Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #385 Embodied Wisdom: Navigating Fear, Martial Arts, and Meditation w/ Michael Holt

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

In this episode, I welcome Michael Holt, a multifaceted being known for his expertise in men's groups, meditation, and martial arts. The talk covers Michael's journey from a troubled youth in Philadelphia to becoming a meditation and martial arts expert based in Los Angeles. We discuss the profound impacts of art therapy, personal struggles with emotional stability, and transformative experiences with meditation and spiritual practices. Michael shares insights on his unique men's work organization, Savage and Saint Collective, which combines the intensity of martial arts (the Savage) with the peaceful depth of meditation (the Saint). Additionally, the episode touches on the significance of cultivating both a savage and saintly aspect of oneself for balanced self-governance. Michael's experiences with unique spiritual practices such as grave and darkness retreats offer a glimpse into his journey of deep emotional healing and self-discovery. The conversation highlights the importance of meditation and the pursuit of personal growth, especially for men dealing with fear and emotional trauma.     Connect with Micheal here: Savage and Saint Instagram    Our Sponsors:   - Organifi.com/kkp and grab a Sunrise to Sunset kit to be covered with Red, Green and Gold, with 20% off using code KKP - Kratom does wonders, and Happy Hippo is the best source.... Go to happyhippo.com/kkp and use Code KKP for 15% off the entire store - Let’s level up your nicotine routine with Lucy.  Go to Lucy.co/KKP and use promo code (KKP) to get 20% off your first order. Lucy offers FREE SHIPPING and has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind.     Connect with Kyle: I'm back on Instagram, come say hey @kylekingsbu Twitter: @kingsbu  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Our Farm Initiative: @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyle's Website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site   If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe & leave a 5-star review with your thoughts!   We always love to hear feedback and are interested in what you want to learn. Reach out to us on social media!  

Welcome to today's podcast, everybody. We've got guest Michael Holt in the house. Got to record this one live at my home. I had heard about Michael Holt through a number of people back in the day working in particular with men's groups and doing some really cool novel stuff. I was fascinated by him. I heard him on Paul Checks maybe four years ago. And then our good friend Jason Picard, shout out to Jason, who's been on this podcast, intro'd us, and I was just super thrilled to get to have him come out to Austin. The podcast was exceptional. Michael's background is absolutely phenomenal. I mean, he has worked with some of the greatest teachers in any specific art, whether that be meditation, martial arts, you name it. And it's such a wealth

of knowledge and a wealth of experience. And really, that's where the rubber meets the road for me. I want to know that people don't just know the stuff, but live it. And Michael is a living embodiment of the stuff that he teaches. This was an excellent, excellent podcast. I learned a ton. I'm excited to try some of the things that he's doing. There's definitely some stuff that he mentions that I'm not sure I'll ever do. It's that hardcore.

But it was fantastic. He's a true brother. And I hope you guys enjoy this episode. Welcome to the podcast, brother. It's awesome having you. Being here in your home, which is pulsating with life everywhere you turn, children, animals, art, you're doing it, bro. We're trying. We've had many, many great influences. Paul Cech being one of our mutual friends and influences who got me into painting my wife was always into art but i think for especially myself maybe i'm just speaking with a broad brush here but i think a lot of dudes who have partners that are good at art think well that's her thing you know of course she's a natural at it well she loves that thing how could i fucking paint and anytime we do a journey with pa, he'd make us start a mandala, bring it, and actually

finish the mandala after the journey. I've done one myself. And just the power behind that was mind-blowing. It was palpable, sitting on medicine, staring at the painting like, holy shit, this thing is alive. Right. And I had the fortune of doing one of his mandala workshops a couple of years ago, and his art therapy breakdown from those paintings was unreal.

I know. I was at one. I think you were meant to be there, but you couldn't make it last minute or something. Because I asked Paul if I could stay in his guest room, and he said, Kyle's family is going to be there. But then you ended up, for whatever reason, you couldn't make it. But to your earlier point, yeah, it is remarkable what that dude can look at a painting and tell about a person. And you know it's not bullshit because the person's right there crying saying, yeah, that's exactly right. 100% spot on.

Yeah. And it was cool, too. You know, he mentions, I'm sure he did with you as well, but there can be a tendency to ignore other people's explanations. But everyone, due to spirits interweaving, is here on purpose. And whatever medicine I have for each individual person, there's something you can harvest from that. So pay attention to everyone.

And he was spot on. Everything that I listened to that had to do with other people either moved me or was medicine for me in my own way. Yeah, man, it's true. And just seeing all the beautiful painting in your home it's it's it's making me want to get back get the brushes out and create something hell yeah it's very powerful it is a very powerful practice very meditative and it's amazing i remember when i was creating my mandala i had no idea what i was gonna create i didn't visualize anything or have

a plan i just started moving the brush and then then when it was done, I was like, whoa, that's really fucking good. But I didn't feel like I painted it. Yeah, it moved through you. A lot of great writers talk about that. Wayne Dyer used to say that. I'm not thinking these words through. They're just coming through. Any artist in any medium, the highest expression of their art is in moments when they clear the vessel, get out the way, and let an intelligence greater than them move the brush,

tap the keyboard, throw the combination, carpentry, chef, whatever. It's like the highest expression of any of it is when the artist can become a conduit for something divine. Yeah, love that, brother. Absolutely. Well, I mean, we talked a little bit about the arc of how I like my show to go. something you know divine love that brother absolutely well i mean in the in the uh we talked a little bit about the the arc of how i like my show to go i genuinely do want to know what life was like for people growing up whether it was good bad challenging easy like you know it's very few people i meet that had perfect childhoods but if it was

fucking tell me about that right i'm curious what does that look like you know but talk about life growing up what your interests were, and, you know, education, all that fun stuff. Did you play sports, all that? Yeah, I was in athletics as a kid. It was like my life, really. I played football and basketball, and I was a swimmer, competitive swimmer. I was a really good swimmer. And it was like an identity for me, athletics.

All through high school, I wasn't a collegiate athlete, but actually I guess I'll circle back. I grew up, uh, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, blue collar suburbs of Philadelphia and, uh, grew up, you know, stable family life. Mom and dad were together, still are together. Um, but I think that I had a lot of kind of emotional disturbances or I didn't come out of childhood with like very strong emotional intelligence. And that caused me some pretty significant problems in my late teens, early 20s. And I got I was getting in a lot of trouble with the law. Like, you know, where I where I grew up, we start drinking when we're like 11 years old. You know, for some people that's weird.

For some people that's – they can relate. I was a couple years behind you, 13. Yeah. It's like Irish Catholic neighborhood. Not a bad neighborhood. I mean, not a bad – a good neighborhood, but a tough neighborhood. Like you were going to get in fist fights for sure. You were going to mob around with a pack of kids and encounter another pack of kids. And rather than recognize like, oh, you guys are just like us.

It's like, who the fuck are these guys? Let's fight. No guns, no knives, nothing like that, but a lot of fistfights. So that was part of it. And then I think that, uh, that mode of expression coupled with a lot of the kind of turbulence that I was not aware of coupled with alcohol you know that's a combination for trouble so I got from the age of probably 17 18 through to 23 24 I was getting in a lot of trouble I was getting locked up a lot early initially for like underage drinking and just dumb stuff like that. But then, you know, DUI, reckless endangerment, high speed chase, assault, and it started to get pretty, it got, it got to the point where I got a little bit scared around, okay, if I don't make some pretty serious changes, then I'm going to, my future is not going to be bright. I'm going to go to prison or I'm going to kill myself behind the wheel, or I'm going to commit suicide. I mean, I was in a dark spot or I'm going to kill somebody else. And

somehow, I mean, I did manage to graduate from college during that time. I graduated from Villanova university, which is a pretty good university I'm not gonna tell you what my GPA was but I got the fucking diploma and so anyway um I had this I went through this renaissance around the age of 21 21 22 where um I recognized that I needed to make some changes and I I recognized that I needed to really examine my relationship with myself because I didn't really, I didn't have any love for the man in the mirror. I talked to myself very harshly. I treated myself very harshly and I also didn't really have any capacity, I don't think, to, I guess I kept finding myself in these loops where the thing I wanted to avoid was the thing that I was doing you know I'm not gonna have a drink I'll have a bunch of drinks I'm not gonna say something crazy

I'm not gonna get in a fight I'm not gonna get arrested and then all that stuff happened so I was like my mind had a mind of its own and I couldn't seem to wrangle it and I had this fascination around meditation it was just kind of of, I think that I was, I was really struggling emotionally and I was, I felt like, well, meditation, it can't hurt, you know? So I tried to explore it. I read a couple of books. I remember reading, I distinctly remember this moment reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tollelle when i was probably i don't know how old i was probably around 1920 2021 something like that and i remember reading something in the book that like you know just the concept of the book there is no future there is no past there exists

only as constructs of the mind the The only reality is the present moment. And I was like, it literally knocked my socks off. I had to close the book and just put it down and just take a deep breath. It was such a bizarre concept. But it opened something in me. It really piqued my interest. And at that time, I had been raised a Catholic schoolboy. And I had basically become a Catholic school boy and I had basically, I had become like

a militant atheist. I read a lot of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. And because I had all this anger in me, I had so much anger. I didn't realize it then, but I had so much anger. People would come up to me and say, yo man, what's wrong? And I would say, what are you talking about? Because I didn't realize that I had this scowl on my face all the time, all of this anger, all this tension. And so I had kind of thrown off me my upbringing around Catholicism and Christianity. And that Eckhart Tolle book and meditation kind of called me back into spiritual orientation. And then through the years of learning more about meditation, studying Buddhism, going on meditation retreats,

I've made peace with Christianity. And I would see that, okay, in studying Buddhism and some of the quotes that are attributed to the Buddha, I would say, oh, that's exactly what I learned Jesus said. That's what he was talking about. All right, guys, quick break. I want to tell you about an amazing company called HappyHippo. HappyHippo is one of the world's greatest Kratom companies. I love this company.

I think they make phenomenal products. Personally, I'm more of a powders guy. I like to mix my own. I don't like having ready shots or other things like that. But in a pinch, they're not bad to have. That said, Kratom has become a phenomenal tool in my arsenal of tools. First and foremost, it helps me with any physical discomfort that I'm feeling. And I've got a lot of mileage on this body from playing football at eight years old through walking on at Arizona State. And then of course, my fight career in the UFC, there's been a lot of wear and tear.

And that physical discomfort can be alleviated with Happy Hippo Kratom. There's many different strains and varieties. I also like it when I'm going out at night. It's pretty rare as a 42 year old man for me to hit it hard in the evenings, but when we have a company party or when we're at a fit for service event, we're staying up late. Happy Hippo Kratom is one of my favorite things to be on. I just feel phenomenal. I'm social. I feel great. I want to dance. I want to move. My body feels awesome. And it's just an excellent tool in the cabinet. Check it out at happyhippo.com slash KKP and run the experiment. You know, reds are going to be more embodied, more of a body feeling. And some of the others, yellows, things like that might be a little bit

more heady, but give it a try. See what works for you. And they've also got some blends that are really cool. If you can't figure out, just run a blend and see what you like. Start with a small amount and then work your way up and see where you feel best. Use code KKP for 15% off everything in the entire store. I guess my, you know, the turmoil that I encountered through the years of late teens, early twenties was kind of like the soil that birthed a deeper inquiry into self-world and mystical experience. And I was still living back in Philly. I was around 23, 24 years old, but I had gone through this renaissance. I started reading, like I said.

I got myself back in the gym. I was an athlete in high school, but I traded that in for boozing and getting in fights. And I kind of let myself go, and I lost contact with, you know, fitness and having reverence for the body. So I had gone through this renaissance, and I knew I needed to make some significant changes in my life. And I had a good friend who was living out in L.A., and my best back in Philly was, he was gung-ho on moving out. And I was just kind of wandering. I didn't know what my next move was going to be. I just knew that I had to change my environment. I just knew from my soul I had to change my environment because the changes that I need to make in my life,

it's going to be hard to do in the same place where I'm at. So I moved to LA. Being my best friend, drove out to LA. And I thought that maybe this would be a nice little six-month experience. I didn't have a plan, bro. I did not have a plan. I only knew that I just wanted to get out of Dodge. And that was like almost 15 years ago.

And I'm still in LA. And the work that I'm engaged in now, the people I'm working with, and the way I earn my living, if I was to explain that to the kid who was driving across the country, it wouldn't have made any sense because I didn't set out to do any of this. I just stayed close to what I was passionate about. And through the years, I've just been able to kind of collect tools and nuggets and skill

sets and create something that's unique to me. So it's been a, it's been a very beautiful journey and one that I'm very much still on. And, uh, I guess that that can paint a little bit of a picture of my background. Yeah, that's incredible. Um, and akin to my life in many ways with, you know, fighting, growing up, boozing, that kind of shit. Um, I hit rock bottom when football ended in college, because I had completely identified with that. And that was my only outlet growing up, you know, somewhere in high school, they instituted zero tolerance laws. So like, if you fought, you'd go to the, you know, you're expelled automatically,

you go to the bad kids school, that kind of thing. So there might have been a handful of fights with like really trusted people, you know, aren't going to squeal on you, you know, like other friends on the football team, but it pretty much died down. And when football ended, I didn't want to give a fuck about my degree. I didn't want to keep going. I didn't like the latitude in the tunnel and, um, attempted suicide when I was 23, I think. And, um, spent a week in a hospital and, and that was the first, you know, time where it shattered the concept of what I should do or ought to do. It was the first time where I got to ask myself, what do I actually want? And I didn't know what I wanted.

I didn't see the path ahead. I just knew what was missing. I missed the team. I missed training as an athlete. And that's what led me into MMA. And MMA led me into taking care of myself, finding guys like Paul Cech, you know, retooling everything, you know, as far as the food I put in my body, the information I consume, all of it, you know? And so that was, that was pretty much my second birth, second mountain kind of deal, you know? And even from there, I didn't know when I finished fighting,

what the fuck I was going to do. I was working at a strip club twice a week and living in my mom's garage, you know, but the, there was this, you know, diving into Mark Gaffney's work who I've had, I don't know if you're familiar with him. I've had him on maybe like eight times this year. We're doing the 12 faces of Eros and Eros is his language for the divine, his language for how consciousness works. And so there's these different aspects of that, but allurement is one of those big ones. And that really stands out to me that, you know, you don't see the path ahead of you, but you're saying yes to what's drawing you towards it anyways. Totally. Yeah. You're just saying yes to the closest thing. And that needs you, that leads you to the next closest thing. And that's just how it unfolds. I think in my work, I see a lot of guys struggle

with that. It's like, there's this kind of uh notion out there that okay a man must have purpose you need to know what your purpose is because your purpose kind of becomes like a like a north star that you can just orient toward if it's aligned with your purpose then do it if it's not then don't it simplifies life but purpose doesn't need to be this huge mission that is your reason for being born that's most people don't know what that is but you know what your immediate kind of interest is what are you passionate about right now it could be uh it could be losing 15 pounds but that's going to lead you to the next thing you know so just that's that's what i've learned in my journey. Because there was many times where I was, even when I got into martial art,

or meditation for that matter, for sure. All of it, even the work with Paul. All of the things that are foundational to my work that I offer right now, I didn't engage them from a place of, oh, I'm going to use this and then leverage this into how I'm going to make a living. That didn't even occur to me. It was only in retrospect that I realized, oh, I can spin this into a way to make a living. That didn't even occur to me. It was only in retrospect that I realized, oh, I can spin this into a way to make a living.

So it pays off afterward. But all you need to know in the short term is, are you interested in it? If you are, then go for it. And if you're not, then find a way out. Yeah, and keep listening to what's calling you towards it. Yeah. So you get to L.A.

You know, I definitely want to talk about getting in a train with Inosanto and stuff like that because we've got – it's funny. Even my homie Dean, who's on site, knew a guy, his best friend. You know, he was like, oh, you've got to ask him if he knows Anton. It's like his best buddy growing up. So it is a small world. My very first coach in MMA was a guy named Vince Perez-Mazzola, who I did the math on it when we were walking this morning.

I think he – we started training like – it's been 10 years since I retired, so maybe 10 years before that. So 20 years ago we started training together, which is fucking weird to say. Yeah, time flies. Maybe like 17, 16 years, but he had been in Arizona for I think 10. So you would have just missed each other, you know, based on your timeline by about 10 years, but he trained it into Santos for 20 some years was a Santa Monica guy before he moved out to Arizona. And, um, that was my first introduction into actually training with JKD and Bruce Lee's

style points. Like I loved, I was a fan of him from film, but never, you know, and I had to draw towards that, you know, but I never thought like, I'm going to go, you know, learn how to do this shit. And so he was the first guy that worked with me on Kali and shit like that. And, you know, we're mutual friends with Dr. Mark Chang. He's such a fucking awesome, awesome human. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Shout out Doc.

He's the man. He is incredible, dude. I'd love to have him. Doc, if you're listening to this, let's get back on the podcast. It's been way too long. Yeah, I'll hit him up. It's been, you know, for me, that was such a cool experience because it expanded what I thought I was going to learn how to punch,

kick, knee, you know, wrestle, break dudes' arms, you know, jujitsu, like very basic shit. And the stuff we were doing, you know, because it's such an it's such an intuitive training style that teaches you shit we have me we we hung a piece of paper from the ceiling of his garage and i bare fist punched that for two weeks straight that was the only punch i threw was the lead with the jab he's like generally you'd want to go you know strong hand forward but if you want to keep the the weekend hand forward you can you just have to make it yeah jkd style they exactly and so i i fucking threw punches with just

you know the three three inch punch with that left hand turning her over until i could cut the piece of paper that's so cool and when i could cut the piece of paper we had two weeks of training and i knocked the guy out with a straight left in my first fight after two weeks wow i was like dude you tell me anything i'm gonna do it yeah it's really counterintuitive i remember guru dan saying something like some study that uh they hooked up some some device that measures force on a heavy bag and they told the fighters to hit the bag at 20 okay now hit it at 50 now hit it at 80 now hit it 100 and they consistently got the highest force production at 80 so there's something about just being super relaxed and hitting that paper and

letting it go it's like wow that's where the power really comes from not from tension from relaxation and then i and i i'm preaching to the choir here with you but it's amazing all of the metaphors that you can draw from martial art into the spiritual path and into, you know, life generally. Absolutely. Well, I want to expand on that. You know, I've had, uh, jokingly, and sorry, if you're a fighter who's listening to this, fighters have been, uh, the least entertaining guests that I've had on the podcast, professional fighters, because generally they're still in that one track mind focus. This is what I do. This is who I am. This is what I'm setting out to do, you know, especially like guys that are in camp, that kind of shit. So I've kind of avoided that.

But I haven't spoken through the lens of martial arts and how that translates to life. So I'd love to dive into that, but unpack like when you got to see Dan, when did that start when you got to LA? I'm so happy that you asked this question, man, because I don't often get to talk about this but um so I had always been interested in martial art and uh I couldn't I didn't I couldn't bring myself to start training when I was living in Philly although I did have a little bit of a boxing background I found a boxing gym and I I learned enough to be moderately not not get my ass kicked anyway but I wasn't training really hard because I still was partying too much, and I didn't really have any real clarity. But I had a little bit of a boxing background.

So I get to L.A., and it's a brand-new life. It's like, wow, everything is brand-new. I'm out of Philly. I remember standing on the street waiting to cross the street, and the cars just stopped. And I was like, wow, it's way different. In Philly, they'll just run your ass over. So it was like, okay, I had some energy. Making a big change in life gives you a lot of energy.

So I was like, yeah, I always wanted to train. Maybe now's the time I figure that out. But I didn't have any money. I actually found a job as a trainer because I was working as a trainer in Philly, and I got hired at a gym in L.A., but they ran a background check on me after I got hired. And I had a couple of red flags. It was like a corporate gym. And so they told me, and I was doing really well, but they told me, no, you know, it's not corporate policy. You can't

work for us. So it kind of took the wind out of my sails, but I wasn't making any money. I'm living in LA, but I want to train, but I just had this strong intention. Okay. I want to train but I just had this strong intention okay I want to train so I think I saw this guy in LA fitness and he was doing some kind of tai chi form or something and I was like just pick his brain and he ends up giving me a free lesson I don't know what the hell he was teaching me but it was cool and then he introduced me to his teacher and this guy gives me a lesson but then he's like uh so if you want to keep training it'll be like 85 an hour which to me at the time was like it might as well be three thousand dollars an hour yeah so okay that's not going to work and then one day i'm walking to uh this meditation collective that i was investigating and i walked past this

martial art gym. I'm not going to say the name because I'm about to talk shit, but it was definitely a McDojo. But I didn't know it at the time. I just said they were training. And they say one month free training. So I go, that price is right. So I go in there, I train,

and the owner of the school is giving me private lessons. And then, you know, it's all new to me. So I'm learning a few things more like karate though. And then all of my lessons were individual lessons with the owner of the school. And he invites me to a group class. And so I go to the group class and some of the higher belts, I couldn't help but think I would fucking mangle this dude. And I'm brand new to this. So what is the use of a belt? And anyway, I expressed this concern to the teacher in a much more polite way.

And he's not happy with what I'm saying. So whatever. Long story short, I'm on the bluffs in Santa Monica practicing the moves that I've been learning under this teacher. And this random guy comes up to me. He's like hey bud you're looking pretty good and I'm like really because I don't I'm just getting started here you know he's like have you ever heard Dan Inosanto and I go no I never have and he goes you should go train at the Inosanto Academy and I go okay he literally takes a card out writes down Inosanto

Academy and gives me the card. I've never seen this man before or since. And so I wander into the Inosanto Academy. And as soon as I go in, I'm like, oh, this is it. This is it. The Inosanto Academy is, it's not a fighter's gym. I've competed in Muay Thai. There are some students who come through the academy who are competitive who want to compete but it's it's that perfect middle ground between like

traditional martial art and sport martial art and self-defense it really checks all of those boxes and i remember the first day i walked in guru dan is playing the drums and people are moving around and it's just like the energy is like i'm like oh wow this is cool but my mentality was so wrong back then I walk in like I walk down the prison yard so I'm looking around at people I'm looking around I'm like for those just listening Michael's a big fucking dude too like bigger than me so I'm not bigger than you bro but but uh so I'm checking people like all right that. So I'm checking people like, all right, that dude's a clown. He's light work. All right, maybe he might give me a problem.

And I'm looking at muscles. Silly, right? And so I'm just kind of like putting everybody in a hierarchy of how they present. And then class starts. And the first class is a Muay Thai class. And we warm up whatever and then guru dan calls up a student who i didn't know then but it's daniel anero who's very high level martial artist in multiple disciplines but to me at the time he just looked like

regular dude like yeah that guy's no problem and daniel anero comes up and demonstrates the combination on the tie pads. And I'd never seen anybody move like that before. And I immediately was like, I like took literally backpedal to the back of the class. And I was like, I'm just going to stay back here, stay humble, stay in my lane and see if I can't learn a thing or two

because I don't know shit. And that's exactly what I did. I stayed humble. I stayed in my lane. And I learned so much about so much at the Inosanto Academy. So much more than punches, kicks, knees, and elbows, man. Like, really. That place is powerful.

I remember one time. I've mentioned this story before. But it really speaks to the energy of a real martial artist and the energy of that place. We're in a Kali class, Filipino martial art, which for any of the listeners who may not know, it's Kali is like the creme de la creme of bladed weapon systems. Like really, really skillful knife applications. Knife, stick, machete, pocket stick. You learn how to move with a weapon in Kali. And so we're doing knife applications, like finding vital targets on a template of a human body.

And the instructor says, something like, on the backhand angle too, if you nick the carotid artery, make sure you get your offhand up because blood is going to come out at like very high pressure and blind you. And that was such a weird fucking thing that like he said it. And I was like, what? That's I was like, that is so strange to hear.

But I also love that. And then at that exact moment, off in the corner, there's some advanced students, higher level belts. And there's like three or four of them. And they're they're kind of huddled around in the corner and i'm like what are they up to there's a bumblebee on the mat that had like broken its wing and they're all very gently making sure that nobody steps on it and just guiding it out to the to safety and i was like wait what wait oh this is you you can be both that's what a martial artist is. Absolutely.

Yeah. Absolutely. I don't know. Dan was Bruce Lee's right-hand man and really took over as Bruce went into film as the premier JKD coach in the world. Yeah. A lot of stunt performers come through the Inosanto Academy, and Dan had a very close relationship with Bruce Lee. He was a top student in JKD, and dan also taught uh bruce collie

filipino martial art i think he taught him the nunchuck too and uh yeah there's big murals and pictures of bruce lee all over and dan's always telling stories about him but yeah it's a very special place and dan asanto is a very special individual guy just shows up and teaches for years he's been doing it i think he's he's in his mid-80s right now and he's still bouncing around he looks great too like he looks old he's got the tan leathered skin sure but he's fucking razor sharp you know you can tell like i've met shaman like that i met this one guy who was smoking mapacho like a chimney down in panama at the tribal gathering in 2015 he was 95 years old and i was like say that i had the translator i made her say it three times he's 95 when did he start smoking mapacho that's what got me into organic tobacco long before paul had and um he

started as a tobaccero when he was five which is typical actually if you're going to be a medicine man and you're from that lineage they just start you young and uh i was like 90 years this guy's been smoking organic tobacco. He was shredded. Fucking perfect jaw, perfect teeth. They didn't have, like the people in Weston A. Price's books, no word for cancer, no word for heart disease, no word for any of that shit in his tribe. But that's what I think of Dan Inosanto when I think of that.

I think of somebody who was just a perfect picture of health, interior, exterior. And one of the things that I loved from Bruce Lee, I think a lot of people's draw to him is the spiritual component, the idea that as you train this vessel, there's a direct correlation to your experience in life. And that's not typically taught in other martial arts, you know? Right. It depends on the energy of the academy. A lot of places are just fight factories where, you know, they're training competitors.

It's more of focused mostly on the athletics. And that's cool, you know. That's fine. And then there's the more McDojos that are so traditional that they're kind of diluted in what they are actually capable of. My Chi will take care of you. There was something that – I forget what it was, but I remember Rogan talking about it a few years back. Or one of or one of they know the old masters who was also in his 80s no one had

challenged him and then um this kid who came up in in china doing mixed martial arts challenged him yeah he was like this is pretty recent right yeah and and fucking destroyed the guy and bleed blood's going everywhere and all the students are like oh my god well that guy i think had to leave china yeah he did it a couple of times i think he knocked out some some ancient masters and he got a lot of backlash in china but look it's not there's it's not to say that there's not powerful kind of applications and utility of the internal work the generating chi and cultivating chi and the softer internal practice martial art practices but you have to be a realist. I'm a Tai Chi teacher, and I practice Tai Chi all the time.

If somebody busted into this room right now, I'm not going. Grasping Sparrow spreads its wing. Stork walk. No, dude. So, yeah, at the one end of the spectrum, there's the fight factories. They'll just chew you up like a meat grinder, hard sparring, and just, it's the sport aspect of martial arts.

It's cool. And then on the other end is the traditional, and then there's the self-defense. But a good friend of mine would say that a complete martial artist can check, there's a Venn diagram there. Sport, traditional, self-defense. And you should have some degree of aptitude in all three to be a complete martial artist.

I haven't seen a ton of guys in the ufc with jkd listed as a background it's like maybe a you know a count on one hand that's listed in their top three but i have seen the collie sticks come into play even in all the fight factories like it's such a useful tool to build speed and hand-eye coordination i don't know why i kept training Kali. I'm so glad I did. But I would, early stages, my goal in martial art really was to be the toughest guy in the room because I had a lot of trauma and I didn't know it at the time,

but I had this like crippling fear and I just needed to feel safe. And so I'm sure you can relate. That's really what gets a lot of guys foot in the door at the martial art academies. If we're being honest with ourselves, we're afraid. And so I'm sure you can relate. That's really what gets a lot of guys foot in the door at the, at the, uh, martial art academies. If we're being honest with ourselves, we're afraid. And so I was very afraid and I just wanted to be strong. I wanted to know that if it, if, if it kicked off, I would likely be the last man standing. Quick break to tell you about another awesome company. That's been one of our longest running

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of products here, but the pouches are my favorite and I'm a big boy. So I like rolling with the 12 MIG mints. Call me old school, but that's my favorite. Check it out. Lucy.co slash KKP and remember to use code KKP at checkout. I was interested in Kali because I saw the way high level Kali guys moved. And I was like, I want to move like that. Damn, that's cool. And so I would go to the Kali classes, but I would constantly, my internal dialogue would be like, what the fuck am I doing? Why do I have two sticks in my hand? I'm doing this choreography with this fucking guy who's got two sticks in his hand. When am I ever going to have two sticks on me and encounter some other guy that's got two sticks on him and we're going to

have a stick fight? But I couldn't see at the time that actually when you're learning how to move with a weapon in this hand, a weapon in this hand, you're moving your feet, your right hand is on the left side of your body, your left hand is on the left side of your body your left hand is on the right side of your body it's so cognitively overwhelming it's like flow state inductive but also you start to add in those little non-traditional strikes to your striking and it really amplifies your ability as a striker like it's you learn how to move with the sticks on day one in filipino martial art typically they'll give you two sticks and it's only if you stick with it long enough and you take the weapons out of your hand that you realize oh this works whether I have a weapon in my hand or not and this these sticks could be a knife it could be a pocket stick it could be a

machete so you learn how to move with a weapon, and the movement then becomes the weapon. And, yeah, Kali is very powerful, and I think that's why Guru Dan is so sharp because it's very cognitively challenging, Filipino martial art. I mean, all martial art or any complex movement practice, but especially Kali. Yeah, the cross body. Yeah, the cross body. You don't see that a lot in any other arts, and you certainly don't see it in the gym. Everything is linear, one plane of movement. But the cross patterning, it's really powerful.

One other thing about the Inosanto Academy is I remember years ago, whenever the first Jason Bourne movie came out, so it's way back. I mean, probably 20 years, right? Yeah, like 2000, 2000 2002 something like that but i went to see the movie with a couple of my boys went to the fucking granite run mall back in on the east coast anyway those fight sequences were so cool and we leave the movie and i said to my boys and they'll remind me of this to this day i said i don't know what the hell that was that i was watching but i'm gonna learn how to do that i'm gonna learn that cut to the next scene years down the line just just from following the passion following the interest i'm at the

inosanto academy learning kali and silat which is the arts that they use for the choreography in the born movies and right there in the class is jeffy mata the world-renowned stunt coordinator for the born movies who choreographed all the sequences. That's so fucking rad. You can't make it up, dude. I didn't even know what Kali and Silat was, much less Jeff Imada. But then there I am. Yeah, that's so fucking cool.

I could talk with you martial arts the whole time, but just because I'm a huge fan of that lineage. And it's as much as I love Muay Thai. I spent a few weeks in Thailand. It's fucking incredible martial art. Love Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, too. You know, I coach at the Gracie Humaita, the kids' classes. That's so good.

Alongside Koji Bamba, who's a phenomenal fucking Jiu-Jitsu practitioner, little guy, little Japanese guy, and he's just dialed. Like, it's his thing. So those are incredible. It's rare, you know, it's rare to come across somebody with your background that, that, you know, understands that this is, this is a tool that unlocks so much, especially for men. You spoke to the piece on fear, right? And it's so fucking true. Um, check was talking about infant childhood development he's probably told you this before but one of the when the first when the baby first is able to push its upper body away from the floor that's it learning the physical version of no right and

right then you'll see like you can stuff your kid with food for a while and as soon as they learn no the hand comes in front of the fucking spoon and says no. And they start throwing shit down and saying no to what you're offering them, right? They start to get picky. Yeah, so through the body, they learn a boundary. Uh-huh. Yeah.

And he goes, why do you think so many young men, what's their favorite exercise? Bench press. How much do you bench, bro? Like that's exactly what it is. They're still trying to say no, most often to dad or or you know uh school or whatever the structure is that they can't

they can't get over but i thought that was so fucking interesting and pulling is yes you're pulling something to you you're drawing it into you sure um but there is this over emphasis on on the no you know that happens to to young You know, there's so much that I want to get into with you when it comes to this, because everything you've developed through your own life experience has a direct correlation with men, right? And that's really what you've taken a deep dive into is men's work, right? Talk about when you had enough of these tools to where you started working with other people teaching it? So my professional trajectory was I was in the gyms initially, just working as a trainer. But I had a real interest in people. And I also had a real passionate interest in kind of

self-development, you know, for myself. And so naturally in my training sessions, you know, the conversation would typically, there was an opportunity for greater depth in the conversation. And, you know, what's really going on. I would, which I'm sure is common for a lot of personal trainers, but you become a bit of a therapist. But it just became clear to me that, um, I'm not very passionate about counting your reps on the lap pull down. And I would rather talk to you about, you know, what's really going on. And it also became very clear to me at that time in my life that fitness is obviously very important, but it's not the end all be all of wellness.

You can meet a lot of people who are very, very fit, but not very, very well. So, and then I had begun my course of education with Paul, and I also had a degree in psychology, and I'd always aspired to create kind of like a mind-body practice, and I had begun a pretty deep dive into the practice of meditation under the tutelage of some real deal teachers. And at that time, my personal training business was pretty lucrative. I mean, I was successful. It wasn't very challenging, but it was really crushing me inside to sit through the sessions and like it wasn't fulfilling my soul. And so under the, you know, at the push of some close friends of mine, it's very important to have a close inner circle. And they pushed me to be like, bro, you got to give it up and you got to take the leap into the next chapter of your business as a health practitioner. And so I did that.

And I started to earn a lot more money. And I was more fulfilled in the work work the work I was doing with people but I was working with men and women and I just I just knew in my I just knew the way I like to talk you know I like to be a little rough around the edges of people I'm talking I want to censor myself and I also just became clear that I am familiar with walking the path from dark to light as a man. But I don't know what it is to be a woman. And I think that men and women are very different. And I want to stay in my lane and work with men.

And so at that time, I was invited by two friends of mine. Dave Burns, who's here in Austin, and Justin Pierce, who's now in Florida. And the three of us collaborated and built a men's community where we would teach online classes and host retreats. And then we did that for a few years. And now that organization, which was called Tribe, is now dissolved. And then I set out and built my own offering, and I built the Savage and Saint Collective. That's awesome. How many years ago was that? That I built the Savage and Saint Collective. That's awesome. How many years ago was that? That I built the Savage and Saint Collective? Probably like four years ago now.

Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I've heard of it. I don't know. Mutual friends. I think somebody in Fit for Service maybe three years ago had either been a part of it or was interested in it. And there was another one, Sons, something, Sacred Sons, something like that. Yeah, I've heard of them.

Yeah, I'm not affiliated with them either. You know, they've had their own. I mean, I have heard of ups and downs through people that are part of that program. See, men's work is such a loosely defined term. And it means so many different things to so many different people. And I think, unfortunately, for people that are outside of the work of, outside of the wellness space, it has a pretty negative connotation. So. I think that if you look at look into the men's work sphere, there's kind of two extreme ends.

The one is misogynistic, alpha entrepreneur, like it's all about getting chicks and getting money you know um and then the other side is like the super spiritual in air quotes like spirituality as a uh it's like a like a piece of fashion you know yeah spiritual materialism yeah and also like kind of uh wearing softness or weakness if you hear a dude that's in men's work, say the word vulnerable or authentic more than three times in a minute, you know you're on the wrong track. They're catchwords, right?

Catchwords like that. And I don't mind. Both of those words are great in the right context. But when they're just thrown out. Yeah, that's that's such a good metric yeah and so yeah the other end it's like there's this promoting this kind of harmlessness or a softness or conflating emotional intelligence with uh kind of getting lost in one's stuff and so that's why i wanted to offer something that's in the middle you know

that's the savage and saint and initially you know as the kind of inspiration came to me, it was, okay, I'm a deep meditator and I have a serious inquiry into this world of spirituality. And I'm doing long retreats and I have the good fortune of meeting really, you know, bona fide teachers. That's the Saint. And then I'm a martial artist and i'm getting in the ring and you know i'm i was working as a bouncer like just like you for 10 years and i know how to fuck somebody up that's the savage and so it was that's not the way i look at it now but that was the early stages but now i've come to see it as like it's a strategy for self-governance. If you would govern yourself well, if you would reach your greatness and enjoy the journey to your greatness, then that path will absolutely

require aptitude in expressing a very savage part of yourself, but also expressing a very saintly part of yourself. The savage part is the relentless striving toward your goal in spite of all obstacles. The saint side is the radical and unconditional acceptance of yourself and the world as it is right now, exactly as it is right now, completely. And something very magical happens when you can kind of do both of those things well and you can just abide in the middle. And it unlocks a vitality, a performance output that I didn't know was possible or that an individual didn't know was possible. Most guys who are moving toward their ambitions are so heavily kind of out of balance on the savage side that when they achieve the thing they have no capacity to really enjoy it and so then it's on to the next thing and life just becomes a series

of on to the next thing on to the next thing with no capacity to ever land where you are and so it's very critical to get still enough to get quiet enough to have the direct experience that oh you're perfect i'm perfect this is And then from that place, then go out and chase your dream. But it's not that important anymore. And because it's not that important, your goal is not that important, paradoxically, it's more likely to happen. Yeah, I love that. I was thinking about the savage portion used incorrectly in some, the men's work you talk about with the, you know, get pussy, get money and that kind of thing.

Sure. There, there is a, there can be a misdirection of, of just fucking getting after it at all costs, you know, but specifically from a business standpoint, this is the most important thing. And I've had clients that were, there can even be a delusion of grandeur in like my app you know tech startup is going to change the world and like i have to give everything to this even at the cost of myself like martyrdom you know and it's like

if you don't take care of yourself during this process that doesn't pan out right there's no sustainability in that there's no hey in five years you know once the fucking the thing releases then i'm good like no you have to take care of yourself all the way through but there is you know uh correctly absolutely a necessity for both of those two things to be harnessed and i totally i had a moment on um a hunt where i'd been successful in hunting before. And it was one of my first rifle hunts. And now I was literally asking myself, why am I here while I'm walking the land, trying to hunt.

And it was after a mushroom journey, like right after a mushroom journey. So I'm still feeling medicine. I'm not fucking incapacitated by any means, but I really questioned that. And it was like, oh, I'm doing this for the tribe. I'm doing this to feed my family. I'm doing this. All these fucking things that weren't the actual reason.

And I knew it was a different reason than before. And it was the moment I came on the animals was the moment it came into my head. I'm here to participate in death. And the life can't exist without death. And it's me agreeing to the killer instinct that's within me. Yeah. And saying yes to that part. Right. While agreeing to the killer instinct that's within me. Yeah. And saying yes to that part. Right, right.

While still loving this animal that's going to die. Right. In that moment, the second it clicked, fucking, I took one step and the guide stopped me and said, here they are, 200 yards. And I was like, whoa. Yeah, that's it, bro. That's it, bro. You just nailed it. Say yes to that very natural kind of energy that is in you and wants to come through you.

And as you say yes to it, keep your heart open. That's what the world needs. Because if you don't say yes to that, or if you live in a way where that energetic has no place to express itself, then it comes out all sideways. Or it comes back against you you know so the it's just about creating healthy containers to express yourself like a man you know and i think martial art is probably for me anyway it's the best way to work all that stuff out but the degree to which a man is disconnected from that part of himself is a degree to which he will most likely cause harm because i'm sure

you'll agree and fuck you're you're a great example you're a dangerous individual but you occur to me as a kind peaceful person and the most dangerous in my life and through the path of martial arts that's pretty typical the most dangerous guys are usually the coolest humble most calm most peaceful because they've they know what they can do and they've proven themselves to themselves. You mentioned you worked as a bouncer. I worked as a bouncer for over a decade. The guys that come in looking for trouble, they're usually not trained athletes. No.

Usually the trained athletes are the ones saying, no, no, I'm sorry, let me buy you a beer. That was my bad. And I can relate, honestly. Since I started training, I told you, early life, I was always getting in fights. I haven't been, I mean, I'm a grown man now, but I remember the last time I was at a bar, and this is after I had some training, and somebody bumped into me, and I apologized, and he told me, go fuck myself, or I'll fuck you up, or something.

And in my head, this was like something out of Karate Kid, in my head, literally, I was like, right elbow, right knee, right knee, push them off. Exactly. And it would have taken two seconds. And I just was like, I took a deep breath. And it wasn't that easy for me. I did have to leave because I felt like it was unjust. But now, it doesn't ever even occur to me. And actually, because I have some training, and I'm not trying to sound like the baddest dude on the earth. I'm far from it. But if you have some training, most people don't. Especially if you've been a world-class fighter, that's just a totally different population. Anyway, because I have some training, I have been able many times actually to walk calmly into a dangerous

situation that I'm like, you know, a guy swinging on his girl or a homeless guy stabbing another guy. You walk into those situations calmly and you can change, you can change the outcome just by your presence because there's something that is so destabilizing and such a pattern interrupter to, to some, to then a guy who's in a dangerous situation, but he's calm that freaks everybody out. And so that's in that way, the savage having that kind of skillset in your back pocket can actually create more peace and love in the world. Yeah. I love that. That's such a fucking cool example. And, and I mean, my mind's going in a hundred different directions right now. I'm like, maybe it's the heart math, you know,

the measurement of the, the energy field as you enter it. But I think, I think the point you made on the ability, you know, this from having been in the experiences, the guy who's running in his mouth is not the guy to worry about. No. The guy who was standing there quiet, calm as a cucumber. That's the motherfucker I'm worried about. Totally. Every time. That's the guy who's standing there quiet calm as a cucumber that's the motherfucker i'm worried about totally every time you know that's the guy yeah if he's if he's panicked i don't worry about him if he's running his mouth i'm not worried about him but if he's calm as a cucumber that's the problem for sure yeah that when i've when i stopped working at the front doors of nightclubs i worked at the doors in philly and in new jersey and uh by the end of it, I was already pretty heavy into meditation. Like I would go on a meditation retreat and then come back and work at the door. And it was just

the juxtaposition into the life I was leading and the life that I, it was too severe. So I had to, I knew it was time to call it quits. But the most fascinating aspect of that job at the end of it was exactly what you just described somebody in front of me drunk cursing me screaming raising their voice and i'm not really reacting at all i'm just standing there looking them dead in the eye and i'm taking deep breaths and i'm cool and i'm calm and they keep yelling at me telling fuck you you're fucking lucky but they're backpedaling and i'm not saying nothing and i haven't even moved i'm still standing right here but I didn't say nothing so I just got really fascinated with like the energy and how it's the energy that can really diffuse a situation but you can only ever kind of explore

that if you have the ammo to back it up if you don't know how to throw a combination then you're not going to be able to be calm when there's somebody in your face screaming at you. Not authentically. Tell me about some of the other tools that you gathered, you know, meditation. And I'm also curious about your meditation. I haven't been on a meditation retreat. My dad did a 30-day satsang with Mooji out in India and said it was, I mean, he came back absolutely different from that experience. My buddy Aaron Alexander told me vipassana was one of

the fucking best things he's ever done 10 day um one of my homies craig was listening to this same thing and just swears the vipassanas are like a one of the ultimate ways to reset um i tried for every form of meditation and then when i was at on it i was the director of human optimization so i was the office guinea pig and i was working with all the fucking devices the electrode energetic this the binaural beats all this shit and nothing ever really landed for me until i got into mantra based meditation and uh emily fletcher who's been on this podcast gave me a mantra and i sat with her for three days with a small group of us and she walked me through her practice which is you, a Vedic traditional meditation style. And that landed so fucking quick that that's been my main go-to, but I'm also curious, you know, like there's,

it's such a wide fucking field. Yeah. You know, it's like men's work, you know, it means nothing. It means so many, the meditation means so many different things, so many different people that it doesn't really mean much unless you define it. And I live in Los Angeles and I could throw a rock and it would land on a meditation teacher. Everybody's a meditation teacher, but very few of them know what the hell they're talking about or know the true utility of practice. Like I said earlier, I've been very fortunate when I look back to just fall into the laps of real deal teachers. And at the time, I didn't really know that. But I had the good fortune of just encountering enlightenment-based meditation teachers who were the real deal or are the real deal and taught, you know, with the expectation of liberation in this lifetime. Meditation, you know, mindfulness-based stress reduction and learning how to relax your

body, that's all great. But the true utility of practice is to realize freedom in this lifetime. And so my core meditation teachers have been George Haas, who's in Los Angeles. He has an organization called Metta Group. And what they specialize in is attachment style repair through the meditative work. And then Shinzen Young, who I'm not sure if you ever heard of him yeah yeah he's uh he was a buddhist monastic lived in japan for years just he on tim ferris's podcast he might have been i just i remember the name i can't yeah he's pretty well known i've been i've gone on many retreats with shinzen he's such an impressive human being he's almost like almost almost feels like uh like he's so brilliant he's so intelligent that it's weird like on a meditation retreat he'll just

recite a poem in fluent german and then give a lecture about physics and how that relates to what we're doing on the med like it like it's crazy how smart the guy is. And then the late Dan Brown was another amazing teacher. He passed away a few years ago, and he was one of the most impressive human beings I ever encountered. And his successor is Dustin DiPerna. But these are all teachers who are teaching from a place of great, great experiential knowledge. And I guess years ago, like I said, I became fascinated with the practice of meditation, fascinated enough to read a few books, fascinated enough to seek out a teacher,

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in the store. It was so fucking weird, man. To me at the time. Coming from Philly, trying to get my life together, trying to keep myself out of handcuffs, trying to figure out my next move. And I'm in Joshua Tree with a bunch of hippies. And I'm thinking to myself, what the fuck happened to you, bro? You used to be somebody and now you're in the desert. What the fuck? So my first meditation retreat was a hard slog of continually trying and failing to cultivate some concentration, to stay in the technique, to stop from falling asleep, to survive the barrage from the inner critic that is telling me this is a terrible idea.

And there was actually one moment where I was walking from the meditation hall back to my dormitory on this long dirt path and there's this Asian woman walking past me old Asian woman and she's walking past and as we get closer I watched my mind suggested me the Muay Thai combination that I would employ if she attacked me and that's the kind of thing that would probably just go unnoticed. But in the context of a meditation retreat, you notice everything.

You really start to cultivate a witness perspective on your own mind. And so for the first time, and I distinctly remember this, for the first time I was like, what's that about? Do you think an Asian woman's going to attack you on a meditation retreat? What are you so afraid of?

Whoa, there's some fear here. And so while the meditation retreat, the first meditation retreat, was not an enjoyable experience at all. When I returned to my life, there was just like this feeling of spaciousness around the experience of myself and i've found there was a subtle but significant newfound capacity to incline myself toward more skillful behavior and you know show up with greater integrity and suffer less and feel a little bit more peace enough that it was like okay what might happen if i went on a one-week retreat and what would

happen if i practice every day what might happen if i went on a one-week retreat and what it would happen if I practice every day what might happen if I went on a four-week retreat and then since then that was probably 12 or 15 years ago you know retreat practice is just it's just part of my year a couple of retreats a year but that's one of the things I feel called to kind of speak to and in my work especially with men is to bring back kind of speak to in my work, especially with men, is to bring back kind of the warrior ethos to the meditation practice. Because I remember back in back at that time, I was working in the gym, and I would tell my clients, I'm not going to be here next week, I'm going to meditation retreat. And they would say, Oh, that sounds amazing. You're so

lucky. And I would think to myself, well, I'm not lucky. I mean, you could do it too, if you wanted to open to the public, it's open to the public. I mean, you could do it too if you wanted to. It's open to the public. Yeah, it's open to the public. Anybody who wants to can do it. And also, there's this connotation with a meditation retreat that it's like a relaxing spa day. Like, oh, it's time to just unplug, unwind, and just chill. R&R.

Must be nice. No, dude. I mean, it's fucking hard. Especially at first. Because you don't really have any capacity to just zone in and just not think. Imagine, you know, it's like we live in a culture where the primary means of emotional regulation is distraction. So what might your experience be like if all distractions were removed? You know, what might come up?

What might you have to face so i really i mean i i know it but i want to share it that meditation the path of the of the meditation is the warrior path and i want to call forth men into this practice that has changed my life and my relationship with myself in profoundly positive ways that i didn't expect or know was possible. And I find myself in a unique position, you know, suited to call guys like you. I mean, not you personally, but fighters, rough around the edges type dudes, vets, you know, guys who've been in some trouble. Because your typical, that kind of a dude just isn't going to listen to, you know, the namaste, super spiritual guy. So I really do feel like my sole mission is to call the warriors into this

practice because it is the warrior practice. I love that. That's an awesome point you make. It's one of the things that Paul Cech always alluded to, you know, why should I teach, uh, what Paul knows better than I know, you know, and, and, and the reason, you know, there's Czech practitioners in the world is because the fact that some people can't listen to Paul, you know, some people see him and there's a, you know, a daddy issue or whatever the fuck, you know, and, or they don't have access. Right. And so like the more people that come from different angles uh it makes a big difference you know in your background in your life experience and your physicality is a drawing point for people that come from those backgrounds right for a certain kind of guy yeah so i'm just trying to

create the lane for that guy and uh to share with him what my teachers have shared with me you know the the beauty of this path of accessing deeper parts of yourself and making friends with yourself. Cause I really think that's, for me, that's, that's what it all boils down to making friends with yourself and maybe challenging how you define self. Yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, I never drank to cover pain. I certainly had shit that I didn't work on until I got into plant medicines and meditation, but you know, I would drink to celebrate. I drink to have a good time. And, um, and I was never an angry or shit, shit head drunk, but it was in my mind when I really

got clear on that, it was either to cover fear or because I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. Yeah. You know, as I really looked at that, there was a part of me that number one, didn't know myself or had identified as something I wasn't, or was wearing the mask and the persona of what I ought to be, you know, and until that bubble burst, right, there was never really a home within. And I think that these, these practices have the ability, you know, like ayahuasca, they say, is like peeling a layer of the onion when you sit, right? I think there is that with meditation too. Maybe not as thick of a layer, but with the practice, just as thick.

With consistent practice, just as thick. And I think the difference between the insights that you can glean through meditation or say a meditation retreat and a plant ceremony or a plant medicine experience is that you definitely get to keep all of the insights that you get through the meditation practice because they land more gradually but sometimes the you know what can be revealed in a plant medicine ceremony can be so outside the ordinary experience that you can't smuggle it all back into yeah you know the sober mind yeah it took actually it was my third journey with ayahuasca three four and five i'll say because i was going at that point i was you know beating the drum this was fucking

amazing this exists how often can i go that kind of thing real gung-ho and um you know had profound life-changing experiences in journey one and two. And three and four and five, I kept getting the same information. Meditate and do yoga. Yeah. Like your stuff, meditate and do yoga. And it was ayahuasca telling me this. Nobody was telling me this. Sure.

Or the part of my own consciousness unlocked from ayahuasca was telling me this. And I had no experience with it. But I started getting pissed off in the fourth and fifth journey. Like, why do you keep telling me this and i had no experience with it um but i started getting pissed off in the fourth and fifth journey like why do you keep telling me this because they were one month apart it was one day sets not not three or four like i'm used to now and um you know the answer was was clear you don't get new information until you fucking at least start you don't have to master this but you haven't done any fucking homework and this is there's no there's no new information if you don't practice so well put dude and that's my primary kind of beef with individuals who they're the totality

of their spiritual inquiry involves substances because yeah like you said you'll get the message you'll be given some clarity on what you need to do and then the work becomes to do it and then if the time is right if it feels right you know months down the line if not years then go look the way i always frame it because people ask me this all the time is i look at uh plant medicines as a supplement you know in the same way that you can if you're doing the work of moving the weights and exercising, then supplements can help you. But if you're only taking supplements, then you might just be kind of, you're not getting anywhere new and you could actually be harming yourself. So the work, you know, in this analogy, the work of moving the weights is like you said, stretching, sleeping well, eating well, doing your daily spiritual practices,

whatever they are, meditation, prayer, stillness, you know, cleaning out the debris from your mind. And then you approach the next time you approach a plant medicine, you come with a cleaner vessel and you get a deeper insight. But I've seen a lot of people who they have a great experience and then, oh, I should do more medicine. And then they just keep doing more medicine. It's not obvious to them, but it's obvious people around them that you're just kind of losing contact with the ground. Yeah. That was myself included.

And it wasn't like I was unhinged in an ungrounded way where it was like, I'm going fucking fifth dimensional Christ consciousness. Like that wasn't the shit I was into, but I could see it, you know, like, well, I forget the quote,

you know, you can, you can see the, the, the twig in the quote you know you can you can see the the the twig in your brother's eye but you can't see the the log wedged in your own you know and like I could see the the fucking wood in everyone else and it only dawned on me after the fact that I was like oh shit what are the pieces that I keep bringing to the altar why do I keep going back to the wishing well and really it wasn't until I had built a practice of contacting a higher form of consciousness, whether that's from within or,

or, you know, God is, I come to understand God, um, until I had made contact in a way where I felt like I could have questions and answers, you know, not hearing a booming voice or any of that, but I could ask questions, present prayers in a way where things would be revealed and illuminated to me if I held that and contemplated it. Until I realized I had that without medicine, I was going back. Anytime I had big questions, I'd write them down.

I'm going to take that to ayahuasca in three months when I go sit again. And it was through the practice of meditation that it actually allowed me to engage number one, the sense of stillness and peace I had on medicine. You know, I think that's a big one. There is a, nobody drinks ayahuasca or does iboga because it feels good. No, you're not. That's not the reason. It's not recreational. Those are challenging as fuck. There are people who take, you know, microdoses or whatever to feel better to think outside the box no big deal um but the peace one has through a challenging journey that too can be something that we chase and i certainly

chase that because it was like you know somebody cuts you off in traffic after an ayahuasca journey you're just like go ahead brother you know like you don't you truly don't give a fuck it's not an act right you're at peace with it and six to eight months down the road of being back in your daily habits, back with the same crew, back with the same information and, and, and all the things we consume, it wears off. And when you catch, when I'd catch that, it was like, oh shit, man, I'm back. It feels like my old life. I need to go back again and re-up to get back to that state and try to hold that state longer.

Not realizing I could attain that state through the work, right? The daily, mundane, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, brother. Tell me about, you know, any other tools that really gravitated towards you through allurement that you find, you know, transformative for the people you work with. In my private practice or?

Yeah, well, just, I mean, in the practice. Well, in my just, I mean, in the practice and the group stuff. Well, in my exploration, okay. So some of the stuff that really kind of, I did a course of study at a spot out in London that a shamanic teacher training. It was a one-year program.

And I was exploring martial art. I was exploring meditation. and then i got really curious about shamanism and what shamanism even means through paul you know the way paul would talk about it and so there's this uh woman in los angeles named kate shella who teaches she used to teach what was called five rhythms uh ecstatic movement ecstatic dance and she's such a she's such a powerful teacher and such a cool person and so authentic in what she she shares and she's a friend of mine so i asked her about what's your course of study what did you do what have you what have you been through and she told me about this place called the sacred trust it's it's uh out in the farmland a couple hours outside of London. That's where

she's from. And so just on a gut feeling, I applied, got in, and I would fly to London like three or four times a year for the full year and stay on the land there for four or five days. And we weren't using any substances. There was no medicine involved. It was drumming breathing we did a uh you know ritual connection with nature all these kind of uh not psychedelic um entry points to to a psychedelic experience yeah altered states of consciousness of consciousness shamanic germ journeying i would have these i've never really talked about this but i had some really profound kind of like dreamlike experiences where, you know, I was moved to tears by the things I was seeing, meeting, meeting spiritual allies that exist, you know, uh, and are just waiting for you to ask them for help and developing a relationship with them. One last quick announcement. I want to tell you

guys about the final showdown for Fit for Service. This is our final event ever. We will be doing other stuff, but our brother Aubrey Marcus is going to create other things and has moved on as far as the events are concerned, which means this is really the last showdown. Six years of what we've done and what we've created, and it has been absolutely phenomenal. I've loved every second of it. I've learned so much from it.

If you want to be a part of it, the only way to do it is to come to Malibu. January 25th is when we meet. Check it all out at fitforservice.com, and I hope to meet you there. Like I said, I'm a Catholic schoolboy from the suburbs of Philly. I'm way off reservation here. So there's always that judgment of, like, where do I come from? This is weird, man. Is any of this real?

But then years later, studying with Dan Brown, who was a meditation teacher, who was a bona fide lineage holder in what's called the Bon, which is like a pre-Buddhist shamanic tradition from Tibet. I had heard of that through Ted Achikoso. Yeah. He's an apprentice of that or studies it sure and so but dan was also and this is what made him such a extraordinary one of the things that made him such an extraordinary person he was also i believe on the board at the harvard medical school and a practicing psychologist and professor at Harvard. So I'm like, okay, if this guy who's way smarter than me believes in this stuff, maybe it's not so kooky. And he would teach, you know,

practice around a premeditation routine around just contacting your guides, allies, and allow them to just do the practice for you. You don't have to have this figured out. You can just, help is available so yeah i had some really profound experiences in fact as part of that year program we uh one of the initiations we went through was to dig a grave dig our grave in the woods and spend the night in your grave it was pretty intense but uh i mean you dig a proper, I dug myself a proper grave in the dirt. And then sun goes down. You put a tarp over the hole.

And then, you know, first put wooden slats that you collect from the forest over the hole. Then put a tarp over the hole. And then shovel the dirt back on top of the tarp. But leave a little air hole that you can just kind of shimmy into you know and get in the grave and then the teacher fills in the rest of the dirt but keeps there's a rock behind you so that you can breathe and i mean honestly if you totally freaked out and needed to needed to get out of the grave you could scream loud enough that they could hear you and then they would dig you out but that would take a. So you're really in a grave and you can't just like in a moment of panic, oh, I got to get out of here. It's not going to, it's going to be a while.

That's like the darkness retreat on steroids. It was very similar to the darkness retreat. I was on darkness retreat too. But so the practice was to go into the grave with a rattle and speak your life story. and speak your life story. Just speak your life story. That was the only instruction they gave. It was pretty loosely held.

I go in there and I'm in the grave. Metta is a meditation practice around generating loving kindness. It's just a repetition of a mantra. May I be peaceful. May I be peaceful. May I be peaceful. You can use that mantra to generate loving kindness it's just a repetition of a mantra may i be peaceful may i be peaceful may i be peaceful and you can use that mantra to generate you know loving kindness and peace and so i'm in the grave and i'm just reciting may i be peaceful internally because i don't want to let my mind go because i feel like this could get really scary if i just let it go but it occurs to me what i'm actually doing i'm holding on to this life raft of this meta phrase and i'm in the ocean of possibility but i'm afraid afraid to let go. So I'm just like, I gotta let go of this thing and start

speaking my life story. I've never even talked about this, but, uh, at some point in speaking my life story to mother earth, there was this kind of figure ground reversal where mother earth was speaking my life story to me with my mouth and i was like i felt like i was listening more than i was talking and then i start i have the the rattle and some songs start coming out of me and there's just like this deep deep kind of healing and letting go of tension and that went on for however long. And, you know, my body just felt so relaxed. I just melted into the dirt. And then eventually the sun comes up and they're ready to dig me out. But I could have stayed in for another couple of days. It felt like the state that you get into when you realize that you are actually held by Mother Earth. You know, you belong here.

I belong here. Everything that every challenge I went through happened for a reason. I'm being prepared for something. Everything is okay. The guy who got into that grave and the guy who got out were different people for sure. It was a very profound experience for me. You mentioned the dark retreat. I recently did a dark retreat. And it was very similar. It was a very similar experience. But the dark retreat was much longer. You know, I was in the dark for, I think, six nights. Did you go to the spot in Oregon?

Yeah, I got a lot of buddies. Aaron Alexander, Godsey. Yeah, I listened to your talk with Godsey. His name's Godsey, yeah? Yeah, Eric Godsey. He's a very fascinating cat. And I really appreciated your guys dialogue but i fast forwarded through everything he said about the dark retreat because i didn't want any like i was a little yeah and i was nervous about going like i trusted i mean

i trusted that it was what i'm what i'm supposed to do and that it will be okay even if it's not okay you know i anticipated that it would be, but I didn't want to listen to his, his take on it because I just wanted to go in blind. But that too was a very powerful experience. And, uh, it was the second, I think it was the second full day. So the first day was like, it was like the first, the first, uh, couple clicks of a long run it was like you're excited about it you're like oh this is this is a challenge i'm ready let's do it and so the first day was kind of like that and then you know on a long run you get to the point where you're like oh shit all right it's like a long way to go and i'm not feeling that great so the second day the second morning you don't you don't know what time it is. Time just goes out the window. And you can only really assume it's morning because there's no reference.

There's no light. And I don't know what time it is. I'm kind of crunching the numbers in my head. This is day two. I have a lot longer to go in this cave than I have under my belt. And I can feel this fear, like a primal fear of being alone in the dark. I mean, I thought about it in retrospect, like that's a real human fear. Everything in our biology says, don't be alone in the dark, stay with people and light a fire,

you know, from a primal standpoint. But I feel this fear and like kind of nervous apprehension and some sadness and you know rather than try to generate positivity I just had this kind of intuitive understanding based on what I learned from Dan Brown really to just offer no resistance to fear or sadness and just have a complete experience of fear. And that's what I did. I just let myself be afraid, really afraid. And I let myself be really sad. And it felt like such a deep healing, like to just give myself full permission to feel the scary emotions with no with no no no running away from it running right

at it and in that turning toward in that complete experience of fear there was like this kind of liberation of fear and then that that would continue to play out for the remainder of the retreat. There was a lot of, you know, I think long-held subconscious emotional stuff that was just kind of softening and just coming up for experience and just release. And I really felt like the dark retreat was like a deep kind of like body work massage from the angels they were just massaging out all of the old wounds and traumas that just collect you know there's nothing unique about me a human being collects a whole bunch of stuff but we go through life at such a fast pace that we're collecting at a greater speed than we're letting go and the dark retreat is just an opportunity to let go and then so my experience in the dark was i would kind of oscillate between just a very mundane experience of me in the dark just like maybe thinking about something silly and then

recollecting oh yeah i'm in the dark here how long has it been just ordinary thinking what when when's my food coming and then these profound experiences of the liberation of you know karmic residue and then like a deep kind of highly concentrated kind of like trance where i was just i could stay in here forever just complete like very heavy just and in those, like I remember probably the last day, they would bring dinner at the same time, approximately the same time every day. And when I heard the door open and they brought my food, I would have guessed that that food wasn't coming for another six or seven hours

because time just started to just move in a different way. But it was a very profound experience and actually coming out of that experience not so long ago just a couple of months I've continued to have these kind of emotional like cathartic releases that seem to occur spontaneously and you know my teachers have talked about this. So there's this process of kind of letting go that is happening. And the, and I'll often say this in the work, it's like, the bad news is you got to feel it. The good news is you're feeling it on the way out and you're releasing it. And when I look to my teachers, you know, these, these elders, uh, who have a performance output, that's's crazy and when you get around them they have these big wide open eyes and there's so much energy coming out of

them it's because they've they've liberated so much they're not holding anything and so that's that's the the work the practice is to just let go and really what I've come to understand about meditation practice, good meditation practice is just don't do anything. Just don't do anything. Just don't do anything and allow this natural process of release to just start to happen. And then you can become empty before you die

and then life becomes magical. That's beautiful, brother. I have not felt called to the darkness just because of the fact that I feel like I need and I'm in a good space now but I have felt that I would want to be better at meditation

and also heal some shit from some very challenging let me tell you this dude because I did befriend the facilitator over there I'm drawing a blank on his name but really solid guy and he says the individuals who struggle most in the dark are people who think of themselves as skilled meditators type-a

guys who have a spiritual discipline those are the people who have the hardest time and the people who tend the hardest time. And the people who tend to have the most beautiful experiences are individuals who are more spontaneous in their orientation and don't have a predetermined script on how this should go or aren't constantly referencing. What am I feeling? Well, what technique should I, what meditation technique should I go to feel better? Because that's all tension. And so I was very lucky that early on in my retreat, I just gave up. And that's really all you can do is just give up.

So I'm not telling you should go in the dark, but you do not need, you don't need anything. I like that. And you're no more or less prepared than anybody else would be. Did you feel after a certain amount of time in there that like the altered state of consciousness, like the lights came on visually from the third eye? were you in a visionary state at any point i was anticipating like psychedelic light show and there might have been a little bit but no that wasn't my experience my experience was more i i thought that what i might have is like a profound out-of-body experience. But what I ended up having was a profound embodied experience.

Because in the dark, there's no, the only show in town, the only thing on TV is your body. That's it. The felt sense of your body is the only thing to attune to. There's not a lot of sound other than your own breath. And there's obviously, it's not just dark, like someone turned the lights off. There's no photons in the room at all. It's pitch black. So for me, I just really connected more to my body, more to the subtle sensations that would otherwise go unnoticed, principally emotional sensation. And I became highly attuned to a lot of, you know, stuff. And I could feel these kind of ruptures open of pockets of old emotional residue that just wanted to come up. And all of us, you know, there's a natural process, I believe, of resolution.

You know, nature wants to resolve all of our stuff. But our lifestyle usually gets in the way of that. You know, because we're so busy. There's always a distraction. There's always something to do. Even when we're sitting still, we're not necessarily doing nothing. And so in the dark, there's nothing to do. And so I think that there's a quickening of that kind of purification. I love that. Yeah. You piqued my interest. That's what I was going to say. I don't know if you haven't felt called listening to Godsey and Aubrey and anybody else for that matter, Aaron Rodgers, Aaron Alexander. But hearing you talk about it, I've and I know too, you know, when I have a genuine fear of something that's transformative, that's definitely a yes for me. Yeah. I get that. Sure. Okay. Yes. I got to do that. Right.

Um, I'm going to do, uh, my first vision quest next year on the land here with, uh, my brother, Ken Conti, he was on the podcast and I'll actually be sitting in separate places in the

land, but I think there's going to be a few of us. And, uh, my brother, Jimmy, who just was on the podcast and actually went through that. Well,

you know, had some, had a profound and beautiful experience, you know there's many similarities into what the mind can do you know when you're fucking when you're not going anywhere like you tie up 400 some prayer ties of tobacco you know and you're there you can stand and stretch if you want but you might as well just fucking lay down and conserve because no food no water for four days is gonna it's, it's going to take its toll. Totally. And you know, you're not going to sleep. So that's an extended, you know, that kind of thing. I think my biggest fear of the darkness would be if the light show comes on and I'm in a visionary state and there's no concept of time,

you know, cause I've had, I'm sure as you have deep fucking journeys where, you know, it could have been five minutes, but it was eternity, you know? And so I think that's, that's the one fear that I would need to address by actually doing the thing is the fear of the light show turning on and me having no concept of time. And when does this end? Well, just, you know, getting to know you and feel you, man, you're as prepared as you'll ever be if it's something that you want to do. So let me just disabuse you of the notion that there's some kind of preparation that

you have to go through where you got to meditate more or whatever. If it's something that you want to do, you're ready. Fuck yeah. I love that brother. Well, vision quest first. What, where can people, I mean, we've gone just almost an hour and a half here. What do you have coming up events wise? You're working with people still talk about your work and where people can get a hold of you and actually work with you. The best way to get a hold of me is my website, SavageAndSaint.com. And there's actually, I've put a lot of time and effort into building a two-week email course completely free. The five skills that every man should own to live a life of vitality, excellence, and freedom. And it's really, it's a brain dump. And so if you sign up for that,

then you'll get an email every couple of days for two weeks. And through that email sequence, you'll understand the things that I'm offering in my work professionally. And you also have a real, you know, you'll know if we vibe. And if you're down with this collective and what I'm trying to put out there,

and if you want to get involved, then that email sequence will tell you how to get involved. And then you can hit me on Instagram, at Savage and Saint. And I've got a men's retreat coming up in L.A., just outside of L.A. in March that people are signing up for now. So, yeah, join us. Fuck yeah, brother. Thank you so much.

It's been awesome having you. Oh, you're the man. This is awesome. Mad appreciation. Thank you.