Beliefs Are The Cause Of Trauma, Not Emotions - w/ Ryan Christensen

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Phoenix Growth podcast. I'm your host, Christo Scriven, and today I'm joined by Ryan Christensen. Ryan, would you like to give yourself a brief introduction?

Sure. These days I'm working as a hypnotist and an author. I spent 23 years in the National Security and Intelligence space, Marine Corps and National Guard. Worked counterterrorism, counter proliferation. Been working as a hypnotist for full time for about four and a half years now. Loving what I do. Awesome. Awesome.

As a hypnotist, I know from when we've spoken before and things I've seen of yours online that you've created your own framework for working with your clients and things like that. That sounds really interesting. And those kinds of unique mechanisms that you've come up with yourself. And it's not just something that you've learned, it's something that you have felt the need to develop because there's lacking parts in everything you've learned from other people. And you've felt the need to develop something that's really interesting to me. So let's dive into that. Tell me more about that and why that's come about.

Sure. So did a really big self improvement, healing kind of journey between 2019 and 2023 in terms that I have autism. Didn't learn that until last year. As you can imagine, being undiagnosed autism, it's a bit of a rough ride. Especially growing up in Kansas and small town in 70s and 80s. One of these things, definitely not like the others. Right. So I had a lot of stuff to unpack. And during that four year period, I really tried pretty much everything. Right. Therapy and CBT and EMDR and spiritual stuff and somatic work and energetic work and psychedelics and hypnosis, like all of it. And what I realized along the way is nothing actually fixes the problem like everything else. Everything creates a lot of space, everything's makes things better. You could do more, but nothing actually fixes it. And the problem is because I have autism, I can't pretend that better equals fixed. I can't pretend, I can't lie to myself. I'm like, shoot. Because if I can't find a way to fix this stuff, then I'm not gonna be able to get what I want in life. I'm always gonna be settling, I'm always gonna be doing that sort of stuff. And I was done throwing myself under the bus that way. So basically what I did was I sat down and sort of like reverse engineered all the assumptions and principles behind all these different methodologies figure out, okay, how does this actually work? What are the actual limits here? Like, why is this not able to do what it needs to do? And that really led me to focus more and more on hypnosis, especially while I was working with the other clients that I had. And the focus on beliefs. Okay? Because if there's a pattern of behavior, there's something that drives it, right? There is a purpose behind it. It's trying to achieve a particular goal, trying to, you know, fix a particular problem. It has a purpose, and there's a reason behind it. And so I was working on these people's beliefs. You know, say, oh, you're doing this because you have to believe this, right? You have a certain viewpoint which causes you to move through a certain way. Perfect. Most hypnosis work, you know, most of the problems we're dealing with are in the subconscious mind. You know, stuff coming out of that is not working. The people needed to. It's not acting the way we need to. It's not following what we need to. It's just not cooperating. But the only two ways to get down there are psychedelics and hypnosis. Nothing else touches it, right? And all the conscious work we're doing is based on what our unconscious mind gives us to work with, which ain't always everything that's down there. It's not always the truth. Doesn't really show you the whole picture. Which means the stuff that we're working with, even though it makes sense, even when we create a story around it, even, like, work with it, is incredibly limited view of what's actually happening down there. Gotta actually get down there and figure out what's really going on. Psychedelics are beautiful. Big part of my journey. Can do amazing things with them. Really creates a lot of space. And it's really great for, like, breaking all narratives, creating new possibilities. Right? I've got a tattoo on my chest as I am alive. July 29, 2021. It's after a retreat. Doing some psychedelics was the first time in my life that I should believe that life was actually worth living. I actually get what I want. Right? That's a huge game changer in terms of the way you personal. But the problem with psychedelics is you don't have any control over that, right? You're going whatever, wherever it decides to take you. You ain't got any control of it, so you don't have the ability to actually go and work on what you want to.

It's also. It's kind of like you were saying when. When without psychedelics or hypnosis, you're only working with what the unconscious gives you, what you're triggered by. But even in psychedelics, you're only working with what your unconscious gives you.

Well, to some degree, yes. But it's like the medicines and the psychedelics are definitely taking on a particular riot, and it's definitely pulling up a lot more from that space. Right. The difficulty is you're only bringing in the tools you have with you, and there's very limited opportunities to do the change while you're down there because you're being taken on a ride. And once that thing is done, that door is closed again. So all the work, your integration work you're doing is how do I consciously navigate the world with all this new understanding? Can't touch the stuff back there anymore, right? Door's closed. So hypnosis has got to be the only tool, is really the only tool that allows us to sustained, directed, targeted access to the uncomfortable. But most of hypnosis work is working on the basis of suggestion and persuasion. Let me throw a bunch of good stuff in there, hope it sticks. Right? Creating a belief system for you, but it's battling an old belief system that you don't actually know what it is. It's got a higher lifetime worth of evidence for it. So typically that wins out in the end, which is why this stuff, you're able to make some shifts around the chain, around the edges. Able that's in your frameworks and motivation, great for breaking some habits. But there's really big limits. But I worked intelligence for 23 years, and that's all about figuring out what people don't want me to know. Right? Let me. There's something going on over there that we need to figure out. I have limited access to it. I need to figure out and map it out. So I understand how that thing is built. So I understand that network, that terrorist group, whatever the heck that is, so I can figure out how to break it, where the weak points, where the gaps, okay? Same thing applies in your unconscious mind. Every bit of information I need is back there. It knows exactly why it's doing it, knows exactly where it came from, knows exactly what it's trying to accomplish, knows exactly why it's not letting you change it. All I have to do is ask the right questions, and by doing so, I can map out the chain of logic that created that behavior, that belief, that pattern. As soon as I have that, I can disprove and dismantle that old chain of logic create a new chain of logic that draws a new conclusion. So instead of having a new belief and an old belief competing now, we've gotten rid of the old belief and now the only thing there is a new belief. Powerful stuff. The other thing I was really looking at is matter of scale. Okay. In the self improvement world, we have a very, very heavy focus on left brain perspective. Individual issues, individual problems, individual events, individual traumas, individual beliefs. Nobody's looking at it from the right brain perspective, the emotional perspective, because that part of your brain is looking at patterns over time. Narratives are run through things. It's looking at the forest rather than the trees. And you can't get there from the trees. Right. You can map out Times Square in New York and excruciating detail and it tells you absolutely nothing about what New York looks like from the air. You can't go from that general to specific general. You just can't get there. Right. But that thing came to be for a particular reason. This idea that I'm not good enough has a logic to it. There's a series of events that drew that led you to draw that conclusion. And based on that, you're doing things in a particular way. And a lot of ways, a lot of individual stuff we deal with is I'm not good enough. Apply to individual situations. Your emotional mind is faster. So it draws this conclusion first. And then we do all the analysis in the, in that frame. So if the frames are not good enough, you have to fight that on that individual detail. Yeah, well, if we can figure. Yeah, but if we figure out what I'm not good enough is and where it came from, we can change it. We can disprove that old chain of logic. We can create a new chain of logic that draws a different conclusion. Right. And by doing that, we don't have to do a lot of this live work. If you got a big box in your head with a million things in it and label on the side says I'm not good enough. Typical approach, take stuff off, put in a different box. Right. If you're really good, take a bunch of stuff out at one time, but there's a million things in there. More stuff gets added every day that never ends. Healing is a lifelong journey. Right. Play whack a mole forever.

Sure.

Right. Yeah. But there's a label on the box.

Yes. Yeah.

Why not take off the label, put on I am good enough. Now everything in the box means I'm good enough. You don't have to deal with it individually.

Yeah.

By changing that overall emotional conclusion, you change the framework for everything you're doing down here. And you can essentially speed run that entire improvement process. You can speed run that entire healing process. Right. And it's basically about bringing that emotional conclusion in line with what you now know. Because unfortunately, your unconscious mind, that emotional mind, never has time to step back and look at things and reevaluate. That part of your mind exists to deal with like the first, this, like one or two seconds of the present world. There's a beautiful set of experiments in Germany in the 1970s that basically proved our conscious mind becomes aware of something about a half a second after it happens. We're half a second behind.

Yeah.

And that makes sense because you got to get all this information come in, your mind's got to process it, got to filter it, got to take immediate action. Right. If you can imagine driving where it's reactions are half a second behind like you're screwed. Right. So it's gotta have that ability. But that also means it never has time to take a step back because it's gotta be dealing with this all the time. Right. The only time it has. Any time I've gotta keep. Exactly, exactly. So as a result, the only time it has a break in time to integrate is when you're asleep. Welcome to dreams. That's your unconscious mind processing, trying to figure stuff out. But it's doing it in the framework it already knows. And you don't have the ability to influence that. Which is why hypnotic trance is so important, because it's that theta state, that bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind, that space right before the sleep state. So we get to put pause on time, give it a chance to step back. We create that bridge so we can interact with it. And that's the thing that makes hypnosis so powerful. We get to interact with the unconscious mind on this level in a space where it has time and space to take a step back and reevaluate things. And that's where we can make some powerful, amazing changes. Awesome.

Yeah. I've had experience with both types of hypnosis that you were talking about. So you had that solution based hypnotherapy. I originally encountered that and it did pretty much nothing for me.

Okay.

I think it helped, but only it's like an affirmation that goes a bit deeper, you know.

That's exactly right. It's affirmations on steroids. That's all it is.

Yeah, exactly right.

Pretty much.

But I also. Yeah. With, with the, the Deeper stuff, the kind of transformatory hypnosis, hypnotherapy that was massively transformational. And every time I came away from there, I felt like I had this massive shift and there was this unconscious processing that was happening and it was like it, it was beyond the understanding of my conscious awareness. Yeah, like I could remember it. It wasn't like I didn't remember it. It was like a guided meditation. I could remember the whole experience, but it was so deep that I could. I had the sense that there was hogs shifting within my psyche, right? And I, I kind of needed the rest of the day to just go. I just need to process this. But there was no conscious processing happening. It wasn't like me like figuring things out. It was just me like, well, I just need to like lie down for a bit.

Quite frankly, that's, that's exactly what's necessary. Because when you're shifting these major belief sets and these major principles that you've been running by, your mind now has to reorganize around this new principle, right? It now has to do all the work it needs to bring everything else in line with this new understanding. And you can't do it consciously. Why? Because you don't know what the heck it is. You don't know what the heck changes need to be made. You don't know what the whole stuff is. So it has to on its own. And that's the way it should be. One of the other things that I, that's in my approach is that I look at the mind. Kind of like a company, right? You got your rational mind or sorry, your consciousness, your rational mind, your emotional mind, your instinctive mind. Seek to mind like your accountants, your worker bees, right? Your emotional mind is kind of like your middle management types. Sorry, say that again, sorry. Trick. Your instinctive mind, right?

Instinctive mind.

Instinctive mind, right? Worried about your physical survival, right? That's basically your worker beast. It's the stuff that's driving you around the, the, the, the, you know, driving you a sore and all that kind of stuff, right? Motor functions, yada y y. Your emotional mind is focused on like meaning and relationships. That's kind of like your middle management types. Your rational mind is focused on like how things work, stuff out there. How does that stuff actually work, right? Physics, all that sort, right?

Figuring things.

Yeah, yeah. That's like your senior management, right? And then consciousness is a CEO of a company. The CEO of the company should not be figuring out what the new format for the TPS reports and the Accounting department should be. You've got people for that. Right. The CEO of the company should not be involved or even be aware of all the different processes. Make this stuff work. What's he supposed to be doing? Strategic vision. We're going that way. Handle the big decisions. That's really all he does.

Sure.

I take the report from stuff from the people down there. Now that I know what's going on, this is where we should go. And once you start looking at your mind that way, things become real easy because you shouldn't be involved in that unconscious process.

Right. So when you're in.

You got people.

When you're in that internally dysfunctional state, you have internal trauma or these limiting beliefs, like literally limiting beliefs like I'm not good enough that I've come up from some childhood experience. They are like. They're like backseat drivers. They are the employees of the company that are telling the CEO what to do.

Yes.

Basically, the CEO has to. Has to like, level with them all the time and say, okay, yeah, yeah, I remember that. You know, instead of being the actual boss and being the visionary and driving the company forward.

Exactly. You have to fight with that whole thing. But here's the interesting part. This is the other piece of the puzzle. Right. If your mind is looking from two perspectives all the time, both of them are correct at all times. What you're thinking, what you feel are 100 correct. So if you feel like you're not good enough, that's actually the right answer from that perspective. You don't like it. You don't want to operate that way. You want to move through the world in a different way, which is why we fight that stuff all the time. That doesn't mean it's wrong. Okay. Sure. The trick is, when you feel those things, instead of trying to prove it wrong, act in a different way. No. Figure out why that came from the. To be in the first place is trying to show your problem. Hey, I don't think I'm good enough. Great. Why? Where'd that come from? But it has to be on that higher scale perspective. Individual events don't matter. So you can't deal with it in a rational way, you can't deal with them in a logical way. And again, if your emotional mind, if that instinctive mind, that unconscious mind, is always in the present moment, it can't take different perspectives into account. It judges true and false based on what already believes. So if you feel like you're not good enough, it doesn't matter what you accomplish. This never changes. And we see that all the time.

Let's kind of try and break this down a bit more because you have those different levels of the mind. I think talking therapy for the most part it like allows you to make sense of things on that, on that kind of conscious level or the rational mind. But so if you've got, had an experience in the past where you feel like you now have the emotion that I don't feel good enough, but now you've made sense of it and you can think, no, but I, the conscious thought is I am good enough, I'm okay, but the underlying emotion is still there.

Exactly.

Does that, do you think that plays a role? Like are both important? I imagine you would agree, and I probably would agree that the emotional healing, like rewiring that deep unconscious, big picture view, oh, I'm not good enough, that the label on the box is more important. But then also to make sense of things in a logical fashion, is that still important? Because I, I guess that might, is what maybe happens in a, in a hallucinogenic experience. If someone goes in there and they have this deep unconscious healing and then they spend the next five years trying to figure out what happened, like make sense of things rationally.

Let me, let me go ahead and throw a couple different things in here. Okay. Number one, all models are wrong. Some models are useful. Every tool has a purpose and use. When you're first starting out, part of the thing you need to do is just figure out what the heck does this actually mean because often you don't have the perspective to look at it of, oh, my environment is completely screwed. Right. I was remember sitting, I was going through my second divorce talking to the therapist and you know, my, my household was kind of emotionally volatile. Right. Mama blew up every once in a while, just a mess. And he's sitting there, I'm, I'm sort of talking about like how we used to argue and stuff like that, you know, end up in these four hour long arguments. And my therapist looks at me and says, you realize that's emotional abuse. Right. Never occurred to me. That's just how things work. Right. I don't think it's emotional because I think she's had emotional issues and blues up blows up. Right. It wasn't intentional. But that sort of thing is like sometimes you simply lack the perspective to understand that what you're going through was wrong, bad, something. Right? Right. That it wasn't you. Right. So that's step one. Right. But then that only gets down to that rational mind, rationally, consciously, you Understand that has an impact to the emotional instinctive processes. Right. So. And since that part of your mind is doing what running 90% of stuff, have you longer instantaneous decisions running your day, you're still operating on old, old principle. Right. There's this thing called the Basil ganglia. It's a structure in your brain that kind of judges whether to do something or not. And it's doing it based on older emotional context from similar decisions. So you can decide to do something and your mind has it in veto as running off of emotional context.

Okay.

Right. Understanding things can cause the seeing out of that. You can sort of turn that down a bit, but you can't really remove it. That's why things like EMDR are good. Reprocessing that stuff, taking away that emotional context, great. Now that doesn't have as much weight. But you haven't changed what it means, just taking away the emotional association with it. But you haven't changed what it means, how it means, how it fits in the sort of larger picture. Right. Psychedelics again give you a lot of new experiences and allows you to sort of re, you know, attach new emotional context to lots of stuff. Great. Again, changing the weights on the scale. Perfect. Doesn't change what it means because understanding something on a logical level is the micro detailed perspective of looking at the trees. And you can change how those trees look as much as you want. Doesn't change nothing. Now the forest looks just change how things look from 30,000ft. And that's the problem is I. That's one of the things I realized it was part of like, oh, discovering things like, oh, wow, this doesn't change because we're doing this work. That's why we're always fighting. Right. That's why it's so important to figure out where they came from. And the first step in doing that is owning the fact that it's right. Owning the fact that from this perspective you're not good enough. Even if you have the proof over here. And the interesting thing is this, the only things we have to prove to ourselves are things we don't believe. If you feel like you have to prove that you're good enough, that means you don't actually believe it. Measuring, keeping score, Right. Oh, I know I'm good enough. Great. You're trying to prove yourself wrong.

Yeah.

Which means you don't actually believe it. Right.

Yeah.

Which is one of those tricky things. Like if you have to say in your mirror, if you say this affirmation mirror, I'm awesome, I can do It. I can kill it. You don't believe it. You wouldn't need to stand in front of the mirror and say, I'm a man. I believe in God, yada, yada, yada. Be ridiculous. Right.

If you, if you have to say it, you don't truly believe it.

Yeah. If you have to try and convince yourself of it means you don't believe it in the first place.

If you know. If you know it, you know it's. You don't have to say it.

If you know it, you know it. Yeah. You just let it. Right. But the thing is, there are sets of tools that you get down there, figure out what this is, figure out what's there, fix it. Right. We just haven't taken that perspective before, haven't gone there, haven't done that kind of work before. It's kind of. I think I'm kind of the first person to sort of look at that from perspective.

As. As you're talking, my mind's kind of coming up with this. This concept of these three layers to. To healing. So there's the belief that underlies it. Right. But then there's the trauma on top of that belief, which is like the emotional resonance of a negative experience.

Could you.

Would you. Is that. Can you split those things up? Because, say, like, emdr, you were saying, like, it reduces that emotional. When you get triggered, or you have that basic gangly ganglion that gives you that emotional reaction. If you get triggered by something, EMDR might help you to reduce the trigger, but the belief that underlies the trigger is still really there.

Yes.

And then on top of making sense of things, like getting, like, the narrative. Right. And, oh, do you know what? Actually, that. That person was just having their own problems, and then they. That passed them on to me because, like, it's been this, like, generational thing and making sense of things.

You can.

And when you get triggered, if you have emdr, say you don't get as triggered, but then you still get triggered. But then you can talk yourself out of it because you know how to make sense of things.

Yes. Let me put this way. The trauma and the meaning are the same thing. This is what I mean. The meaning is like, okay, your mind interprets it a certain way and it communicates that to you with the emotion. It means this. So feel this. The emotion you feel is the communication from your unconscious mind of, this is what the situation is. This is how I'm viewing it. This is how I need you to move in response. Okay. So it's the same thing.

So the.

When you do. When you do.

We're just saying belief that underlies it all. The label on the box is the thing that triggers emotion.

Yeah.

The emotion.

Take the trauma piece out of it for just a second. We'll get back to that in a moment. Okay?

Okay.

Okay. The belief drives the emotional response. Right. The belief is what causes that emotion to be generated for you to feel it. Okay. With emdr, you're basically taking away that emotional response. You're taking away that emotional sick. Okay. Which is helpful. Don't tell me this. Which is helpfulness. It's too much. It's like, turn this thing down. I can't hear anymore. Doesn't change that thing. It just says, don't tell me about. Don't tell me. This way.

Sure.

You're removing that signal. Right. Which is. Which is important because it's creating space for you to do other stuff. Beautiful. Love it. Awesome. But it's a step in the process. Okay. When you look at trauma, I see trauma in a very different way. Okay. Part of it is based on this idea of, like, emotional pain is caused by emotional wounds, which. Caused by emotional trauma. That's what everybody says. Right. When you're looking at emotions as pain, that's the thing that triggers that survival response. Because your mind now has to treat your emotional state as a threat to your physical existence. In a way, it is hard to escape. Yes. Yeah. Well, because they're pain. And you're supposed to be away from pain, suffering. That's what you're supposed to do. Same thing. Right. You're supposed to get away from that. Right. I don't look at emotions as pain. That's not what they are. They're signals. They're questions, their mind saying, I am facing this kind of a problem. Right. If that's the case, nobody ever made you feel anything. It's your interpretation of what's going on. Which means they don't come from emotional wounds, which means nobody's really wounded. Which means they're not caused by trauma, not in the way we think. Trauma is a situation where you're sitting around confronted with. With a situation, and you cannot find a way to win. Your mind is screaming at you for help, screaming at you to help, you know, find a way through. You don't have an answer. So you're overwhelmed with all this past, with all this powerful negative emotion. Because your mind's like, we've got to get the hell out of this. You don't have a way. So that is.

I thought about this quite A lot. We can. It's. It's kind of an aside to this whole topic we're talking about. Now we're starting to talk about trauma because it's just what's coming up for me. And whether you perceive something as negative or not makes it traumatic or not. But are there not, as human beings, animals, we have physiological needs, emotional needs, connection needs. If they are not met or they are abused upon, say, are there not some things that are intrinsically traumatic? Not that don't just come down to perception?

I would say. No. This is what I mean. Your mind has to interpret everything, right? There's nothing that has inherent meaning. Nothing in the world has an inherent meaning. There's certain things that are facts are true, but now they mean a particular thing. Right? Some people are scared to scrap of spiders. Some people love them. Right. There's no inherent meaning. Spout, spider. Right. Snakes, Same kind of thing. Right. There's only a few things that have an inherent. Like, oh, my God, this is exactly what this means, like falling, drowning, that kind of stuff. Okay? Everything else is something you have created meaning for based on how everyone around you is moving through your environment. Okay? Now, when we're very young, we have one and only one tool to get help, that's cry. So every form of distress, no matter what it is, we got one way to. To deal with it. People respond a single way. So from the beginning, we're looking at all forms of distress as the same. Okay. As we start getting older, what's the narrative? You hurt my feelings. You broke my heart. Don't make me feel that way. Right. So we started associating emotions with pain. And when you're growing up in an environment where you can't get what you need, where there's trauma, where there's abuse, where you're being put upon all that other stuff, what's happening? You're experiencing significant negative emotion on a regular basis that you cannot escape. Right. You don't have any control over it. You're trapped. You're just bombarded with stuff. Yeah. So that's the point where your mind is like, oh my God, I'm. My survival is threatened because it is. Because you need the connection and everything else. It's like, how the heck do I get that?

So.

So using those. Those emotional signals.

Yeah, yeah, pause there for a sec. In that scenario, as a kid, you know, between 5 and 11, say 5 and 9, and all those things are happening, you know, they're getting abused, they're not getting attention, they get neglected. You Know they're not getting listened to, they're not getting the care they need. Could you ever say that it's their perception of that that's traumatizing them?

Yes, always.

If, like, if they had, how can they possibly have a different perception? Don't human beings crave a certain amount of connection? Do we not need that certain level of connection?

100%. 100%. I'm not saying that's not inevitable, that they feel this way, because it is. You're a kid, and five to five to nine is actually an easier way to navigate than zero to five. Because from zero to five, your rationality, your, your, Your reason capacity really hasn't come online. You don't have that capacity. So you're navigating things purely from an emotional perspective. Sure.

Yeah.

Right. You don't have any other framework to play with. So by the time you're 5, 6, 7 years old, you've already created all these ideas of, I'm not good enough, there's something wrong with me. Gotta be something different. World is dangerous, it's pain, I'm traumatized.

Chill.

Those have already been created. And since that's the truth, you're navigating by. By the time you get 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years old, these rational frameworks come online. You're understanding that from that perspective. Is there any way for you to reach any other conclusion that you hit? I don't think so. It's the most natural conclusion. Like there was no way in hell I was ever going to grant autistic Kansas. That was different. There was no way in hell I was going to draw any other conclusion. Nobody's saying that.

But you're saying that if, but they could. If, if they just had some, like, crazily anomalous brain and could detach. Yeah.

Well, think about it this way. If you look at attachment theory, right? 70% of people have an insecure attachment style. Right. Anxious. Right. 30% have a secure attachment style. They got what they needed. They drew the right conclusions because they're raised in an environment where they could draw healthy conclusions.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So the other thing I'm. But I'm saying, yes, it is inevitable that you reach those conclusions because you can't reach any other conclusion in that environment. You really can't. Okay. Yeah, yeah. That's okay. It doesn't matter because we can fix it later.

Yes.

Right. It doesn't matter what you've been through. Question is, where are you going next? Yeah, yeah.

It's not your fault.

Exactly. Exactly. There's nothing you can do.

Responsibility. It's your responsibility to heal.

Well, yeah, well, nobody else is gonna do it for you, right? That's just. That's just. The world is savior. Yeah.

Nobody else can do it.

No one's coming, you know. Well, they will. That's the thing is they will if you let them. They're help if you let them. So what I would say is, so go ahead.

Go ahead.

It doesn't like. It doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't matter what you've gone through, it doesn't matter how you're navigating up until now. It doesn't matter what those beliefs are. Because if we can change them and shift them to what you need them to be to move forward in life, the rest of your life can be great. And the other beautiful thing is this fundamentally where I get my people is a place where there's nothing wrong with them. There never was. There's nothing to heal and there never was. Okay, because when you change emotions from pain, questions, ones go away. Traumas reimagined a different way. The reason why we think we're the problem is because when you're hand hurts, you're supposed to look at anything because it's busted. Emotions are pain. It's in here. It's in here. So this has got to be the problem. This is what we got to fix, correct? Given how we're built, given what we understand, how do I navigate the world? How do we get what I want out there? What do I create out there? Once you do that, something interesting happens because you're now seeing your life through the completely different lens of I was never the problem, wasn't me, it's my environment. You're doing it on that emotional deep, instinctive level, which means you're disconnecting your emotional mind to that instinctive mind. So your instinctive mind doesn't have to treat your emotional state as a threat to your survival anymore. So you don't have to avoid those negative emotions. They're not pain. You can engage with them, you can treat them as a question, as that they are. In a lot of ways, those negative emotions are a good thing. Feeling bad becomes a good thing. Why? Because it's helping you identify the problem in your way to getting what you want. And figuring out what the problem is is always the hardest part. Once you understand where the problem is easy to fix. Trying to find the problem really hard. So if your emotions are leading you to find the problem, that means you're actually getting where you want to be faster, that's incredibly powerful thing. And you're healed. You're done fixing yourself. All that's done. What new tools do I need? What new frames are I need? Where do I want to go? That's all you got to ask.

Okay, so is the. When you go in there into the unconscious and you. You reconstruct functional beliefs, right? Functional. I think dysfunctional is the best terminology that I've come across. Probably healthy, unhealthy, maybe. But you reinstate healthy functional beliefs, then the emotional resonance that is, is there. The triggers that are rising, whether they. You get triggered from the outside or from your own internal kind of system, just reimagining those things and bringing them up, whatever's happening, they. So they. They just fade away. The emotional resonance is not there. Strong. Once you've done the belief work.

Exactly. Because again, emotions are driven by the meaning. So if you change the meaning, the emotional association changes. Right. The other thing is you get triggered because you've got buttons to push. Because things out there confirm negative opinions, negative beliefs about yourself. If you imagine things of like, there's nothing wrong with me, then people telling you you're a jerk, you suck, whatever doesn't resonate. Again, true and false based on what you already believe. If the new belief is nothing wrong with me, doesn't matter out there. The other thing is, now I have control over my emotions because everything is my interpretation. So nobody makes me feel anything. So now I'm sovereign. Well, what happens in my head, I'm no longer victim. Never can be again. Right. The other thing is, once if you think there's something wrong with you, you have to fix yourself. That means you're broken. And broken things aren't particularly valuable if you wounded, need to heal. Broken, not particularly valuable. Which means when you believe other than one of those things, you can never have healthy self esteem. That's why we're always trying to prove that we're good enough. Right? But once those things are fixed, now you can create value. Now you create deservedness. You got to do it in a way that doesn't have to be measured. So when you're measuring, the answer can always be not enough. Right? So the, the. The answer to that puzzle is like, okay, I am good enough to be. I am good enough to serve whatever I choose. Because value is a choice. That's all it is. I choose a thing to measure, choose a way to measure it. I come up with any answer I want. That's why we're trying to prove it. In a certain way. Me find something I'm good at. I'm going measure something that way. But if that's just a choice, all you're doing is making a new choice. The problem is the choice you've already made was when you were young. That environment was bad. You could not make a positive choice. You have to not be good enough. Why? Because I'm not getting what I need? It's the only answer you can have. Fix those two things. Create a new choice. Right. And you do it in a way that you don't have to prove anything to yourself or anybody else, because it's just your choice. Anybody tells you you don't deserve something, No, I decide that the answer is yes. So you're not good enough. No, I decide that the answer is yes. Do I have to prove it? No. And the world can fall apart around you, and it never changes how you feel about yourself. That's what's going on out there. Situation. I'm navigating challenge. I'm being faced by any who I am. Really hard to push somebody's buttons when they don't have any buttons to push. Yeah.

When you truly know who you are and you've integrated those fragmented aspects of the self.

Yeah.

Like, you can't be affected by other people's criticism or anything like that. You know, it's like, maybe, you know, yeah, we all have weaknesses. That's okay. You know, I'm. I have strengths. I have weaknesses. And just by you calling out my weaknesses, there's nothing and there's nothing. I don't know. I love that at the. At the end of 8 mile. I use that as an analogy of at the end of 8 Mile, when Eminem, like, he does that, the rap battle, and he's talking and he. And he just lays out everything about himself that they could possibly hold against him, but in a way that he completely accepts it and integrates it and now holds it as his own. Like, it's a strength now because he's. He's integrated himself and then he's untouchable. No one can hold anything against him. Like, yeah, tell me something now that can harm me. Nothing.

Nothing.

Yeah.

When you own every part of you, positive and negative, when you have, like, accepted and owned every mistake you've made, when you, like, own every bit of your history, nobody can use it against you, not even you. And the other thing is this. I think one of the things I really realized about what I'm going through, like, what I have now is, like, I would never Created this. If I hadn't gone through all that stuff, right, There was no way I would have gotten there. Why? Because I would have never had to ask those questions.

For sure.

Nobody questions things, and things are working well enough. But I couldn't lie that things were working. So I had to keep on going. How to keep asking questions? How do we keep on trying to figure out a way to do it? Which took me this place where I don't think anybody's gone, that I can create things in ways that nobody else can really do right now. But I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't been in so much pain. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't been so broken. So all the pain, everything else, allowed me to create this. It was what needed to happen for me to build this. So why would I look at as a bad thing? Get anything you want in the world.

You may look at if you're still emotionally connected to all those things, right?

You may, you may, you may.

But you are no longer. Because you are healed.

Right? Right. And one of the things I'd say is, like, you can have anything you want in this world if you're willing to pay the price. I created something amazing. Really high price to pay to do this. You can't create something of powerful value if you're not willing to pay a big price. You are. Boom. You create something amazing. This took a lot this to build. Fair enough. That's the price I had to pay to create this. Fair enough.

What were the biggest moments in your personal narrative like, your biggest transformations? This is what, like the Phoenix Growth podcast is about Rebirth, you know?

Sure.

Like personal death and resurrection, you know?

Yeah.

Like that Narrative. Narrative, yeah. So let's talk about that, man. What's for you? When do you look back and think, wow, that was a pivotal moment. And for me, I look back at many times in my life and I go, whoa. I just. I do not feel like that same person anymore. I feel like a completely different person. And I think that's a natural. That is a natural way of growing up. Maturing, transforming, developing. But I don't think everyone feels like that. I think they can just go through the whole life and think, oh, I'm just the same person.

You know, that's the interesting thing. When I look back in my life, I am the same person the whole way, but I'm moving through the world and expressing myself in a very different space in a very different way throughout the world. Okay, so I grew up in Kansas Autistic. Nobody knows what's wrong with me. Nobody can help me. The world works for everybody else and not for me. And so I knew very early on I am never going to get what I want and mean in this world, I'm going to suffer for the rest of my life, period. So the first time I wanted in my life, I was nine years old, right? First time I actually considered any of my life, I was nine years old. Right? Because like, if I'm gonna suffer for the rest of my life, fair enough. That's truth. Fair enough. I get to decide how long that is.

Chill.

There's power agency in that. Right? But my mom was like, can't let you go. And I was reading a lot of like military fiction and science fiction fantasy so that I write. Idea of like heroic sacrifice was a really big part of my life back then. Okay, fair enough. Become Batman. Batman's life sucks, right? Not Bruce Wayne. Batman. Batman's life sucks. But it's a really good thing he's around. It's necessary for him to be there. Otherwise Gotham City would suffer. So if I dedicate myself to that greater good, serving humanity, trying to protect people, there's a reason for me to stick around. That's what led me to Marine Corps intelligence work, all that kind of stuff. But by 2019, 2020, I'm realizing the world does not want to be saved doing all this work. Things are getting worse. I'm obviously in the wrong line of work. So now I have to find a different reason to live. And that's where they started that self improvement journey. So I've got to find a different reason because that's not working anymore.

So you were using that, but you're using that means to create meaning in your life. Like my life is suffering sort of in a Buddhist sense. Right. It's like emotions are associated with pain. Pain is suffering. But if I dedicate my life to some, some worthy cause, then that's meaningful and yeah, it's worth me being around. And you came to the end of that period and what you thought that it just wasn't. You thought things were getting worse. You wanted to do things on more of an individual level.

Well, well, there's a couple different things. Like, number one, I was realizing I was not actually having the impact I needed to justify that anymore. Right. So that reason no longer works. So now I've got to find a different reason to live. This is all subconscious. I didn't understand this at the time.

Sure.

So I'm looking around. It's like, okay, great. My parents, my brother, doing a lot of stuff where they're helping people one on one. Always talking about how they're improving people's lives. Like, ah, there's something I could do, there's a way I can help. There's where I can still be a service. That's what took me down the road of like becoming hypnotist, so forth and so on. But I'm still not getting what I need. Okay. I'm still throwing myself into the bus. Still sacrifice. I'm still not getting what I need. And if I can't do that anymore, it's too painful. So got to figure out a way to get what I need. So sorry. Really. You know, 2021 is really when I said like, I am done declaring jihad my bs. I'm doing whatever the hell I need to to fix this, right? And so it took me down a very powerful like two, three year period of transformation. The first really big moment was I was doing some belief work, coaching with some, with, with some people. Sorry. And realizing like, I'm throwing myself into the bus and it sucks and it sucks and it sucks. And I realized, wait a second. If you throw away garbage, that doesn't hurt, right? Throw away the trash, doesn't hurt at all. Throw away something you care about that hurts because that has value. It's like, oh, wow, I must have value because throwing myself under the bus hurts. First time I'd ever thought about that. First time I've actually thought that I actually have value in that moment. Realizing that it's like, wow, okay, fair enough.

That's a cool rehabilitation.

Yeah. Went and did a retreat. Did a couple days worth of psychedelics. Works. After the end of it, I'm sitting there on the, on the couch. Later on I'm like, man, I feel amazing. I'm so excited. I can't im. I can't wait to get to do all those crazy things. I'm so, you know, this is amazing. And it hit me. That's the first time I ever felt that way my life. First time in my life that I felt life was living. First time in my life that I thought it was possible to get what I wanted, needed. Not that I could, not that I had it, but it's possible to get it. That broke me. I'd cry for like half an hour. That's why I chest. Yeah.

Yeah.

I am alive.

That's. That's awakening to the knowledge of good, right?

Yes.

And the apple. It's not just the knowledge of, it's the knowledge of good and evil, what's possible.

What do you want? What do you need? Right?

Yeah.

And up until that point, that had not been true for me.

Wow.

Right? Did a lot more work. Awesome. Now life is a living great. So I'm doing a lot of work the next year, working with the hypnotist. And I'm like, trying to struggle and trying to figure out, like, what am I supposed to be doing and entrepreneurship and all this other stuff and my goals. And I'm gonna say, wait a second. I'm trying to find another reason to live, but I want to live. Why am I trying to justify that? And it hit me because I've chosen to live because I want to live. I no longer have to justify my existence. And that broke my brain so hard, I felt like I was on mushrooms for three days. Talked about how you had to lay down three days. I felt I was an altered, messed up, like, psychedelic space for like three days. Because that was such a fundamental, powerful belief that was rolling around under there that structured my entire life, like 46, 47 years at that point.

So say that again. What was the. What was the rig. What was the revelation?

I didn't have to justify living anymore. I didn't have to justify existing anymore. I didn't have to have a reason to be here because I wanted to be here.

And what led to that?

Just, I was doing some work with the hypnotist and trying to figure out, like, what my goals were, where I was supposed to do, like how I was supposed to measure myself now that I didn't have this whole thing. I really said, wait a second. I'm trying to find a reason to be here, trying to find a reason to live. But I already want to live, so why do I have to justify that? I have to justify the choice I've made. I know that one. Right?

So, yeah, the fact that you're find. Trying to find a reason to live is proof that you want to live.

I didn't want. Yeah, well, the fact that I was trying to find a reason to live was proof that I didn't want to live. Right? Because I had to justify before. And I said, wait a second. Okay, I want to. So I don't have to do this anymore. I don't have to justify it because I already have it. If I already believe something, I don't have to prove it, right? If I am a man, I don't have to prove a man. If I believe in God, I don't have to prove that I'M believing God. It's just true.

Yes.

Right. It's like, wait a second. Why the heck am I trying to prove something that's true? I don't have to prove that anymore. Oh, my God. I don't have to prove that anymore. I don't have to justify being here anymore. I can just be here. I can just live because I want to. And that had never occurred to me. That would never been true for me. My entire life. My entire life had been structured around justifying living, justifying being here, finding a reason to be here because I didn't want to be.

Did you? That was a fundamental belief change.

Oh, yeah.

But I do have a question on those kind of higher levels of the emotional and the tree level. Did you ever kind of truck back and figure out the influences that made you feel like that?

It's very simple. Because I'm autistic. There's all these subtleties about human interaction that I can't see. Right. It's like, you're so yay. Right. You. You've got this, like, Malbec in front of you, and you're, like, tasting it. You're seeing, like, all these notes and scents and the, like, this hair wire and all this sort of stuff. I'm like, yep, tastes like red wine. Right. I'm basically socially colorblind. Right. And the way humans learn, the way we move is what, through observation. Okay. The camera you have is in far, much bigger detail than mine. Right. So you say, oh, do this because that's the way you understand things. And it doesn't work for me. Why? Because that's not actually why you're doing the thing you do. That's your understanding of it. That's a conscious understanding of it. But there's all this stuff going on in the background that you've got no idea about. You've never had to think about it because it works. Okay. Right. Somebody who knows how, somebody who's a natural something can't really explain why they do it because they've never needed to think about it.

Yeah.

So I've always had to reverse engineer everything. Yeah.

There's a great bit from Bruce Lee when he says, when you start out training, a punch is just a punch. And then a punch becomes 10,000 different things because you're like, in amongst all the details of it.

Yeah.

And then once you master it, a punch just becomes just a punch.

Exactly, exactly. Exactly. So because of that, I knew from a very early age, world works for everybody else and not for me. That I am Freak of nature that this does not work for me. Not only that, nobody can help me. Nobody can help me figure this out. Nobody can help me fix this. Because Kansas, it's the 70s and 80s, we're not talking about autism. There's no Internet, there's no Google. Sure, right. Yeah. There's no way for anybody to help me because nobody knows what's anything. Anything's wrong. I'm a smart guy. Somebody said, oh, this. Oh, just because you're smart. That's what it is. I don't know. Something fundamentally different. Which is why it took 48 years for me to figure that out. Right. So I knew very early on this ain't it and I'm the problem. And there was no other conclusion for me to draw because it is actually true.

And you had to prove. Prove that your prove your worth by what your actions was it was. It did. Was it externalization?

Quite right. It's not. That's quite right. Go ahead. Never tried to prove my value because I was never going to get what I wanted. I didn't deserve it. That was never going to happen. Right. You deserve something based on your value. I was never going to get what I want to never get what I need. I was going to have to accept whatever came my way. I was proving to myself there was a reason to live. There's a reason to continue existing. That's it.

Yeah.

Not that I was going to get 101. Not that was valuable. Not that I was going to like be rewarded anyway. No. Just be able to live right. Later on. Now that I want to live. Okay. Now I got to figure out how much value I have to figure out what it served to figure out a way to get up. I want. But that was way later in the process.

Sure.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

What journey fundamentally. Yeah. Fundamentally I've only really been alive and been able to be myself and go after what I want for like a couple years old.

Yeah. How does. How do you feel about that now? Like that like you man, I guess you have a. A rational understanding of like all these things were necessary for me to have the realization I have now and to be doing what I am now. But. Yeah. What does that feel like now? Just out of curiosity, you know, from.

This perspective, it's a really interesting question. The best way I can explain it is quite a while now since we gotten this place where I am. I don't ask who I am. I don't ask what I want. I just be me. I just do whatever I feel like. Whatever catches My interest, I just roll. Because if I trust who I am, trust what I want, trust what I need, my mind is going to guide me to it.

Yeah.

Right. If you look at all these parts of yourself as kind of like having a compass. Right. Your instinctive mind, pleasure and pain, emotional mind, right and wrong and good and bad. Right. Rational mind, true and false. All I gotta do is listen to that thing. It's been trying to help me and guide me in the right direction the entire time. I just didn't understand what I was trying to do. Sure, right.

I think it guides you in the right direction. If it's all functioning correctly or not pulling different directions.

That's the thing. That's the thing. You're judging your results based on your conscious perspective. I want this. Right. The CEOs decided this. You don't understand what's going on under here. And that's part of you as well. I don't want I've chosen is limiting yourself to the conscious perspectives of me. But you were. Your conscious mind, your rational mind, emotional mind, the seat to mind, physical body, all this esoteric things, your soul. And when you look at it from that perspective, when you look at it from the whole. You needed to keep yourself breathing. That was the only thing that my mind needed to do was keep myself breathing.

Sure.

And if everything I've done was in service. Right, right.

Yeah.

And it was using all those negative emotions to keep me away from things that were going to take me down the wrong road.

Well, look man, you found meaning in something useful.

Yeah.

Because it could have been a lot worse.

Absolutely.

Could have just found escapism or distraction.

100%. 100%.

And me and me and my friend have had a debate around this concept of just following your excitement or whatever you feel like doing in any given moment. And that's, it's a theme that comes from like Christ, the Dao, Buddhism, all these different religions. Right. But if you have some sort of internal dysfunction, like following what you feel like you want and need in any given moment can lead to just self harm or harm of others. It doesn't like you distracting yourself from a situation through indulging in drugs or, and, or even if you then, and then if you promise like someone that you love that's dear to you, you know, I'm not, not doing that anymore. Not doing that. But stress comes up and then you go and do that thing and then you blow all your savings on that thing because it's what you felt like you needed in that moment. Right? So when you're not aligned, that can be quite a dangerous place to try and act through.

Let me go ahead and give you a different perspective. Okay. Number one, you talk about as being dysfunctional. Nope. It is 100 functional. It's doing exactly what it should be given the larger picture. It's not aligned with what you want. Aligned what you think, not aligned with the larger goals. That's not what it's looking at. It's looking at the present moment, the right now. So solutions are to solve this instantaneous problem. Okay.

Because it's only looking at it's micro functional.

Exactly, exactly. Because it cannot look at second third order effects. Not looking about the long term. Because the only thing it's there to do is keep you breathing then for the next second.

Yes, yes.

Now, in that perspective again, emotions are pain. That's the way you're processing it. So what's it trying to do? Keep it from too much pain. If your life sucks, if it's too miserable. I gotta find a way to make it worth living. Drugs, alcohol. Drugs make you feel good for a moment. Doing the stupid stuff makes you feel good. And that moment. Yeah. So it's trying to give you enough pleasure, enough good stuff to make this stuff worth living. Going on a little bit more. Other things. Alcohol stores that just numb you out. So you don't have to deal with that. Right. It's taking cranking down the level of pain or cranking up the level of pleasure to make your miserable life worth navigating. Keep you breathing another second. Because that's only job. Right. And it's got those emotional tools. Because if feeling bad is good, feeling bad is pain and feeling good is pleasure. I can use those as a stick, carrot and a stick to make you do whatever. I need you to steer you in whatever direction I feel is going to keep you safe. Sure. Right. So when you're in that place where you're not like fully aligned with yourself, your mind has to protect you from yourself. Which means it's going to do whatever it needs to to manipulate your decision making to keep you in space where it feels as safe. But it's doing it based on the instantaneous moment. It cannot look long term. And one of the things I have to do with my clients is like show the mind. Yes. Here's this instantaneous goal. You're doing this. You're saving him, me now. And you're killing him in the long term. You have to show him that trap. You have to show them that catch 22 Die fast. Die slow. Still dying. Right. Which is why people who are on like addiction, so forth and so on. Gambia addiction, whatever it is, have to hit rock bottom. The compensating, the coping mechanism has to become a threat to their survival. Because before the mind takes it back and say, okay, that ain't working, gotta find something else. Sure, yeah, right. Has to hit present threats there. Exactly. Because until it hits that point, your mind's like, nope, it's working well enough solving the problem right now. Problem. And it can't see the long term effects. It's not how it's built.

Because it's this constant internal threat that is trying to escape from. Yeah.

It's like you're.

Yeah. An internal battle happening and just distracting from it. And I mean your solution was, okay, I'm going to go and be of service.

Yes.

I'm just, I'm just going to just put myself on the line and just throw myself under the bus using your words and, and just give my life away. Because it's the only thing that I can do to make it feel bearable.

Yeah. Let me go ahead and throw one more piece in this, this is, this is going to be really uncomfortable. Okay, just let me throw this really. I remember what I'm trying to say.

I want to say, yeah, you're looking.

As an internal battle and as if consciousness is separate from that. No, no, what it's trying to protect you from is consciousness.

When you say consciousness, what, what do you mean?

Your conscious mind, like the part of you that's like having this conversation and making these big decisions, these big long term decisions because it's the ultimate decider, which means the decision to check out of life permanently is a conscious choice. It's trying to protect you from putting. Is trying to keep you from being in a situation where you might make that choice. Because when you're in too much pain, ending your life is act of mercy.

Sure. Yeah.

Right. So it's trying to keep you from a position where you might go down that road. Right. You might make that choice. And a lot of us, like, I would never make that choice. If you think, oh, I'd never end my life. You thought about it. And this whole idea of like giving up on life, that's passive ideation, not wanting to be here. Passive ideation, depression, despair. I don't want to be here, maybe I shouldn't be here. Maybe I should take, I take myself out planning, doing. It's a very clear little road.

Yeah.

You start going down that road and your mind's Like I've been down.

I've been down some of the ways of that road.

Yeah.

And so I know what it's like to have those ideation kind of thoughts. And yeah, I mean, I guess I had the self awareness enough to a certain degree to be like, this is probably a sign of something that needs to be figured out, you know, rather than just trying to avoid it, you know, confronted it. Okay, so how you're framing consciousness there, I see it very similar to the rational mind.

We often do. We often do. Because think about this way. Your rational mind is part of you that is worried about how things work. Means it's interacting with the outside world all the time. Stop very slow. Because we got to look on detail. Right, Right. So it's a one. It's a part of you that you're using to figure stuff out, which is one of the things that consciousness needs most. How does this thing work? So I can figure out what I'm supposed to do next. Right. So you're always navigating the world that way. And in the west, it's all about rationality and reason. We've elevated that to the highest thing. Right. So we identify that with the most. Right. We identify with consciousness and rationality as us. Right. Y. The way I look at it is, though, consciousness has essentially two jobs. The first is to be that ultimate decider. The CEO say, I want to go that way. And the second is to be the witness of your experience to watch the movie, your life play out in real time. Groceries. Right. I'm just part. I'm just part. I'm just wrong for the ride. I'm not making any more decisions.

That's where I conceptualize consciousness in that place.

Yeah.

I don't. I don't. I don't have the concept of consciousness having agency in itself.

Exactly.

Okay.

Exactly.

Part. Which is kind of this, this knowingness, the awareness of the right path and what, what, what you're called towards. Maybe I don't. You know, it's weird language around this kind of stuff.

What I would say is like, again, I'm a little bit on the spiritual side. Do a lot of psychedelics, do you? There's no way to avoid it. I was racist.

Yeah.

Well, this is.

I wanted to take the conversation. I wanted to take conversation this direction anyway.

Yeah, yeah. So I think of like, self as soul. Like that's what you are, is your soul. Okay. And all these other things are capital S. Self is the capital S. Soul. Right, sure. And so all these other things that we Are are essentially the mechanisms or tools that soul is using to navigate through the world and like, express itself in reality. Okay, so what's happening is these different parts of you have different functions. Like every part, every organ in your body has a different function, right? Your heart does one thing, wants another. Right. Every structure in your brain has different function. Your visual cortex is part. Is done. There's part of you that looks at symbols. There's another part of you looks at color. There's all these different parts of your. Like taking a slice of reality and doing something. Right. Same thing with your mind. What I'm saying is, like, these different parts of you have different functions. So they understand self to extent necessary to do their job. Consciousness doesn't really need to understand self all that much, not on its own. Why it's got people for that. All those thoughts, all those emotions, all those instincts are those other parts of you telling you what you are and what soul needs to do from that perspective as consciousness job say, okay, taking all that sin, what am I ready to go? Right. Given all this information, what do I do next? Right. And so you listening to all these signals is exactly what you should be doing. Right? Because that's soul translating through all these things to give consciousness the idea and the context to make this next decision.

Sure.

Right. But once you've made that decision, consciousness has done its job. You just get to watch the movie your life play out, which why these days I'm just being me, like, watching my life play out. I'm not doing a whole lot of like, what's next? What's next? What's next? Right. I got my schedule. Know what I need to do. I've got a schedule. Haircut. Sure. That sort of stuff. I know which direction I'm going. Kind of got a plan to get there. Once I've done that, I've got people to handle the rest. I don't have to do anything more. Your mind is built to do all the rest of that stuff. Right. I've handed the orders down company. Get to work. Let me know if you need help. Otherwise, I'm going golfing. Right. Let me know if you need. I'm going golfing. Let me know if you need it, if there's a problem.

Right, yeah, that's a beautiful intrinsic, like cognitive ability. Do the work.

Yeah, exactly. Because that's what they're supposed to do.

Well, yeah, there's that thing like, what, 95, 96 of the mind is unconscious or subconscious.

Right.

So you are only. I. I kind of had This, I want to put this into a graphic for, for a post, but where there you have like the 4 or 5% of your mind is like the, the processor. And, and if you were looking at the, the normal like modality of healing, like healing is a lifelong journey. Then you have to take like 5% of the unconscious and plug it into the consciousness. And then you kind of work on that bit and you heal it and they go, okay, now I can put that back down there. And then you take the next 5% and work on that bit. And then you have to like do 5% at a time as you go forward. And as you get older, I think that they say that your neuroplasticity reduces. Right. So as you get older, it's even harder to do the work potentially than it would be if you were like super young. You've become more habitual, become more ingrained in the, in your own ways. You know, you can't keep teaching old dog new tricks. You can, but it might just be hard. For sure. Yeah, but what you're saying is there's, there's a way of kind of just opening the whole thing up and just letting someone who's skilled in the. Just like, let's just recalibrate this mess.

Yes. And, and think about it this way. The reason things are harder to learn and change when you're old is why it's been working for a very freaking long time. Whatever you've been doing, it's been working well enough for a very long time. So why would you need to. Right. You need a big reason to make a big shift. Right. But yes, 100%, yes, the best way to go about things, in my opinion, get yourself to a place where you're good enough to be able to confront all these different things about yourself you don't like. You can allow them to be true long enough to examine them and figure out what's next. Okay. But yes, you fundamentally need somebody else to come in and do that work for you. Why? Because if you're in conflict with your mind, it doesn't trust you. And all the changes you want to make are to allow you to do stuff that things are bad, wrong, or dangerous in some way. So why would it let you do those changes? So you got to have that neutral third party come in and negotiate for you.

So it's not effective to do this as self help. No methodology. No, no. But I think I'm so on that belief level, not, I think, the, the emotional level, the making sense level. So that emotional Basal ganglia level and then the rational left brain, or you know, you could say that the right brain is the emotional level, left brain, rational level. You can do that stuff yourself.

Yeah.

You can do self help stuff. You can like do like timeline therapy or you can do like parts work on your own.

Yeah. But think about this way. If you got a big forest. Yes. There's a lot of work you can do to clear out a clearing, chop down a bunch of trees. Right. You can clear out an entire football field, build a big honking mansion. Beautiful. Is everything better? Yes. Do you have a lot more space? Yes. It's a lot more comfortable. Yes. Are you doing exactly what. Yes. And so football size clearing and a thousand acre forest.

And you still don't feel whole.

Yes.

Because your consciousness has this label.

Yeah, well, yeah.

So I was going to bring up that consciousness pure self aspect because I kind of how I conceptualize it in my mind is I put it underneath that stack so I have kind of the rational brain on top because that's just like what we use. That's the most like kind of surface level. Then you have the emotional brain, then you have the intrinsic. And underneath that is like the pure self. And I was going to bring up how there's. Without going in there and doing the work you're talking about, you can take the spiritual route, which kind of bypasses those whole all those other levels and takes you straight to pure awareness.

Okay.

And when you're in pure awareness, it's like you can just observe your thoughts and observe your emotions arising and things like that. And you can be okay with them, which is creating that space, which is awesome. And then you can make the sense of things at the other end, at the top end. But even though you're in that space of pure awareness and you can even act from that space somewhat, there's still that emotional resonance. Or maybe it's stemming from that underlying belief that's lodged in instinctually. Which explains why, I mean, even in my experience, actually I've done some hypnotherapy sessions around certain aspects. But being in that space and being like, okay, I'm just going to express myself from that pure consciousness state, it still feels a little tainted. It's not like I can't just fully be myself because I don't trust myself.

Exactly, exactly. And there's two pieces to that. Number one, you're actually not going down the stack to soul. You're actually moving consciousness further away from the rest of the stack. What's happening? You're distancing yourself from those, from those signals. Right. Because all that stuff is coming through those lower levels to consciousness, Consciousness, a receiver of all that stuff, so transmitted through all this stuff to consciousness. So when you're doing this awareness and you're separating yourself from it, you're going further into consciousness, further away from the stack. Right. But unless you're getting some really deep states, you're not actually separate. You're not able to separate consciousness from that stuff. It just, I just. Buddhist meditation got down to what's called the seventh Jhna, this place of like non perception, right? Where you are essentially consciousness floating in nothingness. That's a freaking ridiculous experience. Right. Really strange. Really strange. Exactly.

Buddhism, they call it the no self. There is no self.

Exactly, exactly. And that's the trick. You're not self. You're not acting from self. You're acting from pure consciousness. You're acting from pure witness, which means you're completely disassociated from self. Right. Self never goes away. You simply disassociate and say, I am going the heck away from that as far as humanly possible because I can't touch it, I can't stand it. It's not what I want to be. Part of ego is I can't be this. Who can I be instead to get what I need? And that's a conscious construct.

Yeah, I've. I thought about this idea of like, escapism. I'm thinking like, okay, if, if, if life is suffering as you experienced and you escape that suffering through, through service to others, and you found meaning in that, other people escape suffering, which is what the Buddhists believe.

Right.

The core tenant is life is suffering or life can be suffering. And nirvana is the end of that suffering, being in that space of non self. But then, but I thought about that and I thought, well, isn't the pursuit of enlightenment just an act of escapism?

Yes, because again, what are they trying to do? Get the pure consciousness as far away from that they're trying to disassociate from self. Now here's the thing. What if Buddha was wrong? What if life isn't suffering? What if it doesn't have to be not by escaping into your consciousness, but by taking pain and turning it into question?

I think if.

Hold on just a second. If emotions are. If emotions are no longer pain, can you suffer mentally, emotionally? No, because in order to suffer, you have to feel pain. So if emotions are no longer pain, guess what? You can no longer suffer mentally or emotionally.

I think that Is Nevada too. That's.

And you get to be fully self rather than disassociating instead of escaping into consciousness. No, you're bringing everything, all that stack fully together, aligning it so that soul can express it more clearly. Because you're not trying to avoid or run from a piece or shelf.

Yeah.

You're integrating flavor of enlightenment. It's a different flavor of enlightenment. Yes. As the easiest thing in the world by just redefining emotions from pain to questions. It's gotta be done on that deep level.

Well, what a beautiful, beautiful conceptualization there for sure. I'd love for this conversation to go on longer. I think we could probably talk all day, man. But yeah. Really enjoyed this. It's been great. So awesome.

Yeah.

Where can people learn more about you? If you've got a website or wherever places can people connect with you?

Wonderful. So I wrote a book called Winner Peace W I N E R. It's kind of play on inner peace. Because there's a choice of peace or success. No, no, you can have it all. Just got to go out a different way. And it lays out how to get from where you're at to redefining those emotions, reintegrating on yourself, giving all those parts of your mind their particular job, putting them in order, line them up and then helping yourself. Sort of like reframe a lot of these very common beliefs and very common things we come up with when we're young, when we're in bad situations. So the extent that you can get here on your own, this is. This book is designed to help you do that. Right. When you're ready to do that deeper work and you're ready to clear all this stuff and get everything aligned. My website is www.ryanthehipist.com for a free 45 minute consultation. Take a look what's going on in your life. I'll show you why things are the way they are so you can actually understand and also tell you how we can sort of get everything sorted out and get you where you want to be. Awesome.

Thank you, Ryan. It's been great having you here.

It's been a pleasure.

Yeah, let's do it again. And also Ryan is. Ryan is a member of our Phoenix Growth community. So Phoenix Growth is a whole ecosystem. We have the podcast, we're building a program, a full personal growth program. And we also have the community as well. And Ryan is one of our experts in the community. So if you'd like to come along and get more guidance from him or ask him questions or anything like that you can join the Phoenix Growth community. You can find a link in the comments or in the description wherever you're watching this. Thank you everyone out there for watching or listening and hope you have a blessed day.

Take care.