A conversational podcast/transcript (Jason Pickard interviewed by Josh Trent) exploring the interplay of money, religion, personal wounds, and resilience. Pickard asserts many major world religions began with wealth (e.g., Jesus receiving an amount equivalent to $4M at birth), then shifts to how personal adversity, wounds (especially around money and fathers), and difficult life events fuel growth, resilience, and leadership. Practical themes include self-care (sleep, diet, movement), staying connected to purpose, and forgiveness in relationships (notably lessons from Pickard's divorce).
Chapters
In my studies, most of the world religions were all founded with money. Jesus was. I read research at Paul Check's house, at this book that he showed me that there was research that said that in today's value, Jesus was given the equivalent of $4 million worth of gold, frankincense, myrrh, at birth by the Magi and kings had visited him and all sorts of reports. Moses lived with the pharaoh and palace. Arjuna was a prince, very wealthy. Buddha was a prince. Muhammad married a very wealthy businesswoman and they had a lot of money. And so like all of these great spiritual traditions were all founded on money. But then, you know, maybe not so much some of the indigenous ones, but some like the things that we think of as like the great world religions that there are like millions of people around the world practicing, they all started with money. And somewhere along the line we had this split that almost like we had to give the institution our money but it was not right for us to keep it. And then somewhere along the line we got this idea that we have to sacrifice our whole life and our well being to be successful. But ultimately I found that it's just not sustainable that if you want to actually be the top in your field as a business person, you have to train for work like you're an athlete. You have to eat right, you have to sleep right, you have to move your body right, you have to have love and play in your life. And you better have a bigger why that gets you out of bed in the morning to go do what you do. And you have to love what you do because your flow is following your focus and your focus is following where your heart's at. You have to be fully in something if you want to be truly at the top of your game. If not, you're in fight or flight mode, right? You're in a sympathetic mode if you're not eating right. Just a simple thing. If you're eating processed food or crap food or anything, or you didn't get enough sleep last night, you're now in fight or flight. And then when you're in fight or flight, you cannot think outside the box. You're only in this kind of like very fixed, like yesterday equals today survival mode. You're not accessing your intuition, you're not accessing future prediction, you're not accessing creativity or imagination. You can't think of things differently. All which are absolutely essential tools for being successful in the business world.
It's powerful because, man, we talked about this before we hit that red button. The wound that we carry, not just from father. We. We shared a similar yet different father wound around money, which I'll unpack here, but. But that's just one wound and maybe an unlimited hall of mirrors of wounds that drive people. I said this on the podcast before. I'll say it again. How many buildings in every downtown metropolis were built from the W of a son to his father? Because what builds buildings in this construct, that's changing, you know, through the abundance archetype, through the ways of real intelligence, embodied intelligence that are coming online now. We're seeing this shift. But unfortunately, for hundreds and hundreds of years, what has built all the buildings has been a lot of wounding, has been jealousy and greed and, you know, crushing the competition. That phrase, I'm sure you saw that every day, even, you know, yesterday we're recording this podcast. Yesterday was 9 11, and I remember watching interviews of traders in New York saying, wow. I didn't want to say this out loud, but I knew exactly what trades I was making the next day. They didn't even care. This is how disconnected from reality and from empathy that a lot of these traders were. They literally saw the event just as a way where they'd make specific trades. Yeah, like, that broke my heart, and it made me think, I will never be like that. And then, by the way, I think for years later, I was that way in some way, which is probably why it angered me so much. Whatever angers me in someone else is actually a point inside of my heart and my throat that I get to look at. I'm curious for you, like, 26, 27, 330 pounds.
Yeah.
When you look back on the way that you brought in so much abundance, which, in a way, total paradox, helped to fuel you to where you are now. Because once people are at the top of a mountain, most people tend not to ask how they got there. Yeah, they just look at people on the top of the mountain. But if you were to look back and share with people so that they don't have to duplicate the pain and the torment and really the. The abuse of self that you went through, what would that be? Is there a behavior that comes up for you in that same regard where I reference the traitor having no empathy for those that died on 9 11.
You know, it's a tricky thing because if I look back at my life, and if you look back at your life and you look back at, like, where did you learn the most? Was it the times when everything was, like, extremely happy, or was it the times when things were Difficult. And you had to work through an obstacle. Like, if I look back at my life, if I look at my life from the perspective of, like, what's the real purpose of being here? Is it to just cruise and have good vibes? Or is it to learn and grow and discover something? To me, the journey of the soul is we're on an epic journey of growth and discovery, and we're here to learn. We're courageous warriors that have decided to come in and incarnate at this particular time in history and learn and grow and change. And it seems to me that actually the most difficult times in our life have the most impact on moving the needle, if that's the actual reason for being here. And so it's hard to say that I would take any of that away. I wouldn't want that for somebody. But in the same way, like, actually going through and finding the resiliency to overcome those challenges made me who I was. So it's hard to imagine my life even without them. All of the difficult things, like, if I think about my ex wife and my first divorce, she became my greatest spiritual teacher. Like, there's gurus, there's all sorts of things out there. But if you can learn to manage with having kids with an ex and do it from the place of the middle way and from your heart and not letting emotions get involved and always trying to hold the greatest good for everybody at all times through all of the different things like that is was one of my greatest spiritual learnings. You know, I didn't need to go to a monastery to learn that.
That's like through my life. That's like Sparta and 300 and Leonidas. That's essentially what you're bringing to us right now. What was the. The mastery that she taught you? What was her way of being that taught you so much about being resilient?
Yeah. Wow. It's. It's deep. But, you know, forgiveness, you know, coming from my heart, being accepting of her, of differences and different belief systems, you know, always putting the children first, that kind of stuff. You know, real, real big life lessons for sure.
Yeah. Those are some big layers of the onion.
Yeah.
And when you peel the onion, you cry.
Yeah.
Which is what happens to all of us. 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.
