Stefanos Sifandos | What Inner Work Actually Is: Ego Death & The Scale of Awareness | Wellness Force

So we've got to practice breath. We've got to practice working on our. So when I say, do you inner work, it's in real. Real life. It's in. It's in real time, like in the relationships that you're in and. Because relationships are our biggest teachers. Right. But it's also taking responsibility for your sovereignty. So having a disciplined breath practice in the morning, maybe having a reflective practice. So at the end of every day, spend 10 minutes sitting in stillness and silence, reflecting on your day. What could you have done better? Could I have treated people differently? How did I speak to myself today? Was I happy with my emotional conduct? Was I happy with what I created and achieved? What did I embody today that I need to embody more of tomorrow? Whatever reflective questions you've got and pause and think about that. So when you practice, when you ask a question, then pause and then practice thinking about that, the likelihood of that playing out in real time when you're in a more reactive state is going to be higher. Right. So we've got to practice that with the nervous system. Welcome back to the podcast, man. So happy to be here. So happy to have you in here in Austin. And maybe, maybe I don't want to give the.

The viewers anything.

Maybe you might be coming here. Maybe.

I mean, look, it just seems like there's so many big thinkers, big doers, also people that are big about just being in Austin, you know, be.

Do have.

I feel like they're here. I feel like there's so many people here that I know, that I love, that I trust. And what a call to arms we're in right now on the planet. We are in an ultimate call in arms. Like, it's never been more important right now to be a fully embodied man and woman, or however you identify, fully embodied human. And yet we find ourselves. When I look on social media and you and I have chatted about this a bunch in the past couple months, so many people are, like, hijacked by the amygdala. Right. Their posterior, their front is totally turned off. They have no cognitive rationale. They're a slave to their biology, and they're just jettisoned into fear. Like, I found myself getting upset, too. Like, I was on a podcast earlier this week, and I was, like, angry about people that wore masks. And I reminded myself to take a deep breath.

Yeah.

And just calm down.

Well, I've been on that roller coaster, bro.

Yeah, it's a unique time to be a human. But you know what? I really wanted to dig in with you, man, is what are the virtues, the values, the ways of being that we can do as men? I have a huge change coming up for me. I'm going to be a father, which is amazing. It's kind of, like, surreal talking about it on the podcast. So I aim to just continue my growth, you know, continue to do everything I can to be a father for my business and my community. But let's just start here, man, for people that don't know you. Before we get into the virtues and the aspects and everything else, who are you today versus who were you? Almost two years ago, we did our first podcast, like, who. Who is stephanosifandos today?

I don't even. I don't even. I do know, and I don't. And what I mean by that is I feel I have shifted and transformed. I've been through the fire. And, you know, fire is purification and transformation. Right. Transmutation. And I think I have outgrown so many old aspects of myself. And the paradox is now more than ever, those older aspects of self are coming to the surface to present themselves, because I don't think they ever die. I don't think those parts of ourselves, I don't think any parts of us die. I think we get to choose. I think they remain dormant. I think we get to choose very actively, deliberately, consciously, if we're willing to. What beast do we want to feed? You know, what aspect of self do we want to feed? And so I look back at two years ago, and, man, you know, I just come to. To the US I'd been here for a few months. I was really still settling in. And by settling in, I mean dealing with the unsettled feeling of what does my life look like? I've made so many rapid changes left. I mean, I was already. I already intended to leave Australia for a period of time.

Yeah.

But I didn't intend to meet the love of my life and. And come and move to the US that wasn't an intention. The intention was I'm really open to what's happening in the world and where I'm guided to. And Europe and the US was on that radar. I just didn't realize so quick. And so I just had a suitcase and I packed my suitcase pretty heavy because I knew I'm going to be away for quite some time.

Yeah.

So it comes in to Nidus, and, you know, sort of the short story of that is I'm there and I'm still finding my way. I'm still. I'm still trying to get A footing. And so for me personally, if I'm in overwhelm, if I've got a lot on the old patterns of reactivity and the old patterns of dealing with change, dealing with generally comes in a way that is abrasive. So when, you know, when we were. When we had that conversation, it was a great conversation. I remember that. And I said, josh, this is one of the best podcasts I've ever done. It was amazing. I was really commending you and I was really in my power then as well. But just the level of clarity that I have now and the level of connection to my own self and I suppose the wisdom that I have in that time, we've moved, we've traveled a great deal, we, you know, we got married, we settled, we're. We're visioning together at a deeper level. You know, the aspect of sacred emotional union and sacred sexuality has morphed for us. The way we see each other, communicate with each other, the way I see and communicate with myself. My own acceleration into my purpose and my vision or my dharma or just how I serve and the ability to dream that into reality, that shifted a great deal as well. I was really just finding footing back then. You know, I felt like a newborn. And so just like a newborn calf comes out and just trying to find the its feet. Like, of course I was established in the world, but it's just at a different level. And I honestly felt like I moved from Australia, a bigger fish in a small pond to move into the US Being a very small fish in a very bigger. Far bigger pond.

Yeah.

Or. Or ocean.

Right.

And I feel less of that now. I feel more. I'm rooted in this place. I feel more. I feel more peaceful like I really do. I feel more able. That makes sense. I'm doubting myself less and honoring myself more. I was in a place a couple of years ago where I had. I felt I had to do, do and do. And you know, that's a. That's one of one of man's or the masculines and all the masculine sickness is that over extension in doing. Because we identify our value and our self worth through our utility and our usefulness. And if we let that get the better of us, it becomes extreme and unhealthy, becomes quote unquote toxic. Right.

I would assume that came online pretty quick. When you move to a new country and you have like a woman that you want to marry and business that you're building like that came online pretty fast.

It does, but they come from that's the most important thing. Where's it coming from for me? So for me, when I really look back at that and reflect and in those moments that come from is I'm reverting back to old emotional patterns that I have to do. Not for the sake of doing and creating and coming from a place of lightness and ease and expansion, but coming from a place if I don't do this, if I don't make more money, if I don't do what I'm meant to do in the world, if I don't I don't do what I say I want to do, then I'm making that mean that I'm not enough. And the unconscious tethering to the unresolved father wound of I need to impress my father. I need to make sure he sees how amazing I am. Now, I'm not consciously thinking that or waking up every day going through that process, but it's the drive, and that's an unhealthy drive because I'm basically essentially codependent to the external validation of another human being who I've deified for so long as a child, wanted and yearned for his attention and love. And now bringing that energetic into my marriage and bringing that energetic into everything that I'm doing then becomes tainted. Because that's essentially coming from fear. Because I have a fear, I'm carrying a fear that if I don't do this, I'm not going to be enough. So then I'm holding shame now I'm holding that fear and I'm holding that shame in my body. And then I'm coming from a restricted place because fear is restriction, fears constriction. Fear is retraction. It's holding us back. And so I'm in this fucking tug of war of I want to go forward, I know I need to go forward, I know I can go forward. But I'm being pulled back and I can't hear and see why I'm being pulled back. I can't feel it even or I feel is the tension. So what do I do? For me, it's old patterns of, well, I'm going to take that out on my wife. I'm going to make it her fault. I'm going to make it everyone else's fault.

Isn't this crazy? We, we tend to, as we learn how to embody. And this is, this is really the arc of intelligence, man. There's the gathering where, like, you know, we. You get the certifications and you become a breath work facilitator and you coach clients and you, you do the things, you apply what you know and then at the end of that you embody it. But most people want to get stuck in the gathering phase. They want to kind of skip over the application. In order to feel all these feelings you're feeling, you have to actually let yourself feel them. There has to be like a permission slip for you as a man or woman specifically. I want to focus on men in this podcast. But just know that like a lot of these values and a lot of these virtues you can apply to anyone. But I really want to go deep with the masculine because gosh man, I just read a post yesterday and yes, I'm going to put him on blast. John Wineland, someone that I super respect in the world. And he was talking on Facebook and he said, if you don't wear a mask, unfriend me. I don't want to talk to you because you're murdering other people. Something like that. And I thought, wow, if John Wyland is succumbing to the amygdala, how many other men that aren't even close to the embodiment that he has completely being paralyzed by this as well. So let's start there. Let's start with the fear response and the typical wounds of the masculine when it comes to either mother or father that really flavor and color the world that we create for ourselves. What are, what are the common things that you see? If you want more info on your background, you can go to our other podcast. I want to go deep into the subject with you today. So if you're watching, if you're listening, just go to our other podcast is linked in the show notes. Yeah, if you want to learn more about Stefanos story. But, but start there, brother. Like what's, what's the wounding that we typically experience as men?

Two core wounds, rejection, humiliation. Now everything we speak to in the masculine, men and women, they're human constructs. I'm going to be really clear about that. Everything we experience is a human construct fundamentally. And if you want to even strip that back more, it's soul lessons, soul teachings, whatever, depending on your ideology. Right? But rejection, humiliation, these two wounds. And you could throw abandonment in there as well. Right? But particularly rejection and humiliation for men. Yeah, shame, feeling not enough falls under humiliation, rejection, not being good enough, not being seen as enough. This sense of enough, am I doing enough, am I being enough? Am I enough? Am I funny enough, am I good looking enough? Is my cock big enough? Is it? Do I satisfy her sexuality. I make enough money, don't make enough money. Do I have the status and the titles? Am I seen in a particular way? Whatever it may be, right? This sense of not being enough and this struggle, this fight to constantly make ourselves enough. Now that's not the responsibility of a woman or anyone else to make us feel enough. That's our responsibility. And that's where man lacks ownership and responsibility is when we don't take that posturing of I'm in mastery of myself. If I'm feeling rejected constantly, if this is a pattern that I'm experiencing, if I'm consistently fighting, humiliation, trying to outdo other versions of myself, but coming from a place of pain, fear, restriction, whatever, or I'm trying to outdo others, hyper competitiveness, then I need to look at that. Because nothing wrong with competition, it's helpful, yes. But if all we're focused on is being better than others, what's that doing to our psyche? What's that doing to our sense of self worth? So now all of a sudden we're predicating everything we do in the world or how someone else treats us on. Sorry, let me go back. Our self worth is predicated upon how someone else sees us or views us. So then we're never wearing an authentic outfit. The masks that we're wearing, and I speak for myself, I would just wear mask after mask after mask to adjust to my environment, to the peer group that I was in, to the woman I was having sex with, to my partner at the time, to my mother, my father, whatever. I would adjust. I would be outspoken, but I would be outspoken in a way that I thought would appeal to them. They would see me in a way, so they would see me as someone that's strong and courageous because I'm outspoken. But I wasn't doing it for me. I was doing it to get likes, or I was doing it to get approval, validation, avoid rejection and humiliation that's plagued me personally for so many years. And the men that I work with, they're the core wounds man. And again, I want to come to abandonment because that's an important one. Because, you know, we're talking about, you know, culturally and look at the Industrial era, look at the Industrial revolution and well before that, even the agricultural revolution. Men were already disconnected from their families to some extent. Industrial revolution comes and we're talking about mechanizing industry, right? So we're talking about men being responsible for dangerous jobs, hard labor and so forth, being pulled away from the family unit more and more that created disparity a sense of my father's not available for me. I'm going to make that mean as a child that he doesn't love me, he doesn't care for me. That isn't necessarily the truth, but we make that mean that. And then over years and generationally, because, you know, the imprinting, epigenetic imprinting.

Oh, yes.

You know, we're experiencing this. When we're passing it down to our children and our families, we're experiencing this. It's the norm for our fathers to be unavailable. So that's a sense of abandonment, in a sense. So if he's working or if he's away or if he's emotionally disconnected because he's so disconnected from his own self, he's not really fulfilled in who he is. He's not really living his purpose, his mission, his dharma, whatever. He's not content. He's not happy. And he's doing this because he feels a moral obligation or a cultural value set that he's abiding by. There's nothing wrong with looking after your family, but at what cost? Right? If you're absent and unavailable, what effect does that have on your children? And so I experienced that unavailability from my father. Emotional shutdown and physical unavailability. And so there was a sense of abandonment there. And so I'm going to behave in a way that avoids that abandonment. So for me, I went through different phases. One of the phases was I'm going to be a people pleaser. I'm going to. As a younger child, I'm going to do whatever I can to make sure that everybody's happy so they don't leave me. I got fed up with that, got really angry because I had a lot of suppressed anger because my emotions were suppressed as a child. I made that mean certain things, like I'm not enough or my voice doesn't matter. And as a teenager, I got really fucking angry. Couple that with hormones raging through me.

Yeah.

Now all of a sudden, I'm becoming very abrasive. I'm becoming a bully. I was bullied. Now I'm becoming the bully. Now what does that do? That puts a wall up. So now people can't get close. And if they can't get close, they can't leave me. And if they do, it doesn't matter because they're not close. And so, so many men do this. They either become very meek, weak and passive, or they become hyper aggressive, hyper abrasive. They become bullies. They hurt other people because they're Hurt and they don't want to be hurt. And so there's that abandonment that comes in. They don't want to be humiliated, they don't want to be rejected. That's one of the reasons, I think we spoke about this. I can't remember exactly, but one of the reasons why particularly men will go to pornography. It's just easy.

Yeah, we're going to talk about that in a minute. I love the way your brain works because you're able to go back into your own childhood and like make connections that I think every man can really understand. Like, wow, the rejection, the abandonment. I think we all can, no matter who we are. But especially men feel abandoned at times by our father if he's working too much, right. If he's like not present. And that is such a challenging aspect of being a man, is earning money and having purpose. And I think the demands of the modern man right now have never been so great. You know, being fully present with our woman, being fully present with our community, our job, our health, like it just continues to stack up. But there is this center point. And you know, Lao Tzu talks about the middle way. And even if you look at like the ancient masters or the contemporary masters, everyone essentially, they explore the extremes, you know, like you had said, like the men that shut down and push people away or the men that become hyper aggressive. But I feel like there's this genuine middle. And one of the quotes that, that I was looking at from the School of Life. And if you haven't seen the School of Life on YouTube, you gotta check it out, man. There was a video on there and it defined the definition of an adult. A person who can alter their own circumstances. Circumstances through their own agency. I mean like, it just gives me a chill.

Sovereign empowerment.

In order for a man to truly be his own agency and to truly have like the power to balance all those things I talked about and to have the self awareness to navigate the extremes you talked about. Where does that man begin? I mean, maybe it starts with a deep breath, but. But where does that man actually begin? Obviously it's like feeling enough pain, but what's that trajectory look like from that point?

Yeah, I like to reference anytime I receive that question. The vast majority of the time. I like to reference a gentleman by the name of Jack Donovan. And he has four tactical virtues. And I've added a tactical virtue to that for a specific reason. So the tactical virtues are strength, courage, mastery, honor. And I've added connectivity there because I think we need connectivity more than ever. Now?

Yes.

I mean, I was looking at this a number of years ago. It was a couple of years ago now, but I'm going to go there. But before we go there, we. I want to say something else. We need to do our work like we need to do our inner work. And I preface these five tactical virtues, or I preface this before going into the five tactical virtues. For me, it leads back to that. And it leads back to that quote that you just said about agency, responsibility, sovereignty, autonomy. Whatever words you want to put around. Whatever words you know, you know, the audience may resonate with or you. Yeah, I think that's just so, so important. Important for us as human beings and men to be. To take ownership of. It's not your responsibility, it's mine. Because the moment we say it's someone else's responsibility or we blame someone else for not feeling a particular way or experiencing life in the way that we want to experience life, what happens is we disempower ourselves and we give our power away. That does one of two things. We either retract from the world or we lash out in the world. So you're looking at two sides of the shadow. That light side that retracts, that goes more introverted, internal, or that dark side that is more external, lashes out. Extroverted. Right. But in a shadow way. And the shadow way, at some level, it's just about intimacy in relationships. It's about how you give and receive love. And it's about whether you're allowing people in. Are you surrendering to that? Or are you too scared? Are you too scared to be loved? Are you too scared to love because you're scared of loss, whatever it may be? So look at these tactical virtues, and I like them, because really, what these tactical virtues represent is what does it mean to be good at being a man? Not what does it mean to be a good man. What does it mean to be good at being a man? There's a lot of definitions out there. There's a lot of opinions out there.

There's a lot of movies made, a lot of movies.

That's exactly right. But most of the movies follow the suit of what does it mean to be a good man? And that's a subjective cultural inference. It's an individuated thing. It's a familial thing. It's a peer group thing. It's a culture thing. It's, it's. It's. There's too many. The interpretations are too vast and too broad. Nothing wrong with it. But I think It's. I really do think it's a question that can be asked after the. What does it mean to be a good man? And for that, I like to go back to our evolutionary roots. Not only social psycho, evolutionary, social psychology, but evolutionary biology. How we've grown up, how. How we've evolved over the, you know, a few million years as humanoids, somewhere there, right beyond the few hundred thousand years as Homo sapiens, like, really going back into. How did we develop? What were the things that we did that shaped us? What's deep in our nervous system, what's deep in our brain stem, in our cerebellum, really? Who are we? Right? Because that's still. That unconscious part of us still drives a lot of who we are. Now, as the prefrontal cortex has developed, we've had tremendous opportunities to see ourselves differently, to make more deliberate conscious choices that have elevated consciousness or elevated this capac capacity to think about marvels of the universe, right? Like the cosmos, in a completely different way. We haven't been stuck in survival facing off beasts and animals that are 10 times bigger than us, right? So that's a blessing that we have. But that unconscious, primal aspect of self still drives us. So let's start with strength. For so many reasons, being strong is really important. Stronger people are harder to kill. Now, I'm just talking about physical strength, talking about emotional strength, resilience, spiritual strength. I'm talking about emotional resilience as well. I'm talking about having a capacity to move through difficult times and physically being strong in our bodies. Because to the feminine, that represents discipline, that represents confidence, that represents assertiveness, that represents trust in oneself. These are important qualities that the feminine looks for in the masculine, irrespective of what your biological gender is. Right?

Yeah.

So that's important. I think every man needs. And I'm not saying you have to deadlift 300 kilos or a thousand pounds.

I don't get from you that this is aesthetically how you hear. No, we're talking about internal strength.

Yeah, yeah, and definitely physical strength. Like just having trust in your body.

Exactly.

Like we have to. You know, what does breath do, brother? It brings us back into the body.

That's right.

Like, it's health and vitality in the body. So you've just got to be competent in your body, move your body, trust it. You got to take it to the edges. This is the thing. People don't know what their edges. Because we're too fucking complacent. Men are too lazy. I did a post on this? Yes. I haven't posted it, but I've been in this hyper creative space, man, and I've been. I've literally got four weeks worth of posts already lined up. Like, I just keep talking, not really writing, but I'll do some writing, but just typing and it's all coming out of me. And so one of the things that I wrote yesterday was about men being so lazy. Like, we are addicted to complacency. We are addicted to comfort, excessive comfort. That's not what makes a man a man. Man was bred in difficulty and challenge. It is the domain of the masculine. We were responsible for extending the perimeter. We were responsible for fighting off really big things. We were responsible for hunting. We were responsible for ensuring the safety of our communities and tribes. For whatever reason, that was what was bestowed upon us. We, the large majority of that responsibilities was bestowed upon men. That's in us, right? That's why, you know, partly the, the expression or the extension of the cultural role of man has been to provide. Right. And that takes form in different ways depending on the culture in the era and the values of that culture. But strength, so important, courage. We avoid difficult things and come back to this, this age of laziness and complacency. Technology is a marvel and to our detriment. It's made us soft, it's made us, oh, I don't need to do that. I don't need to make the effort now. What happens is the more we don't make an effort, the more we don't believe in ourselves, the more we don't test ourselves, the more we don't know who we are. That's a parallel drawn and a carryover into every other area of our lives. Or you're having an argument with your partner. I'll just leave. Because the masculine wants to be empty anyway. The masculine just wants to leave. That's what's in our nervous system. The female will shut down and numbs out internally. The masculine literally leaves physically the environment when he's in fight or flight.

Which is the opposite of courage. Correct.

We're not facing our stuff.

And within this, you talked about strength, you talked about courage. Within the courage though, there's so many layers and nuance. I mean, gosh, man, like emotional development, like, just because we're aware of these concepts does not mean they're embodied like you can have. I've met five year olds that have insane courage. I mean, they have so much courage. I've met 55 year olds that have maybe the emotional intelligence of A five year old, but not the courage.

Yeah.

So there's, there's some like practice that we can all lean into, especially right now. And I, I firmly press on the table because I just feel like, like we started this podcast. There is such a call to arms right now. I'm not trying to be hyper serious, but it just feels serious. It just feels serious out there lately. Like the courage aspect specifically, the strength aspect specifically. I know we'll talk about more but, but the integration of those two. Like how do you, you personally. And then I do hard shit every day. I've been doing the ice bath for 30 days. Almost fucking hot. It's insane. It's really hard. But like I always feel amazing when I get out and then I immediately do 30 push ups, 40 push ups. And I'm like, you know what if I can do that every day? Like what other things can I accomplish that maybe my limbic system really is hungry for?

Yeah.

So how do you integrate this man? Like what's the beginning stages of this integration? Because this is. The people can listen to you talking about, but how do they actually integrate what you're saying?

Yeah. So it is interesting, right? So I said do hard every day and yes, that's a big part of it.

Yeah.

And there's a carryover to that. Right. So starting the body, go to the gym, go for a walk every day for 20 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever it may be, wherever you, you find resistance, meet yourself there and go through that. Of course, weigh it up. Like, is it, is it moral for you? Does it make sense? Does it align with what's important to you and your values? You know, just because something hard doesn't doesn't mean that you should go do it. Like, I'm not suggesting it would be difficult to go walk behind someone and shoot them in the back of the head. So you should do that. That's, don't do that. That's ridiculous. But you know, that's a pathology. But I'm saying do things that challenge you, that have interested you. Maybe it's starting a business, maybe it's registering a URL, maybe it's starting a new Facebook page. Whatever it may be for you. Maybe it's asking a girl out, maybe it's handing your resignation and getting a one way ticket to Costa Rica. I don't know, it doesn't matter. Maybe it's something really small, like challenge your going a different route every day to work or something like that. Whatever it may be, like get out of your comfort zone because comfort it continues to breed more resistance and contraction. Comfort's great and we need a balance of it, but when there's too much comfort, there's no challenge, there's no growth, there's no expansion. And then we become self loathing. And that's where we find so many men, just dissatisfied and unhappy in themselves. So do something that challenges you every day. And maybe it's working out, it's a different type of workout. Or maybe your challenge is being very systematic with a workout. Maybe it's a press program or a squat and deadlift program, whatever it is. And you, your challenge is to actually stick with it for six months. Do that now. Beyond that, we need to go deep into the. I'm a big believer of unpacking the psychological, emotional self. What I mean by that, at least 70, 75, 80% of all adults have experienced some level of trauma. On the spectrum of trauma, big T trauma, little T trauma.

Yeah, they've.

They've experienced minimum, if not every single human being. Because we're not.

I think we've all experienced little, little T trauma, haven't we?

I believe so.

Can you unpack that concept? Because we talked about it with Connor. But, but can you share which is the man talks podcast with. I think, I think you've been on that like three times or something.

I've been on there once.

Okay. Just an awesome resource for all men as well as you and your content. But like, please, can you go into the capital T and the lowercase T? Because people hear that and they're like, what is, what does that actually mean? Yeah, yeah.

So. So simply put, the big T trauma is that overt stuff that's happened to us, such as war, sexual, physical, emotional abuse, severe bullying, being locked in a cellar for 10 years. Big T trauma. Very overt. Overt trauma. Little T trauma is far more subtle. So it could be. I'll give you a few examples. You come home and you say, mom, I've got a B plus on my exam. And she says, oh, that's okay, but why didn't you get an A or something like that? You sort of disregard and you come back, it's like this. I'm never, I'm never enough for my parents. So you become a high achiever and a perfectionist, and that changes the way you relate to people and you're sort of pushing people away and you isolate yourself or whatever it may be. And so that's little T trauma as an example. Another example of little T trauma may just be wanting dad's attention. At night. And he says, oh, I'm very tired, son. And I, you know, I can't. I can't. I'm going to get up early for work tomorrow. So I go, oh, okay, dad, I love you, but really, you're hurting, Hurting inside. He just wants some attention and love. And he's not necessarily being mean. He's just in his own space. He's trying. He's prioritizing what he thinks is right as a parent. Right. And so that's more little T trauma. And there you can think of countless, countless examples of that. Like even, I mean, the loss of a grandfather or a grandmother or a family member, that can be big T trauma, but that can also be little T trauma. So there's some. There's some crossover in big T and little T trauma. Right. But I'm a. I'm a massive advocate of dealing with our trauma. Now, what does that look like? It doesn't just look like challenging ourselves on a daily basis. It's active work, deliberate work in exploring our traumas and how they shape our personalities and how they affect our behaviors and how they influence our relationships. So we have to look at the patterns of relationships that we're. The patterns that are unpacking themselves or playing out in relationships. For example, if I'm having an argument with my partner and I'm beginning to be heated and she's asking me to do something differently, if my response to that, as opposed to being responsible, being more curious or asking, okay, explain that a little more. I react by taking it personally. I'm making it mean that I've done something wrong. And in order to protect myself, I have to be aggressive. And I'm consistently playing out that pattern in my relationship, which sometimes I do, by the way, because I go into a shame cycle. Because as a child.

I love your honesty, man. Yeah. Because the work doesn't stop.

No, it doesn't stop.

I mean, actually, the more embodied you are and the more deep you go, the more clouds are parted and the more the sun shines on the darkness.

Yep, absolutely.

Which is a beautiful gift.

Yeah.

As well.

It's a gift, and it's challenging.

So you find yourself dealing with this in life now.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm spiraling in a shame cycle, and I become aggressive because as a child, for me, my voice, I. I interpreted my voice never being heard, heard. I would say something, and it wasn't. I was never heard. I was never given the attention that I. I wanted. I was always shut down. And so the moment I'm told. And my dad would always say, you're doing that wrong or stop doing that or stop, stop, stop. Always stop doing things. So if I hear my like, I'll give you a real specific example. This is good.

Yes.

And that is specific. But I'll finish this and I'll go to another example. I would then, I would then shut down and get aggressive. Now that's a pattern. That's a reactive pattern. Now how does that serve my relationship? Because now I'm getting angry at Christine. Like I'm raising my voice. She's becoming intimidated. She's shutting down. She doesn't like that because that reminds her of her father. And now all of a sudden we're in this situation where our past is amplifying the present because we're not in mastery of ourselves. Now that doesn't mean that we haven't done the work. Of course it does. Now we're able to recover really quickly. And when I say really quickly, either within seconds or minutes, hours at most. In the past, I never recover from that. It would just remain.

I've had like day long ones or two. Day three, day 100. Yeah. We've all been there. Don't, don't lie.

If not never recovered, like in my past, I would never recover and they would just fester. Yes. Become stagnant, stale. Resentment and anger. Right. Another one is, we were in the car the other day and. Oh, what was the conversation about? I asked her about something. Oh no. She asked me, where is the ticket? This ticket for? Someone said, I'm not sure where it is. And she went. Now I'll tell you how I interpreted that. Immediately. This is how fucking interesting the brain is. Right?

Yeah.

Immediately it took me back to when I was maybe early teens, like 10, 11, 12. My mother would constantly should. She'd ask me something and I wouldn't know. And it would because my father was putting pressure on her for something. Because they would be fighting all the time. There was arguments and violence and all of that. I, I felt very responsible. And so there was a measurement there. And I grew up very quickly, etc. Etc. And if I didn't have the answer, she would go, she'd make a noise, whatever it is. Right. And it immediately reminded me of that. And I looked at Christine, I said, don't ever do that again. I, I honestly, I morphed into this other person.

Wow.

Because as an adult, I'm strong. As a kid, I'm defenseless.

Yeah.

And so I'm getting my power back. And it took us, maybe 5, 10, 9 more, 10, 15 minutes, but we got it. And I explained that to her because I didn't realize it at the beginning. I did, but I. I discounted it. And we went into it and she was like, no, I'm just like. It was that type of curious. Where the is it.

It's amazing that she's done that level of work herself to not just react to your reaction.

And she didn't. She didn't. She said, you can't. You can't talk to me like that. It's not fair.

Oh, see, this is like, you need.

To respond to me. Like, you have to. And. And I'll give you. I know you want to say something, but I'll give you another example of what happened in there literally yesterday. So she calls me and she goes, hey, I need you for something. Can you come here? I said, cool. Came in and she said, look, this. This is really not good. This. This thing. It was. So I won't. I don't mention too much, too many details about it, but I'll be detailed enough. Hired a contractor for something, you know, obviously paying the money, so it's a. It's an investment. And she. Christine was looking over it and she said, this is really not that good. We need to make some big change to this. Now. I immediately went into. I fucked up. I've done something wrong. Immediately went into that relationship with. I'm not good enough for dad. Like, I wasn't consciously thinking that, but that's a feeling. The embodiment. Like, that's the feeling that I had. Now, usually what I would do is I'd be really sharp with Christine, and I would say, not usually, but I have in the past, right? And like, oh, fuck not. Whatever I do is not good enough. You're a perfectionist. You try. Like, I just attack her instead, this is what I did. I held her hand. I said, darling, I just want to share something with you right now. This is what's happening for me. It's taking me back to here. I'm feeling not being. Not being. Being inadequate, not feeling good enough, feeling disempowered. I feel like I've made the wrong decision again. Like. And she was like, no, no, no, not at all. This is very happy with the decision we've made. I just want to make this better for you. I want this to work for you. Completely different conversation now. I know if I snapped at her, it would. It would have the day.

Yes.

You get what I'm saying?

There's this space you know, Victor Frankel, we've all heard this probably a thousand times at this point, but I'm gonna mention it because it's so poignant. We have something that occurs and then we respond to it. And that space between stimulus and response, it literally is everything. And I know I'm being super reductionistic, but it's actually that simple. Now, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's going to be easy.

Correct?

It's very simple. Like when I get up and I promise myself I'm going to get up, it's a simple act for me to just get out of the bed. But it's not easy when your partner, especially like the masculine feminine dynamic, depending on our levels of wounding and awareness of our wounding. The capital T, the lowercase T. There's so much context behind what you're saying and what I'm saying. But, but simplistically, reductionistically. If I can just remind myself, for me, and I'm curious how you feel. Like if I can just pull in through my nose and then respond like that has been life changing for me. It's on my arm, right? If I can, if I can breathe, I can choose. Like if I can take a breath. I'm not saying I perfectly do it all the time, but if I can do that, man, I'm going to come to Carrie with more love. I'm going to feel better in my body. I'm going to actually be speaking from head to heart connection. But if I, but if I'm not in my body, I can't pull from the virtues that I've embodied that are physically in my body. So coming from reactivity, what's the training look like for men right now? Especially with what we talked about earlier where men are super triggered, we're in our heads a lot. What's the training look like for men in relational dynamics for that stimulus and.

Response, we'll go to practice being calm. So again, parallels drawn, right? There's. It's like having a resume and, and having. Moving into a new industry. It's like, oh, I've been a baker for 12 years and now I want to be a mechanic. It's like, well, they're two very different industries. Well, but look at my resume. Here's the skill transfer because I'm managed here, so I've got interpersonal skills. I managed this bakery for 10 years. I'm very disciplined because I'm getting up at 3am so I've got discipline. That's a carryover into being A mechanic, whatever, whatever it may be. So it's carryover. Right. That's really, really important. So we've got to practice breath. We've got to practice working on our. So when I say, do you in a work, it's in real. Real life. It's in. It's in real time, like in the relationships that you're in and. Because relationships are our biggest teachers. Right. But it's also taking responsibility for your sovereignty. So having a disciplined breath practice in the morning, maybe having a reflective practice, like the end of every day, spend 10 minutes sitting and still not and silence, reflecting on your day. What could you have done better? Could I have treated people differently? How did I speak to myself today? Was I happy with my emotional conduct? Was I happy with what I created and achieved? What did I embody today that I need to embody more of tomorrow? Whatever reflective questions you've got and pause and think about that. So when you practice, when you ask a question and pause and then practice thinking about that, the likelihood of that playing out in real time when you're in a more reactive state is going to be higher. Right. So we've got to practice that with the nervous system.

Yeah.

So we've got to expose ourselves to difficult things within ourselves so that we can deal with them and have a real life reference that. Oh, I've dealt with that. I understand this wounding. I understand this pain. I can now at least have a better chance of dealing with it in real time, in a real life situation with my partner.

Man. It was two years ago we had first met. You took me through this breath practice at my house, my old apartment in Encinita.

This.

And a lot came up around my father wounding. And one of the exercises that you had me do, and it was interesting because I'd done this exercise before. I had intellectualized my healing before. But what you had me do was like, write a letter about everything that was bubbling up and then really feel it and then burn it.

Yeah.

And it was so cathartic.

Yeah.

Because there was first the somatic experience, then there was like the emotional inventory, and then there was the letting go. But for men that are just beginning that journey, because I think the father wound touches on every single aspect that we've already mentioned. The father wound is big because it just continues to doppel from, like, you know, early time when my relatives came over from Italy. And then, you know, I'm sure in your lineage, your great, great grandfather had wounding. And we're all wounded. It's like I look behind You. I look at your tattoos, the sacred geometry. Like, everything repeats depending on what came before it. It all just repeats until we're cognizant enough to go, okay, I want it to be different now. Like, what do I need to do for it to be different? So, long story, short answer is. Maybe it's not a short answer. With the awareness and everything that you're talking about with us today and everything you're sharing, like, what is this space between the knowing and the doing? Because for me, what I come up against is when I take the inventory, when I work with someone like you, and even when your clients, I'm sure, work with you, there's almost like a flinch of the doing. There's something within our psyche, maybe in our nervous system that. That stops us from doing the thing that our heart really knows that we want to do. What do you think that is? And. And how do you help guide people through that? It's almost like an inflection point in the middle of knowing and doing.

Yeah, it's just. It's just familiarity. So the nervous system carries a familiarity with what it's accustomed to, and the familiarity is interpreted as safe because the brain says, well, hasn't killed us so far, so we'll keep doing it.

Yes.

And the protective strategy that we once used as a child is now maladaptive. However, the brain doesn't see it that way and says, well, it's adaptive because we're still here. You know, we've got food, we're surviving, we're here, we're doing okay. So it gets addicted to the familiar patterns. How do you break that? It's not easy. How I do that with myself and with clients is create an environment of safety. That's really where it's at, because there's a couple of things that we're doing where we're constantly in a process of giving and receiving love. We want to be seen, we want to be heard. We want to be understood. We want to be accepted, respected, and appreciated. Everything we do revolves around that and the foundation or the fundamental of, are you safe or are you unsafe? Can I move towards you or must I move away from you? And so that familiar pattern either helps us move towards something or helps us generally, when we're feeling unsafe, retract or fight, whatever it may be. But either way, we take action based on that, on that premise. And so let's open this up a little more. You've got. We've got, as humans, threat funnels that are assessing our environment consistently.

Interesting Phrase. Threat funnels. Yeah, I haven't heard of that.

Eyes is. Are our greatest threat funnel.

Okay.

The ens, the enderic nervous system.

Yes.

Is another threat funnel that feeds information through the vagus nerve up into the brain, that informs the emotional amygdala, that informs the pituitary gland, that informs the adrenals, etc. Etc. Not to give you a biology lesson, you know more than me.

No, no, no, no, it's clear. We talked about that. And it innervates on the back of the diaphragm. So every time you take a big deep breath, you're literally shifting your vagal nerve.

Correct. Yeah. So we have to. Some of the things that we can do to feel safe. And you want to pause as long as the. You want. If you need to pause for 10 minutes in the middle of an argument and breathe or go for a walk. And this has been proven by the Gottman Institute as well. They've done a lot of scientific research around this. Qualitative, quantitative research.

Yes, yes.

Where one of the best ways. If you're having an argument and you're just going in circles and the conflict is escalating, go for a walk, you know, release some dopamine, relax the nervous system, let yourself know yourself. I'm going to add some things to that in a moment, but I'm going to give you the fundamental premises. Go for at least a 40 minute walk, then come back, read or listen to something that's novel or just like, you know, fiction something, whatever it might be, and then come back at least an hour later and then come back and communicate from that place and you're creating space. And if you're escalating again, do the same thing. How committed are you to your relationship and ultimately to your own growth? That's really what it's about. Now, I would add a few things there. So symbolism is the oldest language in the cosmos in human history. 70% minimum. Let's just say it's probably a lot more, but minimum. 70% of all communication is non verbal. You're listening to my tone. You're feeling my tone. Affliction.

I'm watching the muscles in your face to see if you're safe.

The micro expressions. That's right. So symbolism being really, really old and really informing us of what's happening. Place a hand here on the enderic system, on the endemic nervous system. That's nurturing, that's soothing. Place a hand here because this represents our emotional center. Right. And there's also neuronal activity here as well, right. And breathe into those places. And maybe as an affirmation of I am safe or that was then and this is now, or I can choose to be different. So whatever you need to do. And you have those agreements with your partner because again, intimate romantic partnership stimulates us. Right. And it also activates us and it also helps us react.

It's also the church.

Church.

It's the ultimate church for the soul.

100%.

100.

And our relationship to ourselves, like all relationships is it. It's not whether you're in a relationship or not, it's whether what is the quality of your relationship? What is the connection to your relationship, whether it's with someone else or whether it's to an ideal or a behavior or purpose yourself, the past, the future, whatever it may be. Right. And so simple things like this can change the game, man. They can change the game. But you know, manly men may think this isn't, this isn't manly enough.

Yeah. Not the people that are here with us today. We talk about this all the time, man. We had doctor, you reminded me of Dr. Kyrabanet. She was a award winning neuroscientist and she did a vision quest. And I know you've done a vision quest. I remember because I was trying to get you on a podcast right after you did it.

We can talk about it.

Let's dive into that right after this question. Because, you know, we're talking about as men, how do we face the demands of this modern world? You've already explored like, okay, you do hard shit every day. And we talked about the nuances within that, but she talked about there is medicine. She's connected to the Native American tribe. When she put her hand on her chest, when she was in nature without any food, all by herself, she felt like there's medicine in her hand. So there's. There's some kind of a psychosomatic physiological response. When I put the palm of my hand on my heart, and I loved how you put it on the enteric nervous system, on the stomach. Like it's like you got you.

Yes.

Like you're a strong man and you can get yourself.

That's called reparenting in psychology.

That's what it feels like.

Yeah. And that's what it is. Yeah. Because now you're proving to your. Proving's not the right word. It is, but it's demonstration. You're demonstrating to yourself that you are capable. Now if you are capable, that can depending on your wounding, that can make you this hyper individuated Being this hyper sovereign being where I don't need anyone. I'm doing life on my own. And you're coming from a wounded place still because you have a fear of being hurt. But let me just, you know, assure everyone that, that you're not going to push people away. It just means that you're going to bring wholeness to the relationship. Not this notion of I need you to complete me. I'm half. You're half. Let's make one. It's one plus one equals three.

We saw Jerry Maguire. You complete me. And I think everybody got sold a line.

Yeah.

Especially when we were kids from Disneyland.

Yeah.

Anyways, different subject. So. Yeah, like, it's so powerful you mentioned this because when we're faced with our biggest fears and, and so many men would probably get super scared of being out in nature alone anyways, let alone without food. And some people do a dry fast. Some people don't even drink water. What, what compelled you to do that? Like, this is so fascinating to me because I've wanted to do it. I've wanted to go hunting. I want to connect. I have a strong desire and I already see myself doing it. These activities of our ancient ancestors just so I can connect with them, so I can return out of the incessant monkey mind and be more grounded to our earth. It's not some hippie pipe dream for me. Like, it's, it's real. And I'm curious what motivated you to even do that and, and can you share with us that experience? I know it's been quite some time.

Yeah, well, it's been a few months. But all of what you just mentioned was part of my inspiration to take action in that place. All of that and part of what I said earlier about doing things that challenge me, that are in alignment with my ethos and value set, which is connecting to nature, knowing myself at deeper levels, taking myself to the edges. I wasn't, for me, my edge wasn't fasting. It wasn't. And I went for. I did some dry fasting when I was on that six day vision quest, but it was, it was mainly just water fasting. So no food and so. And towards the end, no water because I ran out of water and.

Yeah, so I didn't have a life straw with you. Oh my God.

There was no water anywhere there.

Oh my gosh.

High alpine desert. There was no water anywhere. What I was most, what my age was for that was being alone, you know, in the mountains where there was, you know, building bears, mountain lions and scorpions and snakes and like that.

Yeah.

And that was my edge. And the interesting thing was the first night because we, you know, we prep for. And the first night you walk off and find my spot and. And sort of found my spot the day before, and I just slept like a baby. It was so good. It was so good, man. I just. Under the stars. I had to have a tent under the stars. I was. It was just.

Sleeping bag.

Yes. Okay.

Okay.

Sleeping bag. Yeah. But just a top and then a sleeping bag and a spare top for. If there was a storm, which there was in the last night was epic. And. And, you know, I. I'm not very good at tying knots and like that, but I figured it out. I had to figure it out.

Yeah.

And I had to create a tarp and work the angles. And it was. I was. It was. I felt like that scene from Forrest Gump where Lieutenant Danes on the. On the ship, he's like, come at me. It felt like that was great. But the food was. I mean, if it was Maybe longer, like 10 days or 12 days, maybe that would have challenged me more. But that wasn't too much of an issue. But it was just the. Initially being just by myself in a way, man, I got off that mountain. I just cried, man. Like, it was just. I wanted to be back in nature. Like, I came back here and, you know, I'm very blessed to live in a beautiful home.

Home.

I have an amazing, amazing wife. Like, I've got all the things that I want in my life. I'm not lacking.

Yeah.

But I just felt re. I missed Mother Earth in that capacity, just being. I didn't do it, man. All I did, bro. Like, so I was allowed to have a pad. Well, I wasn't about. I was allowed. I chose to. We were, you know, we were advised, if anything, you know, bring a pad to write on. So I didn't wear a pad and a pen. My pad and my pen ran out. Well, I'm not meant to do any. So I literally, all day would just sit and look at nature, look at the trees, look at the horizon. I would rest. I'll just be resting. You know, I'll do push ups and shit like that because I just felt like doing it. But even after, I was like, I just want to sit. I just sat. Now, you know me. We talked about this before. Like, I'm. It's not that I'm busy. I just. I'm on purpose.

Your whole day is stacked. It's like, even your free time is scheduled, which I don't think it's a good or bad thing. It's just, it is what it is. My, my sense is that you're in the building phase, and I think most men are.

Yeah.

Until they reach king status, you know, and they're just maintaining their kingdom.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Like I, I, I mean, I have essence, essence of kingdom, but I'm still in that, in, in many, in many aspects. I'm in that prince phase.

Are you in the late stage prince phase that Alison Armstrong talks about? Do you feel like you're.

When I look at that, yeah. And I, and I, and I oscillate as well, you know, because I am deeply integrated in so many, many areas of my life and how I show up in my relationship to myself, to my disciplines, to how I view myself. Absolutely. But we oscillate, you know, and I think, I think there's a, to be honest, I think there's a part of us that even when we reach that fully embodied king as men, I think we oscillate. And I don't think that's a bad thing. And I think that's contrast. Right. I think that helps. It's. How long do we stay in that oscillation and why are we going there?

Yes. You know, well, duality needs a vacuum to fuel itself.

There it is.

So you have to, I mean, don't you have to always kind of go in and out of kingdom?

I believe so. So, like I was on a, on a psilocybin journey a few days ago, really deep and again in the, in the forest in the hill country here in West Texas, and, and part of that was the real, some of the realization that I had. Again, it wasn't, it was a realization, another layer around contrast and wholeness. Contrast exists because of wholeness. A contrast can't exist without wholeness. And I'm probably not explaining it right because it doesn't feel right in my mind when I'm explaining. But it's this realization that I had that the reality of duality is non dual in and of itself by default. Because it's dualistic. Because a dualistic reality can't come from a dualistic reality or platform. It has to come from non dualism, like oneness, unity, wholeness, unity, consciousness. Everything's connected.

Well, there's nothing behind God, God, there's nothing beyond God. God creates that duality.

Yeah. And that's the, that's the infinite nature of just the infinite repetition of wholeness. I would, I would think, and I'm Not. I don't have the language to explain. I don't think many do. However, I find an interesting notion to explore it. Right. And so being on this journey and really connecting to nature, I just. Realization came to me at a deeper level. Like I've thought about that before but it's just, it was really profound. And so, you know, back to that, that king, prince and all the, all the different even archetypes and stages of development that we go through as men. I do feel that we will oscillate and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think that that's, that can be a healthy thing. It's when we are stuck in an unhealthy or wounded or extreme expression of self that's causing damage to us and causing damage to others. And we know what that is because we feel it. We feel different dis.

Ease.

We feel disharmony, we feel agitation and frustration. We feel these dense energy energies, these dense heavy emotions. They're not desirable emotions such as happiness, joy, gratitude, elation. They're undesirable emotions. Doesn't mean they don't have anything to teach us. Yes, they just, they just, they're just heavy and they're undesirable. And if we stay there too long, we're not really growing because now we're addicted to the cycle of. Well, I'm addicted to the density because it's all. I know, but I'm not growing.

Let's talk about that density density because it seems like what the ultimate reset you went through in nature. Like to be in nature and to be totally disconnected from all these devices and, and really all the things that I guess we've created coping strategies around. Right? Survival and coping strategies. What was like the gem you took away. I mean you already talked a little bit about seeing duality for what it really is. But what, what was the, the heart based gem like? What'd you take away in your heart when you left?

I thought a lot about my, my loved ones, all of the people in my life that have impacted me in different ways and just the value of human connection. That was a big, big heart opener for me. And just the sadness. There was some. Was a lot of sadness that because of. Of the current socio cultural, socio economic circumstances largely around this thing called COVID 19 that you know, Australia have shut their borders and I can't freely. And that's another loaded term, free freedom. Sure that I can't go visit. I can't see my friends and family in that capacity that physical contact like you and I have now. I mean, you know, we talk on the phone, but how much better is this? Of course, you know, this is human. This is spiritual. This is life. This is everything. And there's a lot of sadness.

People can feel that connect. This is why I love doing podcasting in person. There's nothing wrong with online. Yeah, but people can feel this redox system, the existential, I guess, etheric realm that we're connecting through. This is why people are so hungry for, like, real conversations. And this is what I think the world needs.

I completely, completely agree with you at every level. So I. What opened my heart was this. I didn't feel isolated being in. In nature in that way. I just didn't feel isolated. I felt sad because I was thinking about certain things that were bringing sadness and emotions up. But that solitude, I felt full and connected and come, as I mentioned earlier, coming out of that, realized how much I wanted more of that. Just the busyness of the world, you know, the. The stimulus overload that we experience in the world just. Oh, just too much, man.

Do you feel like. And thank you for sharing that, because I think the. The atom bomb that explodes a man to where he leaves a family or completely disconnects from self or goes into an abusive relationship with shopping, food, porn, money, fell in the blank. Do you feel like there's a recipe for us now that maybe is new? Or is it the exact same recipe for being an embodied man?

I think it's a very similar recipe.

I think similar.

One very similar to what we spoke about. Like, practice self awareness. Practice asking yourself questions. Practice giving yourself solitude time. Practice doing difficult things. Practice disappearing from the. Disappearing from the world for periods of time.

Yeah.

It's not only part of our nature. It is nature. It's. It's. It's in all of us to be able to do that. Practice having difficult conversations with yourself and with others. Practice forgiveness. The only way you can practice forgiveness is feeling. The only way to feel is to tap into emotional literacy, intelligence and fitness or the emotional fitness that you carry. But the only way to do that is to explore those feelings. That means you have to have range. One of the greatest gifts men can give humanity is range. Not being monostructured in their expression. Either I'm really angry or I'm okay. Yes, that's. That doesn't. Doesn't work anymore. We have to have range. We have to have range in how we show up. We have to have range in who we're able to connect and communicate. With like, ideally, you want to be able to communicate with a close friend, someone you trust, someone you feel safe with, and a complete stranger. You want to be able to talk to the United Nations Secretary General and be able to connect deeply with a homeless person. Like, why not like have range? Drop the judgments. Can't drop the judgments unless you're dropping the judgments on yourself. Now the brain judges. It compartmentalizes the world. Are you safe? Are you not? Is this safe? Is it not? That's different. I'm talking about the hyper judgments, the prima facial associations and value judgments we make because, oh, you have this shirt on, you have that hair and whatever it may be, right, this skin color or this attitude. So I've dropped that. But we can't drop that because we're so self critical. And we're so self critical because the world tells us you need to be this.

That's right.

If you don't have this status, this amount of money, this wealth, you don't live here and you're not doing this. You're fuck all.

It's all, as Alan Watts said, all wretch, no vomit. It's the same story that just keeps looping over and over. It's all wretched, no vomit. And this is why, I mean, I feel like I learned from him in the shower 10 years ago and I was just like, who is this guy? But. But I feel like it's this perpetuation of story and really I got my mind blown. Recently we did almost a four hour podcast with Paul Check. And by the time people are seeing and hearing this, they've already experienced it. So there was a moment where I literally had to stop the show because I felt like I had really like a partial ego death in the middle of a podcast. And I have not been the same since. Like it literally changed the fabric of how I see the world. And one of the big takeaways I got, which I think you've been touching on for the past five minutes, there is absolutely nothing between you and I besides whatever illusion we create. So I can create an illusion that like Stephanos has this and he's this. And I can create a heuristic that like your value is determined on this and your social status and all this stuff. And I find myself even still after getting my ego popped, I still fall into the trap of comparison. I still fall into the trap of oh my God, I'm not good enough because I'm not making this much money. Even though, like this is the most money I've ever made. In my life, I can't for some reason fully embody gratitude and presence in the fact that I'm in the best situation ever. And I wonder what you feel that is in our mind, in my mind, in the collective mind. What, what is that limiting factor where we cannot just see things for how they really are? Is that part of our journey here on the planet?

The comparison trap's a tough one, man. And it's been very prevalent in my life as well. And I really think for most of us it comes back down to this self belief we've created for who we are, that no matter what we do, we're never going to be enough. A lot of that comes from deifying our parents, placing them up on pedestals, and then constantly falling from grace, like.

And we learn they're human.

Yeah, yeah, that's. I really feel that's a big part of it. That coupled with the collective values that are in our society that drive industry, that drive ambition. Again, nothing wrong with ambition. Like, I want to be really clear. This is a very healthy, healthy part of being human. It's how we've evolved, it's how we.

Develop that range you're talking about.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But when we're myopic in that, and that's all we, everything's about ambition and nothing else. We're imbalance. We're not in, in a healthy polarity, we're not in complementary polarity. Because if ambition falls under this category of doing or this expression, this energetic of doing, then where's the being? There's no space for that. And so now not only are we myopic, we're extreme, so we're imbalanced. And then we come back to what you mentioned a while ago about the middle path. We're not, we're not there in any capacity. We're just oscillating in extremes. And what happens is there's nothing wrong with oscillating in extremes. Our issue is that we just continue to do it for all of our lives in one way or the other. Whether it's an external expression or an internal expression, we just keep doing it. And we don't find the middle path.

Yeah.

Because we just keep. And sometimes our extremes even just get more and more. They just get further and further apart.

I, there is this middle way, but I don't think we ever are perfectly there. There's always this oscillation, you know, like a pendulum. Right?

Yeah.

But if you, if you really look at it like pendulums don't ever stop moving. They It's a perceived stop motion. But it's not like the pendulum actually stops. There's always constant motion. So we are always in flux, always in motion. But if we can get that sine wave to be like a little bit less reactive, a little bit less fearful, then the sine wave of how we respond to life can, can calm down. So I don't think that we're ever as a society ever going to have full peace. And that was when I got my brain exploded as well. And I'm curious what you feel about this. Do you think that being at peace in oneself, how do I find peace? How do I find inner peace? Do you think that's the right question or the wrong question?

I don't think it's the right question. I think it's an illusion. And the Vedics would say that life is 70% negative, 30% positive. And someone like Dr. John Demartini would say that we know we experience life in good and bad, in equanimity, in quality, it's equal. But it's what we do with the experiences that we have that define how we perceive the quality of our lives. And that's where I think we shun the bad, we shun fear, we shun anger, we shun these negative experiences. We can't see beyond them because we're so reactive. We're in fight or flight. Flight and nervous systems are jacked in that moment. And with the brain remembers that. We remember that because we want to stay safe for future reference, just in case. So I'm going to make sure I remember this just in case something happens again. I've got to go back to this place. I know what to do. And so we're constantly hanging on onto that. It's like the media. 90 something percent of everything's on the media. What is it? It's negative, it's death, it's war, it's fear because we're going boom. Fear. Oh, let me pay attention to that to prepare for it. You don't see them talking about something good, right?

Well, because that's what hijacks people. It floods more clicks.

Yes it does.

So yeah, I think inner peace is not the right question. But it's so funny because before I had my mind expanded this year and my heart touched by this four hour journey with check. Like I really was asking like, well why does God let suffering happen? Why is the world not at peace? And. And he's like this is the wrong question. And it just exploded my awareness because you've quoted the Vedics. And I think most men, we get caught in a cycle. I'll speak for the collective and feel free to chime in. Most men get caught in the cycle of, if I have abc, if I have a car and a wife, and I have these things, well, then I can stop the war inside. Then I can stop fighting for it and striving for it.

My question is called codependency.

Codependency. So unpack that and then please share with us, like, what's the alternate fuel source besides doing life like that?

So I like to say safe enough because it's, it's. It's one thing to feel safe, but. And you can fill in that word safe with another. Another word. Yeah, but to feel safe can be really overwhelming. Because when I say to you, what do you need to feel safe? If you're in a. Think back to when you were in a really wounded state, that question would be fucking overwhelming. Really, really overwhelming. When you were experiencing intensity at a visceral level, you were in it. What do you need to feel safe right now? That's a big question. But if I say to you, what's the next thing that you need to do to feel safe enough? That changes things because, you know, the quality of the questions we ask ourselves determine the quality of the lives that we live. And so is inner peace the right question? No, I don't think it is. I think a better question is, who am I? Who am I in this moment? What do I need right now, being more present, bringing it back into presence, bringing it back into the body? What do I need right now in order to feel safe enough, in order to feel better than what I'm feeling, what I need right now in order to connect deeper to what I'm feeling, as opposed to avoiding it. So that's something that we do really well. We avoid these undesirable states, I call them undesirable and desirable. These undesirable states of being or feelings or emotions, we're really good at avoiding that. We develop a habit around it.

Yeah.

Becomes the norm for us and we become exceptional at it. We become, you know, proficient.

And then I find people that are in that state where they're like, you had determined undesirable states that they don't want to feel. That's when the. The shadow of spiritual bypassing comes out to play. Like, that's when. That's when we see good vibes only.

Hello, Encinitas.

I mean, it's true. And I mean, I'm sure we could Find that anywhere. But it is pretty thick there at times. And, and of course. And you know, spiritual bypassing is a term that we've explored on the show quite a bit. But, but in this desirable and undesirable, like, there's got to be some intelligence diligence there to where we can't fall prey to good vibes only. I mean, I really think that's one of the most harmful phrases I've ever seen.

Completely agree. Because it's a, It's a. A big, big expectation to live up to. It's rigid. Any expectation that we have on ourselves, that we place ourselves, becomes rigid. So therefore it becomes confined. Therefore we've got no range or wiggle room and we're just stuck into this space and then we identify with it. It's like, well, if I'm not this, then what am I? And if I'm not this, then how people going to see me? I better just stay in this lane. It's like what's happening in politics now, bro? It's like what's, it's, it's. It's like what's happening in collective leadership. And I'll use Covid as an example, and I'm pretty clear in my stance on this, but I'll use it as an example, right, what's happening in Australia, in Melbourne, Victoria, as an example, that's heartbreaking. It is. The premier there, the, the equivalent of the governor here in the US of A state, has made a decision to take a particular path. Now people are going to have opinions. Opinions are like, everyone's got one. The truth of it is that it's more difficult. He's gone to the extreme of the decision that he's made in how to run and govern that state. For him to back out of that because he may think that maybe I've made the wrong decision. Ego won't let him shame. All his wounding will come up. And I'm sure he's got, he's got that wounding that's stacked. But even though, even beyond that, just the present moment of shame and doing, you know, having done, quote, unquote wrong to his people, you know, in his mind, he's better off just saying, well, I'm just going to keep this course. I made a decision. I'm just going to stay on it. That's heartbreaking, man. And that's what we do. So that's what we do as humans. It's like, well, I've made the decision now, I may as well just stay with it. Whether it's good or not, and we don't change. And that was one of my biggest lessons. You speak about ego death. That's the ego death, bro, is making a decision about something. Making a decision about who you are and who you want to be in the world and then experiencing that for a period of time and saying this actually doesn't resonate with me. I can relinquish, I can drop my identity here. I can drop the ego around this and I can move into something else. Now that's going to generally come with pain. That's been some of my. They have been some of my biggest lessons. This is how I've identified in the world. I've identified as a womanizer. I've identified as someone that is free. And however I've expressed that in the world, I've identified as someone that's a high risk taker. Can I shift that identity and can I drop the ego that's attached to that? And that. That can be really painful because now all of a sudden, everything you know to be true dissolves. You know, people talk a lot about ego, the dissolving of the ego, and I'm all for that, but that shit can't happen unless it's integrated. You've got to integrate those wounds and those shadows that are contributing to that ego. If you dissolve an ego, ego without integration, that's psychospiritual warfare on the self.

That's right. And this is what's happening with. This is why I no longer am an advocate for people doing ayahuasca. Because I had a. I had a partner in the past. And legally I'm not even able to say the name of it, but y' all know who it is. And so I saw an experience firsthand what happens in that situation when there's not a true integration of the ego being dissolved. And it's extremely. It's. It's a responsibility that I have right now because I've been through it and it still holds a charge in me, actually. I've gone through the ladder of compassion and understanding that I did the best that I could. And. But everyone needs to take notice. Like, if you're going to do deep work with psychedelics or even. Even with breath work.

Yeah.

I mean, but psychedelics specifically, though, because they open you to 4 and 5D consciousness and there's a lot there.

It's too much of an unfamiliar state. Exactly. You've got to do the deep work in a familiar state of consciousness.

That's a beautiful way to say it. And I. I had heard the term, actually, and I'm probably going to butcher it, but it's. Beware of unearned wisdom. Beware of unearned wisdom.

If you butchered it or not, that's great. Yeah, I completely agree with that.

I don't know who it was from, but it's so incredibly important to let your soul guide you and to be kind and loving to oneself. Because when I look back on my journey, especially with plant medicine, there was a ton of my ego that was, like, leading the way. It's like, oh, if I just do this ceremony and if I just do this thing, somehow I'll be healed. And then I got exactly the medicine that I needed, which was a year and a half of PTSD recovery, which I'm grateful for, but I don't wish it on anyone. And so the reason I gave that backstory is because for all the men out there that are looking for the edge, they want to do the cold therapy, the biohacking. They want to actually be like you had said, what are the qualities and the virtues of a good man. I want to officially warn against anyone thinking that plant medicine will be a golden ticket.

It's not.

Will be something that will somehow shatter you and then bring you back home. It'll shatter you, but there ain't no guarantee you're going to come back. Back home.

No, there's not.

What are your thoughts on that?

I completely. I. I wrote an article on. This is quite a long article, and you'd be able to find it on my. On my website, probably about. I want to say two, three, four years ago. I can't remember when exactly, but basically speaking to. Yes, I'm an advocate of plant medicine. I'm an advocate of altering your states of consciousness and accessing certain parts of your psyche or yourself. However, there's a massive caveat to that. Massive. And that is do your inner work in familiar states of consciousness. Breath work falls under that category. And that's also. Can be really dicey. I've had some very profound, intense experience. Many.

Me too. Especially with Anahata.

Yeah, I've never experienced her. Okay, her breath work per se, but she's a beautiful human being, so I have no doubt. But. But my point is, whatever you do, but even. Even breath still keeps you in a more. A more familiar state of consciousness. It can be very psychedelic, per se, but it's more. Yes, your neurochemistry changes, but not to the extent that Ayahuasca San Pedro 5 Meo DMT, whatever it may be that you're doing or engaged in. And, you know, here's the premise of, you know, when you ask what I think of that. Hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, the world was a very different place. You know, you, You've spoken with Zach Bush, right? It was an amazing podcast.

Yes.

And, you know, he speaks a lot to the earth's microbiome. And so, you know, he's. When we look at, when we look at the atmospheric conditions, the pollution in our waterways, our soils, the petrochemicals that are in our world now, the synthetics, like all this, like this is. These are neurotoxins. We didn't have that. We were different, different then. So when these, these plants, these sacred sacraments were being administered, they were being done in a very different way. There's so many fucking charlatan shamans out there that just shouldn't even call themselves shaman. My. One of the, One of my, One of my spiritual teachers, he's been in shamanism for 25 years and he does not call himself a shaman because he's not of that lineage and he's been ordained in different. But he still won't, he still won't call himself a shaman, so to speak. And maybe that's his hang up, I don't know. But the point is there's a reverence to that, right? There's a process. It has been butchered and bastardized in many different ways. And even, Even when there are amazing shamans out there, and there are many beautiful shamans out there, even neo shamans, right, or neo spiritual teachers that are very connected to medicinal sacrament in their own way, even. So the complexities of humanity, now, I'm not saying they didn't exist then, but they exist very differently now. You know, again, I mentioned the industrial era and man, Man's disconnection from family and the absent father and the unavailable father figure in the masculine, there's a fracturing in our psyche that has never been before. Every era has its own fracturing, so to speak. The inner child wounding that has taken place. There's so much psychosis, maybe is a strong word, but there's so much psychological burden that we experience when we go into plant medicine. It opens up a portal that we can't generally deal with. And so I really, really advise not against it, but just proceed with big, big caution.

Yeah. Thank you for saying that, man. Yeah, yeah. It was a. It was a hard lesson, but it was one that I needed to learn.

Yeah.

And I think with humility, that's why I'm sharing it carefully.

Yeah.

Because there was some unearned wisdom that I received, and I didn't know how to integrate it once the ego was shattered. So I look back at that time now, and I'm like, wow, thank God. Like, truly, I'm grateful. I mean, I'm not bypassing. I'm really grateful that I was able to go through that, have, like, multiple dark nights of the soul over the past year and a half, just get rocked to my core, have my psyche shattered, and then build myself back together just by being curious, loving, and open to different healers. And so the reason I brought that up is because we are seeing so much discussion around what is the. The best way to quickly get through your healing and, you know, let me heal so I can. So I can be of service.

Exactly. Take your time.

Be intentional with your healing. And as a man, you know, there's. There's stages of evolution. You have. You have so much content. You have so much content that you're putting out. I mean, I think it's like almost every day you're putting out, like, a micro. Micro class.

A couple every day.

Yeah, a couple every day. So from all the wisdom out there, if a man finds himself in the gathering phase, you know, we talked about the three phases of intelligence. If a man right now is listening to this, and I know he's feeling inspired because I've been feeling little shoots of energy in my body this whole time. But if he is like, okay, where's the first step on the staircase here? Like, what's the first step on the staircase to? The amount of work, the lifetime of work. Right. Because we covered a lot of ground.

Man, community, tribe, community. Surround yourself with other men that see you, you that feel you, that support you, that will healthily challenge you. It's got to start there. We're relational beings. Simple as that. No man is an island. We're not. We're not born in a silo, so to speak. We're not. You know, we. We get stuck in this space where all we're hearing is our own voice, and that's not healthy either. So community, community and tribe, Surround yourself with other men. And it.

And it doesn't look just like a zoom call.

I mean, it needs to be more than that. It needs to be physical.

It actually has to be in person because there is an energetic response. That's different in person. Correct. And this. This is actually a little bit more sinister because I feel like the narrative in our news media and from certain politicians and certain interest groups that are saying, you know, 6 to 10 foot distance, wear a mask, limit, go to Thanksgiving, but don't sing too loud. Literally the governor of California is on record saying, don't. If you have to sing, wear a mask and don't sing too loud. When I hear that, I'm like, how could that even be real? Like, how could people take that as reality?

Did you see what the Canadian CDC released?

No, I didn't, bro.

So good.

We have to laugh at it because it's just so hilarious. It's like fear multiple. Apply it on fear.

I need to show you. I'm going to find it if I can. But essentially, basically advice on how to have sex and oh, the glory. I read that. I said, nah.

Oh, this can't be real.

This is not real. A little bit of race. I, oh, it's real.

And then I saw one on, I think it was cnn where it literally said there was a physician and it said, wear a mask during sex. Wear a mask and limit kissing during sex. Anyways, I, I, I don't, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole.

Because Reminds me of Demolition man with Sylvester Stallone.

All right.

And Sandra Bullock. Do you know that movie with Wesley Slimes?

I haven't seen it yet.

Good to watch it.

Okay. But the only reason I brought that up is because there is such a narrative right now that wants to divide the solution you've just presented because I asked you, you know what, what is the real starting point for all, all men? To be a good man, you know, and to be a strong man, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Like it's community. And the very thing that you're telling us is the solution and the starting point to be an embodied man is under attack right now. Like, what do we do with that? What do we do with that? I mean, this conversations is a great spark. Yeah, but what does it look like extrapolating from there?

Yeah, well, we've got choices, right? So we've got, we can either feed the fear and, or we can, you know, we can begin to think for ourselves a little bit, do our own research, begin to understand what, what. And I mean, I'll just reference your, your podcast with Zach Bush and our friend Luke Story as well. You know, very similar. I mean, Zach really articulates all of that very well.

Yeah.

And there are many other scientists and doctors, physicians, etc that are articulating that. Well. Well, meaning that I values that I aligned with, with and, and what? I mean, and just to clarify, that is that we, we have been born out of viruses and bacteria. We survive because of viruses and bacteria. That's the, that's the reality and the truth of it.

1010 to the 31.

Yeah. Which is inconceivable. Number.

Can't even conceptualize.

I mean, our brains can't really conceptualize seven and a half billion people on the planet. Like, we can say the word, the number, but it doesn't mean anything. We, we just can't.

You know how many football stadiums that is. You couldn't even imagine.

Ridiculous. Yeah. So, you know, you've got, you've got an opportunity, you know, go back to what I said, do something that scares you every day. So if that's. I'm not, and I'm not suggesting you put your life at risk, your physical life at risk, but at what point do you draw the line on saying, well, you know, I'm going to stay in my home because I don't want to go out, just in case I get hit by a car or I'm not going to eat food, just in case I get food poisoning. You know, where do you draw the line is my point. And so we're all going to have to move through different fears. We all have different thresholds. Some are higher than others. We have, I call it the elastic band effect. Like your elastic band or tolerance may be longer or shorter than mine, and maybe longer in certain areas, shorter in other areas, but eventually it will snap. And so you want to bring the elastic band to the point just before it snaps, because that's your edge, and then peek over, like, do something about that. So if, if you do, if you do carry a deep fear around physical contact at the most moment, then that's an opportunity to look into that. What does that actually mean for your ancestors? You're here because of your ancestors, because of the physical contact that they had, right? Yeah. We've got to make a choice around what's really, really important to us.

Yeah.

And so community is important. It's. I don't want to say it's a be all and end all. It's not the be all, end all that's irrelevant. It's part of our integration, it's part of our evolution, it's part of our growth, it's part of all the things. Right. And so at what level you engage in community, physical, you have to make that decision as a man.

So, so then where's your line? Personally, I don't have a line on it.

Like, you know, mine's business is normal. Like, I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not going to start. If I hug people, I can kiss people, right? I, I get close to people. Like, if they have a problem with that, it's cool. Okay, no worries. I'm not going to interfere in your space. That's cool. I mean, but here's the thing. Like this interesting question that you asked. And I'll tell you why it's interesting. Because I've been battling with this for months because I went through a really dense phase of anger and judgment and projection and Christine had to deal with it. And there was a lot of that, right? And I thought to myself, look, this isn't helping. Me being judgmental, me being hypercritical, me being angry, it's not helping.

But you had to experience it.

100. Yeah, I experienced the contrast. So I'm at a place now where I still get charged, I still get triggered, and I deal with it a little differently and a lot quicker. But I'm at a point now where this is who I am. If, if you don't want the hate, send you all the love in the world. If that's your fear, I don't want to feed people's fear. Of course I'll put a mask on for you. No problem. Now, if I want to go and eat somewhere and I want to go to a restaurant and they ask me to wear a mask from the 7ft, 7ft to the table, I bite my tongue. Because sometimes, not always, because I want to eat at the restaurant.

Yeah.

Some other places. Like I went to somewhere the other day and said, oh, you have to wear your mask and have it. And I couldn't be bothered getting it. And I said, oh, I'm sorry, I just, I don't have it with me. And it's not really healthy that I wear a mask. And I've been advised that it's not really healthy. So I'm speaking in generalities. And it's true. Yes, it's true for me. And she served me, it was fine. You know what I mean? Like, if she, if she asked me to leave, like, would I, you know, be fighting with a 16 year old girl?

No, you just go, yeah, what's the point, right?

Seriously, what's the point? Like, at what, what point do I imprint that? It's not my place to educate, but it's my place to. Or maybe it is my place to educate, you know, but maybe not by saying, hey, what about this statistic? And hey, why aren't you thinking about that, maybe it's just staying in my sovereignty and saying, cool, honor your decision. This is your place of business. See you later. You do know that, you know, it's not really a legal thing, but I.

Say, I say it all the time, and I don't do it from a place of anger.

No, I used to. I don't.

It's like, hey, you know, I've had multiple physicians that I've interviewed, and from their expertise, specifically in immunology and virology, it's actually not healthy to bring in your own carbon dioxide on a repeated basis. Right. That's why physicians take their masks on and off. So having this mask thing in your car and doing all these things, I think it's deeper than that, though. And I think what it really points to is the same way that you talked about the virtual virtues and the qualities of a good man, right? Where there's a stimulus and the response and there's that pause in the middle and there's the embodiment of like, going through and experiencing the capital T and the lowercase t. There's a lot of work involved in this. We are on a macro and micro. On a macro, we're going through like a massive growing pain as a collective. On a micro, it seems like totalitarian. Totalitarianism, control, lockdowns, forced anything, fill in the blank, vaccinations, blah, blah, blah. At what point are we going to take a breath and turn towards the conflict and actually, because love has many phases, right? Love protects, love provides, love takes care. At what point are we going to take ownership of what is going on? Like, how long does this have to occur? And. And where are the good men? Where are the good men in this fight?

How long is a pace of string? And what is the boss under do? The Boston huddles together and goes into the eye of the storm. It doesn't run from the storm. We're running as a collective. We're running.

Yes.

And we're being ignorant. I. I can't believe I'll use Victoria Melbourne as an example. What is being allowed to transpire that the people are so complacent? At what point do we do that? Probably it has to get worse. If it. Because it's not getting worse, then we're just going to be more complacent because people are still in that space of it's not enough pain, right? That's where the collective, from my perspective, the collective consciousness is in a place of we need to experience more pain in order to shift consciousness in Order to transform and transmute. And because we're not in enough pain yet, we're not shifting.

Okay, so then your narrative, where you're talking about the ways, the ladder, the steps that men can become fully embodied, you know, it's not an easy thing, but if, if there is a call to action that you really embody for the world right now, like what's that call to action?

Well, it would be some courage. It would be cultivating some courage and making some decisions. Because if we continue to come from fear, we're practicing a pattern of restriction and we're practicing a pattern of holding ourselves back from our true potential. And so now we're in survival mode. We're just worried about keeping safe. That's all we're doing. And when I say keeping safe, it's like, like stay safe survival. Stupid slogan that's going around. I'll stay safe. Like stay safe from what's the worst 31 viruses that are in the world. What does that even mean? Stay safe, stay safe. Like in context of what's happening. Right.

Yeah.

And so we, we're, but by repeating stay safe, we're under the assumption by default that we're unsafe. So now we're excessively trying to stay safe, whatever that may look like. And now we're in this fear response. And now nervous system is jacked and hijacked. And so as men, we have to take responsibility and sovereignty. As any human being, you have to take responsibility and ownership and empowerment on what that looks like for you, whether that's doing more research, whether that's man, it's, it's really, it's. I don't know. I, I'm, I feel sadness. I'm at a point now where I've gone a lot beyond the anger and I feel really sad for how some people are, I just treating themselves and not allowing themselves to experience the fullness of life. And, and some people I think are going to be permanently damaged psychologically. They are going to be permanently retracted from the world.

And, and this isn't a podcast about, you know, conspiracy theory, because with conspiracy theory there, there has to be some kind of hidden agenda. I don't see anything hidden at all. It doesn't seem like anything's being hid. You can look at the data and we'll link this in the shows. We did a six part health freedom series with Zach Bush, Bush and Ben lynch and many other physicians. So we're all seeing the same thing. And that is, it's not the time to react. And I did that too. I felt prey, just like you, or I'd go on social media like, what the fuck's going on? And we talked about John Wineland doing that as well, so I find that super strange. So do I.

And some part of me doesn't.

Yeah. Okay.

Some part of me doesn't.

Well, he's fallible, right? And I know that he had. He lost his daughter, and maybe that plays into part of it. And you know what? I'm sure that he'll probably come around and think about maybe a better way to communicate that or who knows? The reason I'm saying this is because I think what the call to arms is. And I love that you said courage. Courage is not something that we can ever embody unless we actually lean into this shit, into the discomfort experience directly. So, like, men that are doing biohacking and men that are practicing presence with their woman or just. Just great men, good men, they can only embody that by actually doing it. So if anything, man, I feel like this. This podcast for me has been just another piece of gold that. That men can listen to and women, please send to your men, because the. The programs and the offerings that. That you do and that you are putting out into the world are needed right now more than ever. And that's just not a placated statement. I'm not saying, like, well, this is really important right now. What I'm saying is right now is actually the most important time for the work that you're doing. So how can people get involved in that? The community, the. The teachings, the lessons, everything else.

Yeah, I appreciate that, man. So the easiest pathway to take is Grow with Steph S T e F. So growwithsteph.com and then my. My main website is stefanosafandos.com and you can find me on any social media, even tick tock @stefanosafandos.

Are you liking tech talk?

I love it.

Okay.

So much fun.

What do you like about it?

It's just fun. It's stupid, you know? It's just fun.

Can you reframe my trigger around people being fed even less attention span than a goldfish?

Here's the thing.

I don't. You reframe my. My awareness there.

Here's the thing I don't like about TikTok.

Yeah.

Is that I find it interesting that. And maybe this is just some jealousy coming out. Entitled young, very young individuals are making 3, 4, 500 grand a month. Yeah.

Being influencers for 23 years old.

Doing.

Yeah.

You know why I like Tick Tock Is because there's a few people that I follow there that are comedians, and they're just great. They're so funny. I'm on it. But, like, I'll just do, you know, short relationship advice. I might do a video a week or something.

Yeah.

But it's just. It's just fun and silly and it breaks up the. The people. I don't mean I don't even follow anyone, but the people that come up in my feed, they're just hilarious. I find them hilarious.

I just.

Super talented and creative. I see people using it as a real creative outlet, and then I see the dark side to it as well. And there's a lot of dark side. But honestly, I haven't been on TikTok for, I don't know, maybe a couple of weeks. I haven't even scrolled through it. I forget. Completely forget. But it can be a bit of a trigger for me, too.

This is what we put out with the content for Wellness Force is we put out conscious clickbait.

Yeah.

So we'll compete. We'll go out there in the world and we'll create headlines that'll get people's attention. But when they get behind the wall, it's like, hey, calm down. You're with family. You know, you can trust us. Like, we're not here to scare you. And so we covered so much ground, especially, like, the virtues and the ways of being and the embodiment and the space between knowing and doing. Like, wow. But what did we miss when it comes to truly being a good man? You know that? Especially a man right now. 20, 20, 20, 21. What did we not cover through?

Look, it's. You know, in the past, I've received feedback and even pushback. Like, who the are you to tell me how to be a man? Like, what do you know? I've got a lot of. You get hate, right? Like, that's. That's just life.

Yeah. And there's nothing wrong, especially when you're doing good things.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's when the heat. The heat gets increased.

Yeah. And then, you know, again, I'll reference the martini because I heard him say, like, you should be happy when you get more hate because it means you've got more love. Because polarity and balance. Right. Like, it's happening in 50. 50.

That's good.

So it's not a bad thing. So embrace it. Right. Because if you. If you deny that, then you're denying the good as well. So it's not for me to tell you how to be a good man, this is what I was speaking about earlier. And again, the example of that could be a suicide bomber. I know this is an extreme example, but a suicide bomber goes and does his thing, and by his culture, his. His peer group is celebrated. He's courageous, religious. He's a real man. He's going to heaven. He's done. He's done what needs to be done. And by the people that he has victimized, the friends and family and the culture of that people, he's the devil. You know, he's done bad things. He's not a moral person. And so he's not a good man. Essentially, you know, just, he's a bad man. As simple as that. And so, you know, those characteristics that we lay over, what does it mean to be a good man? What I really say to people is, you figure that shit out for yourself. That's part of your journey. That's the whole point. Like, I can say to you, be creative, be kind, be strong, be compassionate, but whatever it is, you know, be. Be purposeful, be postured, breathe deeply into your belly. Like, I can say all these things, they're great, but you figure that out because that's part of being a man. Be autonomous, be sovereign, be empowered.

Yeah.

You do the work. What did you say? What was that phrase that you. What was that saying that you said earlier about earning something?

Yeah. Beware of unearned wisdom.

So I can tell you something and you can go do it, but have you integrated, embodied it? If you haven't thought about it clearly and deeper for yourself.

Yeah.

And so find out what it means to you to be a good man. I'm not talking to you directly. I'm talking to everyone. What does it mean for you? What type of man do you want to be? Explore that, because the more you explore that, the more you're going to move into a place that's more genuine and authentic for you. And. And the more, the higher the likelihood that you will act that out in the world, which equates to deeper levels of embodiment, which is really ultimate truth. Again, the headaches say direct experience is.

The best experience, and it's the only one that people can actually feel. Right. I mean, we've all. I've fallen prey to different marketing hooks and things like that. Then when I actually, like, when I get around someone, I can. I can feel their essence. You know, I can understand like. Like what they're really made of. And so, you know, with all you're made of now and everything that you talked about, not Just in our first episode, but especially today, like, this has been such a rich conversation, man. So I'm just super grateful for this time we've had. How would you, you know, depending on the way you want to explain it, if you were to look at wellness now, like, well, being, living well, how would you define wellness today? And I'm curious. Well, maybe we'll link in the show notes you said a couple years ago. But how do you define wellness? Like, how do you define living your life? Well.

For me, living my life well is a. I think we're multifaceted beings, right? I don't think we're. We're linear. We can be very linear in the way we think and feel, but I think there's more to us. There's layers to us, right? We're very conscious, complex beings. Not complicated. We can be complicated when we're wounded and coming from shadow, but we're complex. We're layered being. So I think for me, it's a multifaceted thing. Wellness for me means having psychological health, you know, spiritual health, emotional health, all of that. But really, it's the integrity of the relationship that we have to ourselves and our constant willingness and yearning to, you know, willingness plays and I can't remember if I said this last time, but willingness, willingness is a big thing, man. I think willingness defines wellness at every level. Like our ability to be willing to traverse the difficult paths that often are laid out before us, that we often avoid. Willingness to celebrate ourselves because that indicates deeper levels of self worth. So wellness is, you know, self worth big time. Like, how deeply can you connect to who you are as a person? How. How, how profoundly can you. You immerse yourself in radical self acceptance. When we do that, then when we honor our bodies. Well, again, I'm not talking about being this elite biohacker like Ben Greenfield. He's a great guy. He's a friend of mine, and he's awesome at what he does, but he's also in the extreme of that too, right? I'm not criticizing him saying, like, he's an expert in that space. When I say, when I say about physical wellness, what are you doing to just be mindful of. And he's a big advocate of this as well. What can you heal book? Boundless is epic. Have you read that?

No.

Oh, bro, bro, that's out of control. I'm not even through the whole thing, okay? And so, you know, just. And what he says, like, start with one minute of breathing today, like that. That's it. Like, just pay attention to the things that matter in your life. And that for me, is a definition, one of part of the definition of wellness.

Mic drop Share this podcast with somebody that needs to hear this message, that gets to hear this message. And until Steph and I see you again sooner than later, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll talk to you guys later. Thanks for coming on.