourself to hell in these slivers of moments where it's needed.

Exactly.

And then you can also take yourself to heaven. If you're enjoying, like eating an orange naked on a cliff with your fiance. Who knows, you can do both. Right?

Exactly.

And I think this is what's being demanded of us right now as men. Women are being demanded of their own things as well. But what's being demanded from us as men right now is to actually truly have more range than we've ever had before. Not just to be. It's no knock on Andy Frisella. I think he's great, but there's a lot of barking and intensity. And same with Goggins, and same with a lot of these leaders in the world where it's just. It's a lot of intensity and it's kind of all the time. What we need is range. We. We need to have trust in ourselves and in our leaders in the world that they can have that range. But there's also a set point in the middle that they can rest in. And I think that's what's missing from so much of the media out there that honestly, in some way kind of shames people and gets them trauma bonded to listening to that leader because of their own insecurities and fear that they haven't explored yet because they don't have the tools to do so. It's not shaming them.

Yeah.

And so I think the ultimate question here is like, what is the point of fear anyways? If you broke away all the definitions of fear.

Yeah.

And even look back on your life when you were a kid, like, what did you need when you were experiencing so much fear? Why did you even go to drugs in the first place? Did you need something different from mom or dad society? Was it part of the dharma? How do you, how do you context what you went through? And also what even is fear? Why, why was it there for you? Why is it there for all of us in the first place? Is it to source out the resources we need to teach us humility or is it something different?

Great. Yeah, great question. I think, you know, at the very core of it, at a very basic need, it's a primal need to keep us alive. Right. It's the fear of, of death. And evolutionary speaking, the, the, the brain wants to just keep us alive like I'd rather be. That's why psychologically there's the cognitive bias called the negativity bias. We're more scared of danger than we are attracted towards pleasure. We'll do more to avoid pain than we do to drive towards pleasure.

People stay in 40 year marriages, they hate exactly. From that we will.

So we will stay in that like. And because evolutionary speaking, it's more valuable that I, that I'm, that I'm conscious of the saber toothed tiger around the corner than missing a beautiful sunset. Who cares if I miss that? I'll still be alive, but I can't miss that. Right. So that's the core level. But clearly we've transcended survival needs. So what next? Now if you coming, like coming to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the highest is not actually self actualization. That's a misconception. What he actually said was self transcendence. So once we meet self, once we meet the survival needs, now we're seeking something deeper. Self actualization, self transcendence. Right. And then to, to, to go down that path, to go do something we've never done before, it means taking a risk. If you want something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before. When you do something you've never done before, you'll feel scared. That's normal because you've never done it. That's why I don't like the idea of always being, being confident to take action. How can you be confident if you've never done the Thing before?

Hell, no. If I waited for confidence, I would never accomplish anything.

Exactly. Confidence is the result of action, not the fuel of action.

That's right.

I always even like to say even belief. Like, I think there's sometimes weight. It is valuable to have belief at the right time. But when you are, wherever you are on your spiritual and mental journey, you don't need to believe in yourself to take action. That's why I don't find it so valuable to spend so much time, quote, unquote, overcoming your limiting beliefs. One of my many mantras is, fuck your limiting beliefs. Take. Take action. And belief is built on the battlefield. So you will feel scared. You will feel a lot of fear. That's why Maya Angelou says, courage is the most important of all virtues. And I would agree. Courage is the most important of all virtues because you will be scared emotionally, mentally, physically, Whatever this thing you want to do to grow in some way, right. You mentioned mental, physical, emotional, financial, spiritual, you're going to be scared. You want to grow. You're going to have to do something new. That's a valuable place. But you have to step into the arena. And then belief is built on the battlefield, whatever your battlefield, the battleground and the playground are two of the same things. So don't get caught up in the semantics of it. Right. Whatever you want to call it, step into the arena. That's how you start growing. So fear is the mechanism that will. That will. That you will have to feel to enter the new arena. And courage is how you navigate that.

I am having such a flashback to, like, five or six years ago when I interviewed Gay Hendrix on the podcast for the very first time. He wrote the Big Leap.

Yeah. Yeah.

And he was also in one of my favorite documentaries that you have to see, Akshay, if you haven't seen it, it's called Finding Joe. Oh, my God. It's. I think. I think they should do round two, and you should be in it. So, yeah, he said in this podcast, and at the time, I didn't get it. And then a few years later, it brought me to tears when I was going through a really dark night of my own soul. He said, josh, the way to actually live life is not to, like, create a life where you don't have any fear or things aren't hard. It's actually learning how to love your fear.

Yes.

Learning how to love your fear is the secret. And at the time, like I said, I was not ready to receive that. And. And I wonder how you feel about this. How I feel about it is in order to love my fear, I have to see my fear as good for me as. As actually part of the guidance from the Creator from God. Yeah, to put me on the path that I was meant to be walking. Anyways, instead of seeing fear as this, oh, my God, it's, I got to get rid of this or I got to push this out of the way. Learning to love my fear has come through my own spiritual maturation process of, like, dancing with it. And actually, hey, fear is here. Okay, cool. Let's do this. Also, like, let's. Let's get into it. What do you make of what he said? How to love our fear? How do you believe we can love our fear?

It comes back to a little bit of what I was saying is accepting the isness of it first without the judgment. And that's easier said than done. I get it. But the first step is becoming aware. And often you can just start by labeling the emotion. Neuroscience has actually shown, and I go way deep into the science of the brain and fearvana. But neuroscience has shown that when you label an emotion, it reduces activity in the emotional parts of the brain, the limbic system, and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex parts of the brain related to focus and awareness. Essentially, what that means is it allows us to create a space between the emotion and us as the feeler of that emotion, because this is the foundation. We're not our thoughts, we're not our feelings, we're not our experiences. We are the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, and the experiencer of our experiences. There's a space between what is and who you choose to be outside of what is. Awareness of what is. You can start by a practical way to do this. Set an alarm on your phone every hour. What am I feeling? Right. Especially if you're new to this. The more you practice it, the less you need to do things like that because it becomes habitual. Right. Awareness of the isness of what's happening, then acceptance of it. Acceptance. And then now you can choose, because it's neither bad nor good. It is. And this is so like if you. If you. The more you train yourself to accept what is, the more you can build around it whatever you want to create. That's how you fall in love with fear. That's how you fall in love with everything in the human experience. As another concrete example, you know, I was in the Arctic earlier this year on a training expedition for Antarctica, and I just been hammered by two days of massive Polar storms, lots of wind, just a lot of snow dumping on me. So next day I'm skiing, and I'm going up and down these kind of undulating terrain in Norway. The heavy sled and the snow is very soft. So it made it really hard to do that work. And I could say, I wish the snow was harder. I wish the conditions are better. Instead, I just kept saying, thank you, God, for these perfect conditions, because the conditions were perfect, because everything is perfect in its isness, for it cannot be anything other than what it already is. Everything is perfect in its isness, for it cannot be anything other than what it already is. When you accept the isness of things, you can now build onto it in whatever way you choose to create. That's how you start falling in love with it. That's how you create constructs of reality that serve you. And what I mean by that, to kind of build. To step back there when I say constructs of reality. Everything with how we view the world is a construct. Like, in the simplest way I look at this, this is a black glass, right? How do I know that? Because I've been taught. When I see this, this thing I'm seeing is a glass, and this color is black. That construct has been in. Is given to me by my parents, by the world. How we think about the world, primarily, all of that. Yeah. It creates the constructs of our reality. Those constructs define our reality. When we engage with reality, we're not engaging with reality as it is. We're engaging with our lens of reality. If I'm wearing red glasses, you could look at something green. The world's gonna still gonna look red. This is why two people can be in the same room in the same reality. And one person thinks everything is awesome and the other thinks everything sucks.

That's relationships.

Sometimes that's. It is. Yeah.

Two people look at a tree, and they see two different plants, completely different.

Things, because these are the constructs that shape us. But there is a pure, imperceptible moment between experience, between pure experience and the constructs we ascribe onto said experience. As simple as. This is a very simple example of the black mug. Right. But there's pure experience. It's imperceptible. You don't even notice it because the constructs are so embedded.

Yes.

But when you start to become aware of this, like when I really went down this rabbit hole, I would. As I was driving, I would keep saying things like, I'm awakened to the truth that all my reality is an illusion. I would see a red car and I say that's a red car because that is a construct that's been assigned to me. So when I first got down, started this path, I would become, I would practice training myself in every setting to see that how I engage with reality is a construct. And the goal is not to say constructs are bad again, they are, they're valuable. Right. But now that I'm aware of it, I can choose what constructs I want to ascribe to my reality in every way. Like even as you know, as an ultra runner, when I did it in the ultra running community, a 24 hour run is nothing crazy. It's fairly common in the ultra running world. When my family heard that I did a 24 hour run, they didn't think it was humanly possible. So in their constructs of reality, that's not even humanly possible. Now if you live in a world where this is normal, it completely changes the dynamic of how you engage with that feat because, oh, it's just what one does, right? So when you become aware of the constructs that shape your reality, you can now start to free yourself from the constructs that aren't serving you and build on them. Constructs that do serve you. To me, the answer to that question, the most existential question, who am I? There's no right answer. But my answer is I am the creator of my own illusion. The way I engage with reality is an illusion of constructs. So I'm going to choose whichever one I want to scribe by. I'm the creator of my own illusion.

When you were creating the illusion as a teenager, before the awareness came online and before the agency to choose it came online, most importantly.

Yeah.

What do you believe the lesson was there? And what might you or any person in your age or demographic might have needed then that you could actually say, well, I could still suffer in other ways and get meaning and wisdom from that. But maybe, just maybe, if I could fly in a time machine for myself or for another young man, what might he have needed at that time that could have made his suffering less and that could have still put him on the path and propelled him to where you are, what did you need back then?

Great question. Obviously, like you said, I didn't have much awareness or agency at the time.

And who does when you're that age?

When you're that age. Exactly. And my parents have asked, you know, what could we have done differently to have you not gone down that path of drugs? Yeah.

See this is, this is what I'm wondering.

They can again. They were great parents. It's not like I had some traumatic childhood, Right? Yeah.

But no, parents are perfect. I'm raising children now. I'm like. I really. I'm praying, like, let me not them up and let me love them as much as I can from a place of humanity.

How old are your kids?

Two and two and four months and six months old.

Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Very new.

Yeah, very new.

Challenging, man. I'm.

Hey, it's our own Antarctic climb.

Oh, dude. Yeah.

But the sun is shining.

Absolutely. Okay.

So please.

So my parents, like, for me, you have to look at the uniqueness of each child. Like, I had a lot of energy. I'm like a sled dog. I kind of joke my fiance. I'm like a sled puppy that needs to have that energy expended.

You have a lot of prana. So even though you have this hemoglobin deficiency, your prana is very strong. That's what I meant with the question of your physiology and your dharma. There's some prana in you that's different than other people.

Oh, thank you. Okay. Yeah. Appreciate it.

It's neither a compliment nor not. I'm just. It's an awareness. I'm observing that your prana is different. You know, we're around people that have more vitality than others.

Got you.

So that's there.

Got you. Okay.

So I digress.

No. No worries. I think that. Yeah. So channeling that, like my. My parents didn't know. The things I do now are things that one does. We grew up in India in a big city. You know, most polar travelers, polar adventurers, like, they're Norwegians who grew up in snow. I didn't see snow Till I was 14. And here. Yeah, exactly. You don't see much snow in Bombay and Bangalore or Singapore. Right. So I think channeling that into. Into those. Into those pursuits at a younger age would have got me down that path. Okay, at a younger age, like encouraging.

You more towards athletics or endurance, something like that.

Getting into outcomes, giving you an outlet.

For all that prana?

Exactly, exactly. And. And this is harder to do, but I don't think it's impossible for parents. Is teaching your kids at a younger age to be with stillness and to not demonize their emotions for them. Like, parents do this all the time, and it's not your fault. If you do it, what happens? The best of us, you'll say, don't be scared. Don't worry, don't stress. We always say, don't feel what you feel from a.

From a neuro linguistic programming standpoint, all that we hear is the thing. We don't hear any. We don't hear. Don't fear. All we hear is fear.

Yeah, the.

The unconscious mind can't process negatives.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that's actually like harming someone with. With the hand of do gooding. It's harming someone. It is. Forgive them, they don't know, but.

Exactly.

Language is power.

It's not their fault. And it also, to your point, it does that and also denies them the opportunity to feel this feeling, which is a very human one. Like if I'm going for a talk, like let's say my kid's about to go for public speaking, which is one of the biggest fears.

Yeah.

Don't be nervous, don't be scared. What is that doing? He's feeling it, then he's thinking he shouldn't feel it or he or she, whatever, and instead. Got it. You're feeling fear. Tell me a little more about that. Okay, let's talk about that. What are you scared of? This, that and that. Got it. Be with that. Just sit with it for a second. Nothing fancy, nothing sexy about this, but sit with it for a second. Let them build that space. As Viktor Frankl says, there is a space between stimulus and response. In that space lies our power to choose our response. And in our response lies our growth and our freedom. There's a space between the stimulus that first start, the thing we don't control of the emotion and who you choose to be outside of that. The more you master that space, the more you control your own destiny instead of being a slave to forces outside your control. Had kids master that, you know, and this, it's, it's, it is harder because neurologically their brain hasn't even fully developed yet. But this is far from impossible.

It's also especially millennial generation. In the generation before that they've been programmed from devices. So the limbic system is wired for immediate gratification at all times. So to get somebody. That's why I do breath work. And that's why people in our Breathe program breathe this. Because I'm like, hey, if you suck at meditating, try breathing.

Yeah.

Because at least you're doing something and you're centering yourself.

I love that.

Being in the dark is interesting. This is a good segue to the dark, by the way. Did you want to say anything else about what you needed when you were a kid?

No, I think that. Okay. Yeah, but that was.

That felt true because you have so much prana. It's like, where does it go? Yeah, it's either going to go somewhere healthy.

Not exactly.

So. So the dark is interesting and scary as to me. So maybe I can. Maybe I can dance with that fear at some point.

Yeah.

Because we're either running to darkness and stillness or we're running away from it. It's one of the two.

Or.

Or I guess it's three. We're ignoring that it even exists.

Right.

It could be one of those three. So there's. There's something within you. And. And my buddy Pavel Stuclick, he's done multiple dark retreats. Super inspiring. I think. I think our friend Aubrey's done a retreat. I think he was inspired by you, actually.

Hey. We went to the. After my interview with him. He.

He connected because of your story. Went to. So that's amazing. So look what. Look what your choices are doing. They're creating this ripple for other people to do inner work. It's beautiful.

And I'm honored and privileged to help other people on that journey. Yeah.

So then what was the purpose of you wanting to go to the dark? What were you running towards? Or were you running away from something? What was it?

Yeah, the first time it was. I was married for nine years. Went through without going too deep into it. My ex wife got kind of caught up in a cult and our marriage ended and I broke my sobriety when that happened. It's my fault, not anybody else's, obviously, because we had a great marriage for a long time and it ended in a kind of pretty unique way. Weird way. Right?

She got sucked into a cult.

Yeah.

Like in LA or something.

It was this Indian organization, this whole thing. And again, without going too deep, y'.

All need to watch out for cults. No, they're real.

There are. There are. And they do a lot of dark, terrible things.

And when you trust you're in a cult, trust that you're in a call and get out.

Exactly. And there was a whole journey in and of itself that I want to do is mostly her journey, not to speak about. But I broke my sobriety and I. And I do everything pretty hard. So when I broke, I broke very, very hard. And I didn't like that about myself. So I knew at this point I'd already written Fear of Honor, done a lot of hard things physically, but something was clearly missing and I wanted to go deeper within to find some answers. So I was originally going to go to the silent retreats. Are you familiar with the Vipassanas?

I'VE done the Vipassana.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Okay.

The goinka method.

Awesome.

2016.

Awesome.

Freaking hard.

I bet. Yeah, that's what I was going to do. I didn't know darkness retreats were a thing. And while researching, I stumbled into the concept of a darkness retreat. And I was called more to that because the draw to me was in the darkness, you're shutting off one of the primary ways in which we engage with the world, our visual sense. So even in the simplest way, I can look at that and see it's a white wall. But consciousness has somewhere external to latch onto. In darkness, you have nowhere external to latch onto. So you're forced to go within. And when you go within, you're going to open doors within yourself that have never been open before. And that's a very daunting journey because what comes out of those doors, you don't know. It's not all going to be sunshine, rainbows and unicorns. They're going to also come out as dragons and demons.

You might see the monster in the closet. That's you.

Exactly. And you're gonna have to face it. And I wanted to go deeper to see what would be revealed. And one of the other cool things in the darkness is that when you're in that level of darkness for an extended period of time, they say your brain releases dmt, so you actually start seeing lights. The brightest white light I've ever seen in my entire life was in a dark room. It was so bright, I was covering my eyes like this. I felt it was blinding. I was literally touching my eyelids. I couldn't tell if it was open or closed. I was going like this, shielding myself from this blindingly white bright light.

You feel like that was dmt.

That's what they. That's what they say from my understanding. And it's as real as the lights that I'm looking at.

I wonder what the purpose of that is.

And again, there might be a scientific explanation, but one of the things I've also learned over my own evolution, coming back to the duality, is there's the scientific and the spiritual, the practical and the mystical. Yeah, whatever term you want to use.

Yeah.

When Fearvana, for example, when I wrote Fearvana, everything was backed by science. Everything had to be explained, not only for others, but even to myself. I need to have an explanation. I need to have an understanding to it. Over my own evolution, I've started to embrace the mystical more. There's some things that, without explanation, I like that I don't need to explain it even to myself, even others. There's just a knowingness, right. Call it surrender to God, to the universe, to consciousness, to the magic of the world, to the mysticism. Exactly. And so I'm sure there's some scientific explanation of lights, but to me, the lights reveal what you need to hear from God or whatever you want to call. But then you'll see shapes in the lights, you know, and shapes like in the darkness. The second time I had what I perceived to be a conversation with God that left me bawling in tears. And in this conversation there was voices, but there was also lights taking shape.

What did God say?

Happy. Yeah. So this experience was magical and mystical, one of the most profound of my life. It was day, night, five in the darkness. On the second time, the ten day darkness retreat. And you can't sleep because what happens is you will start seeing flashing white lights. And it happened to one of my friends who's done this as well. So I don't know, I don't know why. It seems to be universal. And so imagine trying to sleep with transparent eyelids. You can't. Yeah, because your eyes are closed, but their light's still there. And it was really irritating me. So I was getting very frustrated. I couldn't sleep, I was exhausted. So I just sat up on the bed and I just started meditating and just said, God, I surrender to you. And I don't remember the initial part of the conversation. The first thing I remember is started in the lights. I saw an arrow pointing up. And I hear this voice saying, follow me. He said, where? Like where am I supposed to go? Then I saw this kind of white cylindrical shape forming right here. And I said, what am I supposed to see? I said, look deeper, look harder. And said, I can't see anything. And this, this light started like kind of this ray of lights went up like this. And so I'm literally, I'm like meditating, moving my head like this, seeing this ray of light. And I saw a sort of ball of light here with depth to the darkness that was like almost like seeing stars. The this universe above, right? And I heard this voice say, I am everywhere. And then this light exploded and I saw this bright green life, like green light crystals falling in front of me. And it said, and as I was doing this, my head started turning back here. And it just stood this green light crystals. And it said, I am life, I am in everything. And as it dissipated in front of me, it said, this voice said, I am with you. Now go. As soon as that happened for some reason, the intensity of it, I just start. I just start bawling. I'm bawling and bawling. And I think about my life. I think about the life I've been blessed with, as I mentioned, in Iraq, like, why do I get to survive this? And my mom has said from a young age, you know, she was like, you have a hotline with God. And I've been blessed to live a good life, a great life, you know. And I kept thinking about this and. Have you ever seen the movie the Green Mile?

Yes, I love it.

That movie touches my soul, too. Coming back to movies. So there's a scene when he breathes.

The yes, yes, please.

And he says. John Coffey says, right. That one scene, he's talking to Tom Hanks and he says, tom Max is like, do you want me to help you get out of here? And he says, you know, I. No, I'm tired of seeing the pain in the world. It's like in that movie, because he can heal people, but the curse of his ability to heal that gift is that he feels the pain, right? And I was thinking about this scene. It's always touched me deeply, that scene in my own life and looking at it, and I just said, why do I get this God? Why do I get this life? And I heard the voice, as I was like, kind of coming out of it, said, you know why? And I said, I don't know why, you know, And I feel. And I go, I feel so grateful for it, but I also feel so guilty for it. And then I heard the voice say, that's why. And I just started bawling again and again. This is not a paradigm to say everybody has to operate from. This is what happened to me. And to me, it's as real as any other experience. And to me, after this, I started bawling. I was then journaling it, to me, crystallized my life. Like the guilt I felt around my friend, this debt that I feel, that I owe, and that actually was really spawned in there, this notion of I owe a debt to life. It. That paradigm was built in there because I had the guilt before this, but now it was. It was turned into something even more useful in a. In a powerful way. It was like, to me, this God was saying, I'm with you. I'm in everything. I'm here. And you've been blessed with this good life. And the suffering you seek, the struggles you've endured, whether it's life thrown your way or now you seeking it is a price you Pay to access the treasures you've. You've gained. And it's your responsibility to share it. So the pain, the guilt, the struggle, the suffering I inevitably experience doing the things that I do. And again, I've been. I'm not unaware that I get to do that. But even the suffering that I've seen in the world, it's like. It's the price you pay for the life that I. The price I pay, Let me put it that way. The price I pay for the life I've been gifted with. And it's a responsibility to share it.

See that word you just said? Hit. Thank you for sharing that. That was so good. I remember that scene where he was breathing that. I don't want to ruin it for people that haven't seen. Seen the movie, but there's some power in that movie. It's one of the best movies.

Beautiful.

So good. See, here we are talking about movies because they activate our soul. Absolutely, dude. When I hear you say that word, responsibility, that's what comes up for me. When I hear you share and I wonder if you've ever thought about this. I like to like lovingly challenge my guests, cuz why not? We're human.

I love it, brother.

So have you ever thought about replacing that word debt with sacred responsibility? Or do they interplay energetically the same for you?

They have had a thought about some version of this because as I said, a lot of people haven't. Even friends, family, or like, don't like the notion of me saying when I.

When I feel debt, I'm like, okay, well it's a debt that I owe because I took energy, so I give energy back.

Yeah.

And that's fine. But maybe because of my own societal conditioning, because of credit cards and bills, when I hear the, the word debt and I don't know the etymology behind debt, but it like brings me down a little bit.

Yeah.

When I think, when I breathe into sacred responsibility, there's agency and power there and peace there and in love there. Have you, have you ever thought about that?

I get it 100%. I think if you had this conversation with my fiance and with friends, that word debt doesn't fully resonate with everybody. And I agree. Sure, it works for me.

Great.

It drives me. And I use both. Like you heard me use responsibility, you hears me use debt. And like there's different times and places. Like, especially when I'm deep in the suck sometimes when I'm doing the things that I do, reminding myself that I owe a debt for this life, man, that can drive you forward, you know, when you need it. So, yeah, I'm not saying that's the right way. I'm not saying it's.

Sure.

Everybody should think this way. It works for me. So I use both interchangeably. Like just the debt, the responsibility. Right. And it's also a gift. It's a privilege. It's a privilege that I get to do this, that I get to be here with you, brother. That I get to go to places like Antarctica and unearth these treasures of the soul.

No doubt.

It's such a gift. Oh, I could not feel more blessed for that man.

Okay, so when I. When I hear you say gift, I. I saw on your website it was about transforming our fear into health, wealth, happiness.

Yeah.

Usually from all the conditioning we've received, thinking about fear having any place to happiness is not valid.

Yeah.

Right. How do you make that. How do you connect those pieces that seem siloed?

Yeah.

But they're actually all one.

Yeah. Joseph Campbell put it beautifully. Right. The cave you fear to enter holds the treasures you seek. It's coming back to, like, we want more out of life. You want to experience more. You got to go somewhere, you know, and we're so scared of the unknown. So many people are so scared to step into that fear or to leap out because we're scared of falling. So I don't want to leap off that cliff because I'm terrified of falling. So I'll just stay static. I mean, was it Henry David Thoreau? Most men, and I would argue most people, live lives of quiet desperation because you can stay static. You can stay numb to the human condition. But we've seen. We see the effects. It doesn't take the rocket scientists to see the effects of that. I mean, even when I came back from Iraq, I was numb, dude. I was so numb to life. I shut off all feelings. When you open the door to greater joy, you're also opening the door to greater sadness. But I always like to say happiness is not the elimination of sadness. Happiness is the ability to find the gift in sadness. There's a reason why I still consciously go watch. Like, even with my fiance, you know, we've been dating three months, and I was telling her, like, life is so great with you. I'm loving it. I could not be happier. We have what. I don't use this word arbitrary. Like, a perfect relationship. I actually want to go into the emotional pain cave a little bit. So one evening, she was very supportive. I just watched war movies and started crying. And. And it may Sound crazy because life is so good. Why would I want to do that? But when you experience the range. Coming back to the word you used earlier, the range.

Right.

So you have to be leap and be afraid to fall. And you will. Fall, fall. I've lost fingers. I've gotten hypothermia. In a physical sense, I fall in emotional sense, spiritual sense. Right. Hypothermia, frostbite, heat exhaustion. But that's okay. You gotta be like, sometimes we need to be a little bit more like a bull in a china shop. Run into things, break ourselves, hurt ourselves, bleed, sweat, and you'll fall. But only in when you experience the depths of the abyss can you also truly know the heights of awe. The reason I feel so alive is because I also get to experience pain. You need the range. That's what, like, contrast gives life flavor. Yeah. You need the ups. You can't have a summit without a valley, man.

I can so see this relating to parenting with Kerry, Michelle and I and our children. I had this tendency previously that I'm learning how to actually touch my own fear in my body as a parent, where I see my. My son fall or he'll bang his head or he'll hurt himself, and I have this old tendency to, like, run to him and make them. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now we're. I think it's called rye or. I don't know, the actual form. It's something. Something inspired by Steiner and Waldorf, I believe, where it's like, giving kids the. The power of choice and agency to actually pick themselves up and then come to the parent.

Love it.

So now it's like, hey, I'm here for you, son. I got you.

Love it.

Oh, you. Oh, you fell. Okay.

Does that hurt?

Okay, great. I'm here for you. Come. Come to me and I'll hold you.

Yeah.

Instead of, like, doting on children, which. Which actually creates a generation of soft, malleable, effeminate men. Really. And there's also beautiful lessons for. For young women as well, right now. Equal.

Yeah.

But. But for parenting, it's like, wow. The same way that I parent my son and my daughter is literally the exact reparenting that I'm doing for myself, where I tend to myself without expecting someone else to tend to me and my own fear. That's really what this is. Parenting is the most powerful mirror that I think anybody could ever experience. And. And relationship.

Yeah.

Parenting and relationships. And also purpose.

Yeah.

They're all so potent. It's like taking a pill that you can't Ever get out of your body again? It's almost like. I don't know if you've done any deeper psychedelic journeys, but have you?

Or.

I mean, Dark Room is. Is psychedelic in itself.

I've done a ton of psychedelics in my. In my drug days, but they weren't conscious days. They weren't in any sort of conscious awareness.

You were just.

I've done one in since with the more sort of conscious.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, you know, once you buy the ticket, you must take the ride. You're not getting off the roller coaster. It ain't stopping.

Yeah.

And so that's. That's what it is when you become a parent, when you commit to your purpose, when you really commit to your woman like you've committed to your fiance.

Yeah.

There's no way out other than through.

Absolutely. Which is.

Which is what you shared. And there's like. Like there's pain and tears in there, but there's so much beauty in that. It, like, lights me up just to think about. There's so much beauty in there.

Yeah.

And. And maybe people that. That don't even understand this concept, maybe they've never even held their own pain enough to know their own beauty. They just never done it. So how do you. You coach people and you talk about this in the book. Like, how do you allow people to. To have the faculty, to have the. The choice point, to hold their own sadness, to hold their own fear, because if they can't do that, there's no gift they can't ever get to the. To the goodness.

Yeah.

How do you do that?

I do. Yeah. I do work with people. We talk about this some in the book as well, but I would say the. The core essence of it, and this is where it's so challenging. Like, as an example, I was very honored. I was on the Dr. Drew podcast some time ago, and people were calling in while we were on the podcast and.

Oh, cool. I used to listen to that when I was a teenager.

Oh, no way.

Adam Carolin, Dr. Drew. Yeah, dude, That's a big podcast. Congratulations.

Very honored. He's a great dude. It was a great conversation. And we were having live calls coming in. So a woman calls in, and she had gone through the Boston bombing and was navigating some post traumatic stress around that. And we were kind of helping her offer some advice. At one point, I say, all right, the next time you feel loud noise, I just want you to. Because she was very hyper vigilant. Right. Loud noises.

Yeah.

And I was like, I just want you to sit and be with that. And she goes, yeah, but that's really hard. I go, I know it's really hard. You can't get to the other side of the post traumatic stress without being with the discomfort of it.

So the point is, you've been through it yourself.

I have, but even that, like coming back to everything we've talked about, the judgment or the, the second darts, you know, When I came back from the war, I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. I was struggled with survivor's guilt. Hyper vigilant of loud noises, didn't like being in crowds. They were, I was told these were all symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. As I went down the rabbit hole of research and studying neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, after I hit that rock bottom moment of wanting to take my own life, I started realizing, and you know, that, that the hypervigilance of loud noises, it's not a quote unquote disorder. I spent seven months in a war zone where loud noises meant death. Hyper vigilance is a normal human response to said experience. So I started removing that identity of, of post traumatic stress disorder and acknowledging, all right, I got post traumatic stress. I don't control my hyper vigilance, but I'm going to refuse that identity of disorder onto myself. I'm not going to ascribe that to myself. And because that creates a downward spiral of who I am, that's my identity. There's something wrong with me. Yeah, right. Instead, I'm just going to acknowledge and accept and be with the isness of this. Got it. I got post traumatic stress. Post traumatic stress can just as easily be a source of post traumatic growth. But the thing is, and Dr. Martin Seligman, he's one of the leading researchers in the positive psychology movement, he went to West Point, the military academy, and asked cadets, how many of you have heard of post traumatic stress disorder? And something like 95% raise their hand. Hand. Then he asked him, how many of you have heard of post traumatic growth? Something like 5% raise their hand. The point he makes, which is 100% true, we've created a self fulfilling prophecy in this world that trauma, adversity, struggle leads to ptsd. Even here, when people, to this day, when people hear, I'm a veteran and I get it, it's coming from a place of love. But there's this immediate assumption that, oh, like, poor guy, he's messed up, there's something wrong with him. And again, it's coming from a place of love. So I acknowledge that, that. But we've Created a paradigm that says trauma equals disorder instead of adversity, equals growth instead of trauma equals growth instead of suffering. Those characters. Right, right. Whatever you want. However you want a term you want to use. So starting with is being with the discomfort of it. And that's as simple. Like if some. Sometimes people ask me after an interview, like, what's one action people should take? Go lock yourself in a dark room for an hour. Just do it for an hour. Guarantee you, especially if you're new to this, you struggle. Yeah. You will struggle tremendously.

Sit it in 39 degree water in a cold bath for a minute or two.

Do that. That's.

That's really hard for people if they've never done it.

It is really hard. Yeah, absolutely. Carl Jung says people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul. And our. Our world could not be more accurate representation of that.

Yeah.

And not just the bad things of drinking alcohol, drugs, or, you know, binge watching Netflix. Sometimes even the positive things. Working out. Working is just a way to avoid facing our own soul, dude.

The majority. I was a trainer. I was a personal trainer for 10 years. The majority of the fitness industry at that time. And I'm not in it now, so I. I can't say it now. I'm sure my buddies at Mime Pump could be like, yeah, it's still the same. It was all about shining light on others. To be in service of others, but to keep the dark parts of yourself dark. That was my role as a trainer. Like six packs shredded.

Yeah.

13 body fat. But none of the things of my own darkness or fear had I ever explored. Really, like, really, really explored. Because I was just using this kind of veil of being of service to others, which, to be honest, maybe we can riff on this a little bit. I'm sure you felt this. I'm sure you've come across this in your work. Especially. What was the name of your TEDx talk?

The ink Talk. I did. It was inc. Like India's version, Ted.

Yes.

It was around fear and fear of honor. I forget what they named it on the YouTube. YouTube. Forgive my ignorance.

Okay. It's on the screen. It's on the screen now. But.

But I.

There's something really special about this because when we have first the awareness like you talked about.

Yeah.

Then we have the courage to explore. Then we take the action to explore. There's magic there. I didn't know that when I was in my 20s, when I was a trainer. And I don't think people in the fitness space really understand what fitness and health really is. They think it's like you have this shredded stomach and you're super ripped and all these things that honestly just the ego loves anyways, it's not actually about true, true health, about true facing oneself. So I, I wonder if you've seen that in maybe the yoga community, the, even in, even in the military community. Right. When people leave the service and they, they have this tendency to like people that might follow Jocko or people that might be into just like physicality. If they're not careful, if they're not conscious, they could use that projection that their ego wants them to be seen as, as a way to cover up their own lack of or avoidance of having the faculty of facing their fear. Can you expand on that in your own words and, and how you see that in different communities playing out?

Yeah, you, to your point, you do see it everywhere. Like in the yoga community, in the military for sure. Military, right. Like you're not supposed to admit anything inside. You're hardcore. You just, you can't. Men shouldn't cry.

Especially in the Marine Corps.

Especially in the Marine Corps man. And, and now a lot of my marine buddies, we, we've all gone through a lot, a lot of, I think almost universally all my close marine body buddies have gone through some after the war and they started to see the other side of that like go do the inner work and be human. I cry a lot. Who cares? Like you know, it's not, it's not, not, you're not manly if you cry or whatever it is, you know, anything like that. So being with. But that requires the stillness. And I myself did that. When I came back from the war I did a lot of intense things. I went and did a one month crossing of Greenland dragging 190 pound sled 350 miles minus 40 degrees. But this was before I hit rock bottom and I was just going back to the intensity of these experiences to avoid facing my own demons. So I've experienced it firsthand. I now still do these things but I'm doing it from a very different level of consciousness. Right. So you, when you start going in, in that journey within and the greatest hero's journey is the journey within and when you start going on that you will start to see where those gaps are. Am I just doing this to escape myself? To avoid myself? Right. And that, that when that hits you now again you could do the same thing. So not to say stop working out or whatever, but you're going to be doing it from a Greater place of peace. Michael Phelps even talks about this.

Yeah.

You know, when he used to struggle with addiction while, like winning multiple goals. And the last Olympics he did, he had gone. He. I think he got a second dui, went to rehab, and then real confront a lot of stuff that he had as a father. I don't know all the story, but how he did the same. Went back to the Olympics, won a ton of goals again, which is like he had done before, but now he was like, I'm happier within. I'm doing the. The level of peace you feel within is completely different when you're doing it seeking as opposed to just running away. But you have to be with that stuff first.

Do you see this play out in any other worlds that you're connected to or that you play in?

Entrepreneurship is a big one, Right. People will work ass. Work their asses off on a business just to avoid sitting still. No doubt to avoid sitting still.

Sometimes when I'm in big cities, oh my God, especially in New York. I don't like going to New York, but I went to New York many years ago, ten years ago ago, and we were walking on that high line that's in New York, and I looked around and I'm like, God, I think most of these buildings were built by people that had father wounds. Like, I could like, feel it like, like these monstrous concrete structures that were just like judicing their presence out into the street in the boulevard. Like they were just. And that's not to say that all entrepreneurs, you can be a conscious entrepreneur, you know, Alex Charfen, one of my, One of my friends, just sitting here crying and laughing at the table, like, that's how you do it.

Yeah.

And so. And making millions of dollars, like, you can have it all as long as you're willing to have the tree roots and the branches.

Yeah.

If you're willing to go there. But in New York, I'm like, man, so many of these buildings were built by men that just wanted to, like, dominate and crush the competition. And this old school energy, some people call it the patriarchy. You can put whatever words you want on it, but there's this old school energy, this unconscious energy of like, like completion and finiteness and control and dominance and power that I think all of us have felt as men.

Yeah.

And. And I wonder how you've. I wonder how you've matriculated away from that, but also still use that inside of you in a conscious way. How do you do that?

I think to that point, great question is confronting the Shadow side of power. I firmly believe that's one of the core reasons for piss poor leadership conflict is the inability to confront the dark side of power. I think we all have a need for power, right? And we all have it to confront the shadow side of that. Because if you don't, it drives you in a lot of the horrific things we see and we've done. So like Carl Jung also says, one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. So going into that shadow work of your drive for power and when it shows up, use it. That's the second, there's a second dart kind of to that power. Right. Ultimately the greatest power is power over the self, of course, but we all have a power. So sometimes, for example, using that darkness, like when I'm thinking about Antarctica, I have my fuel of all the reasons I want to do it. The whys I shared with you, I think about people who've supported me. That's a huge fuel for me, right? The amount of people coming together to support it.

Oh yeah, all the donations, the donations.

The amount of people, it's like, oh man, I feel so grateful. These guys are giving their, their emotions, their money, their support, their time, their effort, energy. But sometimes I also go into the place of all those people who don't believe in me, all those people who said they'd support me and don't. Oh man, just fucking wait. Wait till I pull this shit off and you're going to come to me, right? So I'm not saying I live there. You're like, that's the dark side.

Watch me.

Exactly, yeah, exactly. So the dark side of the power. Because now I've brought it to the surface. One of our mutual friends we were just talking about before, Michael Gervais, one of the leading sports psychologist, peak performance psychologists. One brilliant man. I love this guy, super brilliant. He says, never trust somebody who's all light. I heard him say that an interview once and I loved it because the point is, and I've seen this especially in the woo woo spiritual space, people who, who are like, I'm all light, I'm all good. And you see the shadows rise in their behavior and they're not even fully aware of it. You see the darkness that they have, but they're not fully aware of it, no doubt. So when you've confronted it now it's a tool that you can access at conscious, with consciousness at will without letting it control you. And that I think is especially the dark side of power of Our desire for it. Go into those spaces, and that's how you don't let it control you and lead to the lot of the shit we see in the world today, man.

Dude, I. I was maybe in the beginning of my spiritual path in my early 20s.

Yeah.

And I sold everything I owned and I moved to Hawaii and I started to just access feminine energy there. I never had any construct. My mom was manic bipolar when I grew up. My dad was really rough relationship with my dad. And so I just wanted peace. I was seeking peace. I just wanted to live my life well. Which is honestly the core mission of our company, by the way. And this podcast, Wellness and Wisdom, is about giving people access and tools to resources that they actually have in them and outside of them so they can live their life well. Part of that is actually accessing their fear, which is why I'm glad you're here.

Yeah. But.

But I was starting to go on this journey, and I'm like, oh, I don't even know what feminine energy is. Like, what is this, like, feeling thing? I'd never actually felt stuff. It just wasn't a thing for me.

Me.

And I got to this place when I was in Hawaii, and I eventually became a trainer, and I. I started to feel like just this pretending. I was just fucking pretending to be someone all the time. And I think a lot of people struggle with this. I actually had someone close to us who helps the family out. And she asked me, like, how do you find your purpose? And I told her something that I wished I would have heard. I said, you know, the way you feel about something when it comes to you, like a breadcrumb from God or a person that comes into your life, or just a lesson that you learn, you know, how you feel about that. Either, like, it pulls you towards it or it pulls you away. Do you ever ignore that? And she was like, yeah. I'm like, don't ignore that anymore. If you just follow that, you're gonna find your way. Maybe with some suffering. Absolutely. Absolutely. With some suffering.

Yeah. Yeah. But.

But you're gonna. You're gonna at least be. Be finding your way maybe faster.

Yeah.

And maybe having a fuller, richer life.

Yeah.

By. By listening to that case in point. Question to you. How do you honestly, your. Your body, when your body and your unconscious mind, which are connected in the same. When they're starting to tell you certain things. I get it. On a. On a Antarctica trip, you may not be able to just, like, listen to that. You may have to access, like, the debt that you owe. But how do you. How do you live in both worlds of, like, honoring your physical body and also honoring these breadcrumbs and. And the knowingness of the isness that you describe?

Yeah.

How do you. How do you hold both of those? That.

That can.

Seems. Seems to be challenging in our modern world.

Yeah. It comes back to the duality of navigating these two, like you said, kind of seemingly contradictory forces. So, for example, to embrace the mysticism and to trust, to surrender to the universe, to God speaking to me. So I'm a giant control freak, or at least I was more so than I am now. World is in my hands. I control my fate. Everything is in my control. Right. So I was like, all right, that's.

Clearly not working until you're in a relationship.

Exactly, exactly.

It's all love.

So to play on the other edge of surrender, what I started doing was I carried a little notebook. And every time something mystical happened, like, you know, there's. Like you said, there's breadcrumbs, there's things.

That happen, undeniable things where you're like.

Paulo Coelho calls it an alchemist. Exactly. I would write it down. And now what I'm doing is building an arsenal of references, an arsenal of evidence to validate there's mysticism to the universe. And that's how allowed me to start trusting it more. Because every. At any point in life, I'm looking at a duality causing me friction, and I'll go play on the other edge of it. So I mentioned earlier, fun, Right. I struggled a lot with fun or with play. Go play on the other edge of that. Because I was so good at suffering. I was. I was great at control, but I was kind of bad at surrender. So I started playing on the edge of surrender. And that was one tool, actionable way. I started doing that to embrace the mysticism, to start connecting more with the mysticism of the universe and then even allowing yourself to feel it within. Right. To trust that stillness. Like when I was in the Arctic earlier this year on an expedition, the last day I didn't want to come back to, it was supposed to be like the last day. I didn't want to come back to civilization yet. So I just went and sat there in this beautiful landscape and just sat there and meditated. And I remember asking, I was having this dialogue, you know, God, what do you need to hear from what do I need right now? What message do you have from me? And I said, you know, nothing. Just be. And the point that I'm making is like there was a time when if I had this dialogue with myself, the response I would hear, I would question, is that just me talking, is that like my own paradigms, is that my own constructs? And then you go down this rabbit hole of the self convers, where is that coming from? I've learned through more life experience, through being still is. Alright, I'm gonna hear that. Call it what you want, call it consciousness, God again, the universe speaking to you. I'm just gonna actually trust that the response that I have to this question, that came from within, wherever it came from, I'm gonna actually trust in it. And that comes with practice, right? It comes with training in that and then having space for more of that. We get very distracted. And it happens to me. I was just talking to my fiance about this like two days ago and I feel like I'm. I'm getting so caught up in work of like fundraising and all this kind of stuff in life that I haven't been as silent with myself recently to, to hear that voice.

Yeah.

And that knowingness and that trust. So. Got it. Now that I'm aware of that, let me take some time for that. You know, how do you do that?

How do you, how do you take with everything that you're juggling? Interviews, book writing, relationship, physical training to cross the ice cap.

Exactly.

How do you, how do you hold yourself in all of this?

The, the. Actually the way I get that time is through the physical training, tire dragging. So my core training for Antarctica is I have a very heavy truck tire that I drag around parks in Scottsdale for hours on end. Like two couple of weeks ago it was my 39th birthday. So to celebrate my 39th birthday I did a 39 hour endurance week that ended with three back to back nine hour endurance days. Two of them were nine hours of tire dragging and then a nine hour hike. When you're tired dragging, you're moving extremely slow, mind numbingly slow.

Oh yeah.

Gives you a lot of time to think. It gives you a lot of time to be with yourself, to be with your mind, to think, to have that dialogue with yourself, with God. And so it's a beautiful time to just access that stillness.

Dude, what's your nutrition like? How are you fueling yourself for all of this stuff?

Right now I'm just trying to get very fat. It's a weird.

So lots of fat.

A lot, a lot of fats right now.

What is it?

Yeah, avocados. I'm actually, I was doing this for a little while, stopped and now about to start doing it just drinking straight oil. Because polar travel is a very unique beast to train for. You have to train strength. To drag a 400 pound sled, you need to be very strong. You have to train endurance to do this for 12 hours a day and you have to do it all while you're fat. None of these three things go together because on expedition you're going to lose a ton of weight.

Yeah.

Just nature the beast.

How much weight do you think you'll lose?

I think in Antarctica my goal is to get to 180 and I fairly certain I'll lose £40 at the minimum. Wow. Because I you're, I mean I'm gonna be eating 61 to 6,600 calories a day and I'll be burning 8 to 10,000. So from day one out there, I'll be at a calorie.

What are you eating out there? Like what, what is it out there?

On breakfast and dinner will be freeze dried meals with butter powder. One of my friends is a supplement formula designer master at his craft. He created a custom supplement for me. Like a beast of a supplement for.

What's his name?

Trent.

Oh, cool.

Jackson. Yeah. He's runs a company called Pure Formance Nutrition.

Okay.

So awesome dude. Really good friend. Like my brother, he actually created fear of honor fuel which I've shown you as well. That's kind of a normal life version of this.

Yeah.

This is kind of that on steroids for Antarctica. That's part of it. And then on the go while I'm skiing is macadamia nuts and chocolates.

Ah.

So very few foods that are very heavy in calories.

Yeah.

And even that, I mean it took months of research to nail this nutrition plan down because I had to find how do I get the most calories while hitting certain macronutrient targets to be as light as possible. And that was a lot of work to go into that detail. Like as an example, on previous expeditions I would eat cheese and salami. Great. Feels good, nutritious. But cheese, just throwing out numbers. It might have 10 grams worth of protein, fats and carbs, but for that 10 grams, that serving might be 18 grams. So that's highly weight inefficient. So now I looked at foods that have a really solid macro weight to actual weight ratio ratio in order to. Because I'm carrying all my own food. Yeah, right. Yeah. So going into that to come up with this plan to get as many calories as well as 70, 70 to 73 of those calories will be from fat because fat is more weight efficient. Right. Nine calories per gram instead of four. Okay. So doing that. And part of it will be drinking straight oil out there. One of my great morale foods is jalapeno chips. When I come back after a long day of skiing and I set up my tent, you have to boil snow for water before I eat my dinner. Yeah, my favorite, like morale is just jalapeno chips. And dude, I can't tell you how good they taste after a long day of skiing.

So are you bringing. You're obviously bringing a firearm.

No, there's.

You're not.

There's no life down there. There's. Polar bears are only in the Arctic. So yeah, no firearm needed. No firearm needed. There's only penguins in one corner of Antarctica.

But you could, you could box with a penguin.

Exactly. I can handle myself there.

You're not worried about a penguin.

But I won't see any life. The only time I'll see even human interaction briefly will be at the South Pole.

Okay, so you, you obviously must have some kind of. Of on screen. Heads up. GPS to guide you through whiteouts.

No, when you're, when you're, when you're in a whiteout, which I inevitably will be. Okay, you actually have a compass harness. So you'll set a GPS for that. You know, go there, whatever that waypoint or that target. And then the compass harness, you set the bearing. And it's mind numbing, this feat. But you just. Your whole job is staring at that compass to keep the red, the arrow in the, in the right place to make sure you're moving in the right direction. Cool. It is very disorienting in a white out. It often feels like you're just moving in a circle.

Right, right.

Extremely disorienting.

I've heard about this. And there's no way to train for that disorientation.

Or is there, other than just being in a whiteout? So that's why I've done a lot of expeditions. I've done a ton of expeditions to prepare for this.

How many total?

Man, I can't. I mean, if you count mountaineering, more.

Than I can even just guessing hundreds.

I mean, over the years, maybe not hundreds, but like a lot. Yeah. Including mountaineering in polar realm. Now, obviously my main focus is polar. So I was in the Arctic earlier this year. I've been to the Arctic a few times before. I've done a crossing of Greenland. Been to Antarctica last. Two years ago I was in Antarctica. Me and my team became one of only 26 people to ski up a very remote glacier up there, after which I got the frostbite and then to get evacuated. So, you know, been on a series of expeditions and now I'm going to Minnesota this winter for another, my kind of final time on ice before Antarctica next year. Yeah.

Okay. So people can get involved with this on a visceral level, which I think is really cool. The URL is on screen right now and it is great. SoulCrossing.com.

Yes, sir.

I love this. I'm totally going to throw down for.

You, by the way.

I want to be energetically attached to your journey when you're out there, like eating your macadamias and chocolates and I'll be in like a warm place eating my dark chocolate. No, but I think, think you know what's really refreshing about you that I. I really didn't know and I. I had the sense and I knew when we got connected that it was something special. But I really appreciate and respect and honestly, I just love when people show up like this, that it's not about rage and it's not about hardcore domination. It's not about pushing yourself just because why the not like this kind of narrative that's really unconscious. And it. It's not that it triggers me. It just reminds me of how I used to be and it reminds me of how I used to treat people. And I just want to, like, respect and acknowledge the fact that you're doing the hardest shit on the planet. And you're doing it from a place of just wanting to know the self, wanting to know God, wanting to know the dark and light, wanting to just explore the potential of that. It's such a juxtaposition to how you used to explore. So maybe let's end with this contrast. Take us back in a time machine how you used to explore. You even said when you were writing the book the fear of honor business was launching, that you actually were still battling the demon of addiction at that time. So that was a way different exploration than the exploration you're in now. What's the old fuel source? What's the new fuel source?

The. At the core level, the old fuel source was pure escaping escapism. I mean, I even went to grad school in journalism so I could go back to work war as a combat journalist. Because I wanted to go back to, ironically, the peace of war, to the brotherhood, to not just part of the brotherhood, but that's even why I went to Greenland is because there is a strange kind of Peace you get in the most intense environments on earth, including war. Right. Because a war, for example, meets some of the core human needs. You get tribal needs at the deepest level.

Yeah.

Brotherhood. Separate from the politics of the war in Iraq. We actually. We're trying to do good for the people separate from all the politics and all the nonsense that went into it. We were trying to help the people. So you're doing something noble in with the brotherhood. Life is dialed up at a high intensity. Right. So you're feeling the intensity of life. Because you're in war, the masks are often shed because of the intensity of said experience. So you're getting connection, you're getting purpose, you're getting life amplified, man. It's so raw, it's so pure, it's so powerful. One of the many reasons why. But I believe one of the core reasons why a lot of people struggle. So I was seeking that. That's even why I went to Greenland. I wanted to go back to intensity, where I find I don't have to deal with anything else. I find peace in that. And inevitably it showed up. Like, I remember one day I was skiing in Greenland, just crying while I was skiing because the thinking about my brother in the war and just show. So it showed up in the stillness of that. But I was just escaping now, as you said, now I'm seeking. Now I'm seeking God. I'm seeking new treasures, new awakenings to find what else? Like, people have asked me, who will you be on the other side of entire Antarctica? I don't know. But that's part of the draw, is the curiosity to go find out. To create something, to build something for myself within and then to bring that to others, to share that wisdom with others about who we all are and who we can create when we. When we choose to. When we do it with consciousness.

Well, you brought it up once. And maybe we can close with this. Joseph Campbell and his hero's journey model. So there's the separation initiation, and then return. And we've talked. We've heard about this and talked about this so many times, but it's in every movie because I know you and I love movies. It's in every movie where normalcy gets shattered. There's an initiation, and then there's the return. The return actually is about sharing. It's about sharing what you've learned from the initiation.

Yeah.

So that's my prayer for you, is that you're initiated out there in a way that will bring even more peace, even more love to your soul. Thank you bro, and allow you to bring that to other people through that wisdom. And I'm sure it's going to be hard. So you know we'll be rooting for you out there.

Thank you brother.

But yeah, tell people where they can connect with you and and how they can donate and how they can be like actually part of the journey, which I think is amazing.

You can find me Instagram the book Fearvana F E A R V A N A Instagram is Fearvana. The book is on Amazon, Kindle, Audible, paperback, all the Prophets book. We've actually donated charity. Currently we're donating it all to the Crossing fund to make that happen. And I'm not making a dollar off this. The crossing contribution is a great soulcrossing.com as you said. And out there we have, I'm offering actually a series of different rewards for donating, including like my deepest like the deep mindset trainings I've developed over decades of playing on the edge. One thing we didn't get into don't have to get into noun, but I went deep into studying method acting as a tool for building a new identity. Like how do actors we love movies, so how do actors create a new character? And the greatest act method actor of all time, Daniel E. Lewis I went super obsessive on this. I have like a six hour training on method acting in there and I've studied personal growth for decades. There is no better tool for personal growth than method acting. It teaches you how to build a completely new identity and construct of who you want to be. And so I have all my trainings in there, different reward tiers. Like I have 25 ways to navigate pain caves save at different donation tiers. So just to be clear, I'm not making a dollar off this campaign. It's going all towards funding the logistics, the medical team, the flights to Antarctica. That's why it's so expensive. So any contribution is not only, you know, much appreciated, I'm very grateful for and hopefully you'll get some value of it as well to as this in terms of the training that'll help you on your own path.

Amazing man.

Thank you.

What a great share story podcast we had today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks to Mike Dillard for the connection. And dude, dude, I'll have to check out this method acting training. It sounds fascinating.

Happy to share man.

Yeah, when I was in my early 20s I was like I want to be an actor or radio dj. And then when I went down the road of like actually being those things. I'm like, that. That world's kind of gross.

There's a lot to the.

There's a lot to that world.

But now I essentially alone, separate from the celebrity. The craft is fascinating.

It's fascinating. Exactly. Which is why I'm here, doing what I do now.

Yeah.

I mean, this is like a radio show, but just on a more conscious term.

Yeah.

And I really love it. I really loved having you on the show, man. Thank you, man.

Thank you so much.

So, yeah, from my heart, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. And until Akshay 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 new videos come out, new episodes. And also share this video with a friend. If you loved it, they're going to 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.