Aware & Aggravated - 70. The Spiritual Isolation Phase

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

What I've been learning about the spiritual phase of "loneliness" AKA the "dark night of the soul." The ego is the thing concerned with surviving because it's what can die. Your true self is what's looking at it. Merch: 🕶️ https://leoskepicollection.comSocial Media: https://www.instagram.com/leoskepihttps://www.tiktok.com/@leoskepihttps://www.snapchat.com/add/leoskepiSubstack: https://substack.com/@leoskepi?utm_so... My App Positive Focus:(Apple) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/positive-focus/id1559260311(Google) https://play.google.com/store/apps/detailsid=com.positivefocusapp&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1Business Inquiries:[e-mail]

Hey, did you hear? Watermelon is back at booster juice all summer long. Nice. I love the watermelon explosion. And the watermelon wave. Yep. They even got a new watermelon assaye pool this year. The one in a melon bowl. And what does that sound like? Mmm. Like that. Booster Juice. Canadian born, blending since 1999. It's weird to try and talk.

right now. The spiritual isolation phase. Hi, friends. It's really nice. It's not that I don't have anything to say of like doubt or anything like that. It's just I'm at such a state of inner peace. I've been learning a lot about the isolation period of spirituality. And I've been through this so many times. And I never knew what the hell's going on. And you know how like you just start realizing certain things and then you kind of isolate where you think it's like, and it's like, intentional isolation. And then you're like, oh, I need to go be around people. And then it's just this game. But this time I've just kind of accepted it. And I've been enjoying it. And it's not been an isolation that has taken effort. So the way that it's kind of transpired for me, I was going through

so many things in life where nothing made sense with the different ideologies and the different perspectives I've tried to hold to get an understanding of life, I was trying to find a fixed way of going about things. And I had this whole idea about spirituality. And then I started reading into the Bible to get my own understanding of it. And adopting certain mindsets from the Bible locked me in my own version of hell in this life. It's like the spiritual perspectives locked me in a certain hell. The Bible in certain perspectives and that locked me in a state

where I didn't like it. Like what? Who didn't like what? I felt obligated to perform more while I was reading the Bible. The different ideas of how life has worked are flipping. And I'm in one now

that is the core of every single religion and every single teaching about spirituality. I've identified the true self, what the real self is. And the way that it happened, like what I was starting to explain was everything in my external, I was looking for new ways to rationalize and understand what was happening.

None of them worked. And I said in my last episode, I'm not someone who can live in illusion long. It shatters, like so quick. I don't get to just cope my way through, it. All right? Like, I don't know what it is about like my specific life path. There is no such thing as free will. We'll get to that in a different episode. But with my life path, I don't get to be in delusion or illusion long. And I've always had this obsession with freedom. And I've always thought

it was an obsession with that. Like, I can't be controlled and anything in my life that makes me feel controlled. I want to blow it up. And I do every single time. But what had to get blown up this time was all the illusions I was literally. under because I got pushed to this point with life where I didn't trust anything because nothing made sense. There was no truth that could get slapped across everything I experienced. It made me start to seek out truth. And there is no truth to be sought out in the external world in anything you can perceive. You are not that. There is just a reflection of the truth that. in you. So my whole thing was my attention being on the external world started to become so intolerable.

The only thing that felt like relief was to turn my attention inward and to look at myself because the external world and all of its projections stem from the inside. Nothing from the outside comes from the outside. It all is a reflection of something inside of you. So that I've kind of known as truth, but I've never fully gone into who is the one that's looking for truth. I didn't lie earlier when I said there's no such thing as free will. The only free will we have in this life is where we place our attention and our focus. So I started to wonder like, okay, I started like playing with it. I'm like to be able to experience something, your attention has to be on it.

I said that a few episodes ago and it's just kind of been unraveling. The external world is the projection. So my thing was I have control over my attention, so I'm going to put the attention on the projector. So what I've noticed with putting my attention on myself and starting to question, who is the one suffering? Who is the one perceiving? Who is that? I'm living this life, air quote, I'm living it.

No. Who is the one perceiving this life? Because if you can perceive something, you're not that. So if I can perceive Leo, I'm not Leo. I am. what I mean? But the truth, truth is I'm the one witnessing it. So the reason I see that isolation comes from this when you have an entire ego death and you have a whole contemplation of what life is, how it really works, your attention is no longer able to be entertained or distracted

in the physical. I kind of don't feel phomo because I see everything as a projection. There's no life to experience. This is all just a hologram. So it's like you're experiencing yourself in other forms and other points of consciousness where it's kind of like gone into and it's looking back at you. There's only one source of consciousness, God, whatever you want to call it. There is one source of that. In order for that to self-actualize, it has to focus down into one point. I'm a point. You're a point. Every other person is a point. It's like if you stand in front of a mirror, there needs to be an object in front of the mirror to be able to see a reflection. For awareness just to be trying to self-actualize, there is nothing to reflect itself. Awareness itself

cannot stand in front of a mirror. There's nothing to reflect back off that mirror. That's kind of how I'm seeing things. But this is also talked about in the Bible. It's talked about in every religion, like I said, because there's a point in the Bible where God says, I am that I am. And Jesus revealed the illusion of separation. That's what I took away from it and how I see it. Typically in the past, when I would take breaks to kind of like sit with myself and rest, I would always be having thoughts of I need to get up and do something. There would be so many things that would flash over my mind that were the ego trying to get me

to get up and do something, to survive, to look after itself. The only thing that is worried about its survival is something that can die. When you realize the awareness that you are can never cease to exist, that pressure falls away. Like when you truly experience it

and feel it and see it and recognize it for yourself, all of these like survival tactics of the ego just go in front of you and kind of flash by. So as I've been in this period of isolation, I'm just witnessing the thoughts and the emotions and everything kind of going by as a distraction. It's all just things overlaying on top of the truth.

And I'm the witness of these things. But when you're identified with, the ego and with something that can die and with something that is in control, you're not in control. When you're identified with the ego that thinks it is in control, it will do nothing but justify in every single way possible how it is in control. So it's hard to word and verbalize what I'm experiencing and going through, but the isolation of it all, I'm at so much peace. I'm not angry. I'm not sad at all. I haven't cried. I haven't been upset. And I'm looking at in a way that I've never seen before.

And when I say looking at myself, looking at this physical body and what I am, air quote, and all of the stress that I used to have, stress was my reassurance of productivity. Stress and being frantic and feeling stimulated was my proof of projecting forward and like propelling myself forward. I'm making progress. I'm okay.

I'm earning my ability to exist while feeling stress. I no longer have that. So much of my life was built off of getting reassurance from the external. Looking for proof outside of yourself is useless because it was like feeding a never-ending void with so many different ways I would get reassurance that I was allowed to exist or that I was doing okay. like for the ego to constantly be looking for things. I'll give you a couple of examples. Being out and doing things and being around people was one big thing.

Numbers and views on social media was another thing. Actively making money was another thing where I would look at the numbers on my social media or look at the money that I was making and that would be my permission and my reassurance that I was okay. but as soon as I was no longer feeling stress to post more and make more and do more, those thoughts would come back up. I need to recheck. I need to look again.

It's like everything became like an incessant checking. And with like scrolling social media, reading positive comments gave me a reassurance that I was doing okay and doing good. And all of this kind of came down to like every time I would take a break, I would have this worry that I was wasting my prime and wasting my good years, wasting my potential, because I wasn't constantly having my reassurance come from the stress of doing. With all of the external things, no longer being available to access with this isolation period, because it's, I'm still doing my job, air quote of like when you guys put in orders for merch or sunglasses or whatever you guys buy in order for me, I'm still going.

to the warehouse and fulfilling those, but it's taking no effort. I'm enjoying it. I'm happy. I'm there and I'm present. My ability to gauge myself is no longer outside of myself. I had this thought of, am I actually healing? Am I actually having this awareness? Like, am I having this experience? Am I like really seeing things how I see them now? Or is this just another like tactic for trying to explain and understand life. Looking at myself and the way I've been feeling the past month, like probably two months, is my new kind of gauge where I'm more at peace than I've ever been in my life.

And I've never used being at peace and feeling at peace as a metric for reassurance. I've only ever known how to use stress as reassurance and stretching myself and doing, doing, doing, doing. Being has never been a means of reassurance for myself because everything is set up, you have to do more and be more and constant. So looking for reassurance, I started noticing like an urge to start checking shit. And I'm like, I haven't been posting. There's no way to get a reassurance because there's no views to look at.

There's no like metric that I'm used to. So I started to question, who is the one looking for the reassurance? and what reassurance needs to be found. And then I started to stop and think. And I'm like, okay, like I said, the amount of peace I've been in is speaking for itself. The other thing is I've been sober for the past month from everything. And I haven't tried.

I have not tried to be sober. I have not put a number on it. It's taken no intention for me to not want to do drugs. and drink alcohol. A few months ago, I was drinking. I had the urges to do drugs a lot, but certain times I'd party, but certain times I just really wanted them. I've not had a single urge for any type of drug or alcohol. I don't want it. I was smoking a lot of weed a couple months ago just to go to sleep. And it's like, I just like to be high, like out of my mind a little bit. I've had no genuine urge at all to alter my state of consciousness or alter my mind. I've had no

desire for that. I've valued the piece I've been in and the clarity I'm getting. I'm just like journaling three, four hours a day and so much clarity is coming out. And I'm learning what it is to truly create from my essence because through journaling, it's something I've always done. Not, oh, today I had a lemon water. Damny going to whack. Not stupid shit like that. I don't know. narrate my fucking life like a book. I go into like journaling as an understanding of things. But when I'm journaling, I never write to read back what I'm writing. The journal is the only place I can be 1,000% honest because there is no thought from me that it will be read by anybody. I'm able to be fully honest and meet myself when I write. And I know what it's like to create from

truth now and to create something you can feel. But I've gotten access to that and my creativity has skyrocketed. And I've just been letting things come out and I'm back to, I bought an iPad and I've been drawing designs for future clothes I want to make and new logos and new things and I'm drawing it. And it's like it's that flow state you hit where your perception is not anything of you. It's just something is expressing through you. And you lose track of time.

You lose track of bodily functions. You don't need to piss. You don't need to drink water. You don't need nothing. It's like you just lose track of everything and you're just fully in it. Like I know what it is to create now because that's true creation. That's creating something you can feel. That's true creation.

The world is so devoid of that now. Like there's no more art that speaks to you and moves you in a way that you can feel. Because everything is just so rushed and bullshit and just on productivity. It's on timelines. It's on this. It's on that. It's trying to cater to the person that you're drawing for. That's like art.

And me with writing, it's like when you're writing and trying to cater to the person that you are projecting is reading it, it loses its substance. It's like I've been reading a lot more books. And when they can truly suck me in, I know when you were writing that, that's the state you were in when you wrote it. You were in a state where you were sucked in by what you were creating. and that's books that can truly get you to forget a track of time. And you're in the story, you're in reading it.

I've never really liked fiction books. Chuck Palinick is one of my favorite authors for fiction books. Stephen King wrote a few that were good. But Chuck Palinick really like his shit is like, it's crazy as hell. But I like it because it just feels honest. But that's kind of a metric now of the piece I feel with myself, no absolute urges at all to alter my mind. or to ingest things. It's taken no effort with any of that. Creating is coming out just so effortlessly.

My eating habits have changed. I've lost weight. I'm not bloated. And I've not binged. I've had no urge for anything processed. I don't want processed food nowhere fucking near me. It's like my eating habits have changed on their own. I've been to the gym every single day. And it's taken no effort. So looking at my life in this isolation period, I could overlay the thought and identify with the thought of something's wrong because my metric of how I measure my worth and how I get reassurance of things has shifted. I'm not looking how I used to at life. And my reassurance that comes from flipping my awareness back onto myself, this is the state where I don't need proof. I don't need reassurance outside of myself for the way that I'm feeling and the things that I'm coming to and the way that my life is right now. I'm so just content, happiest could be.

Like I told you last week, I went to Miami for my sister's birthday. I stayed sober the whole time. Everybody was drinking, having fun, having a blast. They were partying. And a couple times I would just go be in the room by myself. Or like I'd be out partying, but I wasn't having an early. urge to leave myself. Like I wasn't, I didn't wish I was somewhere else. I didn't wish I was like out of my body. I didn't wish I was altering my mind. Like I was there. I've been present in

every moment. And there's no more living in the future, living in the past. I'm just in this state of isolation and pure bliss because I don't feel like there's anywhere to get to and anywhere to get away from. I know what arrives is what arrives. And the way that I take action and have certain disciplines is in the way that it's already written. It's already happening. It's already happened. We get the luxury of experiencing time and space through our limited perspective. But our lives have already happened. There's nothing to do. There's just to be. And put your awareness where you want it to go and take it off of where you don't want it to go. There's no steering a ship that's already sailed, you know? We're just,

witnessing it through, air quote, time and space where we are now. I've never been more happy and nothing's taking effort. That's the crazy thing is I'm way more productive than I've ever been, but I'm not recognizing that I'm productive. That's what this state of isolation has kind of shown me. I'm like, whoa, I get like that thought or like that feeling of I need to get up and do something. and then I think to myself, I already went and packed and fulfilled orders today. I went to the gym. I designed a bunch of shit.

I journaled. My house is clean. I did the dishes. Everything's done. It's like as soon as I go to look for the external of like something I need to do, I'm recognizing I already did it. But I was so in it that I didn't notice that it took effort. So it's nice.

It's real nice. but it's taken some getting used to because I've only ever known how to exist as separated from the awareness, period. There's nothing else to say. I don't have to finish that sentence. That was the end of a sentence. But that whole fear of like wasting my prime that I had, I've been looking at that. And one thing I'm really big on is like look at things. When you stop looking at shit is when it needs to amplify how it's projecting. and like reflecting to you. When you refuse to look at things and look at yourself,

things will happen in the external that make it where you have to. Like I said, life got very confusing. Nothing made sense. I had to just turn inward. So the way that I'm, I've always done it where I just like sit down, if I have to make a decision or think about something or there's something about myself,

I don't understand, I just sit with it. And I sit with it long enough until I understand it. It's like if I have certain, impulses or desires or jealousy or anger or hatred, a resistance to getting up and doing something that I'm telling myself I need to do. I just sit with that. I sit with the feelings that come up. It's like earlier, just a small stupid example. I didn't want to go to the gym. So I sat with it. What I mean by sat with it is I was present with that while my physical body got up and got in the car.

It got dressed, got in the car, and on the way to the gym, I was watching thoughts come by of not wanting to go. And I'm like, no, I'm going. Like, I'm on the way, I'm going to the gym. And I'm going to go work out. And all the thoughts that I was having were things that I needed to sit with and watch. But my resistance to going and having a workout was in the projection of what I thought the workout would be. the amount of people that were going to be there getting interrupted getting bothered by fucking people people being on the machines i need not having a good workout feeling tired i was projecting all of these things into the experience before i was even fucking there so getting back into the reality now and then sitting with the projection that you have of the future is how you break it that's how i approach things and like understand things as i sit with them long I understand them. Like with myself, like I was saying, I sit down in a journal. I'll sit there for

hours on something that I don't understand. And I will just sit with it, with my attention on it, until I understand it, or until I see the projection and can integrate it. But back to my original point of feeling like I'm wasting my good years and wasting my prime. What I was living in before was not my prime. Yeah, I had a lot of things, air quote, going for me, and there was a lot of external shit. It's like, someone with the following that I have, no one has the balls to take a break. That's the dumbest thing you could do, is to stop posting. And I've never taken, like, as long as a break as I have from posting on social media.

But I'm genuinely not worried about it because the way that things were going, I was seeing the external proof. as my prime, air quote, of the numbers, the views, making money, the excitement that I had that I mistaken for alignment, which doesn't exist. Alignment doesn't exist. There's nothing to align to is what I've figured out. So this external shit, how is the external reality going to tell me, and I'm going to dictate what I view as my prime from the external. How I truly felt the past almost six months, it's like from last December till like two months ago and I started coming to all this, life went to hell.

Like life got bad. So because I'm young, I look a certain way and I had the amount of views that I was getting and things were going how they were going. Yeah. A lot of people would look at that. and say that's their prime. No, I had a spike in what I do for a living.

I had a spike. That's it. That wasn't my prime. I don't feel like I'm wasting anything because I'm coming back to myself because the version of me that I'm meeting and the version of me that's coming through what's being stripped away, I can't wait to see what this motherfucker will do. The things I'm creating, the things that I'm thinking about

and the way that I feel now, this feels more like a prime than when the external was revealing a spike. So I'm basing it more off of this now. I don't think that my prime is done and I think it's stupid to think like that. I've thought I liked that forever. Like when I was 18, I was like, oh, I'm wasting my young years.

There's a song called Wasting My Young Years. I think it's called London Grammar's, the artist. I don't know. But I used to play that shit on repeat when I was like 18, 19, because I was like, I'm wasting my young years. I'm in college to go be a nurse. I'm speeding through all my courses and everybody, all my friends are partying and doing all this shit and they're living life.

And here I am. I feel like I was just wasting my young years. And there's nothing to waste. Who is wasting? Who is wasted? That's the question. There's no prime to be wasted. Like, I don't even meet my prime yet.

And I don't think I'm in it right now. Like, I think that I'm meeting the version of me that is the prime. And it's just not even a prime. It's like the truth. The external's gotten a lot more, not boring, but my attention is not being grabbed by anything anymore because my attention's already here.

It's already on what's witnessing it. I see that as a part of me. So I'm very just that piece with shit. And I'm not like incessantly shopping like I was to try and buy things. I'm not trying to control perception of me. I am the perception. What the fuck are we doing?

Like genuinely. I'm going to buy these things and wear these things and do XYZ for other people's perception to try and control an external thing how it sees me and how it feels about me. There's no way to do that. The truth comes out. What do you want it to or not? So the way I'm kind of focused now is like I'm paying attention to what moves me, what makes me feel something, what makes me feel something, what makes

you feel inspired and what I truly like without the thought of anyone else's approval or what they would think. I'm just being honest enough where I'm like, I like this, I like that. I don't like this. I don't like that. Okay, cool. If I hate something, that's a projection. If I love something and enamored with it, that's a projection also. So it's just kind of like the neutral ground of like not swinging the fucking pendulum back and forth. Yeah. So that's what I've been up to. that's what I've been saying. When my tank tops, these are mine. I wore one in the last episode and this is my tank tops.

And I don't feel a sense of urgency to like rush them like they're done. And I'm excited about them. And I'm like, woo. But I'm waiting on the true inspiration of when to launch it. Because I'm also working on a couple other things. And I'm like, yeah, that'll come up when it comes up. I have no interest in like the salesy shit. I have no interest in like pushing a campaign and sitting here and freaking out about all this and that.

It's like, oh my God. Like I know that I don't know. I project that I've seen it work for other people and that's air quote the way to do it. But I've always just been honest about the way that I sell things. And this time I'm not rushing it. Like I'm like, okay, I'll do it when it feels right. I'll do it when I feel it. I'm not forcing it.

And I'm not resisting not doing it. So I'm just trusting the timing because clarity keeps cracking me. I'm just like, okay, cool. So I'm going to sit here and be cracked open like a little turtle shell and see what the hell is inside. It's been fun. But that's all I got for this week. It was nice hanging out with you, nice talking to you. I enjoyed this.

Really, I was just talking to myself, but you are me anyway. So, wait, what do I want to comment for this week? What do we want to put like a mirror? There's a mirror emoji, right? If you made it this for on the episode, comment a mirror emoji. Because you're standing in front of it. That's all this life is, as you're standing in front of a mirror. Oh, sorry to spoil it.

But let's do that. Also, leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought. Yes, I'm going to read them. I always read them. I love to just see which all these. Some of y'all are funniest shit. Okay, I just have to say, I appreciate the wit in all of you because you're

fucking hilarious. Like, you make me giggle. I'll leave your link in the description if you want to go shop anything I have for sale as of now. And yeah, my social media will be there too. I'm posting on my Instagram stories. Like books I'm reading and low passages I love. like I have a highlight there too of like certain things I've highlighted and posted.

So I'm just posting kind of like stories on Instagram. I just posted like a grid post today. But taking my time, doing my thing. But yeah, that's all. Thanks for hanging out. Love you so bad. If you're listening to the audio version of this, leave me a five stars rating. That would be very nice to view.

I think I have like 40 something thousand on Spotify. Five star ratings. I have plenty. I'm just greedy at this point. I got just one more. I'm fucking with you. You can leave one if you want. If not, that's fine.

Love you anyways. That's all I got for this week. Everybody, be safe. Take care of yourself. And I'll talk to you guys next Sunday.