Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 152: Risk, Reward & Responsibility

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Daniel Packard ~ https://www.danielpackard.com/

Greetings friends and welcome back to another episode of dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Daniel Packard from the southern coast of England. Apparently he gets around. We'll talk about his travels. He is a UC Berkeley mechanical engineer and the CEO of Permanent Anxiety Solutions here to have a talk with us about how to get rid of anxiety permanently. I love that. I have anxiety.

We'll talk about that in more detail soon. You can find him at Daniel Packard.com. For my part, would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more. volunteer dreamers, viewers for the video game streams, where I just kind of hang out and usually play first-person shooters, that kind of thing, but a lot of different games. 17, now 17, currently available works of historical dream literature, the most recent, The Fabric of Dreams by Catherine Taylor Craig, lovingly reproduced, recreated, and enhanced, if I may say so, by yours truly, your friendly neighborhood, Dream Wizard.

All this and more at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, including downloadable MP3 versions, of this podcast, encyclopedia of a lot of the stuff that I've put in footnotes of the books. And if you would also, please head on over to Benjamin the dream wizard.locals.com trying to build a community there.

Hopefully someday that'll be the primary source for volunteer dreamers. Let's do it together. That's how I roll. So enough shilling for me. We'll get back to Daniel. Thank you for being here. I appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for having me. Just based on words alone, I'm already, I mean, the fact that your podcast is called Dreamscapes, I'm like, let's do that. Sounds like a video arcade from the 80s and I love it or like never-ending story. I'm never-ending. And then the fact that you just own it and beautifully say I'm Benjamin the Dream Wizard, you know, I mean, you could just say I'm the dream reader, the Dreamweaver, but to say Dream Wizard, to take two words, bring them together, I just appreciate that you own it and you call yourself that. My nickname is not as cool.

I call myself the Danyl, but it is nothing compared. to the dream wizard. But I'm here to be grateful to be here with the dream wizard on dreamscapes to help your audience be permanently less anxious. Very cool. Yeah, like I said, I have anxiety too. It comes and goes of a variety of different methods. I've attempted, including medication to, you know,

kind of a generalized anxiety disorder type of thing is the way it's been diagnosed. But just on the wizard thing, briefly, you got to call yourself something if you're going to be on YouTube and selling yourself. So it's partly brand. but also the concept of a wizard makes, means something to me archetypally. You know, you think of Gandalf. You think of any elder, wise one who, you know,

and it's more, in some ways, it's aspirational. I'm around, you know, 46 now. So hopefully by the time I hit about a thousand interpretations, I'll be a real wizard. But right now I'm like, you know, in D&D terms, I'm like level one or two. And I'm just got my first spell book. And I'm like, okay, I can throw a fireball.

but I'll gain the skill as I go. But, you know, that's, that's where I'm coming from on that. I appreciate it very much. A lot of people say, oh, like, what's on your vision board? And someone says, oh, I want to go on a cruise. And you're like, I want to be a full wizard. I appreciate it. I appreciate it.

Yep. I got the beard and the hair. I'm wondering, I've joked with my wife, too, if I should get the robes. But I just kind of wear my whatever, you know, dress shirts from back of the day when I was in, inpatient psychiatric. trick. It was a business casual type of thing. But anyway, that's enough about me.

We're supposed to be talking about you. I hope one day that you own a style called Wizard Casual. And if you do, I think you should coin that and have a whole clothing line. But yes, me. And specifically what I can bring your audience right now, because your audience's time is valuable. There's a lot of podcasts. And I want to explain, before we get into some very valuable perspectives on anxiety. I want your audience to know exactly what I and my company does because it's rare and it's

very valuable and it's not typical. So I like to be really clear in what we do in the value that brings to your audience. Before I get into all the other stuff, I want to explain. So yeah, what we do that as far as I know, nobody else is doing is that we are solving anxiety permanently, meaning it's gone and it doesn't come back. And why is that valuable? Well, because you know Benjamin and Many of your listeners know you, you know, you have anxiety. And, you know, anxieties, depending on how severe it is, it just, it sucks. It not only do you feel anxious, it creates doubt, messes with your focus, you don't do what you love, you're not as happy, you can't show up for yourself and the people that care about.

It's just not, it's just, you can't be happy. But that's not even, to me, the worst part when I had my anxiety. It's, and your audience probably knows this. When you have anxiety, you know, you go looking for help. And you go to a therapist or a psychologist or a girl. or a teacher, and they give you tips and strategies and understandings, but it never solves it. It's still here. It manages it.

And it's better than nothing, but you still have anxiety. And so what I'm going to explain to your audience in a bit is why. You know, why has nothing solved your anxiety yet? Why did you go to that therapist? And they helped a bit, but it's still here. Why did you download that app and do that meditation? It helped a bit, but it's still coming back. Why did you lick that psychedelic frog and you felt good for a week?

But now it's back. Like why? And the reason I want your audience to know why is because if they don't know why their anxiety won't go away, they're going to keep spending their entire life managing their anxiety and never solving it. But then what happens is when you can't solve it, what tends to happen is you start to think it's like your fault. Like I'm broken. There's something wrong with me because this expert told me to do this and it's still here. I must be broken.

And what I want your audience to know is there's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. There's something very kind of broken or inefficient about the mental health community that they don't want you to know about. So I'm going to tell you a kind of a dirty little secret that the mental health community doesn't want you to know that's going to explain to you why your anxiety isn't going away. And then I'm going to explain to you the two breakthroughs that my company made that make it possible so that you or anybody, no matter how long you've had anxiety, your anxiety can go away and not come back. so you can just be happier and calmer, have more energy. So if you just want to keep managing your anxiety for the rest of your life, it's like you like having it and you like spending money on apps and things in therapy,

like you should leave now. But if you're intrigued about the idea of it being gone, then keep listening because that's what I want to share with you. Very cool. So you're, I think if I recall correctly, this all came about because of your own personal journey with an anxiety condition. and then applying, I would say, your, you know, engineering mind to solve, like, mechanical problems and now psychological problems. Is that a fair assessment of kind of how you slid into this?

It's close. Yeah. But I want to be clear, because I want to tell you kind of where we came up with this and how the company was founded. Because, you know, when you tell people you solve anxiety that they like it, but they're skeptical. Oh, yeah. So I want to explain to you why. where this information comes from just so you can trust it. There's a lot of information out there that sounds good, but it doesn't work that well.

So I want you to know where myself, my company, and this approach comes from. And it comes from the fact that, you know, our program gets incredible results. That's what matters to me, and it's what matters to our company and our clients is results. Oh, yeah. And the reason results mattered me is because growing up, my dad was a scientist, and he was also an inventor. and I just thought inventing was just the coolest thing ever. Something didn't exist and then you invented and now the world was better.

And he said to me once, he said, Daniel, you know, if something in this world isn't working the way you want, you can just invent something better. And it stuck with me. And I also liked inventing. And he also said something to me that stuck with me. He said, you know, what I like about science is you can get real results. Anybody can claim to know what they're talking about, but not everybody knows what they're talking about. But you know who you can trust? The person who gets results.

Results matter is what he told me. And that always stuck with me. And so I went to UC Berkeley for engineering school to become an inventor and to design and engineer things that work and get good results. And I was properly trained, how to look at something complex, break it down into its individual mechanical pieces, and then build a prototype and then test it and optimize it until it works. it gets results. And the good news was I got really good at it. You know, I could make machines and bridges and bicycles and things that work. But unfortunately, Benjamin, they did not teach me how to make relationships work.

I don't know if I missed the class or it was like some special advanced class. I should have been suspicious when I found out that Sir Isaac Newton died a virgin. That shot probably should have told me that like really smart physics people aren't so great in matters of the heart. Anyway, I come out of engineering school and I fall in love and I'm completely ill-equipped to deal with it. We love each other very much, but it was really unhealthy and it turned, I later found out I was basically an emotionally abusive relationship and didn't really know it. And then about two weeks after the relationship ended, my whole just system crashed, meaning just the tiniest thing

and I would go into full terror and I didn't it was so scary I didn't know what was going on and I'm at home in the fetal position just it was horrible and then you know

I went looking for help and I spent 10 years and $100,000 going to therapists and psychologists and doctors and gurus I was probably in a cult did ayahuasca did BBT EMDR, C-G-T, M-O-U-S-C, all the letters. I did all the letters and just nothing solved it.

And I, it was just managing it, but I was feeling worse. And then everybody in my life didn't want to be around a person struggling. So they sort of walked away, leaving me even sort of more feeling broken and alone. And, you know, I wouldn't have taken my own life. I knew I'd get out of it, but I definitely got why people. people do because I had no life. I was just scared all the time and I had no way out. I felt trapped.

And I kind of just was really just, it was a soul searching moment. I'm like, what? Like what am I supposed to do? What? And I remember what my dad told me, which was if something's not working, invent something better. And results matter. And I had had this awareness that the mental health community and personal development,

spirituality has a lot of well-intentioned people. But if solving it is the result, they're just not getting great results. So I started my own research company with the goal. Could we reverse engineer a program to solve anxiety permanently? They got permanent results and make it measurable. And it was way harder than I thought. But after about three years, an early prototype of the process worked for me first. And my anxiety and complex PTSD just basically went away.

And we kept thinking it would come back because that's what happens, but it never came back. And so for 10 years, I've just been calm and content. I feel stressed sometimes, but I'm free of it. And I have energy and joy and contentment. And I'm just free of it. And we were all here to help. And so when we saw that happen, we went, oh, my God, we actually crack the code. And we want to get this out to more people.

So we spent another several years to create an online program with a set of very specific steps in a certain order that if you follow the steps, the six-week program solves anxiety, no matter what type of anxiety you have, with a 90% success rate, because results matter. We're very proud of that. Nice. I want to give you some other results

that your audience, I want your audience to know. So 90% success rate, but also we believe in results. So we don't charge you at the beginning of our program because we're trying to disrupt this whole idea of people spending money and not getting real permanent solutions.

We only charge you at the end once your anxiety is measurably solved because we care about results. Very cool. The third thing is that because it's an online program, it's very simple and step by step, and it makes it much more affordable because you're not seeing a therapist for years. You're just going through a set of steps. So one result is that it's much more affordable than you'd think.

And then the final result is no matter what I tell your audience, they're not going to believe me. And so I want them to have a real result that they can be free of anxiety, So at the end, I'm going to send people to my website, and you can download a free training and get a technique that we developed, and you can apply it, and you will feel measurably calmer. Like, you'll actually get a real result that what I'm telling you is real and it can work for you. So 90% success rate, we only charge at the end when we get results. It's much more affordable because it's a program.

It's online. And I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to get a real result so that you can really feel permanent. calm for the rest of your life. So again, if you just want to manage your anxiety, leave now. But if you want to know how to get permanent results, I'm going to show you how in a bit. Very cool. Very cool.

So just from a, it is, I want to validate what you're saying in terms of like people being skeptical. It's like this seems like the human condition. And in some ways it is. But there's a, the way I framed it for people in, in the past is that typically, I know, there's a lot of aphorism. that go with it. Like if you're depressed, you're living in the past in your mind. If you're anxious, you're living in the future. It's kind of one way some people have, but you're not

present is the way some people have phrased it. But also from, let's say, an evolutionary biology perspective, we've, humans have a lot of adaptive mechanisms that allow us to survive in the environment. One of them is pain response. If you don't feel pain, and there's some kids that don't like they're born without that connection in the brain they run around with the broken leg and bleeding and burning their hands on hot stoves and they don't feel a thing and that's destructive to the human organism so like pain serves a useful function in keeping us alive and i and i often frame it uh that way in or have in the past with with my clients um to say you know anxiety and fear are there for a reason too it's like usually to focus your mind

towards a potential threat in the environment, you know, immediately with fear or a known future threat and anxiety is typically, or my understanding of it, has been in the past, that if you feel anxious about something and you can identify it and you can do something about it, that tends to minimize anxiety because now you have a plan. Now you're, now the unknown future isn't looming over you. you have an approach to solving a particular problem. Sometimes that free-floating anxiety is, that's where we get into the generalized anxiety disorder range of things. Let me just interrupt you because there's truth to what you're saying.

Please, yeah. There's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but the language that you use, which is common language, is like, you know, it'll give you, I think, some strategies to minimize. Something to the fact. Like, if you can do this,

but what you're describing is helpful but you're still managing it. It's still here. You see that? Yeah. So, and that's just what's taught is management and all these incredible perspectives that are true and valuable that are taught, but they're to manage it. But I want to be clear and completely reframe people's possibilities. What if we could just step away from understanding things for management?

When you break your leg, okay, you don't go to the doctor. The doctor says, okay, let me give you a perspective, that that pain in your leg, you, leg is actually, in some ways, evolutionarily a good thing. Right. Actually, if you reframe it, you're like, doctor, just put a cast on and fix my leg. Like, I don't need to explore this. I don't want to manage my leg pain. I want you to put a cast on and solve it.

And what we've discovered is you can do that with anxiety. You do not have to spend your life learning about it and reframing it. That manages it, but it's still here. And the reason we were able to figure it out is because our approach was new. We weren't therapists. We weren't psychologists and spiritual teachers. Because that industry has a lot of yourself included, well-intentioned people that learn certain techniques and understandings

that are helpful to manage and give understanding to make it better. And then they pass that on to their clients and say, hey, this will make the pain less. And there's value in that. But it's an entire industry of learning management things and passing it on. And that's fine. But the mental health industry primarily isn't solution focused. They go to school, you learn some things, and you pass them on.

And there's value in that. But we couldn't tolerate those results. We were like, no, we don't want to manage it. We wanted to, could we solve it? And so we started from scratch. And because we started from scratch, we could look at mental health with a completely clear slate. We didn't take, we didn't regurgitate old stuff. We were like, let's start from scratch and try to solve this bad boy.

So the first thing we did was we started challenging a lot of the paradigms. And the first and most important paradigm was where anxiety is actually coming from. The most common explanation of where anxiety is coming from is, you know, it's a problem of the mind. And they'll tell you, like, you know, reframe things in your mind, quiet, your negative thinking, don't have such a scarcity mindset. They give you pills to target the neurotransmitters in your brain. And it's even called mental health. It's got the word like mental, like right in there.

So your average anxiety sufferer has been told, it's. in the mind, so they're trying to solve it in the mind. Okay, but we looked at that and said, well, wait a minute. Is the anxiety is a problem of the mind theory? Is that getting good results? Like, if it is, great, results matter. And we looked and we said, no, that approach is not getting the job done. It's managing it, but it's not solving it. And anxiety's on the rise. Depression's on the rise. Suicides on the rise. The opioid epidemic. I mean, this stuff's getting worse. And it's not the pandemic. It's not the economy. These trends were getting worse. starting about 20 years ago.

Also, our clients felt when they applied our program, felt the calmest they'd ever felt during the pandemic. So the fact is we said, okay, based on results, this whole mind theory seems a little suspect. And so we said, well, is it a problem of the mind? And the second we just challenged that perspective, we said, well, where is it coming from,

if not the mind? And then we started listening and paying attention to what people were saying. And what people usually say is, I feel anxious. Like, I'm feeling, anxious right now. I feel so anxious. And then we said, okay, people are feeling it. They don't really feel in the mind. We said, where are people feeling it? But when you feel anxious, you know,

what is that? How do you feel it? Well, maybe your throat closes up a little bit. Your chest can tighten. Your stomach can get that queasy feeling. Your heart rate can go up. So Benjamin and your listeners, the experts say it's a problem with the mind. But listen to those words, throat, chest, heart, stomach. Does that sound like the mind to you or more like the body? Definitely in the body. That's, that is where we feel. We say we get a pit in our stomach, like that, that feeling of dread. Absolutely. Yeah. But you said definitely the body. Now, it is the body. This isn't a theory. Like, we're solving anxiety at 90% by going in the body. And once I say it, it's kind of common sense. Yeah. So it's, we feel it in the body,

but for 100 years they've been sending us to the mind. Do you see the disconnect? Yeah, yeah. And I'm sure there's some people who would quibble that, well, the brain processes all the sensations from the body. But that doesn't mean that the root cause of the problem is actually in the mind. Whether the mind processes everything. It's almost a meaningless term to say, you know, the problems in your head.

I mean, sure, pain's in your head too, even though your hand is actually cut, you know. But so it's a very, very good point you made. The mind is part of it. You said something very smart that most people miss, which is that doesn't mean it's the root cause. Because in science, we know there's a concept. There's causation versus correlation. Something can be correlated, but not causing it.

So the mind is correlated because the mind is a tool that genetically is a tool to get the body what it needs. The body feels first. You feel hunger in your stomach first. Then your mind picks up on the hunger, and then your mind says, okay, we better figure out where to get food. Or if you're in the jungle and you hear a sound, you feel fear in the body first,

then your mind senses the fear, sees you're in danger, and the mind is a tool to either run away or like pick up a tool and fight. So if you feel fear, your mind then thinks there's a problem and starts to spin. So for reasons which I'm going to explain to your audience, your body is already feeling anxious all day long,

then your mind senses that fear, thinks there's a problem and then starts saying, oh my God, we've got all these problems and what if this happens, what does that happen? And when the mind starts saying scary things, then the body starts to go, oh, I guess there is a problem and you get stuck in the loop. So the mind is part of it,

but it's a symptom of where anxiety is actually the root cause, which is your body. And the reason this is a big deal is for two reasons. One is, to your audience, the reason you still have anxiety is not because you're broken. It's because the experts sent you to the wrong location. Like you've been stuck in a cave and the experts gave you a map sending you south instead of north. So you've been stuck in this cave your whole life thinking, oh, there's something wrong with me.

I'm a horrible speedunker. I'll be trapped here forever. I'm broken. And I'm here to tell you, what if they just gave you a bad map? And what if you had a map that actually sent you to the right location where your anxiety is actually coming from? It means you don't have to live like this. But the other thing is your mind is a symptom of the body. So this was four months ago.

A client came to us not only had horrible anxious feelings, but the spinning, horrible, scary, scarcity, catastrophizing mind. And she thought she was going crazy. I said, no, no, no, you're not going crazy. Your body is feeling anxious. And then your mind starts spinning. It can't help it. It's a reflex.

And I said, not only are we going to lower the anxiety in your body, but your mind is going to go quiet. And she said, look, that's impossible. I've had this my whole life. I said, okay. So about four and a half weeks. in to our program, she sent me a message. She said, I thought you were kidding. I said about what? She said that my mind would go quiet. And I said, no. And she said, for the first time in decades,

she said, I was just out going on a walk, and there was no chatter. And I just enjoyed the trees. And she said, it was almost creepy. It was disorienting. It was like, who turned off Fox News in my head? But the point is, if you're listening to this, and not only do you have anxiety in the body, but you have that constant spinning mind that's robbing you of joy, both of those can go away permanently if you go to the actual root cause location, which is your body. Well, I don't know how much you want to say about process.

If it's proprietary in a way, you know, like I don't want you to give away the farm, so to speak, but what can you say about the process that kind of helps with understanding that the new map you're trying to present? I don't know how. how you would want to go about explaining that.

Oh, I like that. The new map. Yes, because I'm trying to create a new map, a new possibility for people, because if you've had anxiety for a while, you've gotten all these different theories from all these different experts and you've tried all these different things. It feels like you'll have your whole life, and it's very complicated and confusing.

And I'm trying to explain to people it feels that way because the way you've done it, because of the way the experts have conditioned you. But there's a whole new way to do this, which makes it possible for you to be. free of it permanently and that it's simple. We love simple. But people cannot process simple because they're so used to complicated. So I'm trying to create a new map, a new possibility of why it can be simple.

So I can't explain to you. Well, I could explain to you the process, but it wouldn't help you because you still wouldn't believe me. And that's why at the end, I'm going to send you to my website where you can understand the process better and actually apply one of our tools and actually feel it working in your system. That's what's going to convince you, not what I say, but what you experience. But here's what I can tell you to help you get a new map. Once we understood it was in the body, that wasn't enough to solve it. Like, we had the right location, but it doesn't mean we understand it well enough

to solve it. So I said, okay, it's in the body, but this is good news. Because we understand the body a lot better than we do the mind. Like the mind, it's like 86, what, billion? And, neurons, 100 trillion synaptic pathways. And psychology and spirituality, they don't actually tell you what's going on in the mind. It's mostly concepts and theories. It's like scarcity mindset or the ego or, you know, it's a lot of words and catchphrases that are sort of trying to point to what's going on, but it's not really clear and mechanical. But when it comes to the body, we understand it mechanically.

Like there's a skeleton and ligaments and arteries and a heart. and there's blood pressure. It's like mechanical. We can look in with an x-ray or an MRI, Dan, and like, see it for real. You don't, you know, it's not a theory. So we said, this is good news because the body, well, we understand that.

And the body is something that I appreciate, which is mechanical. A skeleton's mechanical. Arteries are mechanical. Respiratory system. It's all mechanics and engineering. It's incredible. Do you know how much it would cost to buy a body on Ali Express?

it would be incredibly expensive to buy a human body. We get it for free. It's an incredible feat of engineering. But here's what's cool. The body has mechanics, and the body is comprised of something that engineers love, which is systems. Ooh, systems.

You got the respiratory system, you got the dental system, you got the coronary. There's all these systems. And systems in the body can be understood, the mechanics of these systems, how they work, how they malfunction and how to repair them.

So we said to ourselves, okay, if we can find the system that's making everybody anxious, then we can understand why it's malfunctioning, why the system's malfunctioning, and how to repair it. You following Benjamin? Oh, yeah, for sure. So then we started to say, okay, what system is it? Is there a system? And again, because we weren't coming from psychology and spirituality, we could just ask these questions. And once we asked a question, what system is it?

The answer became, it's pretty obvious once you asked the right question. And your audience is going to figure it out because it's so obvious because it's simple. So take out the word anxious because that's just a label to describe something. And instead, use the words nervous. Anxiety could just be like extra, extra nervous. Yeah. That was the original concept back in the day. Millions and millions of people feeling extra nervous seemingly for no reason.

Okay. To Benjamin and your listeners, which system in the body do you think might be malfunctioning and making everybody extra nervous? Do you think it's the capillary system, the respiratory system, or do you think it's the nervous system? Yeah, and this is actually a bit of, I was going to say it, a bit of a throwback to how they originally conceptualized some of the stuff late 1800s. early 1900s and that's where I'm getting

the bulk of my material for the for the books that I republish these older works it they were originally considered a lot of these nervous disorders and it's sounding like you're and then they they got away from that and said no the problems in the brain and there were reasons there were reasons for that and we started studying areas of the brain and whether they function or not properly we had Phineas gauge that got the you know railroad metal bar through his head and changed his behavior. And they're like, oh, if you destroy the corpus callosum,

you get a lot of impulse. And then frontal lobe areas, you get a lot of impulsivity. But they very early on, we're looking at it more medically in terms of, okay, this is a disorder of the nerves, because nerves communicate, like we were saying earlier, pain. If your hand is cut, the brain knows it because the nerves send a signal to the brain going, oh, damage, damage to the body. So are, it's that kind of where you're going with it, more that medical, like literal physical nervous system. Well, I mean, it's not where we're going. It's just like it's, it's what's actually going on. What we discovered, people sometimes say like, oh, how did you, what fancy thing did you?

We didn't figure out anything fancy. We just approached this in a simple way from scratch to actually solve this instead of just keep regurgitating. We weren't regurgitators. We were innovators. And when we're innovating and we're trying to get permanent results. We asked the right questions, which is just people are feeling super nervous, so it's probably the nervous system. And then, yeah, they went to the mind and, you know, Freud showed up and he starts, you know, talking about all these theories of psychology. But psychological is not mechanical.

But here's what frustrates me. They were on the right track with the nerves and the body because that's where it's coming from. Then they go more to the mind, more psychological. Now, if they solved it, great. No problem. Go to the mind. But they didn't solve it. They got worse results.

Freud, for all he knew and understood, was a chain smoking cocaine addict. Which kind of lets you know, okay, it's great if you want to go to the mind and have all this understanding. But it's not solving anything. You're just learning and understanding, but you're not solving. Yeah. To solve, you've got to go to the actual root cause and ideally go to a root cause that's mechanical. Because psychological is like theoretical and abstract. It's interesting.

It's a map. but a map is not the same as getting somewhere to where they want to go. To do that, we went to the body, which is more simple and mechanical. And we have a track record in the body, the thing's in the body malfunction, and then you can repair them. Yeah. When you mentioned Freud in that way, just the thought popped in my head is like, you know, he's a chain smoking cocaine. I thought, we used to be a proper profession. I just, I love that dark humor.

Sorry. But no, it's very true. I mean, and that's, that was, there was a tension between those two schools of thought and one has ended up dominating it. And we've really left out, I think to our detriment, the mind body connection and that there's a reciprocal feedback that goes between the two and that some things that end up in the mind and we express with the mind. What is it? There's a emo Phillips, one of my, one of my favorite comedians. He says, um, uh, they say that the, the, the brain is the most important organ and the body, but look what's telling you that.

So, of course, we're going to, you know, our intellect is going to, an overreliance on intellect sometimes, not enough on intuition or looking at mechanical systems. I mean, I think it's very, very true. Definitely, speaking of, not to go into too much of attention. Well, your point is a very good point because I've asked myself, look, we're feeling extra nervous. It's the nervous system. Once we focused on the nervous system, we cleared that, we figured it took about four years

for us to figure out, not only how to solve it, but then systematize it. It was and again, it's pretty, it's common sense. This isn't fancy. And I've asked myself, why did all these well-meaning therapists and psychologists that said it was a mind issue? Like, why did they triple and quadruple and quintuple? It's been a hundred years, a hundred years of them trying to solve it. And they didn't say, you know what? Maybe it was in the mind, but we're not solving it.

Let's go to the body. And I think it's because we live in a Western culture where the mind, the almighty mind, you don't have to feel. we go to the mind and the mind can solve things. And in some ways the mind can. It's great for technology. It's great for solving lots of technological issues and logistical issues. And we live in this ego culture where the mind is king.

And the mind is great for a lot of things. Until you're feeling extra nervous, in which case the mind can't solve this because the problem isn't in the mind. It's in the body. But all your listeners were sent to the mind to solve it. And that's why they never have. Not because they're broken,

but because people thought the mind was the answer to everything. And it ain't. And I know because I'm living proof. I was a mechanical engineer. I'm a mind guy. I love figuring stuff out. But anxiety was not in my mind. When we saw it was in the nervous system and why and how to repair it,

not only did my anxiety go away, but now we're helping people get their lives back. And I want to explain to you what that means. Like what it means that it's in your nervous system and why it's also good news. It's good news because if I tell you, your audience, we can solve your anxiety quickly and affordably. They like it, but they don't believe me. They just don't. It seems, because they're used to the psychological model. And the psychological model is very confusing. It doesn't get great results, but that's what they're used to. That's what they're conditioned to. Well, that, that too. But there's also, I believe, a prevailing

opinion in psychology itself that certain things like anxiety can't be fixed. It can only be managed. So that definitely leads them in. into that kind of a blind corner of not even looking for a solution in a way, looking for management techniques, as you've described. And I don't know that there's any, you know, working or teaching psychologists that would say that anxiety can be solved. So there's definitely that, as I said, prevailing opinion. And that's, I'm open to the possibility that could be completely wrong.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a prevailing opinion. but as my dad says, what matters most? Results. Who's getting the results? Anybody can say anything about anxiety. One person can say, oh, it's a lack of gratitude. One person can say it's childhood trauma.

One person, like anybody can say anything about anything. And what I say is, yeah, and we're saying something. But you know what's different about us? We're getting way better results, and we back up our results. So your audience can't fully trust me, and I don't have letters after my name. But here's what I'm going to tell you. We have a program where we back up our results. And usually people who back up their results are getting results.

Did your therapist, psychologist, doctor, spiritual teacher, guru, or coach, did they guarantee their results to you? No. If people don't guarantee their results, it's usually because they're not getting them. So the reason I'm saying I know what's going on better than anybody is not because I'm arrogant. We have the data to back up our theory. That's what a good scientist is.

You have the theory, but then you got to back it up with results. And we do. So, but also, you know, we very, a few therapists have reached out to us to say, hey, a client of mine who I couldn't help with anxiety, you got rid of their anxiety in six weeks. Like, what the hell did you do? They saw the data. They saw the result. And that's what got them intrigued. But I've been to conferences telling people, we're solving anxiety and well-meaning therapists and psychologists who care about people.

Nobody was interested. it because we've been conditioned just what you said, Benjamin, it's not solvable. Now, that explains probably why they're not solving it. They're not even trying. People say, Daniel, what makes you so special that you solved it? Because we actually wanted to. It's going to increase the likelihood of solving it when you believe it's possible, and you get a bunch of passionate people going right after it.

Yeah, you got that, the basic starting point is where you, how you approach the problem in a lot of ways. Are you looking in the right place? Do you have the right mindset about it? If you've decided a priori, this cannot be solved, you're going to only look for management techniques. And so, but you were, I interrupt, I took us on a little bit of a tangent there. But you're going to explain kind of how. So once you started looking at the nerves, once you took on that mindset, let's see if this is a physical problem, you were going to explain a little bit more about kind of what that means.

Well, I'm just going to explain briefly to you again with enough information. that it'll make sense. But ultimately, again, no matter what I explain, it'll logically explain why anxiety is solvable, but your audience still will not believe me. So I always just say, I'll do my best, but ultimately do not take my word for it. You have to experience this for yourself.

So no matter what you hear me say, don't take my word for it, get the free training at the end, download the technique, and do the technique so that you can feel this for yourself. Yeah, absolutely. However, I'll explain to you, sort of what anxiety is in a way that your audience can understand it's solvable.

So you have the nervous system, and the nervous system is just like any other system in the body. It just happens to be cranking out too much nervousness. Okay. Now, it's bad news because your audience is very anxious. However, do people understand that systems in the body can malfunction? Do we know that's a thing? For sure, yeah. Yeah.

You can break your leg. You can need a root canal. You can have heart attacks. You can get infections. All these systems in the body, we've all seen, can kind of start to malfunction. If you are choking, the respiratory system is blocked. It's malfunctioning. We've all seen systems malfunction.

And when they malfunction, a lot of systems have a similar behavioral profile, which is they become kind of weak and fragile. If you don't brush and floss, your teeth become sort of infected and they're fragile, meaning they're not strong anymore. And if you bite on something, strong teeth should be able to handle it, but your teeth are now fragile and you feel pain. And we've seen that. Or if your arteries start to get clogged, you walk up a fly of stairs, and all of a sudden you're not as strong as you used to be. You have shortness or breath. You feel pain in your chest. You're fragile.

So people have seen that systems in the body can become sort of. of fragile. And people will even say, I can't, I don't feel as strong as I used to be. But people also say that about anxiety. Like I can't handle things anymore. Like, why did this small thing make me so anxious? But what you're describing is like a fragile system. You put a pressure on it and it can't handle it and you feel pain. But that's, that's what systems in the body do when they malfunction. Are you following? Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So what we saw was essentially, you're not, nervous system is a system in your body that's basically crashed. A system can have different degrees of health.

If you don't brush and floss for a little while, you'll get some bloody gums. Not that big a deal. You can brush and floss and it goes away. But it can get worse. And then you have cavities. And then you need to fill the cavity. It's a little bit worse. But then if you really neglect your teeth, what happens?

The tooth becomes infected. and you need a root canal. Your tooth system is basically crashed. It's in a state of failure. At that point, surface level things don't fix it. Once you need a root canal, brushing and flossing doesn't fix it. Breathments don't fix it. Avoiding mashed potatoes doesn't fix it.

That'll manage it, but it won't fix it because the system is crashed. Once the system crashes, you need to repair it. Now, here's why this is important. It explains why all this stuff that people are trying, that's good for management isn't working because it's not repairing the nervous system. If you have a crashed nervous system, meaning it's crashed, it's in a state of failure, and you do some breathing exercises that temporarily make you feel calmer, can you see that that's not going to repair your nervous system?

Well, certainly it's not a physical repair in that sense. You know, it's definitely managing the signals being sent by it. And there might be some reciprocity, but, you know, I certainly couldn't explain a mechanism of how merely changing, say, your mindset to one of gratitude has a distinct or specific effect on the, you know, tangible nerves in the body. Is that where you're going to? Well, I ask you a question that's hard to have the answer to it. So the answer is no. Okay. You can't repair the whole nervous system with breathing exercises.

You can temporarily affect the signals and manage it. Just like if you have an infected tooth, you can eat mashed potatoes and you can spray, you know, anesthesia on your gums. And you can affect the signals. You can manage it. But the tooth is still crashed. There's still an infection. You haven't gotten deeper. So let's say you have a crashed nervous system.

It's crashed. And you get an app that has you think of positive things for a while. Does that repair your nervous system? I mean, I don't see how it would necessarily. It won't. Yeah, yeah. And the reason is it's deep. It's gone deep and it's gone too far. Now, I'm not trying to bum your audience out, but what I'm saying is your anxiety, you have a crashed system.

It's like in a state of failure. And at that point, service level stuff ain't going to clean it up. If you need a root canal, breath mints ain't going to get the job done. You need a more extreme process. But here's the cool thing. These exist. If you have an infected tooth and you need a root canal, And everything you eat hurts. Do you have to live like that forever or are there people that can repair your teeth? Yeah, definitely thinking happy thoughts does not remove or replace an infected tooth. That's just not, that's not how that works at all. No.

But if you had an infected tooth, do you have to live like that forever and manage that? Or is there something you can do? Yeah, there's definitely a physical fix for the tooth problem. Yeah, definitely. We got dentists and they drill out the cavity and, you know, pack it. What do they call it? Put that stuff in it. Anyway, you know what I'm talking about.

Fill the cavity or root canal or a crown or take it out entirely, you know, one way or another. Exactly. It's a system. And there are experts who study that system and they figured out why it's crashed and how to repair it. So you don't have to spend your life managing tooth pain. You can go to an expert who studies this and understand the steps in just the right order repairs your teeth. And someone who's had tooth pain their entire life could be free of tooth pain after one surgery. Very much so, yeah.

So I, but I assume your method is not surgical, right? That's not what you're not what you're selling. This isn't surgical. Yeah, yeah. But I'm explaining to people a perceptual framework to understand that things in the body that are very dire, we have a track record that they are completely repairable. If you don't eat right for a long time, you have clogged arteries, and now you're having heart attacks, and you're actually having a coronary, okay, and your heart is on the verge of just like almost killing you.

Do you have to live with chest pain and heart attacks for the rest of your life, or are there people that know how to turn that around and repair your heart? Yeah, yeah, definitely cardiologists. We've got specialists in that specifically. Yeah, somebody that's having chest pains. Do they have to spend their entire life managing their chest pain or can they go to experts that know how to repair a heart? Yeah, for sure. And so it seems like what you had discovered is that we haven't had or don't have very many.

And you may be the first who's really taking the system of nerves in the body seriously from a biological standpoint and looking at, okay, how do we rebuild the proper function or good health of that system specifically? Yeah. Well, first we had to diagnose the issue isn't just a nervous. it's that it's crashed. Like, that's a specific situation. Having bloody gums is different than an infected tooth. There are two different situations. We saw that it was dire, and what that meant is, oh, you can't just manage it.

You have to repair it. And a repair strategy is different than a management strategy. So we spent several years to figure out how to repair the nervous system, just like dentists figure out how to repair teeth. Cardiologists figure out how to repair hearts. That's what we spent years figuring out in testing and optimizing. So it's completely possible. I know your audience is like,

if you can have a lifetime of tooth pain, go away from a visit to the dentist, it means it's possible to repair a system. But here's what this means. Because if I say nervous system, extra nervous, repair it. It's hard for your audience to understand what that means. So I'm going to tell you what a repaired,

healthy nervous system means. What it means is that nervousness, whether you call it fear, worry, anxious, panic, that goes away. And in its place, you get to feel a feeling that most people don't feel. But I feel all the time and our clients feel all the time. And that feeling is safe. We talk about nervous system and engineering and your audience is like, I don't care. How am I going to feel?

You're going to feel safe and solid. can you, Benjamin and your listeners, that if you just felt safe and solid from within yourself, then if life pushes on you and challenges you, you might feel some stress, some worry, some concern. But if you feel safe from the inside out, do you see how you'd feel a lot less anxious? Yeah, for sure. That's almost like the, you know, let's say you had a specific. about a specific thing, and you did take the steps to mitigate, plan for, prepare for it, psychological level, behavioral level, that restores that, that feeling of, okay, the threat

has been managed, is dealt with, it has been resolved in a way that I no longer need to worry about it. I mean, because people use these terms of nervous, I'm anxious, I'm worried. There's a lot of these interchangeably, they mean different things, but a lot of it is talking to that fight or flight, that threat system. and the opposite of feeling under threat, feeling safe. So, yeah. Yeah, and it's good that you pointed out

because people are so used to like lowering my anxiety, overcoming my anxiety, managing my anxiety. But it's still always talking about lowering the negative thing. And because what we have is so effective, it's like, no, no, no, no. Art's so good. You get to experience the positive thing. What do we actually want to feel? Safe.

Mm-hmm. Solid. Yeah. So to your audience, it's out there, I'm sure you can hear me. Ask yourself, what if it's not that you have anxiety? What if that's just a feeling that you feel because within yourself, you don't feel safe? And little things happen that shouldn't make you feel unsafe, but you feel unsafe. And then you call it anxiety, worry, overthinking.

But what if you could wake up each morning? And no matter what happened during the day, you just felt safe and solid. Like that's what I have every morning. And I get challenged. Stuff happens. And the old me, every now and then something really extreme will happen in my life. And I'll brace for impact because I'm remembering the old me and I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to panic. And my system, this happened a month ago.

I was out and about and I saw this woman that I was attracted to. And I was walking up to her and I was about to ask for her phone number after we flirt. a little bit. And I was prepared to feel anxious because old me, that would have sent me into a tailspin. And it was almost surreal. It was like the Matrix, you know, when Neo's like bending backwards and the bullets are like going around him because he's so in the zone. I sat there. And as I was talking to her, I just said, hey, I'd like to take you out some time. Can I ask for your number? But as I'm saying it, I feel no fear, Benjamin. I'm just calm and I felt safe. and I just didn't care one way or the other what she answered.

Now, she did say yes, which was nice, but the real win was like, oh, my God, no matter what situation I'm in, I feel safe. Your audience out there, if you like the idea where you just feel safe and solid and grounded, and life can push on you and challenge you, but you have a foundation of safety from the inside out, and you can see that that would help you be calmer. but also all the overthinking and your brain would stop spinning. If it sounds good to you, I'm telling you. I know it sounds too good to be true, but that's how I live right now. Okay.

I used to be in my house, in a fetal position, with a mind spinning and cannibalizing me with terror. Now, not only is my body calm and safe, but my mind is just quiet. It's creepy sometimes how quiet it is. It even says nice things to me, which is incredible. So, again, it's not just me. this is what the program does, not because of the theory, but because we've been testing it and optimizing it.

But here's the other cool part. Because this is a systems approach, systems repairs are efficient and affordable. What we want to do is innovate, the mental health space. And an innovation, a good innovation, makes things easier, but also cheaper. Yeah.

So let's say you didn't know about a dentist. And you had tooth pain your whole life. And you went to a spiritual teacher and a psychologist. You said, oh, you're focusing on the tooth pain. You need to have a positive mindset. You need to focus on the lack of pain. And you tried to understand it psychologically. You could spend years and thousands of dollars trying to manage your tooth pain.

But the cool thing about teeth is you go to an expert. they know the steps and it's repeatable and it works for everybody and it's affordable a root canal is like $1,500. It's worth it to you. It's like a million dollars, but it's like very affordable because it's not psychology. You don't spend a lifetime exploring and understanding. You just go to an expert who knows the steps and then it's very efficient. So our program's only six weeks and it's very affordable because you're not talking to somebody one-on-one for years. You work the steps that we figured out And if you work the steps, you get the results. So it's just a lot cheaper and it works faster and it's permanent.

Results matter, Benjamin. I think they do. Absolutely. And, you know, I, um, okay, so I'm coming at this like, I don't have anything to prove or or a point to make. I'm not here to either validate what you're saying or debunk it. You know, I'm listening. That's a, I love Joe Rogan for that.

Who like, you listen to anyone and everything and I'm just here to see. what you have to say. So I'm on that side of things. And what I would caution people not to do is say, you have to pick one or the other in terms of either you do the method that you're suggesting or that you've crafted and believe 100% it is only physical or dismiss that and accept it's only psychological. I would say heading into the future, we probably want to a blending of the both. So if you can do a physical method that tend to... in terms of how you feel reduces that feeling or eliminates it entirely. And you can still see a psychologist if you got other things because there may be one type of

problem in your life that's physical that you need that for. And another one where you've got to get your thinking straight. And you got to figure out why are my patterns of behavior messing up my life, which are, you know, two questions that work towards the same end, better health, better mental health, physical health. But, you know, sometimes you need a more than one approach to be maximally. successful. You know, it's, you can fix the engine of a car. You can change the tires. But if you ignore either one, the car's not going to drive. You know, so you got to, and then there's an expert

that changes tires, an expert fixes engines. And sometimes you need them both. You know, that's best analogy I can come up with on that one, on the fly. No, it's a valid point. And we're not here to tell people don't see a therapist. There is no value to psychology or spirituality. We're saying that it doesn't appear to efficiently solve anything. Yeah. Certainly not. This specific problem. This specific thing. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Now, and here's what I always tell people. The reason I recommend people find out what we do first is, first of all, it's no risk to try. Like you try it if it doesn't work, you don't pay. There's a 90% success rate. But it's because it's based in fundamentals. Now, if something in your system is fundamentally not working, you want to do the fundamental mechanical thing first, psychology, second. So what do I mean by the?

at. Okay, let's say all of a sudden you're choking. That's a mechanical issue. And two people walk up to you. And one person says, okay, we can look at the psychology of why you eat so fast. Like what was your childhood like where there wasn't enough time to chew your food properly? And that's why you're scared because you're afraid to maybe get hit from the past. And so you eat really quickly. And that's why you don't chew your food enough. And maybe, maybe, maybe on some level you don't feel deserving of better food. And maybe, and you could explore the psychology behind your eating habits to maybe understand yourself better and have better eating habits moving forward and maybe change your diet.

Great. But in that moment, do you want to do the psychological approach or the mechanical, which is let's do the heimlich maneuver, put pressure on your abdomen, which puts reverse, put pressure behind the cheeseburger and pops it out so you can quickly start breathing again. When you've got like something mechanical going wrong, which should you do first? The mechanical thing or the psychological thing? Yeah, definitely. I mean, you're just going to flat out die.

And there's no more time for talking after that if you don't get the cheeseburger out. That's very true. And one is just gives you way better, more results the fastest way. Or if let's say you're not drinking enough water, you could have headaches, it can create bruising, it can create fatigue, it can create fatigue. It can create organ failure and you can die. There's all these symptoms if you don't drink enough water. Okay?

Because you have a system and it needs to run right. So if you're not drinking enough water and you have headaches and fatigue and you're on the verge of adrenal shutdown, which should you do first? Should you go to a therapist to, again, understand maybe if you'd made better life choices, you would do things that make you happier so you have more energy, maybe, you know, learn about boundaries so that you. you aren't around your in-laws so much that make you... Should you do that or should you first just drink some effing water?

Yeah. Seems like, you know, addressing the physical causes. You know, it's a good place to start, actually. You know, even if you go on somewhere else. Get a huge bang for the buck. Headaches go away. Energy comes back. You don't die between your failure and you're back to stability.

And if you want to explore the psychology of your life and make refinements, Wonderful. I totally get it. But when you've got a system shutting down, trust me, it makes more sense to address that thing first because that's the most important. That'll give you the most bang for the buck and the best results, and then later go to the therapist. But I can tell you, again, I'm not dismissing psychology,

but I will tell you this. This was just happened three weeks ago. One of my clients, he came to me. His name was Andy. And he'd had panic attacks and horrible anxiety. his probably for, I think, 15 years. And he said, I've tried everything. I've tried every psychologist, every therapist, every modality.

Nothing has worked. I'm not happy. My kids don't have a father. They're outside playing, and I'm in here scared. And I feel so trapped. He said, but I have a friend that went through your program, and he feels better. So I'm really hoping this will work. And I said, great.

And about three weeks in, he reached out to me. And he's like, oh my God, all that psychology helped me understand myself better. There was value in it. But all along, I had this system that was crashed and just needed to be repaired. And he said, I just spent like probably $80,000 on psychological understanding when I really just needed to bring my nervous system back to health. And he said, now I feel safe. And I don't need to do therapy anymore because I feel safe.

I'm happier. My wife has our husband back and my kids have their dad back. So I'm not dismissing psychology and spiritual. I go do it. But I'm just saying this approach gets you faster results. Yeah. They're backed up. And it's a valid thing to look in the right place for the right answer.

I mean, you don't, as I was saying, the car analogy, you don't take your, you know, you don't take a flat tire to the priest to get it fixed. If it's a physical problem, it takes the mechanic. So, you know, or, you know, you don't take your engine to it to a psychologist. that kind of thing. Even if the engine is, you know, the beating heart of the car or whatever, you don't take it to a cardiologist, that kind of thing. You got to look in the right place for the right answer for the right type of problem. There's different, different fits. Absolutely. We're coming up on about an hour in. I don't know if you wanted to take a quick break.

I think I've got to take the dog out in like 10 minutes and then we'll come back and do the dream thing. Well, I just want to wrap up really quickly. Sure. And, you know, because, well, thank you for telling me. Man, an hour went by. I get very passionate about this topic, and you ask great questions, Benjamin. Thank you. We really got going there. Yeah, yeah.

Now, I've explained how we're solving it, and that's great, and there's truth to it, and my anxiety solved where it's, you know, that's great, but as I told your audience, they're still going to be skeptical. And if they're skeptical, we can't help them. So the next step is not to just hear what I say and go, oh, what an interesting perspective on anxiety, no, that doesn't solve anything. This is good knowledge, but knowledge doesn't solve anything. If you understand a root canal that doesn't solve it, you still have to get it repaired.

So if you're intrigued about that, the next step is not to just believe me. Again, Benjamin's right. Don't just fully, can't fully believe me. But I want you to go to my website, and I like things simple. Okay, my name's Daniel Packard. So Benjamin, what do you think my website, URL is? Oh, I would guess Daniel Packard.com. See how simple I make this?

Okay. We have a free training. free because it's simple. And you're going to go to my website and you're going to download this free training. And here's why you would do it. If you've been hearing me talk to Benjamin and you're like, man, this guy, he's making sense.

Maybe it's not in the mind. It's in the body. And that's why I haven't solved it. And it makes sense. I'm feeling extra nervous. And there's a... Whoa. You're extra frozen.

At the moment. You can repair a heart. You're coming back. So... All right. You're back. Say again? You were frozen for a moment.

Now you're back. So, and if you're listening to this, you're thinking, huh, this guy's making sense, but I don't know if this can really be simple. You know, this feels complicated. Can it really be simple? And even though we like simple, when it's innovative, we reject simple. And I want to give you historical context. In the 1800s, there was a Croatian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweis. And he was the guy, he noticed that all these women were dying in childbirth.

And he didn't know why. And he's the guy that figured out that it's because they weren't washing their hands before surgery. And infection was catching, was setting in. And he's the one that figured out you've got to wash your hands. And when he and the other doctors in the hospital started washing their hands, the death rate of women and childbirth went down by 90%. Simple solution. Huge.

Did he catch on? No. The medical community rejected him and ostracizing. He had a nervous breakdown. and it took 30 years, 30 years for the simple solution to catch on because when simple is innovative, people rejected it first. But I don't want people to wait 30 years to be calmer. So I want you to have an experience that this can be simple.

So you're going to get this free training at my website, and you're going to get two things. First of all, you're going to see really the root cause of what's making your nervous system anxious. You're going to see it and feel it. It's not what anybody taught you, but it is super simple and right under your nose. Then we're going to explain to you the basic theory of how you repair the nervous system, and then you're going to apply one of our techniques. And when you apply that technique, two things are going to happen. One is you're going to feel calm.

For some people, a level of calm they haven't felt in a very long time. And also, something that used to make you anxious won't make you as anxious as it used to be. And what that's going to give you is an actual real tangible result. that not only can this approach work, but more specifically what you care about, will it work for you? You will feel it working, and when you feel it working, it's going to show you that you don't have to live like this forever. So if you want to learn a free technique to be calmer, 45 minutes from now, if you want to understand the root cause of your anxiety that nobody taught you, but that makes this solvable, and you want to apply the technique so you can feel it actually working in your

body, which will show you that not only can you be free of anxiety, but it could be simple so that you can feel safe and happy and show up for yourself and the people you care about, if that sounds good to you, if 45 minutes is a good use of time to see if you could be happier for the rest of your life, if that's you, and go to Danielpacker.com and get the free training just to see what's possible. That's the next step. Again, I'm not here to convince you, just here to get you to the next step, which is to try something for yourself and see for yourself. That's the next step, which you can take at Danielpacker.com. Absolutely. That's a great idea. And the link is in the description. I'm going to make sure that's there for everybody.

And I would encourage just checking it out at the very least. Why not? You know, you got nothing to lose. And just go get a taste of something that honestly results. If you feel better, maybe this is for you. you know, so there's nothing, uh, no reason not to in my opinion. I think I'm, I'm going to do the same probably after we're done talking here. I'll go check it out and, uh, see, see what all the, uh, see what all the hype is about. Um, but okay, so you're good to take, uh, maybe a quick 10 minute break and, uh, we'll come back and do the, do the dream. Sounds good.

Okay, cool. I'm just going to make a note of the time for editing later. Benjamin the dream wizard wants to help you. Here's the veil of night and shine the line. light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New dreamscapes episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks exploring the psychological principles which inform our dream experience,

and much, much more. To join the wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at benjamin the dream wizard.com where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature available on amazon documenting the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world of dreams over the past 2,000 years that's benjamin the dream wizard on youtube and at benjamin the dream wizard.com we'll see if he wants to get back in my lap or if he's going to go lay down somewhere else. That's okay. That was a great interview, Benjamin.

Thanks for your great questions and validating without, you know, being a Pollyanna. I thought you asked very legitimate supportive, but challenging questions. It was great. Fair enough. Yeah, I consider myself a credulous skeptic, which is, I love the dichotomy of opposites. in guinea style it's like i'm willing to believe almost anything my bar for proof is pretty high you talk about results i mean that's a fantastic way it's got to make sense it's got to function properly love that engineering perspective my dad's actually a civil engineer designs uh towers his first

passion was bridges but he kind of you know made made his made his living in towers so i mean and either a bridge can hold the weight and span the gap or it can't or either a tower stands up under spec with the, you know, wind, wind shear and all, and earthquake readiness and all that gets, or it doesn't, you know, it's a great, great proof in the pudding type of thing. Yeah, people, you know, again, we get pushback sometimes. Like, well, you're engineers. You're not therapists.

What the hell do you know? Yeah. Well, also, I just say, look, what do you care? You care about results. Like, you, right? And they'll say, yeah. And I'll say, who are you going to go talk to? people that learn and teach and have understanding and tips,

or do you go to passionate, trained, results-based problem solvers? You know, if once something's solved, talk to anybody. But if it's not solved, go to problem solvers. It's a, we're a certain breed. Go to them, you know? People are like, you're not a therapist. I'm like, they're not solving anything. Yeah.

Well, I get a lot of the same skeptics. of a dream interpretation thing. I mean, even people in psychology, it's a very small part of psychology. Then you get the broader general public and their perspective can range from that's fascinating. They think it's literally magical astrology style and spooky whoop. Fair enough. I don't know what to do with that. I'm on the clinical psychological side of the side of things.

I don't discount the possibility. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know prophetic dreams, lucid dreaming. It's not my thing. Um, but I've actually had people who say they believe I, uh, dream, dream interpretation is Bunkum and I am a con artist. Uh, and that's just their perspective. They, they, you know, they just don't believe what I do is real or has any benefit or, or that I'm actually doing anything that has any value. And it's, what are you going to do? You know, some people are just going to

believe that. And then that's, that's the way it is. Um, you know, I hope I'm helping to rehabilitate the, the, the image of, of dream interpretation for, through what I do. And so, what I do. And then, you know, I'm, you know, I do showing live on video here. Here's how you get something of value out, out of this experience. So that's what I, I appreciate you being here to give me the opportunity to, to share what I do. So, yeah, because I, I don't, I mean, I get the theory behind it. I have no experience with it working or not. It, to me, falls into the category of fluffy and woo-woo.

And who knows? I don't know. So like you, like skeptical. but why not? I don't know. Let's see what happens. Let's collect the data. And that's what any good little inner scientist is, which we all are, you know.

So yes. Yeah. So I think we were talking before and you said you had a series of recurring dreams. And that's some of my favorite are those. But you had a recent example of one we could kind of drill down on and see if we can discover some kind of pattern. Yeah. It happened last night. That's very common.

That's very common to people. The night before they speak with me have a new dream that they're like, this is important because they know this is coming. And their brain sets them up to don't waste this opportunity type of thing. Oh, I like that. It happens all the time. It was like, I'm going to give you some some yumminess to bring to Benjamin. All right. Well, let me deal with the dog real quick.

He says, come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. He says, give you. Get me back in your lap or throw my baby. What's happening? Okay.

So now I'm going to shut up and listen. You're going to tell me your dream as you experienced it. And then we'll go from there. So I'm ready when you are. Nope, you're frozen again. This happens. We'll give it a moment to bounce back. I see you moving again.

There you go. Better. Yes. Okay. Now, for real. I'm ready. Oh. Maybe I'm frozen on your screen.

Are we good? Yep. Okay. So here is the dream I had last night. Yes. It was with a group of people. It felt like they were friends, but they didn't look familiar. And attached to somebody was a bomb that was on a timer.

It was sort of that, you know, bomb looking from like a movie. It sticks a dynamite with a digital clock with red letters. And it was attached to somebody, not me. And we were sort of myself and the other people, but I was certainly trying to at first disarm the bomb and get the timer to stop. And I did everything, you know,

and it was just frantic. it was this fear of, oh, God, this thing is going to go off at any second. It's going to kill them and me and the people around us. And I want to disarm the bomb. And the timer's getting lower and lower. And I'm feeling more and more afraid. And then it intuitively almost felt like the time had gone off, meaning the timer got into zero.

So I just remember standing next to the person just like bracing for impact. just basically like, okay, it's going to go off and we're both going to die. Hopefully it'll be painless. And this is the way it ends. And it was very scary. And then I woke up. Okay. Not bad.

There you go. There is a sequence of events, a story, a kind of narrative to the whole thing. I've mentioned this before, but I literally had one gal on the show who her entire dream was the sensation of falling through a void. And we just talked about it. and we made a whole, we made a whole show on that. So a lot of people think,

I didn't, I don't remember much. It wasn't a very long dream. Like, it doesn't matter. We can, we can work with it. So step one,

shut up and listen. Step two. Now I, I do, you know, what I call my deep dive. Go, go back through it.

I'm going to try and see it a little better through your eyes. So, and I described this as like, you're inviting me into your head and I'm standing kind of behind your shoulder with a flashlight going, what is that over there?

What do you see over here? What does this look like? What do you think about that? and I just throw out suggestions. On the spooky woo side, I'm not getting messages from God. I don't hear the voices of spirits. This is all just two people talking through the experience. See what we can figure out about it.

Do you remember or do you have any impression of where you were, the physical environment? Yeah, it was sort of outside. We were sort of surrounded by some like little berms. and hills, there were houses around. And so one of the things I tried was like when I thought the bomb was about to go off, at the moment of impact, I think I even like pushed the person sort of like I ducked underneath the hill. And I told everyone behind me, get down.

Like it's about to blow and avoid the impact. So there were like hills and places to kind of hide. And it was this thing of like trying to disarm the bomb, but also another thing. So yeah, outside, there were houses. houses around with hilly things and ditches and places to kind of hide. Okay. Yeah. So this is where my brain starts going with these things.

I very often go to contrasts. You were not inside a specific type of building. You were outside. So what does that mean? I don't know. But you were definitely outside versus being inside. You weren't underground. You weren't in your bedroom.

You weren't in a school, in a, you know, in the halls of Congress. Um, so you've got this, um, and you've got this kind of uneven landscape that, uh, hills and berms, but, but also populated. You've got houses. So people live there. Um, you know, I've had people that are like, they're in the deep, dark forest alone. That's its own kind of thing. But there's, so we're getting starting to get with the picture of where you're, the context within in which your brain or dream experiences is starting the thought experiment in that way. So you're with a group of people. And what I imagined was the first thing popped in in my head was a kind of a tight

cluster, like standing in a group or were they kind of spread out? How would you describe the distribution or placement of people around you as this was happening? Yeah, they seemed sort of nearby. And also it was at night. And yeah, they, it felt like maybe five or ten people were around. That was part of the terror was trying to stop this bomb. Obviously, for the person that was the bomb was attached to me and anyone around behind me. Mm-hmm.

Nearby. There were multiple people in the impact zone of the bomb. And that's good, too. I forgot to ask a time of day. And usually, let's say, if someone is inside a building, it may be less relevant, whether it's day or night. Sometimes that comes up. When it's outside, that is usually more relevant about the time of day.

And a lot of it depends on your conceptions of nighttime. We might get into that. I mean, what does night mean to you? Why night and not day? The placement or closeness of the people, they were not right on top of you. it wasn't a cluster, so to speak. It was a little bit of a distribution, but they were in the blast radius.

I mean, even so, and it's interesting too that you said at the very beginning that they were unfamiliar people, but you felt that they were friends. So we've got this, this thing of, it's not specific friends. If it had been, you know,

my brother John was there and he was the one the bomb was attached to. It would be specific to maybe your relationship with him. but these are, this is more, um, it's feeling like to me a more generalized idea of, um, so you've got the, the concept of friendship, they're friends, they're people you care about and care about you and you want to help them or you want good things for them. You don't want them to be hurt because you have an intimate connection. Um, but they're unknown friends.

So it's, uh, it's not a specific. It's not your, say the core group you'd go on a bowling with on Thursday. It's not your bowling team. it's it's a more generic concept of the people around me i want to help or have have good outcomes for or divert from you know prevent a tragic outcome for them save save them from death uh you've got a very kind of place yourself in a very heroic uh role uh you know and that's neither neither good nor bad certainly it isn't like self-aggrandizing it's like we do that in our dreams a lot it's like if there's a problem i need to solve it um i want to stop there for just a moment and and see if any

thoughts occurred to you with all that rambling, I just did? No, not rambling. No, no, that feels about right. Fair enough. It may have been earlier in the dream. I believe it was or the night before, but I think it was all just one dream. Before the bomb, there was also a burning building. and the building was well that's what happens with the burning building is a building is burning

and that same urgency of people are in danger and and try to get them out in time and I did that that wasn't as scary we got I got out we got out and and then they put out the fire okay so an interesting experience of kind of in one ways going from one disaster to the next and it's not caused by you. You're kind of experiencing these things. And there's metaphors that come with that to you disarm the bomb, put out the fire. There's a metaphorical level to that too of problem solving of, you know, catastrophic consequences. And, you know, the people survived in the building. Everyone got out safely as far as you know, or it feels like it. Yeah. And I've seen in my life several times in my life,

surprisingly a number of times where I either saved someone's life or got them out of grave danger when other people were just sort of watching. And I said, why is no one doing anything? I'll step in. Yeah. Not with a burning building, but a burning store.

People were just standing around. the thing was built burning, smoke was coming out, they were just standing there and I went in. Yeah, speaking of psychological principles, there's that kind of bystander effect, I think is what they call it, a diffusion of responsibility. You're in a group and everyone's looking at someone else

to do something. And the larger the group, the less likely it is any one person's going to go, no one's doing anything, let me do it. If you're the only one who shows up to the scene of an accident, say it's on you, you do it or nobody does it. And that we kind of, that's a little more clear in our mind.

There's no one else here. There's no one else I could rely on to be the hero. I'm going to have to decide to step into that role. So wonderful imagery on that too. And I don't know if you want to say more about the burning building thing or we leave that alone and just consider it a kind of a precursor and we focus more on the bomb thing. Thanks for asking. No, the bomb one feels more.

or a pattern I've experienced, which is like time running out, urgency, save either me or other people before, like, time runs out. Okay. Gotcha. Well, that's also with the fire. I think it's in there, too. Not to, not to focus on you, but just to put a pin in it. Fires progress. They get bigger.

They get out of control. And they consume and destroy. And there's a time limited factor to that as well. like you got to get people out before they burn to death because the building's going up the bomb's going off it's a very very similar similar theme on that one um so you're in this environment outdoors nighttime um a kind of scattered but close group of people that you you consider friends people people you have a relationship with you care about their you know good out and care about saving them but not that we don't care about saving

strangers, but there's a, it feels more important to save friends. I mean, there's more, it's more meaningful to us specifically. And broadly speaking, were you aware of the bomb from the first? Like you appear in this moment, in this circumstance, in this environment, and there's a bomb. And I see it right in front of me. It's like an immediate knowing. Yeah. It seemed just to kind of come out.

to know where it didn't seem to have like a ramp up just all of a sudden there's a bomb with a timer strapped to somebody sure I guess what I'm asking maybe is were there was there a moment when you were in that environment before you became aware of the bomb or like your first immediate understanding is I'm here there's a bomb like you just know it right off right off the bat I don't recall in the dream that occurring it may have but I don't recall no that's fine I say I rattle a lot of doorknobs and some of them don't come open. It may have been significant. It may not.

So, you know, right away it throws you into the midst of a crisis is what it sounds like. It wasn't, not a slow buildup. Not, oh, we're just hanging out and having fun and all of a sudden there's a problem. I know, okay, you're here for the problem specifically in that way. There's something along those lines. It may not be that relevant. So what would you say about the person the bomb is attached to? Male, female, old, young, tall, short.

Any details of how they're dressed? What they look like? They were younger. Yeah, felt around, you know, like teenager. They weren't a kid. They weren't a child. They weren't an adult. It felt like in that kid, sort of 10, 11, 12-year-old.

old age. Okay. I'll go with, it's not strong the gender, but if I had to guess, I'll say, I don't recall, could have been either, but my, the answer that comes up right now is male,

but it's not clear. Okay. And that's fine. That, also, again, I ask a lot of questions may not be relevant. It might be relevant that, you know,

said, you don't have to give me an answer. I can't tell. I don't know. I don't have a strong impression. So what it could be, if you had a strong impression, this person is definitely male. That would have been, say, related more to your concept of how you're viewing men, male masculinity. It might have been more specific to a certain type of person. But this is more it may be significant in the idea that this is more generic to everybody. This is not a specific type of person. It's a specific type of maybe younger person susceptible to whatever problem you're trying to consider. So you have a more distinct impression that, well, I knew they were younger.

They're not a little child, but they're not quite fully in adults. And there's an interesting thing that happens in the teenage years where there's a lot of growth. There's a lot of painful life experience, heart knocks. In some ways, we've got to figure out who we are as a whole. whole swath of cultural and and and you know interpersonal understandings of what it means to be at that age. Um, so this is not a problem unique to boys or girls. It is generic to the human condition, perhaps. Um, but specifically to younger people in this regard, there's a ticking time and like with, um, there's a lot of ticking time moms metaphorically with with being a teenager. There's a lot of

pitfalls you can fall into you can fall in with bad crowd. You can start doing drugs. You could start doing drugs. you could start having certain mental health issues that pop up. You have to in some ways, okay, and this is, I say a lot too, but I just follow wherever my brain goes. When we're very young, there's things in terms of education where we're just told you go to school. And then we do it because our parents say so. And this is expected and this is my routine. But then you start hitting a certain age where you've got to decide, I'm going to do this for me. like you begin to captain your own ship in some ways you become more self-aware and you start looking at maybe

school and education comes to my mind just because you got to say i can slack off if i i can cheat i can do all kinds of things to screw up and not learn what i should you got to kind of become self-motivated at some point in younger years now i'm throwing a lot at you some of it may resonate and if you have a completely different conception of what it means to be that age whatever comes to mind uh you tell me so i'll stop there for a moment. So it came to mind as you were exploring as I've known this. So from basically zero to puberty, I was lots of self-esteem. I felt confident.

I thought I was very cool and, you know, that youthful confidence. And I thought I looked good. And I remember having nice clothes and I would dress and just, I even remember showing up one day to the first day of camp. I was about 12 years old. And I remember having this awareness of being, I am so cool and it's not even fair to the other kids, how cool I have. That was the sense of sort of. And then I remember very clearly, I had a, so I used, at that age, I used to about once a year get a very painful gas pressure in my, somewhere in my lower intestine. It was very painful. And it would last about a day. It was debilitating. And it happened about once a year.

So I'm about, I think, 12 years old. And I had to do a report on Illinois, a book report, or something no not a book report it was just a report on illinois and i didn't do it though i faked the pain the day before christmas vacation thinking oh i'll just do it over christmas vacation spoiler alert i didn't get it done by the end of christmas vacation i almost got it done but it was due that first day back from school so i faked the pain again so that i could stay home one more day and finish the book report. So I fake the pain. My mom lets me stay home from school.

I finished the book report. But my mom says, you know, normally you only get these pains once a year. Now you've got two in two weeks. We're going to go to the doctor. Oh, boy. Yeah. Now you've got a line to the doctor.

Oh, crap. So I go to the doctor. They give, they do a scope. They just, you drink this barium liquid and they look for any blockages. Anyway, there was a small benign tumor in my lower intestine. and the doctor said, I think that's what it is. I think air is getting trapped behind this benign tumor and causing this backup. And he said, you know, you should probably get it operated on partly because of the gas thing,

he said, but also you guys travel a lot and it could become infected and could rupture. And you're fine if you're in the U.S., but you travel to these places with not great health care, and that's not good, so we better remove it. And I was like, gosh, should have just done the report on it. Illinois. Anyway, so I asked the doctor, I said, is there going to be a scar? And he said, yeah. And I said about how big. And he said, oh, just big enough to get my hands in. And he holds up his hands. And I was like, did this guy play center for the Knicks? He had the biggest hands. And I was very tiny. And this guy had biggest hands. And I went, oh, my, I'm going to have a scar. I was like, don't you have any doctors with like smaller hands? He's like, nope. So I go. And I go. And I go. in, I get the surgery, I wake up, and I wake up, not only do I have this scar, right at the age where you want to fit in. And to me, the scar made me very self-conscious and also puberty hit. So in about like a one-week period, I went into things, confident, joyful kid, and I came out

of it, this very self-conscious, incredibly insecure, pubescent boy. And I started getting pimples and life was so scary. And puberty and just that whole period was very hard in my life. And it all started when I went into that surgery. And I remember having a bit of feeling of, I don't know, resentment at my family of like, you caused this. This is your fault. You should have protected me from this. Now, it's not their fault. But their choices led to this, you know, how kids' minds are. It's oversimplified. And I logically, they did nothing wrong. But I just remember this feeling of like, why did you do this to me? And I'll just keep going with one other deep seeing in case it helps. Is that okay? Please, yeah. So that was a benign tumor. And the thing with

my family is, you know, they're very emotionally limited people. They do the best they can, but they're emotionally limited. But logistically, they show up at a high level, meaning I always, you know, had a house and, you know, there was always enough food to eat. But when I would go to the hospital, they would step up. My mom was a nurse, and she would be at the hospital 24 hours a day and just be there. And in a family where I didn't feel emotionally loved, I never got the I love you and I'm proud of you. But I remember being in the hospital,

seeing her there by my side and thought, oh, that feels like love. So that was at 12. And then when I was 18, I got another tumor, a benign tumor. This one was in my vertebrae. and it was horribly, horribly, horribly, painful.

And about once a day, if I got bumped, I would feel the, basically the feeling of your neck snapping because the tumor was pushing up against my spinal column. And it was horribly painful. We finally get it diagnosed. We have an operation. And there again is my mom and probably my dad standing there, 24 hours.

But before that, I'm only telling you this in case because, you know, in terms of our core imprints. So when I came out of surgery, I was anesthetized. And they were transferring me from the operating table to the recovery table. And I was half knocked out, but I had just enough awareness to know if they moved me in that moment, my neck was still very fragile and that excruciating neck snapping pain was going to go off. And I knew it. So I'm laying there surrounded by about five or six nurses and they're about to move me.

And it was a straight out of a horror movie, you know where they're about to bury you alive and you can't move and you're sort of saying, no, don't do it, don't do it. Or that scene in misery where she's about to knock his ankles and he can't move and he's James kind of saying, don't do it, please don't do it. That was me. I was in there saying, please don't do it. Please don't move me. Now, they didn't understand my neck.

And I don't think they got it. They thought I was just. But my mom was watching. And she just watched knowing, and she saw me saying, please don't move me, please don't move me. So the nurses did the best they could, but they didn't know to listen. And they lifted me up.

And sure enough, that excruciating neck snapping pain flooded my system. So not only was this feeling, the feeling of hopelessness of like, please listen to me, please stop, don't move me, but also my mom watching and not doing anything. And years later, my mom never apologizes for anything. She apologized for that. She said, I could have stepped in and I didn't. And I wish I would have. So this feeling of powerlessness of wishing somebody. would have like heard me and saved me

and this incredible pain creating like a Pavlovian link but also wrapped into this whole thing is the two times when I really felt love from my family keyword felt it was when there were these operations and they stood by me

and I don't know if maybe unconsciously in our extreme need to feel loved that maybe the first almost like like I manifested the second tumor to have an operation to have my family stand by me. I don't know. But an interesting experience. I just wanted to share that feeling of powerlessness.

And I wish someone had stepped in and taken me away from that horrible pain. And didn't they just let me hurt when they could have done something. And so in that moment with the bomb, that, feeling of someone has to do something. We can't just let people get hurt. You have to do something. It just feels linked to that painful core memory. Absolutely. That's fantastic. That's why I ramble. That's why we look at these things this way because suddenly you'll go, wait, I'm having this whole memory. And I see it so clearly and I feel it. And it all comes back. And then we get the, and then we get the story. And it's also a very common form of healing.

I would say for a lot of people that they, they overcome their personal traumatic experiences by becoming the hero that they wish had saved them. You know, they go on to save others. And there's, there's actually a forked path there. If it's, say, abuse trauma, a lot of people go on to identify with the abuser and empower themselves that way. And the alternate fork is, no, I'm going to be the hero. I'm going to be the one that stops this from happening to someone else. I would say that probably speaks to your self-concept.

or in a way, moral character, even as I would encourage most people to do, is to become that hero you wish you had and not carry on the cycle of abuse. It's very much a choice. And not to say that the way your family engaged with you was abusive, but the trauma that you experienced and hoping that no one else would have to go through that. This is a tremendous amount of empathy for other people. You're not just, it isn't just about you. It's about helping others with a win-win situation.

I'm going to help me by helping you. I think that kind of a thing. And I'm sure lots, there's so many good people that do good things. I can just see in my life, it's, I don't know, this is just feedback from others. It's very strong. And even when I tell people, you know, I tell them like, yeah, I had crippling anxiety and PTSD. So I started my own research company to see if I could. you know, solve it for myself on the planet.

And people say, you did what? Yeah, I started my own research company to solve it because no one was solving it and someone had to solve it. And they said, you do realize that's not normal. Probably a billion people with anxiety. They didn't go out and solve it. Yeah. And I went, oh, yeah.

But I did. And I sacrificed my whole life. I left my entertainment career. I put everything into it. To me, that just felt normal, but I do get, yeah. Yeah. It's probably in a good way, a typical behavior. Like, someone's got to do this.

I guess it'll be me. Yeah. And that's great with a lot of times dreams represent our understanding of concepts in a way. So there's a great way to illustrate this is just to examine this idea of normal. There's like normal is a statistical average. It is the norm. What do most people do? And we might look at that and go, yeah, it's not.

It is atypical, as you said, as most people don't do what you did. Now, we might wish they would, but they, but they just don't. That's, that's like recognizing the is versus the odd. On the other side of it, there's the, the cultural connotation to something being abnormal. You're not normal as if that's bad. As it's, it's almost universally category being not normal as categorized as, bad. I'm not normal. How many dream wizards are there out there? I'm a, I've been a, I've been a

strange customer for decades. An odd duck, horse-sized, as I say. Um, so if in your mind, uh, the idea of this is not normal, um, this is not what most people do, um, that's very much going to show up in in the, in dreams like this where I'm going to step up and take responsibility. I'm not concerned with doing what most people do. I'm concerned with focusing on the problem and a solution. There's a bomb. It needs to be disarmed. I'm going to take responsibility. I'm taking it on to myself to try and solve this problem. There's a, it's rambling again. I've been my own inspired thoughts too. There's a certain school of thought which believes every person, object, environment in a dream is you, an aspect of you. I think sometimes it is. I think sometimes it is.

This is why I don't subscribe to any specific school. I think I would say perhaps, you know, I think this other person, we can look at it either way. They are you and you're saving yourself, but you're also saving other people. I think it's becoming more clear why it's unclear who this person is. But it is very much related to exactly what you described in this, in your, in these experiences from your childhood. you've got this person in front of you that is kind of a representation of you or the type of person or the what am i what i'm i trying to say other people who would be at risk of you know time dependent disasters in in formative years um and so i would say it's giving a hint to you of why

you've followed the path you followed today um you know here's what i went through and here's how it inspired me and shaped my shape my understanding and and determination in in a sense um it's so all of that from just who is this person we talked for like 20 minutes on that and got got personal stories that's i love that because it's just yes just asking questions and getting into that um whatever comes to your mind say it where where do these associations go completely free um well one thing else Thank you. Go ahead. I've just seen from a young age, this was just kind of automatic.

I mean, even as a kid, I remember being five years old, and we didn't get, we were not the type of family that got candy. But every now and then for a little treat, my mom would buy his candy. So during the summer, we would go swimming at this public pool called Strawberry Canyon or Strawberry Creek in Berkeley, California. And there was a vending machine. And when we'd go, my mom would, you know, I'd get some lifesavers, which for me was always excited because we weren't a loud candy in the house.

And I'm sitting there just loving my lifesavers. And I see this kid over in the corner watching me eat the lifesavers, aware that he wants a lifesaver. And no part of me wants to give up my lifesavers. I am, I mean, this is my treat. I'm in lifesaver heaven. I'm five years old. And I just, it was very strong.

It was just, well, yes, but you have to share. This person has an experience. And if you can make their life better, you do it. It's a non-negotiable. And I went up and I gave them a lifesaver. Now, for an adult, not that big a deal, but a five-year-old? Yeah. It's not like I had to be talked into it.

And so, again, I've saved some people's lives while other people just stood by. And one of the times I was 12, and there were adults and much older kids. And I, the 12-year-old, I'm the one that stepped up and saved a kid's life. So it's very strong in me. And my point is, to me, all we know is ourselves. And then we project into other people. And we think other people are like this. And then, of course, we learn over time.

They're not. But when I was, before I developed this program to solve my anxiety and PTSD, it wasn't solved. I was in excruciating pain, emotional pain. And my friends and family were told the things that they can't do. Because if you do this, it's going to send my system into a terror viral. Basically, they're going to activate the trauma. and they were all told please don't do this

and if you do do it I'll tell you but then just say sorry and you'll try to be more careful and then that'll help me feel safe again and I won't go into all the details but my family started doing the things that I told them if you do this you will send my system into terror

they did it I went into terror I started telling them this is going to disill damage me like you have to stop like that kid on the operating table pleading please stop you're going to do damage and they wouldn't stop and to protect my own psychological safety i walked away from my family and they know i'm hurt they know they dropped me and I'm hurt and none of them reach out to repair what happened. So it's like they know I'm hurting.

They know full well they did something because other people told them. And they know I'm in pain and they do nothing. Now intellectually, I know they're limited people and they can't. But to me, when someone's in danger, you have to put your stuff aside and be there. You show up for people when danger is in. I think we had another small... My family just sat and avoided it.

And because to me, I would never in a million years do that, it's extra painful that they did it because in my world, that's just like a non-negoti, you just do it. Now, logically, I know they can't. They're avoiders. being around my pain is just too much for them.

Logically, I get that. But experientially, they're just letting me burn. Yeah. And it makes it extra painful because it's like they don't care. They can't be bothered to get me out of danger. Yeah. Sounds like, well, I didn't mean to interrupt. So, yeah, just the fact that saving someone,

and when they're in danger is a non-negotiable and it's easy for me. I assume it's easy for others. So when they don't do it, you just feel extra unwanted, unloved, unimportant because we try to save the things that matter to us. And my family didn't try to save me. So in an overly simplified logic, it feels like they don't care. Now, again, logically, I know they do, but it sure as heck doesn't feel that way. Yeah, that's very interesting too.

It's like, um, so if I were to look at my family dynamic, I think my, uh, mom and dad and brother, um, a mom less so, but definitely my dad and my brother were more, um, emotionally limited people. Uh, you know, I don't, maybe I haven't talked to my brother in a minute. Maybe he would disagree with that assessment necessarily, but especially in your circumstance, it seems like you had a lot of natural, strong natural empathy. And, sensitivity in a way. And those go hand in hand. Like if you can feel, feel viscerally another person's pain, like the kid with the candy, you're looking at that going, you know,

he's just drooling over there. And you're like, I can't live with this feeling of not sharing. I need to do that for me. Even if his or perp, I don't even know, a situation was not your fault. You didn't cause it,

but you're there with it. You're there feeling that pain on behalf of another person. So you would definitely, as you're a kid, you're looking at your world experience as normal for you, certainly. And you think other projecting onto other people. I assume other people feel the same way I do. And it looks like you were in a family where they just didn't. They didn't have the depth of emotional range.

There's a couple words ago. There's restricted and constricted. And I'm not sure if it matters much. But it's definitely like it's just not a very strong response, whatever it is. It sounds like yours was just a bad match for your family's relational style and how, um, and your emotional range compared to theirs. Uh, so that what they need from you was different than what you need from them and they don't get it.

They could, in a way, couldn't get it. They can't feel what you're feeling because they just don't naturally. Uh, something, something along those lines. But then, yeah, from your perspective, you're going to look at that going because they must be feeling how I feel the fact that they're not. responding to me must mean what they hate me. What is going on here? That had to be just horribly confusing until you're able to then go back and rationally process it and say, oh, of course, they were just kind of biologically different, a little programmed a little different,

a little different nervous response or emotional response. And it doesn't make it hurt less necessarily, but at least, yeah, now you don't have to carry the resentfulness of, you know, they did this to me on purpose. They knew and they hurt me because they wanted to. It's, it's tragic as it may be it's that's not malicious i don't know if we're on we're on the same page as far as where you're at understanding yeah no i don't i understand it well enough i work with people long enough to know yeah it's a capacity issue mm-hmm and i don't uh great word capacity i don't say you know i've let go of oh why me that all that like it doesn't hold it however the human in me now says huh it's been five years by

close family basically you know something to tell they're not a day but they're

hurt there's something to address and you're nothing so there's a little so there's an

little like a sort of yeah you know your family holds a certain

representational pull on you yeah and so there's this weird god they do nothing they do nothing

in it so yeah that's tough where you understand it and it still hurts. Yeah, I get that. Morris is, yeah, I guess, and it's not strong, but it's there. And so if it comes up in the dreams, it makes sense because it's just like,

wow, they're still alive. They have my email. Nothing. And my awareness, my humanist is like, man, that just doesn't feel great. Yeah. And it also, it doesn't feel right. You want balance and reciprocity and relationships. It often doesn't feel right to be the one that has to initiate or reach out every time.

Okay, I'll start because no one else is doing it. That's another element of you're in a crowd and no one's addressing the problems. You're going to step up and fix it. Then again, so trying to see things from both sides. The drive is there in you to fix it. You see a problem. Maybe they don't see the problem or they don't see it the way you do or they don't feel it the way you do so of course you know like it logically they're not going to reach out because they

you wish they would and i'm not trying to excuse it either like if you've fallen out of contact with someone and you care about them maybe you'd check in with them once in a while you know you haven't heard from them in a bit hey maybe they've been busy you give them a call um and not everyone has that impulse and and again so to me on the autism side and i think my i think it runs in the family let me say i'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus um but we don't talk for months sometimes. We're all just, we do our own thing and then we go, oh, it's February again. Wow. Where did the, where did the year go? I guess I better call and say, I remember you exist. We just got to get busy doing our own thing. I spend a lot of time in solitude out here, my little, little wizards cave. But, okay, enough about me, of course. Bringing it back to we're still at the moment of you've, you've recognized the bomb is there. So I think we've kind of dialed in a bit of the general, concept of where this recurring theme is coming from. And then there's the experience of how you try to disarm it and whether or not you're

successful. What can you say about how you tried to disable the bomb? Was there a process to that that you're aware of? I don't remember there was sort of two phases. One, I think I was just trying to figure out. you know, is there a button? Is there a wire? But the timer was really low.

It started low. So there wasn't much time. And then all I remember was sort of frantically just seeing if I could pull it apart. Like could I rip the TNT sticks just out of the cluster and sort of disconnect them from the detonator? So I remember as the timer is getting like down to around 10 seconds, I'm just trying to rip this thing apart. hoping last-ditch effort that that would work. But it felt like tangled and I couldn't quite do it. The clock's going down.

And then finally I was like, oh, that's it. And I just braced for impact. Okay. Well, that says it's its own type of thing. So you're in the, what am I trying to say? Not to reduce your entire personhood to a single dimension, but you've got the engineer problem solving, you know, mindset going on here, maybe two. But you're not, you are not that person in the dream.

So what you're facing is a problem beyond your skill level. You don't know how to disarm a bomb. You're looking for the answer. But so there wasn't a sense of confidence of like, I've disabled a hundred bombs. This is just another one. I know what I'm doing. And then it goes off anyway. That's a different kind of thing.

This is more like, I've never disarm a, to bomb before. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what button or wire to push or pull. And you get a, you get a kind of, you know, I'm running out of time so there's a desperate need to act, to kind of, I better do something, anything, because doing nothing is not an option. Doing nothing means surrender. It means death. Even if I fail, I've got to do something because the bomb's going to go off. There's that, you know, our head into the edge of a cliff type of thing. It's going over if you can't stop it. So you're yanking at wires in that kind of last minute desperation to try something, anything, but they're tangled and they won't come apart.

It's a problem. You can't even just going in. What am I trying to say? I had this thought the other day, too. There was a concept in my mind. You tried to brute force it. You know, I can't, I can't intellectually solve this. I'm just going to brute force it and try and tear it apart.

And that even, even that last lowest level, desperate thing that we try as a last resort is just fails. I want to stop there and just get any kind of thoughts akin to your mind as I was kind of exploring that. Well, and it's very painful in my relationships, especially the one. that turned abusive that led or activated the anxiety in the complex PTSD, that relationship followed a similar pattern of relationships where I could logically see like what the issue was. And I'm a decent communicator and I would explain to her like this is what's going on. And she would say you're right.

Like, you're right. That is what's going on. I would say, well, that's causing problems. And they would say, yes. I would say, great. And they say, so I should probably stop doing that for you and for me. So it sounds good. And in my head, I thought, okay, that's case closed. And then, of course, they did the thing again anyway. And it took me years to figure out.

When I see the logic of something, I'm pretty good at following it. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I've gotten feedback from people. Once I see what's sort of right and wrong, I choose that path. I have to. Once I see the logic of this hurts you or me, that's done. When I was in college, because I was insecure, I would use making fun of people to get attention. Because I was funny and I would make fun of kids. kids would laugh and it made me feel loved.

So I'd been doing that since I was 12 years old, 11 years old, because I was very tiny. And so to basically keep the big physical kids away, I learned to be a verbal bully and back kids off. It's a defense mechanism. It also got me attention, and I was really good at it. So I'd been doing that unconsciously from probably like 10 or 11 years old. I get to my college. I'm still doing it.

In the first week of college, this girl walks up to me, and she says, do you know who I am? And I said, no, I have no idea who you are. And she said, well, yesterday at lunchtime, you humiliated me in front of everybody. And she said, everybody already knows you're funny. You don't have to tear people down to prove it. And it was the first time I heard that my words were hurting someone. And I went, oh my God, I did hurt you. And I'm not, and I said, that's the last time that happens to you or anybody.

And I just stopped. Now, I felt the impulse like an addict. Someone would do something silly in my mind would say, ooh, a joke. And I could get, I could make the joke and get the attention. And the addict did me like wanted to make the joke and get the attention, the validation. and I would stop myself. And for a year, it was really a discipline to not make the joke. But the fact that it took one time and I stopped.

Decades of behavior based in very deep patterns of lovability and validate, I just stopped. Again, I think everyone's like me. So I'm in these relationships. I would explain to people, we'd have a talk. Hey, this isn't working. This is hurting me and you and us. And like, don't do it.

And they'd say, okay, and I think they would stop. And they, of course, did because I learned early on, I, whatever you call it a capacity or something, not normal in a good way. So my point is, in these relationships, but also with my family when I was going through this pain, it was like I would logically explain to them. Like, this is harming me. It's harming us. It's harm.

Here's the logic. But then understanding, you know what, people have a capacity and that bomb's going to go off anyway. Yeah. So I think if it's connected, it's like, I do have this engineering mind and it's very powerful. And it's great at explaining to people things, but they're still limited and they're going to still do and be them. and that bomb of pain, even if you can figure it out, if it's a human being, they can still be very destructive. And that sense of powerlessness of like, I kind of know how to diffuse this bomb,

or I think I can or maybe I have a strategy, it doesn't matter, it's going to go off anyway, hurt us all. Yeah, that's interesting too. So there's a, we kind of dialed in a bit the idea that the bomb, the symbolism of the bomb, attached to the person. It's almost like it's a part of them. You know, this isn't a person with a bomb on them. It is a person who is a bomb or has a bomb within them, the capacity to, to explode and do damage. And you can't disconnect it. You can't get it off of them. It's, you know, it's, the old joke in psychology, how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change. So we get these things where we have insights about

other people and we even communicate to them sometimes this isn't working for me this is our hurting you and they are um in denial oblivious they may even agree and then find it hard to have the discipline to maintain self-awareness and follow through on the change um or some people have have fantasies of well if i just recognize it's a problem then of course i just stop and change and it isn't you know that easy you said you know you had about a year where the impulse was there to, you know, something that had been your way of interacting with people 10 or 15 years of your life so far. Now you're like, I don't want to be that guy anymore. I don't want to be the bomb going off and doing hurt and other people. Another interesting thing is that this gal that came and told you, she was kind of enacting that step up, say something, be the one who takes action, be the hero in the situation, let you know that there's a problem that, you know, something that hurt her.

And then you could have that feedback, that self-reflection and say, you know, maybe you could have decided, hey, screw you bitch, I'm going to be an asshole anyway, because I think it's funny. But you didn't. You know, you decided, okay, I don't want to be that guy. I didn't know it was that bad. I didn't know I hurt people that badly. And then you were able to carry that with you. And that's the motivation for change.

Nobody changes anything until what they're doing previously stops working or it gets brought to their attention that it's doing, it's having an effect that they don't. don't want to accomplish. Yeah, that kind of a thing. The other significant part, I think, at the very end of the dream, is that you, and what came into my head as you were saying, and I'm glad it came back because I'd forgotten it. That scene in Captain America where the scrawny kid jumps on the grenade and that's what

gets him into the military, they're like, that's a soldier. That's a hero right there. You know, he's going to save. So what you did is like, this is going off. I'm going to try to move, you know, warn other people around me that this is a problem. There's, there's potential damage. There's actual damage coming in the sense of the dream logic.

But they're in danger. They're under threat. And you make a last ditch effort to move that person with you into a lower area and, you know, yelling at other people to get down. And then realizing that it's going to, it's going to hurt you no matter what you do, because you stayed close enough to try and save. the person salvage the situation in some way you could. And then minimize the impact on others, you know, jump on the grenade.

So I don't know if you have any thoughts regarding that ending and how you approach things. Either in general. I mean, as you were saying it, what just came to mind is it didn't even occur to me to run away. Like the principle of if you could. can help and someone's in danger you it's a non-negotiable i mean people say that all the time it's a burning building they're not a hero they just went in yeah and that's how i am and some people are sometimes but many times in my life i've been in pain in danger and they knew they had full like knowledge

like this is not and either they did the thing that hurt me or they would walk away and the bomb feels I don't know if it's the pain or my heart being obliterated

there's something very deep because when I went through my pain with the anxiety and the PTSD it was so painful from it but also everybody walking away it was so painful and there was this metaphor I heard somebody talk about because I really came out of it healed

and I don't like to use this word that often but sort of transformed in many ways many patterns I used to do just melt it away and there's this you know we talk about the metaphor of the butterfly as a metaphor for transformation and I used to think oh it's a caterpillar the caterpillar goes into the cocoon

and then sprouts wings that's what I thought and I found out that's not true I believe what happens is the caterpillar goes into the cocoon and literally liquefies and then comes back

reconstituted as a butterfly and what I heard someone say is if the pain is bad enough or long enough you don't just get hurt your heart just gets like incinerated it just gets blown open

and then you can rebuild it from the ashes into what you want it to. Sometimes we get hurt a little bit and you build, you still have your heart and you build a protective layer and you keep going. But the pain I went through was so excruciating for so long that it just felt like my heart just got just liquefied from the pain and the duration. And then I reformed it into a beautiful, loving even more. more sensitive and caring heart.

And so something about the bomb and the explosion and the finality of it, the obliteration, and then that's an opportunity to rebuild from scratch. Okay. Yeah, that's significant that that would occur to you, that your thought process would take you there. My initial thought, and just to throw it out there, and that's why I stop sometimes and let's just let people respond to what I've already said is that, uh, you could be, I mean, you're definitely exploring this type of concept. And the, the thing that came to my mind partly was we often analogize emotional pain to physical pains. Like it's as if I was stabbed in

the heart, you know, it's, uh, it's a death by a thousand cuts, but it's mental. You know, that kind of, a thousand slights of someone who's, you know, nitpicking at you, that kind of thing. Um, so it seems like you're, you're definitely conceptualizing your, you're, you're, definitely conceptualizing or analogizing to this, you know, an explosive situation, a bomb that's going to go off a time limited thing. It's going to do major damage that's going to kill the person and probably more people around them. Part of what I was thinking, too, is whether... Go ahead. On what you said, when I was in the abusive relationship that led to the anxiety and the complex PTSD,

I was doing my best to just keep showing up at a high level for her and just keep trying to save the relationship and be the hero and keep going. But after about a year and a half of this, my system started to break down from just, we're not meant to go through that for that long. Yeah. And we went to a marriage counselor, and the marriage counselor told my then partner at the time,

like his system is breaking down from the stress of being your partner. And like he can't take much more of this. Like talking about my emotionality almost like it's going to break. You know, you don't normally think of feelings as like they'll break. Yeah. So soon thereafter, we were doing well. And then she had one of her things where she tries to blow up the relationship.

Basically when things would go well, then she would blow it up. which took me a while to figure that one out. But anyway, she went out of seemingly for no reason, out of nowhere, all of a sudden she became the worst she'd been since I'd known her. She's screaming, obscenities, she's yelling at me. It's like she went into this fugue state of possession. I don't know what to call it.

I just tell you what she was doing. And I was staying calm. And I remember calling her. I walked away from her. Like I said, I'm leaving the house until this past. I don't know what this is. So I, you know, stay with her friend and I called her or she called me. She was like yelling at me on the phone and I said, I need you to listen to me.

I think my system is about to break. I don't exactly know what that means. I just intuitively since I've been through too much already and if you can't come to the table, as a loving partner, I think, like, damage could be done. And I said, if you're unhappy or if you're upset, come to me as your partner and we'll talk and we'll work through this. But this violence, if it keeps going, I think it might actually do damage. And again, I don't know exactly what that means, but please stop.

Stop. And I'm pleading, like that kid on the gurney saying, please don't do it. and she just starts screaming louder. This is one of your, you know, trying to control me, manipulation tact and just starts screaming. And so this was, again, like 12, 13 years ago, but I sort of remember that the moment that my system, for lack of a better word, broke.

Because about a month later, the relationship ended, and then the crippling anxiety and PTSD. Yeah. And so I think they were linked. And so what's my point? My point is, yeah, that feeling of powerlessness of please stop, Like don't go off, bomb. Don't go off.

It's going to harm. And I remember saying this to my family when they were doing their things. And I had the PTSD, I pleaded with them. I said, this thing you're doing, you can do damage. Please stop. Please, I'm begging you. And they didn't stop. The bomb just kept going off.

So that feeling of being around something, it doesn't just hurt, but it can do like damage. Absolutely. And not being able to stop it is what I went through in various ways. with humans. Yeah. I wrote down a couple ideas that based on what you were saying is that we don't have trouble conceptualizing a weight too heavy for us to lift. I mean, we get that. We have a physical limit to our body. And you know, you can become more, you can go to the gym and you can do bench presses. But let's say you've never been to the gym in your life and you're just, you know, doing your natural thing. Ain't a way you're lifting 600 pounds off the rack on

on your first day. It's just not going to happen. So we have a, we know, we know. know and we accept physical limits. Well, of course, I can't run as fast as a cheetah. I just can't. It's not a human capacity. But we have a less, less of an understanding of how psychological or emotional limits are similar. There's only so much stress we can tolerate. There's only so much mental bandwidth we can dedicate to a problem.

There's only so long we can be, you know, dedicated and persevered. and persevere through certain things. And so what you mentioned, or the idea that came to my mind was this analogy to lifting heavy weight and some emotional burdens are too heavy to lift. And you hit that breaking point. You hit the point where, you know,

you just can't take it where your cup is full, whatever analogy you want to it. And a lot of us, I would say, who care and want to help. And are very, you know, we persevere and we're, what am I trying a patient long suffering to try and help someone through through a struggle. There are breaking points for us as well. We get, you know, and like I was saying earlier, the idea of burnout in the mental health field that they hit their limit of what they can emotionally tolerate and, and for their own,

for their sake and the people they wouldn't be helping anyway because they're over it. You know, they just, they hit the wall. They get out. Fair enough. the other thing is but building on that some people are bombs that this idea that you came to my mind that just said some people are bombs you can't diffuse no matter how much you want to and no matter how dedicated you are that you can't sheer force of will yourself to have the capacity to fix someone else eat no matter how much you care and really want to do

it all you can decide is am i going to let them take me down with you that you're them are am i going to stay here and um let the bomb destroy me also um and what i wanted to do in in sharing that last bit with you was now that we've talked about this one dream if you think about other similar types of this recurring theme does anything come to mind in terms of this same dynamic is playing out or in some ways that we've described? I definitely have a recurring pattern that's just, you know, the negative outcome and running out of time. It can be as benign as I've got to catch that flight and I'm stuck in traffic, I'm running out of time. Yeah.

That's the one that comes to mind. It's more benign. Nothing comes to mind sort of medium, but this idea of, uh-oh, something's going to happen, running out of time, got to try to fix it, and then they're normally not as violent

as this bomb going off. There's these, but there's definitely this pattern of, oh, God, it's going to happen, and running out of time, trying to keep it from happening, diffusing up bombs, but situations, running out of time.

Oh my God. Am I going to, am I going to, am I going to, am I going to, am I going to, am I going to, am I going to, and then wake up. For sure. And I wonder the thought that just occurred to me was to consider whether or not you might be placing too high expectations on yourself. Like you feel you should be able to accomplish more than you actually can. But you just, you don't like that feeling.

And I don't mean that in like, oh, you just don't like it. It's like you're in denial. But you, um, we're trying to flesh it out a little bit. You may have the idea that you should, you have the should in you that I should be capable of more. I should be capable of just diffusing that bomb if I just try harder. If I'm just more dedicated, if I'm just put more effort and focus into it, you know. And, and part of you, that I could be completely wrong.

all this. Please tell me. But part of you may look at it like every problem has a solution. I just need to be smart enough to find it. Or I need to be dedicated enough to persevere to get to that answer. And part of your brain may be showing you there are situations where you don't have enough time to figure it out. Give an unlimited time, unlimited time.

The bomb's there. It's not going off ever. But you just have to get it off the person. You got time. You can go research. You can go call the bomb squad. You got a million. But there's you may be confronting this idea that in life you've got limited time for yourself.

You've got there's windows of opportunity to pass that you know, and some people you just can't save no matter how much you want to. I'm just going to stop there and let you feedback. Whatever comes to mind. So two things come to mind. Definitely with people, as you can tell, I would carry an unhealthy amount of the burden. I remember actually seeing this in physical form. I was back when I was trying to solve my anxiety, I went to some personal development retreat,

and they had this ropes course. And to get across this particular obstacle, there's two of you, and both of you have to sort of lean on each other. And if you lean on each other, then you properly in proper balance, you make it across this sort of rope bridge. So my partner that I was budded up with,

with, I'm 5-8, probably a buck 45. This guy was like 6, 3, 2-10. Big guy. And we go onto the rope bridge and we're wobbling a bit. And I'm trying to basically hold him up. So he won't fall. And I tried. And because I'm 1-45 and he was 210,

I'm weak, relatively weak to him. He was much stronger. That's not the way we should have been doing it. Anyway, we fell. and I didn't know it in the moment I just remember with all my might trying to hold up this guy as 200 like 220,

2.30 and muscular and I'm trying to hold him up and it failed and I wasn't sure why I just know we fell and afterwards the coach basically said like were you trusting him to hold you and I went no because in the past

I didn't feel held by people. I was the hero. I'm the one doing the holding up and the hold uping. Yeah. The hold uping. And so through my life, that's definitely been a pattern. I'm the hero. I can, even with my family, I can see more than them. I'll go for, I'll be the leader. Now, with people, I don't do that anymore. Now, one of the gifts of what I went through and not taking care of my nervous system is now I know how to take care of a nervous system. And I'm very, very, very, very, very very, very emotionally healthy. I see people right away.

I see their capacity. I know how I want to be loved. If they can give me that great, if not, bye-bye. And it's, it's been years to develop these high standards of high self-worth. And I take very good care of my nervous system. And it's why I have no anxiety and no PTSD. Because I healed it through incredibly high standards

where I'm not caring anybody. That is, I see right away and it's beautiful. That said, I've got probably decades of stored trauma from not doing it. Sure. But when I'm with people, no, I don't feel like I'm the one. However, with this program that we developed that solves people's anxiety, it's much less now, but there was this obligation of like, oh my God, we could save millions of people. And because what we do is innovative, people just think it's too good to be true.

And we're just not able to help nearly as many people as we can. And so I wouldn't say what keeps me up at night. But every day I'm thinking, how can we get this healing to the world? They're not hearing it. They're not paying attention. And there's a certain, it's at a balanced level now, but I do feel in a good way. Like, I got to get, I got to. I've softened a lot of the should where I went, you know what?

All I can do is try. Yeah. I get that what we do is innovative and it's a bit ahead of its time and people are too hopeless and confused to hear it. I've seen a hundred times people are sabotage. You know, so I've, but there is a weight when you see the world in agony from this. And if I could just get our program to them, they'd have happiness again. Yeah, it's incredible power with power comes responsibility. So I would feel it's healthy.

It's not debilitating. It's not punishing. Like I should. What's wrong with me? But there is a weight of I can help this planet and I'm not helping them nearly as much as I could. And it weighs. It does weigh on me. Yeah.

But oh, there's a tremendous amount of stuff in there. And one, I don't know if you said the word or if it just popped into my head with the idea of a martyr. And a lot of people go, they use that derisively. Like, oh, you're just trying to be what yourself like like you're trying to self a grand. and take on, oh, you think you're such a big shot. You think you can save the world. A lot of dismissive people. But actually what drives, historically, what drives martyrs is intense passion.

They see something that needs to be done and they do it to the point of self-sacrifice. And that's what we hold up as, you know, examples of people who did great, great things. of you know to to death uh to their own death that kind of a joan of arc that whatever um so it's it's this is where i don't give advice to people i don't tell you you should or shouldn't feel this way um and and honestly i don't know whether we should this is just purely philosophically should we discourage martyrs should we tell them it's not worth it don't do that don't try to change the world you know that kind of a thing but But it is, they are going to suffer and they might suffer to death.

You know, so even just understanding what it is to, to engage in that path. So that was one thing that came to mind. The other thing was way back in the beginning. I don't even know if we got it on recording. I think we probably did, but the hand washing doctor. And I feel that way in some of my works, too. I've had to learn. And this is only over the past three years of publishing, you know, these works.

I have to disconnect the accomplishment of writing the book and getting it up online from whether it sells a million copies. That doesn't. I've had to come to the disconnect myself from caring about the results as a measure of the worthiness of the action in some ways. So maybe in terms of perspective, if you identified more with the hand washing doctor in terms of I'm getting this out there and people will, it'll eventually. do some good. I may not live to see it. You know, it may be after my lifetime. And so kind of

disconnecting the, um, the worthiness of the activity from the immediacy of validation of the results. Like other people going, wow, this is real. I'm using it. I'm doing it. And that doesn't mean stop doing what you're doing. I mean, the, the doctor with the hand washing, I'm sure he didn't just stop telling people this is a good idea. He persevered to, to a degree and, and probably felt terrible that more lives were being lost. But you might be in a similar situation where this won't catch on. It won't, you know, people look back and go, wow, he was right all along. And, you know, and you may not, and honestly, you may not live to see it.

I don't know, I'm going to stop there and just let you tell me what you think of all that. No, I mean, what you're saying is true. And yeah, like that's, there's an emotional, there's sort of, how does it feel to have this thing that could help so many and you see the world in pain and you can't get it to them. It's tragic. You know, it's a healthy sadness.

But after it's been like five, six years now of collecting the data of seeing, oh, I mean, again, I just thought if I explain this to people and tell them, also if it doesn't work, you don't pay, I mean, that's just a no-brainer. And the people that we help just right away, they go, wait a minute.

You're trying to solve it. It's not the minus in the body. You measure your results. And if it doesn't work, I don't pay. And I say, yeah. And I go, oh, my God. So there's no downside and just an upside. And I say, yeah.

And they just do it. Yeah. And that is not the common response. So I've, that's what I keep expecting people to do. Oh, it's the logic. Like, oh, you don't hurt the girl with the joke. Like, oh, I see it. boom, the person should see, yes, you're skeptical,

but if you don't get charged, there's no risk. We can't harm you. You're in pain. You're drowning. We've got the lifeboat. If you get in the lifeboat and we can't save you, we'll just put you back in the water. But like get in the lifeboat, at least try to get to shore.

If it's free to try. My point is, I've just seen, I've had so many calls with people. Just the other day, I was on a call with someone. And a guy had met someone who had done our program, had seen the results. So he was intrigued. I'm on a call with him. I tell him how much.

He's like, is that all? I said, yeah. And he said, I can afford that. And I said, great. And then he starts to freeze up and starts to create these excuses. And I showed him over about half an hour. I said, you're just uncomfortable. Change is scary.

You don't know what will happen. You may be afraid to let this go, but you're uncomfortable right now. And I said, are you willing to be uncomfortable for an hour or two to maybe be happy for the rest of your life? and I showed him that that was happening. He said, you're right, there's no reason I shouldn't do this. I'm just, I'm afraid. I'm just, I'm afraid.

You're not even afraid. You just want to be comfortable. It's human. It's understandable, but are you willing to be uncomfortable? You're already miserable. So just be a little more uncomfortable, but try to save your life. And he didn't do it. And I was emotionally detached.

I'd just seen it happen so many times of people just like choosing to drown. And you just have to let them. And I just said, no, he said, oh, I'm so sorry. I took up your time. Hey man, I'm used to it. I try my best. I try to get you in the lifeboat. You're not ready.

It breaks my heart. But like, you know, I've just seen it. So my point is, yes, there's a certain amount of, like, passion that still I wake up each morning trying to get this to more people. But I have totally gotten clear data. This is ahead of its time. Anxious people are very anxious. They're very skeptical. And, yeah, this isn't going to catch on.

maybe in my lifetime. And I'm, yeah, that was a long answer, but I've already kind of made my piece with that. Okay, fair enough. Well, that's what I was looking at in terms of, um, I just want to throw it out there. So we can, we can talk about it for number one. Um, what I found in the, my patterns of talking to people about recurring dreams is that sometimes what they need is to see the problem more clearly. And that's the point of the dream is to get a better look at it.

and identify, put a name to it, put an understanding to the concepts involved. And that can make those dreams stop entirely. There are some which it's trying to find a particular solution to a particular problem. And once, if we get an answer to what the problem is and what might work, the nature of the dream changes or stops entirely. And then there's, I guess I'm getting the idea of a third class of dreams, which is this is and I think this is this is the type of dealing with here for you. This dream will probably come back because it's intrinsic to you to want to help people and to be sad that you can't help more, even if you make peace with it.

Every time a new, every time it's refreshed to your memory that that's a situation that you're in, that that is a recurring pattern. The dream might come back. And it might just go, yeah, here we are again. Another person I couldn't help. That's too bad. And even if you wake up the next one. That feels true.

Yeah. Because on the way to discovering this anxiety cure, because we were going so to the root cause of a part of humanness that psychology was missing, not only did it clear up anxiety, it was clearing up all types of fears and patterns related to fear, sabotage, procrastination, insecurity. we, to make it simple, because nobody would believe that one program solves all those things. Personal development therapy tells you you've got all these different problems. You have self-doubt. You have self-esteem. You are insecure. You have anxiety.

They convince you. It's all these, and we saw there's, no, there's really, it's all symptoms of one or two core things. And we built a program to address the two core things. And so we have programs. online that can literally save almost any pain point on the planet in a short period of time. Addiction, I was working in South that.

Anyway, the point is, and I watched, like we all do, we watch the world, cannibalize itself. We're all seeing that. But imagine sitting on the medicine that could ease this, and it's scalable, And it's been proven, but it's sitting on my Dropbox folders.

Unable to reach people. And because when we're sensitive, we pick up on the pain of the planet. We all do on some level. I do. And you feel the pain. And I feel the pain, the insecurity and the doubt and the self-hatred when I just watch a video or see a thing. And I feel the pain. and I know I can help, but I won't be able to.

Yeah, it makes sense that that gets into my system at night. When I was working in South Africa, we were working with addicts. And, you know, the weight that we could help some but not others, but you feel their pain, you know you can help, but you can't. you know we yeah it makes sense i pick up on all this and it shows up in my sleep and it's it's for sure it just makes sense yeah so this this type of dream may keep coming back for you and there's a there's an interesting i mean go going off on the philosophical side of things too we can conduct a thought experiment where we say uh there is a certain number of people you won't be able to save and we

can accept that logically like yes you can't save everybody just just broad strokes. But how many could you save if you try it a little harder? Are you doing everything you could? That's where the gray areas and the doubt and the self-judgment and whatnot is like, if this is important, should I be trying harder? Should I, you know, you're kind of showing yourself, you may have hit a wall. Now, whether this is true or not, with the bomb analogy in a way, you're showing yourself like,

this is a problem, the problem of how to get this out there and get more people to accept it seems to be like diffusing a bomb. Like it's beyond, whether it's permanent or temporary, it's currently beyond the capacity to effectively disarm and save at least that person in the dream. So you're showing yourself that situation of, here's a person I couldn't save.

And how do I feel about that? And how is that motivating me, you know, to continue looking for an answer. Something along those lines, perhaps. I don't want to ever encourage anyone to give up. I also don't want to encourage anyone to torture themselves pointlessly with something that cannot be done. But where that line is,

it's not for me to say. And it's hard for you experiencing the situation to know where that is either. It's like, you know. Yeah, it feels balanced for me. I feel I care. And this is my purpose. And you keep going. And it comes from my heart.

As long as there's not a voice, you have to, you better. And if I didn't, what, as long as it comes from a place of love and purpose. Yeah. I continue to do it. Just try my best and then let go of the result. That's like what you do with your book. You write the book. You put it out.

Let it go. And just know there are people that will hear it. But I do. It does. I am thinking, you know, if I could just explain it. differently or what if we shared this information in a different order and then we could figure it out and then scale that up with social media. So I think about it. And I, I, it gives me purpose. It gives me something to do. What a cool thing to wake up every more. I mean, we're all here to help.

You're here helping, Benjamin. And I just happen to have a unique life such that I figured out something with my team to help millions. And how cool that is that in this lifetime, I'm really sitting on something that could sign, I mean, my bucket list goal, no joke. I want to win the Nobel Peace Prize because these tools, what they allow is they create, basically inner peace in a person.

Because when you feel safe inside, you're not angry, you're not violent, you're safe. So if we had a program that could scale and we could get it into schools and get it into all over the world, it's all online, and we could affect millions of people feel safe inside, the violence levels would go down. There'd be more peace in the world.

Yeah, for sure. And so my thought is 30, 40, 50 years from now, I win the Nobel Peace Prize, not from anything I did on the outside, but because this helped on the inside. And I'm not being hyperbolic. I don't think it'll happen, but like, that's how I think. Yeah.

And I think it's great. And I feel grateful that this is my life. And it probably deeps into my dreams. And as long as it's not debilitating, you know, I'm okay with it. It feels for sure. Yeah. I'm okay with it. I'd love it to stop.

But it feels okay to me. Yeah. Fair enough. And that even if you have struck that balance logically and, and emotionally, and it's all, and it's working for you. Sometimes we revisit these questions and we have these doubts. And it seems like this dream was like, if you get into that mindset of, I have to save this specific person, it might take you down with it. And it's like at that point, you can't save anyone else.

You've ended your ability to save anyone by trying to save one person to the point of self-sacrifice completely. So there may be a warning in there for you. Like, if this type of dream comes back, like, uh-oh. I'm, you know, I've got another bomb to diffuse or I've got another impossible situation that I feel responsible to fix. It may be just that little warning of like, don't, don't put that pressure on yourself. Don't, you're falling back into that habit of trying to be too self-sacrificing in an unhealthy way. So this particular dream could have been that kind of a warning of like, remember, there's a boundary there. You've set that boundary for good reason and you want to follow it.

Otherwise, look at the consequences. The bomb fixed you out. What you said that felt true is not so much, I'm worried that in my attempt to save a person, I'll get pulled under. I did that in relationships. I don't do that anymore. You know how that works out. Yeah. Yeah.

And with my work now, some people reach out to us for help. I have a call with them. And I've learned very early on. They're either all in or they're not. And I don't try to, like, save them. It's like, they're not ready. They're not ready. what what I could what does feel true though is just the balance the amount of energy and focus that this gets

trying to get this out to more people it's all I do and it's balanced I don't feel stressed I have a nice life I wake up in the morning I go about my business but then I get to work on this trying to reach more people so I don't have a lot of balance in my life. I'm not suffering. I'm not in pain. I'm not, I don't have burnout. I know how to take care of myself. But if I could blink and magically have more balance, I think that would. What kind of froze up a little bit again. Self care. So that feels true. Creating more balance. You're back. I think I, yeah, just creating more balance. Yeah, for sure. Let's good. We'll just

sometimes dreams are just a reminder of things we've already learned and need to just revisit to what is it we've got a situation where we remind ourselves why we made a particular decision and why it was the right decision to make that could be that could be part of what this is as well and other other dreams of its type and each one so sometimes there feels like a recurring theme of running out of time that may be true you may feel time pressed in a lot of different ways we got a limited number of hours in the day, the limited number of weeks in the month, limited number of years before we're gone. So the time pressure is universal, save the human condition. But when we're feeling it, this type of dream might come back

to just explore that concept. I think that's what my conceptual understanding of dreams is it's just our normal thought process going on when we're shut down to external stimuli and conscious attention to the environment. Um, it's just our normal thought process. So whatever was on your mind, usually thoughts from the previous day, thoughts or experiences or emotions from the previous day or from what you've been puzzling over for a longer period of time pops into our head. And then that's when we get the, I have the expression, your dreams self select for importance.

If you wake up feeling like it means something, feeling some kind of way about the dream and the details are pretty strong, probably something in there that you're, that you need to know, that you want to have a look at for your own sake, that it might be useful to examine. Dreams that fade quickly, you don't feel strongly about them, or you don't even remember, less so. Sometimes they're just also flights of fancy. Literally some people just like flying in their dreams.

And it doesn't mean anything more than that. I just feel good and I want to go for a fly. That's also good. Well, I appreciate the exploration. Yeah, actually, as I was talking to you, right, when I said, No, I could use more balance. I felt this little chest burp, which for me is usually an integration or something moves or release. So definitely some more balance.

And also just lifting, even just exploring like the have to. Like I said, it's not heavy and oh God, but it is there. Yeah. And this idea of got to get this out sooner. again, it's not debilitating, but I can see if you scale it by 7 billion people and I'm picking up on it

that even a little bit of the have to would come out at night in that way. Yeah. This weight, this have to do it before people harm themselves. And with anxiety, people kill themselves and take their lives from anxiety.

So, I mean, oftentimes we maybe overplay how much we can help someone in this case, this program, and really me, the communicator, it's like saving lives. Yeah. I've saved lives. I've had people say, I was ready to end it, and you were my last hope, and now I have my life back. So that's nice to hear that you help. It's also, it's interesting to carry that to know. So it's, yeah, it makes sense. sense it's it's getting into me and just do like you said it's just explore it be aware of it and be

mindful of it so thank you for the insights that was sure it's helpful yeah thank you and thank you for your just listening and being curious and exploring these spaces with people well thank you too for being here i mean i couldn't do this without someone who was willing to participate in the process you know i'm not none of these answers are in me like i said i'm not hearing the voice of God or, you know, Ouija board spirits or anything. It's just, you know, two people trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. What is this thing? What are we looking at? I love, I love that. I love that experience. And I love, you know, when a guest says they found it useful, insightful, they feel settled in their mind on some kind of an understanding. That's huge. That's huge

for me, too. I get that for clumped, you know, oh, feeling, you know, like when you look at, looking at puppies rolling around. Um, so. That said, we're heading up about three hours. I know if you feel like we've gotten a decent handle on kind of the, you know, we've explored as much as we can, gotten as much of an answer out of it as possible. For now, you know. I do and I'm, I do. I do.

And I like that it's just slow and we explore and take a time. Jiggle the handle and see what's there. And I, yeah, it helped because I don't explore. this way, this slowly, and you're very gentle, just allowing me to peel back the layers and see what's under here. Maybe that's it. You're not telling me it's this or it's that. You're just allowing my natural intuitive wisdom to bubble up,

but by allowing this much time into anyone, if anyone listened this far in, hello? Call me. If I know who you are, I'm here. Yeah, but I'll be impressed. I don't know if people listen to the end, but I'll be impressed. But yeah, that did help because it's a very soft, gentle way to just keep coming back and exploring.

And I did this idea of balance and maybe being more mindful of the burden that I'm carrying. And just doing, yeah, being even lighter with it and just being like, yes, we figure this out. It's ahead of its time. will help some people great and then that's all I'm and I sometimes remind myself because I'm the hero I'm like if you can save people

you save people and you got to and then I had to remind myself a lot of people know something how to help people yes this thing that solves anxiety let's just say it gets a gold medal but there's lots and lots and lots of ways to serve people people have insights

from being a better parent, a better partner. You know, there's so many ways that people have learned some things to help. Yeah. 99.999% don't take the time to share it with the world. You do. I do. And I have to remember just the fact that I'm doing this at all and you're doing this at all. We're already doing way more than the average person. And to appreciate ourselves for, I was a successful. entertainer making a lot of money just being funny you know how easy that life was i would be funny i wish i could pretty girls would like me like i had a good i had a nice car and nice clothes i gave all

that up and now i'm trying to help people with it like good for me daniel and if if i help some people great if not just be proud of myself and you for even trying because most of the world just Doesn't. Yeah. And it can be very simple. An example came to my mind. I was getting gas at the gas station. And the fellow, the attendant pumping the gas, he just said, I got a nail on your tire there.

He didn't have to say anything. He could have just let me have a blowout down the road. But he wanted to be helpful. He had an observation that I had missed and that no one else was around to make. and cared enough to share it. Something very simple that literally he might have saved my life. You know, a tire blows out and you get into a huge accident and you're dead. You know, so something as simple is just sharing something that small, but he got a nail in your tire.

That's it. That's all he had to say. And I took care of the problem. Might have saved my life. That's, who knows? I'll never know. And neither will he. And he didn't, he didn't know he was going to have that opportunity.

he just saw it and took it when it came along. And that's sometimes that's the best we can do. I did want to give you, I think you'd mentioned earlier that you wanted one more chance to kind of shout out your material and your website at the very end. Oh. Okay.

Well, I mean, if anyone's made it this far, clearly you know I care about the world and I carry this, I guess, slightly out of balance burden to help people. good news for you if you have anxiety or any fear-related symptom my passion my obsession my heroness my burden whatever label you want to put on it uh the good news is for people to want help we got something really special because all that passion and care and heroism and sacrifice and whatever you want to call it magnified towards decades has created something truly

special. So, yes, if you have anxiety or really anything that has to do with fear, could be caring what people think, could be fear of public speaking, could be fear of being yourself, anything where you can see that fear, whatever you call it, anxiety, fear, panic, worry, concern, and the thoughts that are associated with it, overthinking, ruminating, catastrophizing. Anything that's not working in your life that you can see is in some way linked to fear and you would like to not manage that but have it be gone.

That's what we're doing so you can either go get the free training and apply the technique at Danielpacker.com or if you've heard enough and maybe my story here helped you realize

that this probably isn't a scam then you don't have to download the free training. You can just book a free console with me. You can tell me what you're struggling with, and I'll tell you the program that we have. And if you want to do it, great. If not, that's okay, too. But just know that if you're in pain and anything that has to do with fear, we have something and be open to the possibility. Come find us at daniel packard.com. That's very cool. You know, that's one thing I was definitely going to say. is if anyone is skeptical out there, at least they would be skeptical of the product, not of you.

And what I mean by that is you talk to someone long enough, you get this long form thing. You invite me into your head, the whole audience to look around. And we're seeing the real you. There's, you're being genuine. You believe this works. You're putting a lot of passion into it. So at the very least, they shouldn't be skeptical that you're an honest person who really believes they're trying to do something good. And that, you know, that concern of the, yeah,

the con artist type of thing. Or I'm, you know, it should be off the table by the time, by the time people are done listening to how honest you are and how this comes into your dreams that you're trying to save people's lives. You can't, you can't lie about that kind of stuff. So that's a good point. You know what? I want you to send me if you'd be open to it when this is all, send me this file so I can also put this up because, no, I don't think anyone is going to generally listen for two hours of being talking about my dreams. However,

you never know, and you would be, because people just think it's a scam, it's hard to unscam them. You know, we have testimonials on our website and I've had people say those could be actors. And I'm like, really? Do you really think I was to say, do you really

think someone, I'm relatively intelligent, well-spoken, and I could probably make money a lot of different. Do you really think the way I make money is this elaborate scheme of solving anxiety? I then go out and find actors of different ages and ethnicities. Really?

But they've been so burns that they do think it. But this, yeah, talking to you, if someone, I think it's a very compelling bit of content. If anyone's like, it's a scam. Listen to this guy, talk about his dreams for two and a half hours. how he's been trying to save lives from the kid with the lifesaver to now. It's in his dreams. If that guy is a scam, he is really committed to the scam.

He's really in deep. But yeah, I think hopefully anyone listening this far knows I really do care. And I care because we have something that actually works. And when you can really help people, we all care. I wouldn't care this much if this was a scam. It's not. real deal we're saving lives and I care. So yeah, thanks for pointing that out. Good deal. Well, then we'll do the wrapping it up in and I will shout you out myself. This has been our guest,

Daniel Packard, currently on the south coast of England because he likes to get around and see the world. He is a UC Berkeley mechanical engineer and CEO of permanent anxiety solutions. He's been here to talk with us about how to get rid of anxiety permanently. If you made it this far, you know, you know how that works. And you can find him at Daniel Packard. com link in the description below and for my part the housekeeping if you would uh kindly like share subscribe tell your friends 17 currently available works of historical dream literature the most recent the fabric of dreams by katherine taylor craig uh all this and more at benjamin the dream wizard dot locals dot com building a community there and uh the last thing to do is just say

daniel once again thank you for being here i appreciate your time Thank you listeners for making this far And thank you Dream Wizard for having me And sharing your gifts with me Wonderful, nothing left to say But to everybody listening Thanks for listening