Know Thyself - E146 - Cory Muscara: Former Monk: “Stop Missing Your Life!” Here’s the Key To Lasting Happiness

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Cory Muscara shares profound insights on achieving lasting happiness and fulfillment in the present moment. He discusses his transformative journey from awakening to monastic life, emphasizing the importance of breaking free from cycles of internal distress. Muscara challenges common misconceptions about meditation, urging listeners to confront rather than escape emotional pain. Throughout the episode, he offers practical strategies for tuning into inner wisdom and strengthening intuitive knowing. Try Pique Life tea and save 20% for life & get a free frother:https://www.piquelife.com/KnowThyselfAndrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books___________0:00 Intro 1:39 Stop Missing Your Life9:00 Finding Fulfillment in the Present Moment13:43 Awakening & Becoming a Monk25:32 Breaking the Cycle of Internal Distress32:41 Stop Meditating Your Way Out of Emotional Pain41:40 AD: Pique Life Save 20% for Life45:46 The FACE Model - 4 Steps to Presence 51:04 Truth About Self Love57:13 The Desire for Safety Controls Your Life1:00:36 Practice to Tune Into Your Inner Knowing1:06:53 Commitment & Romantic Relationships1:27:42 Strengthening Your Intuitive Knowing1:31:25 IFS Process for Healing Stuck Parts of Yourself1:53:43 Finding Stability in Surrender1:58:00 Conclusion ___________Episode Resources: https://corymuscara.comhttps://www.instagram.com/corymuscara/https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcasthttps://www.knowthyself.oneListen to the show:Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9lApple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

The belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives. I was 22 when I went to live in the monastery. A few days in, I was like crying in my bed, wanting to leave because I did not yet have the capacity to be with everything that was arising. Most of our negative patterns, relationship woes, insecurities, they are not the result of not having enough will, energy, or patience. They are the result of old, stuck pain. If you're someone struggling with this and you feel like there's something, in me that comes up, I would start by, and this is where so many spiritual practitioners get stuck, is do you believe you are fundamentally whole, or do you feel like you are fundamentally broken?

If you are fundamentally whole, then your practice is about subtraction. My direct experience has been we are fundamentally whole, and that is why I often say you need to descend if you want to transcend. Muscarra. Thanks for being here, dude. Thanks, Andre. Yeah. One of my greatest joys in this podcast is getting to see these different individuals online who are sharing similar, inspiring content around meditation, mindfulness, spirituality,

and getting to connect in person and feel like, oh, we're going to be great friends off the bat. Yeah, likewise. Yeah, it's really cool to dig into your story too and see your life as a former monk, becoming a best-selling author, cultivating quite the audience online. and proliferating wisdom in these modern times, something that really resonates with me also, the name of your book titles, is this idea of how we can stop missing our lives.

Think as you start to realize what a gift this life is, you realize to the degree we've been unconscious for so much of it and living life through the perception of our own conditioning. So that phrasing of like, stop missing your life really resonates with me because I feel like for many different periods of my life,

I've been keenly aware of the passing of time and how aware I am and present I am during those periods and the times I really haven't been. And it's painful to realize those times you haven't been because you see what a gift this life is. And so what comes to mind when you hear that phrasing, stop missing your life? And why was that so kind of motivating for you?

The first thing that comes to mind is how much I don't like the title of my book, actually. So I'm grateful that you, that that speaks to you. And it does for a lot of people. There's something confronting about the title, as you're already acknowledging. People can sense how much of their life is spent unconscious on autopilot. And it is the reason we went with that title. But the title I wanted to name my book was permission to be human because I felt like

that was actually the journey to coming back into your life. And as most authors know, there's a bit of a wrestle between. like the creative and the publishing company and we wanted something that kind of stood out to people. But it's a phrase that I would never say to someone. If I was inviting someone back into their life, I wouldn't say stop missing your life. I might say something more like, what's it like to be you right now, which is the line that I open the book with, really meeting people very specifically where they're at at this point in time, which is going to be different for everyone. As you already alluded to, the process of being

out of touch with your life, like actually missing your life, to coming into awareness is not easy. I mean, for a lot of people, there's a grief process, and a lot of people have good reason to want to stay unconscious. It's painful to wake up to the things that have been motivating you to stay unconscious. It's painful to wake up like 10, 20, 30 years later and realize like, wow, much of how I've been living is based on protective patterns that we're trying to get me safety, connection, and love. So that phrase, like, missing your life, I think there's like two chapters to it, at least

there were for me. And the first chapter is just recognizing that there's a being who can be aware of their life, not being identified with your thoughts and your emotions. I still remember the first time in college where that came up for me. I was, well, I didn't get into this work for any noble or spiritual reasons. I was trying to impress a girl. I had a hippie girlfriend at college. She was in a meditation. I wanted her. I think I was cool. And that's what like prompted me to start meditating. I love it. Yeah. No, no happy ending on that one. She broke up with me a couple weeks later, but. Not even one happy ending.

The real happy ending was that it was the pain of that breakup that actually like troubled me into trying to figure out how to get out of the torment of my mind and my thoughts and my emotions. And it was, I was seeing that the meditation, which I did not know what I was doing at the time, right? I was 20, 21 years old. I was just lie in my dorm room bed, put my hands on my belly, focus on my breath, go inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And I was just trying to be as present as possible. But in a short period of doing that, I was, I quickly became aware that there was this place that could watch the thoughts that was, that were judging me, the emotions that felt overwhelming, the pain that was gripping me. And that was the first stage of seeing like, oh, there's, there's a being here that is bigger.

I didn't, I wouldn't even use the word being at the time. I was just like, there's something going on here. And nobody ever taught me this before. and the more I zoom out and identify with that place of observation, the less torment I feel with the experience. So that's like mindfulness 101. But the next stage of really stepping into your life is once you connect to the resonance of freedom of awareness,

that space of what some people might call true self, what does it mean for that to express itself in all facets of your life. That to me is the real work. A lot of people can have awakening experiences, but it quickly gets caught in the gunk of their conditioning. And so they wake up here, and then they're their 14-year-old self over here.

And this is why you can also have great meditation teachers who, like, you read their stuff, like, OSHA or trumper, Rimposha. You're just like, this is penetrating. And then you find out there's like abuse or there's alcoholism. It's just like, how does that happen? This is because like the awakened state has to express itself through our physical embodiment.

And I've never met a single human being that doesn't have some complication with this. And so if we view spirituality as the recognition that there is a place within us that is not bound to the same laws of impermanence and unsatisfactoriness as our mind-body experience, then we can view embodied spirituality as creating enough trust between that space and the facets of our personality structure such that awakening can express itself in all moments of our life. That's a lifelong journey. I don't know anyone who does that perfectly. Absolutely. It's a messy, windy road and the synthesizing and integration of both paths isn't really talked about as much as I think I would like to. I think it's getting more and more light, you know,

but I think we're really familiar with the spiritual insight of waking up beyond the illusion of your thoughts and your emotions and those meditative practices that can really support in waking up beyond the identification with those processes internally. And then, of course, the Western psychotherapeutic approach of parts work and healing your traumatic wounds and daddy issues and, like, you know, really familiar with that too. And I love to see the coming together of how they both support one another and are incomplete in and of themselves. And so we can continue to dive into that. I think a theme throughout this conversation is I want to pull from some quotes of yours,

either from your post online or book, and we can expand on it because, I think, you know, they're articulated really well. One aspect of internally feeling like we're, like, not present for our life is this continual sort of orientation that our ideal life is somewhere in the future. That is a.k.a. not now. And so this quote, I think, hits on that really well. The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives.

And so if you want to kind of share about your journey, awakening to that realization, because it's such a pervasive and persistent one, I think, throughout all culture. Yeah. The belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives. That has been a piece of writing that has both resonated with a lot of people and has also been hard to understand for a lot of people or activating for a lot of people. Because some people hear it and they hear it as the belief that a future moment is going to be better is the reason we miss our lives, which is not what this is saying.

The recognition that a future moment is going to be better is wisdom. It's the recognition of impermanence that whatever suffering is here will shift and give way to something else. but the belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence that we can finally show up to and like really let ourselves sink into that is the trap we get into where we develop this push-pull relationship to our experience where we're grasping at the things that we want pushing away the things that we don't want and it's an inherently non-spiritual relationship to our experience to our life because it is layered with the presupposition that there is only gold in something

that feels good or something that matches the blueprint of our personality structure. And my experience with like the greatest transformations that I've ever had, I mean, almost all of them have been during the most painful experiences, the experiences where I'm most confused, where I'm most tormented, and where I don't want to be in that moment. And I use, and I have, like, use my distraction and suppression strategies to avoid that thing and try to buoy myself above it. That never works. I always have to come back to whatever that thing is that was asking for attention. And when I do, when I allow myself to soften into it,

when I almost make it a devotion, just like, I trust that there is a reason you are here, and I'm going to soften the protective layers that don't want to touch this, as long as I feel ready, right? There's wisdom sometimes to protection and saying, not right now. But knowing that we come back to it, it's like, I'm here to feel this.

When that gives way, life moves, through again. And then you are on like the pulse of your life, the natural flow of your life. Waiting for some future moment that fits the blueprint of what you want is a very surefire way to really disconnect from the aliveness of your life. And it's a mistrust in why things are showing up, the way they're showing up, and what opportunity there is for. for you when you actually let yourself touch it. It's pretty amazing to feel the radical transformation in our present moment when we can, yes, acknowledge that there is maybe a certain arrangement of conditionings or a certain amount

of money or relationship or health that is someday in the future we want to attain to, and we can have those. But to recognize that part of having that and part of actualizing that and to form in the manifest is not having it. And that's the journey that we're currently on. And so like not being on our path or feeling lost is our path is part of the whole journey. And so yeah, finding that acceptance in the moment that maybe we want something to change, but in the moment realizing that it is our current life right now and allowing us to land in this moment fully is so much of our work. And it's so tough to do that when we're so heavily identified.

with our own thoughts because we believe them to be true. And so I know you started to wake up to this realization as well yourself, and then you decided to go spend six months as a monk. And so talk to me about awakening to that realization and that transition and what then led you to make such a radical choice. I was 22 when I went to live in the monastery. I was 21 when I had the realization in college that I, did not want to go in finance like I thought I wanted to. I had an internship lined up on Wall

Street. We met with this multi-billionaire hedge fund manager. Everyone said, this is the guy you want to be. This is where you want to get. This is what success looks like. He gave a two-hour talk and it sucked my soul right out of my body. And I remember thinking, I don't know exactly what I want to do with my life, but I do not want to end up like this guy. And to be fair to him, I have no idea what was going on in his life. He could have had a colonoscopy. before he came in the room for all I know. I'm not saying, oh, people in finance are miserable because I know tons of people who are in that world

that are fulfilled in different ways. But that was the first time that I really had an inner reckoning and challenged some longstanding ideas of where I thought happiness was going to come from and started asking myself the question, well, if that's not what I want, then what is it that I want? If that's not the path I want, what is it that I want?

And I just started exploring, like things that I thought I wanted. I want a family. Well, why do I want a family? It'll give me meaning. Why do I want meaning? Well, that'll make me happier. I want money. Well, why do you want money? Well, then I go on more vacations at free time. What will that do? That will make me happier. I want to be married? What will that do? Give me love. What will that do? That will make me happier? So everything was when I really looked at it. I spent months, not a long time, but at the time it was a lot. Just like, what are all these things I'm pursuing? What do they reduce to? And it was just this this desire. to feel a certain way.

And it just was so clear to me at the time. Like, if that's at the heart of everything, figure how what that is? Because all these paths, like, how many people do you know who are married and miserable? How many people do you know who make so much money but they're completely enslaved to the process and they feel dead inside?

Or if kids and, like, they resent their children, just like you just going on those paths is not going to guarantee this thing. that your mind is subconsciously pushing you to. And I didn't really know what that thing was or how to get there or how to reverse engineer. I did just know, though, at the time, I was meditating and it was anchoring me

into a place within myself where the peace that was arising seemed less contingent upon the external variables. I'd be walking around campus and, you know, after a couple weeks of doing this, and I just noticed myself smiling more or things would happen that would typically cause stress, and they would just brush off like water on Teflon.

And so that spoke to me. That made me curious. And I am like as type A of a personality as you can get, my mind goes, all right, you're doing it 15 minutes a day. It's going really well. What would happen if you did 15 hours a day? Like, where can you go to do something like that all day long? I had known of like eat, pray love and that sort of thing.

So I thought I was going to go. There was still like jokes because I was a, a fraternity at the time, like, fraternity members and sorority people. It was just like a whole rumor going around like, do you know Corey's going to go like sit on a mountaintop and find himself? Because it was so contrary to like how people knew me at the time. But I felt it deep in me. And I just kept following that intention.

And anyway, I went on the, I went on a seven day silent retreat that inside meditation society in Massachusetts when I was. right after a graduate college. And I told them like, hey, I want to go deeper into this stuff. And I want it to be hard. Like, I really want to be stripped down. It's like a very young man kind of orientation. And they were like, all right, cool.

Well, a good place to go is Burma because the teachings are like as close to the heart of Buddhism as you can get. And if you really want it to be difficult and intense, you should study under this guy named Saida Upan D. who I didn't know anything about at the time, but was just notorious for being unrelenting in his push of people toward enlightenment. So I said, that's the one I want.

Three months later, I was on a plane and showed up, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, really with just, like, I had a romantic idea of what it meant to do that work. More, it was a romantic idea of what it meant to come out on the other side. How cool would it be to do six months of this, not really thinking through what it meant to, like, what was going to be

on earth. But just, just knowing if I could force myself into this, I would come out the other side with the idea was like a happiness that was not contingent upon external variables. And then everything in my life would just be gravy that I could build on it. That was, that was the motivating force at the time. A few days then, I was like crying in my bed, wanting to leave. because it was so physically painful, and I did not yet have the capacity

to be with everything that was arising. And just to paint the context, that place, Pandita Rama in Burma, the schedule there, you have to do a minimum of 14 hours of meditation each day, which is typically an hour of sitting meditation and an hour of walking meditation that you're alternating back to back.

You wake up at 3 a.m., go to bed around 10 p.m., two small meals at 5.3.8. a.m. and 10.30 a.m. No reading, no writing, no listening to music, no contact with the outside world, no speaking, and no days off. You were doing that every single day that you are there. And the mattresses you sleep on are so thin, you could squeeze them between your finger and feel the bone on the other side. So this is not comfort. But the food was good, and they support you doing the practice. They don't want you working. They don't want you doing,

Like in other monasteries, you know, you have different jobs supporting. They just want all of your time devoted to practice. And we're doing vipasana, like straight up vipasana meditation, which is just cultivating an awareness of the flow of experience as it's moving through you, watching thoughts come and go, watching emotions come and go, watching the pain arise. It's one thing to read about doing that, as you know, And it's another thing to actually be like in the midst of all of your physical pain and emotional pain and your thoughts.

And the first thing that I encountered while I was there was very extreme physical pain from all of the sitting. Right. Like I'm sitting. I can't even sit cross-legged still. I was even worse back then. They didn't have cushions for people like me where I can like kneel down and prop myself up. So I was trying to sit cross-legged. There's no air conditioning.

The fans go out 30 times a day because electricity is going out, so you're sweating, there's mosquitoes, you're not sleeping, you're getting a handful of hours of sleep a night. And all day long, I'm just like sitting there like this crumpled up piece of wire. My body was so tight and I'm trying to be aware. And all I'm doing is just cursing out every aspect of this place, the teacher, myself. and by day seven, I was ready to leave. I was like, there's just no way that I'm going to be able to do this for six months. Like, I'll go to Tickna Hans Monastery.

That guy looked like calm and nice and everything I read about him seems really sweet. You could walk around, let you smell the flowers. This guy won't even let you look at the puppies running around the monastery. It's just like, it just felt so antithetical to everything I was looking for. So day seven, I'm going to leap. something happens when you know that you're going to come out of a difficult experience. My experience was like it just lets you relax into the experience a little bit more. So I was going to go to the main office, try to get a plane ticket out.

I'm still doing the meditation in the morning. I said, let's just like really go as deep as we can in these last couple of hours. And it, in doing that, it just softened the part of me that was so angry and frustrated at myself and everything around me. just enough that I could see with a little more clarity what was going on. And what I noticed was, like, the thing that was arising first was physical pain in my back. There was like a sheet of pain that would come up every time I would sit down and meditate. But that wasn't the only part of the experience.

The pain would come up and then immediately there would be the thoughts of what's wrong with my body, nobody else looks like they're struggling as much as me. how long am I going to be able to do this? There's no way I can do this for six months. So all of those thoughts would arise. And then if I paid careful enough attention, I'd watch how those thoughts would trigger emotions of anger, sadness, grief, confusion.

And then the most interesting thing, as my concentration got a little deeper, I could see that those emotions were actually making the intensity of the physical pain worse. And I saw this insidious mental loop that was just being fueled by the mind. There was an experience of primary pain that I could not control, the physical pain in my body.

But there was all of this secondary pain that I was layering on top of it that was being turned up or down with the dial of my mind. Just seeing that was liberating because now I felt like I had some agency with the experience. And that was the first time that I really started to play around with,

like, okay, so if the thoughts are triggering the emotions, Like, how do you reduce the charge of a thought? I can't even necessarily stop the thought from arising, but I can watch the thought with compassion rather than fueling it. And that's where in that tradition, you have that, the mental labeling of experience. Like, all day long, all you're doing is just labeling as soon as you wake up, eyelids lifting. It's like, you need to pee, need to pee.

You're going to the bathroom, peeing. You're just like tracking every sensation and every experience. So when you're noticing a thought, instead of letting it go into what they call paponcha, which is one thought going into another into another, you just try to like meet it for exactly what it is, just the mental phenomenon that it is, thinking. So you just label it, thinking.

I hate this, thinking. What's wrong with your body? Thinking. And the more I would do that, the less those thoughts would trigger the emotions, the less the emotions would trigger the pain, and the more I was actually able to just settle into and soften into the pain.

that first insight of primary pain versus secondary pain and seeing that there was an ability to not fuel and take on the layer of secondary pain is what gave me enough space and confidence to keep going with that retreat. And then that retreat became one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. But I wanted to get out, and I was planning to get out,

and it was an act of grace that I did it. I'm looking forward to hearing what ensued afterwards. But that insight you just shared about primary and secondary pain, you know, about the reality of having a human body that experiences things, but then the recycling and multiplication of that that our mind does as, you know, per habit, is a really liberating perspective because then we can stop being prisoners to our experience and we can actually be liberators of it. And one framing that I love around this too was,

experience, awareness, and story. And so I would love if you could share a couple more examples of that and how it could be practice and practical for anybody who's listening right now, that is living life that has an experience, the awareness of that experience and the stories that we unconsciously or consciously continue to label on top of that and how it's important to differentiate the three. Yeah.

So this is pointing to that when you pay attention, you're going to see like three main categories of experience. There's the direct experience, which is like what's happening. I'm sitting here. I'm seeing you. It's quite quiet in here, so I'm just hearing maybe it's all sounds. That's the direct experience. There's the awareness.

This is just like the knowing that is happening. That's behind that. And the interesting thing about awareness is that it's untouched by the experience. It's like my awareness of sadness is not sad. My awareness of fear is not fearful. My awareness of pain is not in pain. So there's this aspect of experience that is just able to be there and hold what is present. But there's a layer in between, and this is the story, that is really what moderates the relationship between awareness and experience and what conditions,

whether we're suffering or whether there's ease. And so in terms of experience in people's life, right, you can imagine someone losing a job. So in this case, just like, okay, job is lost, direct experience. I'm aware that I lost my job. Story, I'm not worthy, or I'm a bad husband, or I'm a bad provider for my family, right? And so that story is going to be the thing

that conditions the emotions and the suffering. that comes next. We can't impact the experience that's arising. We can't do anything, nor do we want to do anything with the awareness that's arising. But we can intercept the story and start to play with the story and see how the story that we tell about an experience

opens up a different emotional expression. And so in that case, right, you have a job loss, and I'm not going to dismiss, like, the meaning and how that can shift someone's life. But there could also be another story around this that potentially this is making way for something that wants to come through

that I've been fighting against. Or potentially this is giving me an opportunity to follow a creative pursuit that I haven't had a good reason to do because this has been so good. Or maybe this is giving me some time to really reevaluate what is going on in my life and do I need to make any serious shifts?

So the story is what conditions the emotional response. And seeing that we can impact that story is another way, especially in the early stages of our spirituality. And I would actually even put that more in the camp of just like personal growth of like when you're playing with the story is just seeing like, oh, I can shift the thoughts in my mind and therefore shift how I feel in my body. And I think that's where a lot of people start on their personal growth path. And mindfulness itself, the ability to anchor in the awareness begins to show you the distinction

between, like, oh, I am seeing Andre, and then there's thoughts about Andre. They're all good thoughts. All great thoughts, right? That's the story and that old condition. Like, you know, even if I think, like, what does Andre think about what I'm saying right now? And then I could get in my head of just, oh, am I saying good things? Or people who are listening, are they going to like me? If I have another, if I even just let that go, though, right?

So then there's a whole thing of like, what happens when we let go of the story? Then I can really just drop into a channel with you. And we might both have our stories, but we kind of like let that exist as radio noise in the background and drop into like a shared frequency that is creating this moment. And the word frequency doesn't have to be like mystical. It's kind of just like, think of it as like connection. Just like, oh, the curiosity of what's actually arising and what happens when I meet what's arising without story, but just curiosity, what awakens within me

and what is shared from that place. So, yes, there's a layer of being able to work with that story, and then there's another layer of seeing that and seeing that we can let go of the story, and that's when we invite even just like another layer of surrender. Yeah, that complementary aspect and dynamic, between replacing disempowering stories with empowering ones, and then also waking up to an awareness that encompasses

and will always be the background field in which any story arises, really support each other. And again, it can be easy to get sucked into one camp or the other. I think it's great to replace old narratives that are old conditioning, passed down through culture, family, genes, whatever, with new ones, you know, I am worthy is much better than I. I'm not worthy in terms of your internal experience in the fruits that it's going to bear in your

external reality. But even more empowering perhaps is to wake up to your worth that is inherent to your being beyond any story of it comparing to something externally, you know, whether it being, I am not worthy or I am worthy. And part of getting to that point is I feel so much of creating distance from us in any story whether it's nice or not nice depending on what we think it is. And that, that requires practice to create distance between us and any narrative or story that are, that's happening neurologically. Like, the reality is we're so close to our own bullshit. If we don't brush our teeth as the

saying goes for a couple, you know, a couple weeks, we won't really notice it because the change is so gradual and is so close to us, we become accustomed to it. But other people can tell, right? And so that's, I think, where it becomes really easy when you're at Thanksgiving dinner and you see all the neuroses in your family members or you, you know, you're in school and you can see things and patterns that play out in other people way more easily than you can yourself. Of course, you have them too, right? As much as we don't like to admit it. But it's in creating distance between us and those stories and those patterns that we begin to see them. And so, can I? Yeah, I just wanted you to jump in here too because you talked about the jump from awareness

to story. And obviously you were practicing, cultivating the awareness between the two. Yeah. Well, so I think what's really cool here and an interesting edge when you're working with story is so my experience, right, I have done probably 10,000 hours plus of, Vapasana training, just aware, aware, aware. And it's a beautiful practice. I still do it.

It helps soften edges of conditioning in a profound way. It helps remind me that there's a place that is separate from the fear and the control and the thought. Something else, though, that it did to me is we all have different survival strategies. Some of us have like a fight. Some of us have a flea. some of us have a fawn, some of us have a freeze. I have more of a freeze survival strategy, which means that when things get stressful,

kind of get quiet, a little bit more withdrawn, want to isolate. Well, what does it look like when someone gets quiet a little bit more withdrawn once isolate? Looks a lot like meditation. I would say a lot of meditators that you see on retreats are people who have a disposition or have certain survival strategies that they can, it's an intense way to put it, but they can like mask as morality or spirituality.

Not intentionally. It happens subconsciously. At least I'll just own it. This was my experience. This was a way for me to relate to my experience in a way that was safe based on my particular strategies. So what I often found with my meditation training is that I got so good at just watching experience and being the observer, that it created some distance between the emotion, between the

sensation, and between the thought, and my personality structure. A lot of distance where I could just kind of like sit back. But if I really looked at it, yeah, there was some freedom there, but it was also kind of the similar freedom as like a low grade freeze response. I describe it as like it let me sit on my perch of awareness like oh that's your pain down there oh that's your emotion oh it's just an emotion just watch it just come and go it's impermanent everything will come and go powerful there was wisdom but it was wisdom hijacked by aspects of my personality structure that were afraid to make true contact with experience so how does this relate to story yeah there's power to creating separation from story seeing story is something that you can manipulate seeing story

that you are not story, there is also power to getting intimate with story and seeing story as like the tip of a thread of something that is wound up deep in your system where you actually like let yourself get into the story of, I'm not worthy. It's like instead of like shifting that to I am worthy and trying to stay on the perch of I am worthy, which has value to an extent. What if you let yourself just feel like the I am unworthiness and not just feel it like let yourself get into it like I'm not worthy like god I suck I'm a terrible once you give that permission to go it's gonna it's it's gonna take you into your body it's gonna show you and bring

you into the places where that core conditioning and wounding lives and much of how we live our lives especially when we're meditating and this is where like so many spiritual practitioners get stuck in their embodiment practice is their practice, like, keeps them, whether it's just sitting still in meditation, or it's maintaining an idea of how I'm supposed to practice and not getting too messy, or just staying in awareness. It keeps them from having enough permission to get into the messiness and the rawness of the experience that is holding together these patterns of condition. That's not letting the awakened state come through in the first place.

And that is a key thing that people, that I also had to. recognize for myself that comes to how do you orient to what is spiritual growth? Do you believe you are fundamentally whole and that the joy and the compassion and the love and the freedom that you're looking for is innate to you? Or do you feel like you are fundamentally broken? If you are fundamentally whole, then your practice is about subtraction. You are releasing the protective layers of conditioning that have learned it's not safe to be yourself, to not trust that space. If you believe you are fundamentally broken,

then your practice is going to be about adding things and thoughts and ideas that build an idealized view. My direct experience has been, we are fundamentally whole. My direct experience of the greatest transformation that I have is when I let go of the patterns telling me who I need to be, including the pattern saying you need to have a positive thought.

It's when I let myself kind of now meet the negative thought, take that into the wound underneath, let the wound be decoupled from shame, meet the awakened state, which is there to hold you. If you soften into it, if you surrender, it will be there to hold you. Let that now take the burden of holding your experience. That's where the wound begins to heal.

And as soon as that ball that is held together by all of these protective layers of who you need to be in order to be good or right or spiritual, like those beliefs get to fall away, the core pain gets to be touched and released. And now that particular line goes away. And it's another area in your personality structure that is free for wisdom and awakening to emerge. And that is why I often say you need to desecis. if you want to transcend. You have to let yourself go down. The self-energy, true self-energy, has a gravitational pull to it.

But we keep ourselves from going through the layers that it wants to bring us back through because of our ideas of how we're supposed to practice, how we're supposed to behave, how we're supposed to think, and it prevents us from letting ourselves be in the messiness of our experience. I'll just give one more example of this,

like when people try to force forgiveness. and just like someone hurt you, and you feel angry, but you don't want to feel angry anymore. God told you you're supposed to forgive, or Jesus told you to forgive, or your mom told you you're supposed to be forgive. So you try to forgive.

Very noble pursuit. The perspective I take is that forgiveness is innate to the heart space. If you surrender over the burden of not knowing what to do with this person to the heart space, that's how forgiveness takes care of itself. Your true nature is forgiveness. You can't do forgiveness, especially the parts of you.

You can perform it, but it doesn't, it's not from the deepest place. So a lot of people try to perform forgiveness. I'm not mad or it's okay. And then you interact in this half-baked way where you're like kind of okay with the other person and you also still resent them. And then these projections come up.

And then the dynamic just exists on this plane of, you're not in truth. You're not actually in connection. You're playing out parts and patterns and protections. What that person first needs to do is give them space to be angry and to feel hurt. And then take that down and what does it touch from seventh grade where you have betrayed, like an old wound that's stuck in the system that this activates. It's like, oh, wow, so this gives me an opportunity to touch this.

And you take that down. And that could be a long journey. We're not talking like minutes or hours. Sometimes this is like weeks or months, but it is the unwinding of the personality structure. And so when you meet what is given, you stay in the sequence of what is being presented to you. And this goes back to the quote we talked about before, the reason we miss our lives, because we have some idea that there is a future moment more worth our presence right now. If you bow to what is given to you in this moment and trust that there is wisdom here,

even though your mind can't understand it, you are meeting the most alive thing in your experience. And when you do that, it will give way to the next most alive thing and the next most alive thing. And then you'll hit a stuck point. And then that's like the spiritual waiting room where it's just like, oh, I don't know where to go here, but I can't abandon myself anymore.

You let yourself cook in it until something else gives way. And you go down and down and down. And transcendence is just the reconnection back to our natural state. Mike drop. That was flames. Fire flames. Hey, fam. Sometimes I get asked what kind of tea my guests and I are drinking on the show or what I just like to drink in general. And I just wanted to give you guys a quick share because not all tea is created equally.

Many companies are not organic, leak micropastics into your tea or are just low quality sourced ingredients in general. One tea brand that I have been drinking almost every day is from Peak Life. They have this Puere tea, which sounds very fancy and bougie, and it is. It's not like normal tea. It's fermented, which means that it's loaded with living probiotics and prebiotics that support your gut health. It's like a reset button for your microbiome that supports with digestion, energy, metabolism, and your skin. Peaks, Puare, Green Tea, and black tea, which are right here. It's wild harvested from 250-year-old trees.

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Yes for Life. And they'll give you a free rechargeable frother and glass speaker when you grab their Puera bundle, which is the black and green tea. This is an exclusive offer just for everybody who listens to this show. Peek hooks it up with a 90-day money back guarantee. So that means it's a risk-free. You can go to Peeklife.com slash know-leself to grab yours now. That's peaklife.com slash know theyself. Linkin bio, as always, I hope you enjoy. Man, there's so many touch points there that we can dive further into. That last note about transcendence being, again, not something that we're in the continual acquisition of, but is the realization, which is why it's called self-realization,

as the letting go and the undoing of those parts of us that aren't actually us, but yet we subtly or sometimes grossly believe to be ourselves, then realizes and makes space for that experience of our true nature and true self. A great book on the synthesizing of what you're talking to that people want to check out is already free by Bruce Tiff. Oh, yeah. I have that on my book show. I'm like a few chapters.

Yeah. He's great. Yeah, it's a great framework for seeing how, I mean, you could do years and decades of shadow work and make great progress in terms of your ability to be with your inner child and take full custody of it and, you know, do those parts works and all of it. and still live so much heavily identified in your mind and story and trying to improve it. And that can be a never-ending journey. On the flip side, you can go deep into the contemplative practices and waking up beyond the story and still be an asshole.

Like you can have a lot of those character things that are not resolved because no matter how much you become aware and to separate yourself from a story, you still have a personality structure in there that you'll go back to, especially if you have a family and you live in society. And so they're both needed. And like you spoke to earlier, we've seen so many examples of both, of the spiritual teacher who dies about alcoholism, of the enlightened guru that sexually abuses, right? What is that?

Why does that happen? It's because there's all this other characterological stuff that's not addressed and can't be addressed from just the waking up perspective. And we know obviously, and you can experience a lot of, of individuals who continue to do shadow work and continues to do the inner excavation,

which is amazing, it's noble, and it's a never-ending path unless you start to wake up beyond the illusion of any story, right? And so this, I think, ties nicely and also with your face model. And so, yeah, if you'd like to share kind of your process of how you, orient yourself towards this because what's really been useful and not just sharing your story,

because that's amazing as well, but all these practical examples you've given of how whoever's listening to this right now can engage in their next challenging moment that happens in their life or when they go home and something happens pleasant or unpleasant, they have more tools, like an internal capacity and capability to be with anything. That's a truly powerful individual. And I think some frameworks like that would support. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So the face model is from my book. And I came up with that in like 2018, 2019. So it represents a certain chapter of my teachings where I was doing it more in the mindfulness space. But it has relevance for how we meet a moment with presence. And so it's just four, it's an acronym for four simple, four different things. One is just like focus, which is our general, are we attuned to this moment? Allowing is A, is there an ability to meet this moment with an attitude of this moment?

It's like this. Or an attitude of good luck, bad luck, who knows? Curiosity is kind of like the glue in, with the moment. It like pulls us in, like, oh, what's here? for me, what's being presented here, what can I learn from this moment, or just like, what's it like to be an interaction with this moment? And then E, embodiment, just make sure we're not caught in our head, that we're actually, like, attuned to what's happening in our body and the wisdom of our body. And so many people, especially in the early stages of mindfulness,

do it in kind of a, like a heady way, because we often think of, like, awareness happening in the head. And disconnect from. Like, there's huge wisdom and communication happening all throughout the body. And I like to almost think of the body as like this mega sensor as I'm going through space. I'm just like picking up the wisdom that's coming in. It's just like, oh, what is this making me feel? And what's that communicating? And what can I learn from that?

So I outline that as a moment of presence where we can have these four things if you wanted to break them down, just check with yourself of like, am I, am I focused in this moment? Am I attuned to what's here? Am I meeting it with an attitude of allowing? Is there curiosity that I'm bringing, maybe to the person I'm talking to? And am I in my body as I'm doing that?

If you do that in your next conversation with someone, you check those four domains, those four pillars, you'll probably see that something's a little off. Like, yeah, I'm focused on them, but I have some judgment. I'm focused on them, but my curiosity is like kind of going elsewhere. I'm not actually leaning into what they're sharing. And so, like, bringing those all online can just, like, drop us in in this way that we're talking about. I think as, like, in terms of the earlier, like, part of that journey of being able to focus and allow what's happening, we have to be aware of what's happening.

Like, we can't just be in the unconscious reactivity that's the habitual nature of our mind. and what we've been in the past. And of course, as it doesn't capture the whole picture, but meditative practices like Vipassana can allow you to widen the gap between the stimulus and the response and cultivate the capacity for equanimity

in the face of any sensation and experience that is so invaluable to have that. Arguably, one of the most transformational things for our consciousness is our ability to simply sit quietly and not need something special to happen in the next moment and to be able to just essentially be with what is, period, end of story, not meaning that we don't take action or we don't change, you know, what's happening,

but that ability is really powerful. And just to kind of close out and put a ribbon on your story of meditating for 14 hours a day for six months, there are these like latent faculties that we just, don't get to experience because we're scrolling on TikTok all day. Like, because we haven't been immersed or shown the kind of user manual of the human body in mind and what's possible when your mind is so concentrated and how blissful it can be to simply be sitting down. Like, when you taste that, I think your perception on life radically changes.

You stop being under the illusion that your ultimate happiness and key to fulfillment is somewhere external because you've experienced it. you've tasted that full, like, satiation internally. That wasn't attached to anything happening outside of yourself. And that's one of the most liberating things I feel like we can experience as a human being. And so what was it like? Share, like, maybe a peak moment. I know you had lots of difficulties throughout the time,

but I know when you're focusing that much on a contemplative practice like that, you discover faculties and, like, capabilities as a human being that you just were not privy to. and I think it's an important reflection. So what was that like? The first thing I'll share is the best thing I got from that experience. And people typically think, like, when you spend six months meditating 14 hours a day, like you're going to have some trippy, transcendent ego death type experiences. And I had plenty of those, and I'll go into some of the cool ones.

but the most valuable thing from that time is that I became my own best friend there was just an inner coziness that developed really as like a means of survival to get through it because when you are spending that much time with your mind with your pain like if you're if the thoughts that are moving through of just like are like what's wrong with you do this better like you're not a good meditator, and those are like benign ones compared to what can come up in the mind. I mean, you're just not going to make it. It's going to be brutal. You're going to have to disconnect from your body to get through it.

So compassion and love and that inner friendship arose organically out of meeting the intensity of my experience and having to find a different way to work with it. And over time, you know, judgment was replaced with understanding and hatred was complacent. replaced with compassion, intention was replaced with ease. And it was just a deep reverence for what it takes to keep showing up for the mess of the human experience that made me able to talk to myself in a way that I wasn't able to do before, where I could just be in my experience and go, like, hey, Kor, how you doing? Like, this is a mess, right?

and this is really hard. Like if you need a break, like, it's okay to take a break. And we don't have to listen to what they're saying, what the teachers. Like, I'm with you. I wasn't able to do that before. I had a harsh inner critic. And I don't have that inner critic anymore. I still have thoughts that come in that, like, judge a situation and keep me accountable.

But I don't beat myself up like that ever. I don't really know how to do it. that was the most liberating thing from that experience and that was just a slow gradual softening back into myself there were other experiences of course that you know really deep penetrating experiences of impermanence where you just kind of spend all day long watching your body vibrate and thoughts moving so fast so your attention and concentration gets so refined that my teacher would have me shift from noting a thought. So every time a thought would arise, you would just go thinking. And then he would have you label like the content of the thought like, oh, anxiety, fear.

So that was another level of specificity. But then as concentration got even deeper, he would have you label the intention to think. So even before a thought arose, you would feel the energy in the mind-body system coming up to want to pop up a thought. So you get that level of refinement of attunement to your experience. And so all day long, you're just watching pain arise and disintegrate. Emotions arise and disintegrate. And you're seeing what happens to experience when it has the space to just be without being having a layer caked on of judgment. and why is this here and what's wrong with me?

When that layer comes in, harking back to the secondary pain we talked about, that's what keeps emotion stuck. It's what keeps anger perpetuated. But when that's not there, I mean, these things just move through very quickly. So penetrating experiences of impermanence and penetrating experiences of non-self

where there was just, there was no, the illusion of Corey was evaporated and in that space was just like a heart of compassion that was truly beautiful and really changed my perspective on myself and was very hard to integrate in the real world where you need to have like your name.com or you're building a brand or personality and you need to make money and so the coming back was that's where the work started. I think it's a one. more important thing to come back to was the awareness of how even meditation itself can become

a behavioral compensation and coping mechanism to not have to go into the story. And that perspective that you can be with anything, that you can be your own best friend is like you described it as like an inner coziness. I love that. It's just like a sort of warmth that there's less friction between these noises in your head. You know, it's like, we can be with this, we can work with this. Because I think when people say like love yourself or be your own best friend, it can kind of sometimes seem like this fragmented thing. There's like you and then there's a voice in your head and you're trying to like talk

with that instead of just recognizing as that's like all part of one thing. Yeah. And just making space for that to feel safe. And so I'm just curious because you've been doing this work also with so. many different people on both sides of it, like how much of our efforts, both through meditation, through our behavioral compensation of so many different things are really our subtle desire to just feel safe. I think it's all of it.

That's been my experience. Like it just, we can cast a wide net of what safety means. Like the resonance of happiness has safety. Residents of love has safety. But, yeah, it's all safety. The glue that holds the outdated beliefs and wounds together that organize our life, they are held together by fear. The actions, the beliefs, and the thoughts that typically run through your mind that are

telling you who you need to be in order to get safety, love, and connection. Like, that's all held together by fear. The opposite resonance of fear is safety and love. And this is why, as people start to do this work, and they develop a more regulated nervous system, they develop capacity to actually be with more spacious aspects of themselves that have inherent safety. These layers of their personality structure

that are gripping slowly start to soften and unwind. I mean, I think it's so evident any time that you have some sort of awakening or just you feel really good in your body, really good in your mind, really safe, really connected, really love. The corresponding thought is just, oh, this is what it's all about. And you often see, like, all these other things that I've been caring about, they're just trying to get me to this. and many of them are distorted, but you got to do something in the world. So let some of those things be an expression of this place, but most of the time,

they are distorted ways of trying to get to this place. And, you know, these practices are ways to just get back there, see that it's your true nature, and then let that true nature illuminate life itself. That ability to give reassurance to yourself. It's such a switch to where I think culturally, it's kind of conditioned to be in the pursuit. I mean, it's literally written the Declaration of Independence,

the pursuit of happiness. It's the extraction of joy from something outside, right? And instead of the sharing of joy from like the inner wellspring that you have, it's a different orientation and different things come out of both of those experiences separately. And I think as you start to deepen in these practices and awarenesses, you start to see how your sensitivity raises and your ability to listen to, the more subtle whispers in yourself about things that are happening

within your own psyche, about intuitive impulses to move in certain directions career-wise, a certain level of resonance and ability to see if somebody in a relationship dynamic is meant for you or not. Like all of these things,

you start to attune to more. And that is an incredible place to live life from, instead of just the wants and desires from ego. And so what's the difference of texture? from desires that arise from stillness versus desires that arise from ego? My experience of stillness is there's a spacious,

non-arguing quality. The choices that come through don't actually have the resonance of being a choice. They don't have the resonance of being a decision. They're just like a receiving. from the personality structure, the ego structure, they take a lot of other different forms, but they tend to be noisy, they tend to be pushy.

If you turn your attention away from them, they tend to grip a little bit more. They really try to convince you. And so that inner knowing, it's not as loud, but it's steady. And it's something that when you let yourself get quieter and you let yourself get more safe, you default to that space. And this is like this simple prescription I give to people

who are trying to discern, like, am I leading my life from ego or am I leading my life from soul, if we were to put that word on it? It is take note of the moments in your day when you feel most grounded, most safe, most connected, and most happy. These are moments where the fear aspect of your personality structure are not going to come online.

And notice in those moments, how does your system orient? What does it think is possible? How does it feel about the relationship you're in? How does it feel about your work? Where does it want to go? What does it feel is possible? Then contrast that with the moments throughout the day where you feel tight, fearful, stressed. Where does your attention go in those moments?

how do you feel about the relationship? How do you feel about your work? What is your mind convince you you need to do? Sometimes you need to contrast that many times to see that there's a distinction and many times to actually be sold on the reality of, oh, there's something happening over here for the fear parts of you to start to get on board

of like maybe they don't know everything as it relates to what's going to give you happiness. But that simple practice is a way to start to, at the very least attuned to there's a place in you that you can orient to from a different resonance and it will pull your life in a different direction

that's not conditioned by fear. And another relevant piece of this to tie this into Buddhism, like in many ways we're talking about dependent origination, which is like a pretty dense Buddhist concept of like why we come into human form

but really like why do we get sita stuck on the wheel of samsara like the wheel of suffering and it's it's because we're we're conditioning one moment into another from a place of graspiness and feeling like my refuge will be if i get there and so that creates a cause and effect relationship where we get a moment that now we've just reinforced this pattern of gripping grasping or aversion and we just stay stuck in the tumult of thinking that next moment is going to be what frees me. It's the same thing when we're talking about, like, well, why even choose to lead from this deeper place? Like, what if it doesn't, what if it doesn't give me everything I want? What if I surrender and I don't get the relationship or I don't make as much money?

And one, that's the fear of the mind. But it's important to remember that what we're surrendering to and why we're surrendering is not so that we have a life that gives us everything we want or our mind wants. And it's not because we're going to have a life that no longer has pain that just won't exist. It's because we have seen that there is a place within us that already has the resonance of freedom and safety. and like all of our pursuits are trying to get us that resonance in the first place. So we anchor there and then we let that be the origin of the next moment. And what you then get in the next moment is a world that is an extension of

and reinforces you being in that place rather than an extension of and a reinforcement of you being in patterns of fear, control, and conditioning. If you go into the relationship from a fear-based place, you are playing out dynamics from the level of the personality structure. You can break free from those. You can drop in and you can do conscious work and find your way to the other side. It doesn't mean that the solution is going to be you're supposed to be together.

That's why it can be very helpful to do this work beforehand, but most of us, like, that just doesn't happen. but don't be upset when your partner's interacting with your 13-year-old when you made a decision to be in the relationship from the place of your 13-year-old. It's a really important reminder, too, that, of course, we can do this work before getting into relationships, and the unique capacity a relationship has, especially romantically, for being a mirror to our inner core vulnerabilities that would not have otherwise had the safe space to be for, you know, held for is really real.

Like, and maybe no other space would we feel safe enough to really experience and even just witness and see what those kind of core patterns are, except for romantic relationships. Like, they have that unique capacity to kind of reveal those things for us. I'm curious, do you have any with your own relationship dynamic and coming to these awareness and choices? I'm curious about your journey because when it comes to making choices from the place that feel like they're actually not choices,

they're almost like the choiceless choice. When it's coming from stillness, when it's coming from joy, the way you described it experientially, I really liked, because it resonates with Mia's truth that there isn't this back and forth and convincing. There's just kind of this deeper knowing

and receiving and accepting of what is. and the Buddhists also have a term for this sort of intuitive knowing called direct non-conceptual valid cognition you know meaning direct it's right it's right there it's immediate in the experience non-conceptual it's not of the mind

in terms of formulation of thoughts or the intellect or logic valid meaning obviously it's true there's coherence to it and cognition is like being aware of it right so it's like this level of intuitive of knowing for things that are meant for us, for directions we want to go, choices we want to make, and many different impulses that can arise

from our deeper sense of knowing. We think of the mind as just the intellect, but the mind is a vast sea that's connected to all life. And so that's a different place to live from. And I'm curious how you're related to that deciding who you're going to spend your life with and have a baby with and, you know, your journey with your relationship,

because I know there was an arc there. Oh, as an understatement, there was a roller coaster there. Yeah, my relationship with my now wife, Brianna, was the deepest spiritual experience or integrated spiritual experience of my life, bar none. After I got back from the monastery at, like, 23, I that chapter from like 21 through age 27 before I met Brianna I really got to kind of like coast off of the the work that I had did I had kind of this balanced orientation toward life I was

single so I could kind of follow what I was interested in I wasn't being too confronted I was building teaching business I was enjoying it I was working with people and I was I was teaching from that space. And then it wasn't until I met Brianna that I was thrust into a five-year journey of trying to figure out how to discern what is truth and what is conditioning and what does it mean to make one of the most important decisions

of one's life from a place of freedom and truth so that the relationship is an extent of that. So I'll share about our story. I met Brianna at an alumni event at UPenn. We both went to grad school for positive psychology there. And I remember when I first saw her, she, like, stopped me in her tracks.

I would watch her walk around the room, and there wasn't a performative bone in her body. She just carried this resonance of authenticity that drew me in. And I eventually convinced a friend to introduce us and we started talking. We spent three hours talking about spiritual bypassing. We went deep, quick, and we were hooked. And the next several months, we really just, like, danced in this place of getting to know each other,

sharing stories, laughing, and falling in love. And one of Brianna's students refers to her as a walking Mary Oliver, poem and that was my experience she was just opening me up to new dimensions of myself and as i'm sure you know with you know that much access to life that much commitment to honesty and that much devotion to truth is confronting and my 27 year old self was not ready for it the biggest thing was just how much emotional range and expression she had. Like when she was in anger, she let herself be in anger. When she was in sadness, she let herself be in sadness.

When there was something that was misaligned, like she wanted to get in and wrestle with and understand it and be like, there's something not right here. Why can't I feel you? I can't feel you right now. And, you know, it was scary to me. You know, here I am, like monk boy. She's like, well, why don't we try to pause and rest. respond instead of react. And have you heard about the halt acronym? Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you

lonely? Are you tired? It's like, let's just breathe together. She's like in life itself and scared the shit out of me, honestly. I didn't have the capacity to be with it. And at the same time, it was so clear that so much of my spiritual practice had become like forms of suppression and didn't give me range to meet her on this level. But when I was in it, I was like, you know, Mary Oliver turned into Edgar Allen Poe. I was just like, what am I supposed to do? But we, like, we worked on it. Like, we continued to meet that. We also had a lot of other things, like, working against us. We were living on opposite coast. I was the East Coast. She was West Coast. She was seven years older than me. We met when I was 28. She was 35, so we were, and she both wanted

family. We were aware of timeline stuff. We just came from different cultures. I grew up on Long Island, like New York Italian. She grew up in like the wholesome Northwest. So it's just like there was friction and a lot to be worked out in our personality structure. And yet there was like a deep magnetic pull that was undeniable. So we kept exploring and playing and trying to figure it out. And after like a year or so, I checked myself and I was like, you know, what is it? How do you feel about like proposing when you think about getting married?

And when I would imagine getting on one knee, the thing that arose was this tightness in my chest. And I was like, whoa, okay. So I guess this is a sign that this isn't right. Like this is an intuitive knowing. I didn't have that language yet. It was just like something's can't move forward, telling me not to move forward. So then I would think about breaking up. It's like, all right, well, let's think about breaking up and how we want to do it.

And as soon as I would think about breaking up, all this fear would flood my system. And the fear would get all swirly with these other emotions and not wanting to hurt her. And then it would convince me that, like, that's not right. And then all of a sudden I went from like 90% clarity to, like, it's time to break up, to 90% clarity to it's time to stay together. And then that would last for a couple days. And then it would settle. And I would just be back in this space of like, oh, we're just kind of doing the relationship,

but can't really go all in, can't get out. and this was my first internal reckoning of like, I actually don't know how to discern in my own experience. What is truth? Like, what is wisdom? What is the voice that I should follow? And what is the one I shouldn't? And so we would talk about it.

And we try to work on it. It is a hard thing to admit. But we were conscious enough to explore it. And we did that for weeks. and weeks turned into months and months turned into years. And during that period, we tried to break up multiple times and failed. We tried to imagine being together. We would like pretend to plan out a wedding and who we were going to invite and where we were

going to be and I would just like freeze the whole time. We tried to break up and succeeded a handful of times or we'd do it for a month or two, but we'd come back together because it didn't feel right. And then as time went on, like the pressure built up, the pressure to have a decision. And anyone who's endeavored in this path knows that like the main thing that will get in the way of you accessing and inner knowing is feeling stress and pressure. It just creates too much noise. So we knew that.

And we're just like, all right. So let's do these things where we create these open containers for one month or two month or three months where we take the pressure off entirely to know what to do. And we just focus on loving each other. and figuring out working out the edges. And we would do that and it would work. And we were deepening in how much we loved each other and learning to live together.

There was so much that was opening up. But it was like an asymptote. It was getting closer and closer to the thing but never quite touching. Because each time we'd get to the end of one of those containers and I was counting it down. It was like three days left, two days left. I would check what is it like to think about

getting on one knee and proposing and the same stuck tension in my chest. we did that for five years. Whoa. Five years. I met Brandon when she was 35. We wanted a family. We were pushing up on when she was 40.

And we had our stuff. Like, it's hard to go that long and not have stuff. Like, why can't you guys break up? Like, that's a good question. That's a very good question. We were trying to figure that out. But there was just something pulling us forward. Eventually, September 2020,

after five years, a couple months before 40th birthday, I'm just like, we have to end it. This has to be done. We can't keep doing this. And so I mustered up enough courage and surrender to actually really break that process. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, which it might sound ridiculous,

but anyone who's worked at relationship dynamics at this level, you know these things, they hit your most vulnerable survival, patterns. Like, it feels like you're dying. But we made it through. And then once that softened, we knew on the other side, like, okay, yeah, this is right. We do need to be broken up right now. It wasn't a perfect breakup. Like, next five months, you know, I packed up, everything, went back to New York, she was in Palo Alto. We would talk periodically, you know, do the things you're not supposed to do, like, I still love you. But we really stayed separate. And it was like moving in that

direction. Then, New Year's 2022, I microdose psilocybin in the attic of a friend's house by myself. It's like the saddest visual you can conjure up. And Brianna just comes through full force. And I see some stuff in myself, like around commitment and intimacy that I'm like, oh, man, like, could that be the thing that's blocking it? So I reach out to her the next day and I tell her what's up. And she agrees just like, all right, if we want to give this one more shot, let's do it and let's do it well. We go to LA, we meet with this therapist for four days and we put everything out on the table

and we go deep and it's mostly stuff with me. Like I'm going into childhood patterns. Like I'm crying on the couch. I'm touching some like learned patterns when I was a kid in relationship to boys and other people where it didn't feel safe and I felt guard. and it's like, man, something is opening up. And after all of that, we get to the end. We're sitting in the car about to go to the airport.

And she asked, like, so what are we doing? And I imagine getting on one knee and proposing. And it's still there. And that's when she said, like, we're done. Like, we've really done. We got to move on. And so we did. We went our separate ways.

A week later, I go to Mexico with my very good friend Miles, single guy now. So we're going to go kite surf for a month. I love Miles. He has been such a healing friendship for me. There's so much range in our friendship. We go deep in different areas. We laugh. I love him.

Three days into being together, he does something that annoys me. Don't even remember what it was. I walk out, go on the roof, top overlooking the sea of Cortez. And I just noticed this thought, like, oh, maybe Miles isn't going to be as long-term a friend as I thought he was going to be. I had enough awareness that I had some stuff potentially around relationships. And I had enough recognition of how much I adored this human to be able to catch the

absurdity of that thought. And I said, wait a second, buddy. like if Miles is not a long-term friend, like who would be? And I could feel myself trying to squirm away from an answer. It was like a part of me that was like, oh, don't ask that question. And I held its feet to the fire. I said, no, you, we got to look at this. Like, where did that come from?

And as soon as I held it to the fire in that way and penetrated into it, something started to unravel. I went into this like sober psychedelic experience where I got dropped into all of these past relationships. My mind was taking me through friendships, partnerships, family dynamics, where I'm seeing this pattern of something get uncomfortable, a part of me get judgmental and want to pull away and create distance. As I'm doing it, this part of me that's been like aching in the relationship and tightening

up is throbbing and pulsating. But every relationship dynamic I go through in my mind, it's softening a little bit more. There's fear coming up. I'm seeing the pattern. It's softening more, taking me all the way down to some of the earliest ones when I was five years old. And like a boy threw snow in my face. And I remember it was just the first experience of betrayal and not feeling like I could get out of the situation and learning that it wasn't safe to be with people. It went on for a half hour. My body. made movements it hadn't made before. My chest was pulsating. My mind just cycled through everything over the last 35 years. Then after 30 minutes, something settled. My mind got calm and clear. My body

started to soften. And then I thought about Brianna. And when she came to mind, there was no tension in my chest. And I said, what's it like to think about proposing to Brianna? And I imagined myself on one knee. And the answer that came through was, of course, of course. First time ever, no tension here at all. No resistance. Just clear knowing the deepest yes and truth I had ever experienced. For the next two weeks, I woke up and I checked that because I didn't know maybe I just had a manic episode or something. And I would imagine her in like her worst moments and I would imagine like the way she triggers me the most and it was just still a yes two weeks later I got on a plane San Francisco told her I wanted to meet up I asked if she'd be willing to

bought a ring and shared the whole story with her and said like I'm here I am 100% here and if you're ready to move forward only if you're here too like I'm ready she said yes and we got married six months later and now we have a four-month-old child all within that stream of truth and love. And that journey, I had a teacher say, like, we front-loaded a lot of karma. People sometimes do this at different layers of the relationship and in different ways, in different contexts of their lives. For whatever reason, like, there was a current, like, pulling us together, but we had, a lot of conditioning getting in the way, and I specifically had a part of me that in internal family systems, they call this blending when a protective part of you masquerades as wisdom.

And this is when fear is most dangerous. It's not when it's loud. It's when it impersonates your voice of reason. And it was running this relationship dynamic for years. And I needed to let my... see it and I needed to see what was behind it and allow the pain to breathe for it to release so that it could unburden itself. And once it did, it no longer had its grip on the relationship. And so this, that really represents like the second chapter of my work. The first chapter was just

like how do we cultivate awareness, the recognition that there is that place in you that you can dwell, that you can allow experiences to come and go, that there's impermanence, that you don't have to grip so hard that you can release. The next layer was, how does that resonance of freedom move through the human form, right? Because vipasana and mindfulness, they teach you really well how to be with a thought as its own observable event. It's just a thought coming and going, Don't judge it, whether it's a good thought or bad thought. It's just an emotion. Good, bad, it doesn't matter.

But when you have to make a decision, part of that decision making includes thoughts. It includes emotion. Like, intuitive knowing comes through the body and the mind. And if you're not able to discern, like, the resonance of a thought that's coming from freedom versus the resonance of a thought that's coming from fear and conditioning, it all just feels like the same soup.

But it's not. It's like oil and water. And for me, I really needed to do a lot of descending to sensitize myself to what are parts that are acting out of fear and protection trying to run their life that are impersonating my voice of reason. And how do I help them unblend so that the awakened state can just move through? It's been the deepest work of my life. But it's what I understand now to be embodied, embodied spirituality.

Powerful, man. Powerful. Yeah. Getting to see your own journey. Because we've touched on a lot of themes on different aspects, but putting into practice in your own life, you know, we talked about those intuitive pulses that, you know, when you tune in from a place of stillness,

you'll move towards a direction that's going to bring you more true joy and what's meant for you in life. But there are so many moments where it's just not that clear. and despite all your practice and devotion to growing your awareness, like over years, like half a decade of still like coming up against this resistance point. So, I mean, it's commendable to honor the part of you that is committed to the full FES. Like, if there's a part of you that isn't fully there in terms of this is what I want to do to move forward, then it's also not honoring to your partner, you know?

So it's important there, but obviously so frustrating at times because you don't have clear, like full clarity on what's the internal block for me having clarity on making a decision like this. Yeah. And this, it's a really juicy point you bring up because, like, you can look at the story and see like, well, at the end of the day, you guys got together. Like, you were going to be together. So couldn't you have done that in any particular point? We didn't know that was, like, we broke up with surrender. the narrative I had was that the greatest, this was going to be the greatest spiritual work

that I was going to have to do in this lifetime, which was to let go of someone I loved so much because it wasn't in alignment. And I didn't know why it wasn't in alignment. I just knew when I thought about moving forward, I was stuck. And that was the deepest thing I could access. And I always said to her,

the only thing I am more scared of than losing you is losing myself. And if I override this, I will lose myself because it means I am not honoring the deepest thing I can listen to. Most of us are going to find ourselves in these positions

when we're trying to make decisions. We won't have clean access yet to intuitive knowing. Sometimes we do. Usually what we have access to is a part. It might not be as blended deeply as me, as mine was,

but we, we just have a sense of like a stuck point. And what I invite people into is like your work is just to listen as deeply as you can and to check with yourself and ask yourself, am I listening as deeply as I can? If you are, that is all you can do. And then you are given the information and then you choose what to do with that moving forward or how to respond next. and if making a decision against what's coming through,

if you can feel like that overrides something, then that you have to pay attention to because now you are reinforcing a pattern that says, I don't trust myself. And what's coming up might not be the deepest thing, but that's okay. What you're doing is creating a tether to yourself of self-trust that I will listen and I will follow what is given.

and you often need to do that to get into the other places that let that conditioning resolve itself. Because the way those parts begin to release is with more safety and trust in the system. One way to ensure you're not going to have more safety and trust in the system is to override a part that's trying to tell you something. Or to just say, yeah, this is what's coming up for me, but I feel bad leaving you, and I'm going to put that experience first. Right? People might see that as nobility, but nobody is in service when that happens. The truth is always in service to everyone that is involved. That will just perpetuate superficial patterns of people pleasing and codependence. So yeah, what we have right now is the deepest level we can listen to and we don't know where that's going to take us. But it's not your job to know. Your job is just

like, this is what I'm given and I'm listening earnestly and sincerely and I'm on my knees and I wish it was something different, but it's not. And therefore, I surrender. And what's come on the other side? I mean, we were just chatting as your baby was being born. And like the, you know, the fruit has been bared from making that decision, collapsing the energy. And I know this is something that a lot of people struggle with in terms of commitment,

in terms of making these big decisions in life and discerning and seeing what's in alignment. it's an interesting path to navigate, to honor your truth, to not abandon yourself, but then also make this commitment to somebody else that has real effects in the world and their life. And so it gets into muddy waters, you know, in this process.

But yeah, so is there one thing you would say to somebody that's struggling in terms of that sort of commitment? And that's maybe whether it could be, a relationship to anything in life, but, you know, a romantic partner seems to be obviously a really popular one. It can be difficult at times. You said, like, cultivate the ability to listen, but also seems like there is an inevitability to these things that will play out almost when they're supposed to. And as much as we want things to happen on our own time, the universe doesn't work like that. And so what do you think about this dichotomy of doing everything we can in this moment

to make to know what we need to know it and make a decision. But then also like having patience and seeing how things play out. Yeah. I think there's a combination there, right? Like there's going to be some real life urgency in terms of whether there's this decision we need to make about a job or in relationship. It's more how do we use that urgency? Like what are the practices we're putting in place that are allowing us to do something?

if what we're doing is just beating ourselves up, right? Well, then that urgency is not being used well. So after this happened, I really didn't know exactly, like what just happened in my system. I just knew it had the resonance of a miracle. It was the only thing in my life that I experienced as a miracle, which is something completely shifted and reorganized how I thought.

Spontaneous? Yeah, yeah. It wasn't until about a year later that I really figured out the parts that were at play and figured out more how to reverse engineer that process. Brianne and I went on a nine-day silent loving-kindness retreat at Spirit Rock. And loving-kindness meditation is where you're like intentionally anchoring into

these heart qualities of love and compassion. And I found. by combining that practice with also my understanding of parts work and semantic experiencing, that I was able to direct the stream of that heart space toward areas where I felt friction or tension and could actually unwind that bundle of conditioning

that would keep me stuck in certain states. And what happened with Brianna, as I said, there was a, a part that was blended. So what is a part from an internal family system's perspective? They're like fractals

of your consciousness of your psychology that will are interacting with your experience. And when something painful happens and the system is overwhelmed with stress

or fear, those parts take on the burden of figuring out who do you have to be now, how do you have to behave, how do you have to think and what emotions do you need to feel to make sure we don't touch this pain that we already have and to make sure we don't have any more of that pain? Those parts are typically now running most of the patterns in our life and they are like if we have something like commitment issues, so to speak, they're usually a result of these

parts that have some deep-seated belief and learning about it's not okay to be open. These can be super deep. I can't tell you how many times in the five years that I was with Brianna that I checked myself. Like, do I have commitment issues? I talk to my friends. Tell me, like, I want to see what am I missing? Like, is there something going on here?

Talking to my mom, talking to my dad. It's like, what can I figure out in this? So sometimes even when there's willingness, they can be hard to see. This is why, so the first step is you start with like what is given.

And so in this case, let's just say there's a commitment issue and you feel yourself, if I were to redo this with Brianna and I were to imagine myself getting on one knee and proposing and feel that tightness in my chest instead of just stopping there and going,

okay, that's the intuitive knowing that something's off. what I would orient that as is a fearful, is a protective part that is, that learned at some point that intimacy and commitment and relationship with others is scary. And it's creating a feeling telling me to get away and creating thoughts telling me to get away. And that all of that is held together by fear. Those parts, they stay in place because they, are afraid that if they let go, you are going to have to feel this unresolved pain or more pain

is going to come through. Most of our negative patterns, relationship woes, insecurities, they are not the result of not having enough will, energy, or patience. They are the result of old stuck pain that lives in the system and now organizes your behavior so you no longer have to feel it. That stuck pain and that bundle is held together by fear. What is the opposite result? of fear, what softens fear, love and safety. So if you're someone struggling with this and you feel like there's something in me that comes up, I would start by what I typically tell people. I taught a whole course on this last year called Opening the Heart because I wanted to

dissect this process. And the model I taught there was an acronym called Care and Socare is, care is you you connect to the place in you that you feel this stuck point. Feel it in your body or just notice the thoughts. Like, I don't want to move forward. I'm scared of them or I don't like them. Connect to it. A is you appreciate and acknowledge that that thought process and that block has a positive

intention. It is trying to serve you even if you don't understand yet. There's an intelligent design there. There's an intelligent design. It's so used to you being angry at it that it will just start to soften just by you saying like, I don't know why yet you're here, but I trust and I know that you're doing something to protect me. So you connect to it, you appreciate it. Or is you ask it to reveal what is it that you're protecting? And the question I like is, what do you fear would happen if you were to let go

of your role? This starts to give some insight of like, okay, it's scared that if you were to be open. If you were to get into a relationship with Brianna and now you're married, like, what happens when it gets bad? You can't get out, especially if you have a kid, right? That's the learning of this part. So then you, like, the E is to empathize. You could go, oh, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And usually there's logic. You can understand why this part's protecting. And it's usually very young. So the first four care is just to create enough of a connection with the part that the system starts to soften. you start to see that there's more going on rather than you just not being able to do the thing. That for many people is the stage you kind of just want to linger at for a while.

You just want to develop a relationship with that part and get to know that it actually cares about you. It's trying to serve you and it loves you. And sometimes it won't let you go further than that because they're very sensitive. They're like a hot stove. Like don't you dare, like pull back real fast. but if there is connection there and you feel inspired to go further, the next is the acronym So soften. So S just stands for soften. This is where you invite the part to actually just not completely let go, but just relax a little bit.

Like I'm going to be here with you. Again, you're relating to this as like a semantic, psycho-emotional semantic script in the system. So for me it was, right, this tension in my chest. So I would just, you can have a visual on it. Maybe you imagine it like a little kid or like an object or you just feel it as sensation. And that's where you say like, okay, what's it like just to soften? Like what if you didn't need to hold on and protect and be so scared?

Like we're giving you the space to do that. Oh is you invited to actually open to the pain that it's protecting, open to the burden that it's been holding. That doesn't always happen immediately, but you know when it does start to happen, because you go from usually like this density to things starting to vibrate. These calcified walls of protection and belief of don't touch me, don't go near me, they start to thaw, and then the pain that has been protecting can start to be felt a little bit more. F is to feel in sequence. So this means you are just letting yourself be present.

to what is being given. Maybe the thing that's coming up is like deep anger toward your mom. And you have a thought of like, I don't hate my mom. Like, I'm supposed to love my mom. Just you let yourself cycle through whatever these layers are

because they're frozen in time. These parts and the constellation around them, they are just layers of psycho-emotional, somatic gunk. And with very good intention that has memory after memory after memory that is building behavior. A lot of evidence.

A lot of evidence. So as you soften that, you're going to go through stuff that's like, that's from 12 years old. Why do I feel anger toward my mom? Why do I have a voice as saying, I hate you, mom, I hate you mom. If you try to bypass that by saying, I don't hate my mom, you're going to get in the way of the process. These trauma responses want to complete.

The way they complete is like you let yourself embody them. You let yourself get into the position that you were in when you felt that fear. You're just trying to hold your posture and be good. You get in the way of the intelligence of the somatic. So you let yourself go into it. You let yourself feel the emotion. The T is to trust that unfolding. That process for many people, like you can spend a lot of meditations just hanging out there,

like titrating the amount that you let yourself feel. as that starts to open, you get to the E and the end, the final part of soften. And E is to start to embrace the shift. And so there's a way you show the part like, hey, do you see how you softened? Like, we went through that process and we're still okay. Like, you're safe right now. We're safe. Our system can be held.

We can exist without you gripping. This is like a crucial. part that gets overlooked because the part's not going to disappear when it's free of its burden it wants to support you it loves the shit out of you it's just doing its best to try to help you so you show it like hey do you see like we're okay and we feel good feels good to be here you can relax so you like embrace it and then n is just to nurture the integration and it's just like okay let's come back like our feet are on the ground I'm me like all the parts kind of can exist as one.

So that's the model in a nutshell. It's a great model. Thank you. It feels pretty comprehensive. Yeah. Yeah. It's... To connect, to acknowledge, to reveal,

to empathize, yeah, this is great. To soften, to stay open, to feel it, to trust it, to embrace it. you're phenomenal

and to nurture it that was great 10 plus for me I've never seen everyone do that I even I have to be like what is this thing I teach again but that I've taken

thousands of people now through that process and are there others sure but that is the if you want a model for how It's a combination of internal family systems, somatic experiencing, and loving kindness meditation. So there's actually a key point in the softening when you start with the softening.

The way you get that to happen, because a lot of times you're going to ask it to soften and it's going to be like, fuck you. I'm not doing nothing. Now just remember, you are dealing with the. resonance of fear. So talking to it, it has so many good deflections. Your job is just to show it love. It's just like, yeah, I know you don't want to do anything and you don't have to, but I love you. Like, thank you so much for everything that you've been doing. I so appreciate you. And you don't say it sarcastically, you say it like as deep as you can mean it. And do it in your own attuned way. People are, some people like talking like, I love you so much, honey. Like, I'm so grateful.

it's okay to let go. And other people are like, dude, you've been holding this for a while. Like, I get it. Life sucked. Dad was an alcohol. Like, we've been through some shit. So talk to yourself in a way that you can receive that love. But the idea, and it's probably the most crucial part of this model, is that you just,

you stay with that love as long as is necessary for that fear will to soften. And sometimes that means an entire meditation, like, not much will happen, especially if these are dense, but if you keep coming back to it, we did this over an eight-week period. It can take weeks for people to start, for that wall to start to soften. And when it does, then things start to vibrate. The whole process that I had with Brianna, that unblending of the part from the wisdom function,

starts to happen. So that's one piece. And then the second piece that I want to remind people about this, and I think is also relevant as something where I think vipassana and some traditional meditation practice lose the wisdom of the somatic practices is that

where a lot of these wounds, like so many of these wounds live in your body. And so if you imagine, let's say you're in seventh grade and you got a bully behind you, like right in the corner of you. And the whole, like, you're,

you're in a class for a full year this person's behind you. And you feel them, you just have the sense the entire time you're in class that they're looking at you, that throwing spitballs at you, they're gossiping about you.

Like, what's going to happen? One, you're going to feel a ton of fear in your body. You're going to feel a ton of emotion. You're going to feel like, I hate this. But you're probably also going to, like, start gripping on your right side, like curl yourself up like this. Right?

And so that's a semantic script that develops in relationship to a stressful experience. Well, there's a good chance now moving forward. You're going to find your body wanting to lean in these directions. And the thing is that that's not just like a physical thing you do now. That physical thing is loaded with emotion and fear. If you don't let yourself meet those scripts, and that somatic experience from a place of love, it's going to stay stuck in your body.

So a lot of times when people are doing this work and things start to soften, they'll feel that they go from, they're in their good meditation posture and then something in them wants to slouch. But then the good Zen in them says, nope, good upright posture, they force it up. But if they really pay attention,

it's like, oh, man, something just wants to curl up like this in a weird way. What's happening is you were creating, enough safety in your system for it to feel comfortable to want to complete trauma responses that didn't get to complete. So the wisdom of the system is taking you back to these places that are frozen in time. And if you interrupt them or bypass them with your idea of how you should be sitting or how you should be thinking or what you should be feeling, you miss out on allowing yourself to go back in time, but from now the place of love and presence, so that the pain that's

stuck there that is protected by all of these walls of judgment and yelling at yourself, of like, don't look stupid, don't be bad, or be perfect to keep you from having to experience the pain of that bully. You're going to have to cycle through those thoughts and those emotions. And a lot of those thoughts will sound like that. You'll go from being peaceful and loving to then like hating yourself. You're an idiot. You look stupid. Your nose is big. And you're going to be like,

I'm not meditating right. I'm not, this isn't transcendent. Descend to transcend. You are letting yourself go into that. Let yourself embody it, but hold it with the backdrop of love. Because you're cycling,

you're not, you are not doing that. You are creating the space for those voices to get released in the container of awakening and love in a way that they never got to do. and then you will find if you allow yourself to touch those deep enough, the body will start to expand in other ways and you'll come out of it.

And so this is often a missing piece for people when they're doing the embodiment work of getting their system open enough and healed enough to actually be able to hold self-awakening energy as it comes through without hitting the gunk of fear. and that's been a real game changer for me in my meditation practice. If you look at me meditating on any given day, like, I look like this, I look like this, I like, I really let my body go into these different positions when it needs to. And then it's amazing, like, if you watch time lapse and some of them are recorded because

I'm doing it like while I'm teaching students, you'll see my body go from here and then, like, over the course of an hour slowly, like millimeter by millimeter, like curl up and expand and then go on this side and then curl. And you can see that there is stuck trauma, energy and emotion that is just being released layer by layer. I'm going into the position where I protected myself and fear locked it in place and I'm giving that the ointment of love and then it's release. thing and then that gets the ointment of love and then that next layer next layer next layer next layer

yeah this work is incredible i mean i'm just so humbled by it over and over um welcome aboard via rail please sit and enjoy please sit and stretch steep flip or that and enjoy via rail Love the Way. It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular priced merchandise. Two days only. Tuesday, April 28th and Wednesday, April 29th. Open your PC optimum app to get your coupon.

That's the model. Thanks for sharing and you showing it. There's so many paths to those different access points, whether you work with the raw energy of the system, whether you work with the language and the words of our neurology and how that's kind of built up the historical somatic evidence that's built up in that familiar sense within our body,

that familiarity you can work directly with it in the body and the emotions and that aspect too and why not leverage all them? Like they're all access points and all have a component in which they're wound up in, you know? And so I think so much of compassion is needed here in this process of real, that these wounds aren't our fault,

but they are now our responsibility for us to be able to move through them. It can be easy to shame, blame, and being our own victim narrative around these things, which is disempowering to the reality of just taking responsibility for our current and descending to transcend, as you said. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, well said. Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. And that's, it's not meant to dismiss anything anyone's been through. It is meant to empower you and your own freedom. One last aspect, I think, that I'd like to explore on the tale of what we just discussed is,

I think, in a life that is inherently impermanent and uncertain to how things are going to transpire externally, there is this awakening to the realization that, of like, that backwards law, you know, of where we, try to control things or want things to happen in a certain way. And the more that we try to pursue it, it almost eludes us. Like by holding our breath, we lose it, you know, and by trying to stay aflo, we can sink. And so it's this interesting balance of like you spoke to with it, in terms of our internal, characterological, emotional wounds and trauma and stuff, but then also in terms of like trying to create in the world and build our career and create the life of our dreams

and whatnot, there is this interesting. balance of intention of action and then also finding the place that arises from that state of inaction of stillness and seeing that as a bedrock. One quote that you shared in your book saw on your Instagram post actually said you don't find your ground by looking for stability. You find your ground by relaxing into instability. And so there's this interesting universal paradoxical framing that is really interesting to put into action in our life because it's a very unique philosophical exploration, but to actually live it is where liberation comes in. Yeah. This is one of those quotes where if I were to go back,

I would add a little bit of context. Maybe I did in the caption, I forget, but you don't find your ground by looking for stability. You find your ground by relaxing into insta. stability. There's a spiritual truth in that. There's also a relative truth that sometimes you need to create enough external stability to allow your system to relax enough to even begin this pursuit. I think sometimes like coming out of poverty, coming out of very difficult circumstances where there's a lot of chaos, having a grounded relationship. Even if we're not sure, it's like coming from the deepest place, but it just, like, we feel stability and something feels good about that

is really necessary for other parts of our system to open up. So I want to acknowledge that truth. And there is no example in the universe of someone attaining, awakening, by perfectly manufacturing their external world. In many ways, it can actually become a prison because it gets so comfortable that you mistake it as awakening,

and you mistake it as freedom, or you have just less and less of a reason to try to pursue something else. So my invitation to people is really to look at like the classic, once that happens, then I can start the work. And just watch how compelling that is and how subtle that is. and what is it like to just meet this moment with an orientation, as Bikuburi would say, this moment it's like this, this moment it's like this.

It allows us to soften our grip on how this moment should be, meet it in its perfect imperfection, as spiritually trite as that is, and do the practice of, instead of entangling ourselves with how does this need to be better in order for me to find refuge how can I keep zooming out and remember that the refuge is already here and that wholeness is not something I have to create it something that I remember I may need to fall apart in order to see that my life can be built on the resonance of space trust and surrender and that often means letting go of the need for stability surrendering and instability and seeing that there can be still a motivating pulse that creates your life.

I certainly want to create from that place. That's where I strive to. And I see your impact, both through social media and the innumerable courses and writings and things that you do as an extension of your ability to do that internally. You know, there's something very alluring in the personal development space of being somebody. who says the most profound things or it can quickly be divorced from the authentic sense of realization internally. And so I strive to have this platform on this podcast be a space for people that are speaking from direct experience where what they're saying is actually connected to the place it's coming from. And so I feel like you do that very, very well. And it feels real and true and

authentic to you. So thank you for sharing all of the fun nuggets of wisdom and insights and explorations we did today. It was epic. Thanks, Andre. I really appreciate it and I love what you're doing. Thanks, man. I'll just leave it for any other last things you want to share, both maybe work you're doing things in the world, anything else to send your mind before we head out. Sure. The first thing I'll say just in relationship to what you said next is like, I am so imperfect, right? And so anyone who's listening, if there's a sense of, like, he's got it figured out, it's just, like, know that I am fumbling in the dark alongside everyone else. And, you know, ask my family if I'm enlightened or anything like that, right? It's just like,

even within the container that Brianna and I have where it was coming, it's coming from, like, truth and that container holds us like we are still working out so many edges and so like have space for the mess in yourself like really watch the spiritual performance because it's the thing that can get in the way of true awakening so i stand in solidarity with everyone on that path um for anyone who wants support or if they resonate with how i'm talking about this you find all my free teachings on Instagram. If you want to go deeper, like more structured support, the 30-day course that I offer is the main flagship program so that you can find all this on my website, Coreymascarra.com or on Instagram. And then what we talked about, like the experience I have with Brianna,

that the unblending, that course I did, that's my most immersive course called Opening the Heart. So if that is something that people want to go into, that course will walk you through with daily meditations, that process of unblending protective parts that are sabotaging and running your life. We have free resources as well. People can just text the word podcast to 55444. But anyone out of the country will just create a page for them as well. They could go to cori-mascaro.com, forward slash to know thyself. And that'll have some meditations and stuff for people. There you go. You're loaded and ready to go with all the offerings. Sweet. Great. Great touch points, dude. Thank you. Appreciate you.

Excited to connect and develop our friendship more. Yeah. And everybody for tuning in. Thanks for being our virtual friends today. And tuning into this conversation, sending you much love until next time, be well.