Sense of Soul - Awaken to Freedom and Peace Within

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

This a must listen!! Today on Sense of Soul we have Jonathan Labman he is one of the leading spiritual awakening experts in the world, with 4 inspiring books, a weekly Substack column he writes and runs called Simply Awake, and a psychotherapy practice that has transformed thousands of lives over the past 25+ years. After years of childhood abuse and life in religious cults, Jon has helped thousands of people go from the constant hustle, anxiety, and exhaustion of “success" to living a life of peace and fulfillment, while still crushing their goals. His teachings resonate deeply with those seeking to balance the demands of a high-achieving lifestyle with a profound sense of well-being and contentment. Jon’s unique approach not only addresses the exteral aspects of success but also nurtures the inner transformation necessary for lasting fulfillment and happiness. Schedule a free 15 min chat or get a FREE pdf of his newest book Being Human & Waking Up by following and messaging him on IG @jonlabman. Visit his website at www.simplyawake.com Donate to Shanna’s coffee fund at www.senseofsoulpodcast.com

Hello, my soul-seeking friends. It's Shanna. Thank you so much for listening to Sense of Soul podcast. Enlightening conversations with like-minded souls from around the world, sharing their journey of finding their light within, turning pain into purpose, and awakening to their true sense of soul. If you like what you hear, show me some love and rate, like, and subscribe. And consider becoming a Sense of Soul Patreon member, where you will get ad-free episodes, monthly circles, and much more. Now go grab your coffee, open your mind, heart, and soul. It's time to awaken. Today on Sense of Soul, we have Jonathan Labman. He is one of the leading spiritual awakening experts in the world. With four inspiring books, a weekly substack column, he writes called Simply Awake and has a psychotherapy practice that has transformed thousands of lives for the past 25 plus years. After years of childhood abuse and life in a

religious cult, John has helped thousands of people go from the constant hustle, anxiety, and exhaustion from success to living a life of peace and fulfillment while still crushing their goals. His teachings resonate deeply with those who are seeking to balance the demands of a high achieving lifestyle with a profound sense of well-being and contentment. And I think we all need that balance right now. So I am thrilled to have John with us today to share with us how we can nurture the inner transformation that is necessary for lasting fulfillment and happiness. So please welcome John. How are you?

I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Where are you located? I'm in Colorado. How about you? Okay, I'm in Pennsylvania, close to the border of the eastern border of Pennsylvania, the Delaware River. Oh, I've never been there before. It's pretty country out here. I've been to Colorado only once for about a week. Yeah.

I didn't get to see much of the country. I was in a seminar. So I'll come back someday. Yeah, it's pretty. I'm super excited to hear your story. You know, I mean, I feel like I've been grieving my religion for a long time, grew up Catholic. So I'm originally from New Orleans. And my family's been there since late 1600s. So it's deeply rooted in me, my religion. And, you know, me even speaking out about this. I mean, I'm a heretic for sure. So I know, and I work with so many former Catholics. I swear to goodness, I must be, as formerly Irish priest, especially Irish Catholics seem to flock here, although there are plenty in the area. I'm curious to know your story and how you got to where you are. And if you don't mind, to share how this spiritual journey started for you.

First of all, thanks again for having me on the show. And I always like to open by saying to listeners, please support Shanna's work, give her five-star ratings and likes and share her podcast, because this is a place where we learn all the things we weren't taught in school and by our religious leaders. And, you know, Shanna, I know that I'm trying to ramp up technical abilities. You know, at my age, I'm almost 70. And I know that there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. So I wanted to acknowledge that for you and for your listeners and to say, thank you so much. Oh, I appreciate that. And now I'll be glad to answer your question. So I call my work liberation therapy therapy because I've been melding the psychological and the

spiritual together really my whole life. But professionally, since probably in 2000, when I got my degree as a counseling psychologist, I was right away in a program to become a yoga teacher. As soon as I finished the one, I went into the other. And at that time, I had my initial spiritual awakening. And so I've been trying to combine both since. And even my thesis was on whether yoga was compatible with psychotherapy, yoga philosophy. And I found, in fact, it it was and there were quite a few early psychologists like Carl Gustav Jung and Roberto Assigioli who were very adept in yoga and were using some of the ideas

and so that's where I am now how I got here I'm not going to try to tell 70 years worth of stories trust me and your audience will be asleep if I do. But I grew up with sexual abuse at home. And, you know, some listeners may have that experience and bullying at school. And I know a lot of people have that experience. And by the time I was 15, I was pretty much coming home every day with a headache because I was so, so tense and anxious and panicky most of the time. Somebody came to our 10th grade class and showed us a film of an international high school in Wales on the South Sea coast of Wales. That was going to be the last two years of school in a castle that had been owned by William Randolph Hearst. And something in me just leapt up and took me to the front of that room and signed up to apply to go there.

And at about the same time, I thought, hmm, you know, I want to investigate Christianity because I had been raised in a Reformed Jewish tradition. And my tradition, sorry to any reformed Jews listening, but to me it felt as dry as death. It was like, it was so dusty and so boring and so devoid of what I would call spirit that I just, I didn't have any sense of being at home there. And so in the process of studying the New Testament

and asking whether there was a God at all, because I wasn't sure I believed in God. I got an offer letter to the school to go, but my parents said, if you don't get a scholarship, we can't afford to send you there for you to send to college and we're just middle class people. There was also a postal strike. This was 1971. There's no email. Long distance was impossible to pay for. And so I was on my knees praying for a month. God, if you exist, prove it to me. Very arrogant, right? I would never do that now. By getting the scholarship that I'm not supposed to get. And I got the scholarship. I waited a whole month and I got that letter in the mail May 1st. And that was a moment that changed my life. And I'm sure you and audience members have those moments that really changed life.

And I was really ecstatic for a long time. I thought, well, this is a solution to all my problems. I get away from all my abuse and from all my trauma. I get to start over again. And now I believe in God. And that was probably the most important change that happened was that I started having a belief. Now, my belief was very didactic and rigid. And, you know, I was involved with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And they're Calvinists. And like the Catholics, they believe in original sin. The first dogma of Calvinism is that you are totally depraved from the time you're born. So it's the same problem that we have in Catholicism with original sin.

You come into the world, it's hard enough to be here, everybody, right? No. And then they slap you on the behind. You're cold and you're wet and you're hungry. And then about two or three years later, you're being taught that you're wicked and sinful. Like as if that's really going to help you and as if it's even true and that sets you up for a lifetime of feeling less than feeling bad feeling wrong feeling shameful and so even though I got into this wonderful school and I had these great opportunities to meet kids from 50 countries and to travel in Europe when I was young. And I got to meet some very famous evangelical people at the time, got to go to Israel because I had a couple of my father's stepbrothers living there. Even though all that happened, it didn't solve my internal problems.

And some of those I wasn't even aware of. I wasn't aware of my abuse until I was 52 years old. I didn't remember any of it. And't aware of my abuse until I was 52 years old. I didn't remember any of it. And this is something that audience members may be quite savvy about by now that trauma can often remain hidden. And so what I kept doing was kind of looking for people who reminded me of the person who traumatized me. And unfortunately, in my case, it was my mother who traumatized me. It was very unusual. And not only me, but others. And then I kept looking for leaders and spiritual leaders who reminded me of that experience, which Freud calls repetition compulsion. So if you repeat a behavior over and over again, and you feel like, I don't

know why I'm doing this. I know this isn't going to be good. It's a repetition compulsion. You're trying to remember something that happened to you. And you keep seeking out the kind of people that did that thing to you. And so you can make a lot of difficult and bad choices as a result. And, you know, I was in a Christian college eventually and was going to go to seminary. I was pre-seminary, studied ancient Greek, following up on my Hebrew studies. It's interesting. I have the languages of the Bible, even though I don't know them anymore. And because my parents were divorcing at that time, I had nowhere to go. I spent one summer alone at school, just totally like adrift. And I know the audience can identify with that. So many people now are adrift.

It's a very difficult culture to live in. And eventually I got invited to spend the summer in a church that was related to the denomination of the school I was going to. So I thought, oh, well, this is safe. And when I got there, I was love bombed. Nobody paid attention to me for two hours in my entire life, but the cult leader who ran the church, and it was a woman. And she was very pretty, and she was very loving. But she was also a master at terrorizing people psychologically. So it was a perfect setup for me to repeat my childhood. And I was in that cult. I took lifetime vows to be in that group. It wasn't a cult when I started, but almost right away, the elder that I had stayed with

that summer before I joined was excommunicated and his whole family with him. And then this one family basically pushed everybody out who was in power and took over. But I had made my vow, so I was going to stay. We were celibates in our 20s, strict celibates. You had to confess in front of a group any kind of sexual sin, even a thought, right, but certainly any kind of activity. And so there was a huge amount of shame and fear always, but that was my childhood. So after about six years, one of the former members, many of whom were excommunicated, tried to burn the church down. At least we think years, one of the former members, many of whom were excommunicated,

tried to burn the church down. At least we think it was one of them. And then rather than the elders and the woman who really was behind the elders saying, oh, what are we doing wrong? Why has this happened? Maybe we're being too harsh. Maybe our doctrine is extreme. They said to all of us church members, you're hiding secret sins. And so that's why our church was burned down. And so now while you're helping us to rebuild the church,

you're all suspended from communion. And if you don't cough up your secret sin, and you dare to walk back into the refinished church that, by the way, you're rebuilding with the sweat of your brow, you're going to be doubly damned to hell. And by the way, I did try to confess a secret sin. I thought that I was gay, even though I'd never had any experiences, but I had attractions. And that was pretty obvious to me by that time. And they said, ah, you've never done anything, so that can't be it. And so for the next six months, I paced the floors in my group housing situation where five other guys lived back and forth, back and forth in the living room. What am I going to do? Anxious. I was given what's called a double bind, right? Two bad choices that somebody else gives you that you have to choose from. You can go into the church and be doubly damned. You can leave. And they said, yeah, if you're really gay and you leave, you're breaking your vows, you're going to hell and you'll die of AIDS, by the way. And so at some point, some little voice inside here and here said, something wrong with this. Even though I took my lifetime vows, I got to get out of here. And one day when

the rest of the guys are doing something else, I fled. I took all my belongings. I put them in storage. And the next day I was in a therapist's office and I was homeless for a few days. And so that therapist was the real turning point of my life. She said, I'm going to treat this like a divorce because you've lost your family. I don't know anything about dogma. And I was feeling very suicidal when I left. I'd lost everything except my job, my home, my friends, my spiritual community, my relationship with God. All of it was like, and I'm sure again, listeners have gone through these things you may have yourself. And this woman said to me, her name was Pat McGrath. She said to me, if you're coming to see me, then you must actually have some hope.

And when I looked, I thought, she's right. I must have some hope. It was the first time I'd really looked here. And she was instrumental in teaching me to look here where we all have to look. And that was really the turning point of my life. And I determined to come out of the closet and to pursue whatever it was I was going to pursue. But I really loved her work with me, and I kind of wanted to do that kind of work, but it took a while before I got there. Oh my God. I mean, just the psychological damage and you see it in so many systems today. When you were talking about the threat of,

if you don't do it this way, you're going to fail. Right. That linear thinking and also seeking outside of you, like the only way. And also blame and shame. So much damage there. And this has been happening for generations, not just in this cult, but even subtly. And maybe people don't even realize it in government, in schools, in religion. Right. The model we get when we're little kids in this culture, and it's been this way for millennia, is even though the teacher tells us we're sinful or the religious leader, although we

think they're sinful, we're supposed to listen to them. And they are supposed to be able to ferret out our secret problems and our sins and fix us. And we're supposed to listen to everything they say without questioning it at all. And that's the basic, you know, formula for a cult. And, you know, there are various gradations of cult. You know, there was the one I lived in, which was very controlling. But, you know, you could say a lot of the major religions are a kind of a cult. Yeah.

And I think there's a lot of value in a lot of the major religions. But if somebody is controlling you, audience and listeners, right, you've got to ask that question, you know, is this really the truth? Because we all have that little voice in us that says yeah i don't know if that's really true and it's really what saved me from a lifetime in that cult there are some people i think that are still there 40 years later i've been saying over the years that one of the first things that broke me open or freed me liberation what did you call it liberation liberation therapy yeah is i asked myself how much of what i believe in have i been told to believe and of that how much had i really experienced to be my truth like could i speak on that to be true for me? And my list was so small. Love was one of those,

you know, and love for my children. I mean, that was an experience you couldn't take from me. It was a felt experience and it was my truth. I mean, everything, the way that I thought I should be as an adult, what I should have as an adult, you know, what I should learn, what I should do. I mean, it all was of somebody else's in addition to my beliefs. So it was just a facade of this American dream or somebody's dream, but it wasn't necessarily mine. That's right. It's really well said. And the other thing is that because we're supposed to look up to them, we never question the fact that nobody's teaching us how to be a human being, how to deal with thoughts, how to recognize that 90 to 95% of our thoughts are false. And those false thoughts

create roiling, difficult, negative emotions. And then if we act on those emotions based on false thoughts, we create all kinds of drama and trouble in our lives. You know, a lot of spirituality, and I've heard you on a couple of other podcasts refer to this, people first want to go up and out. Let me get away from my body and my problems and my psychology and my emotions and my thoughts can i meditate myself out of all that and of course we've learned to call that spiritual bypassing right but as a person who benefited so much from so many you know three or four really outstanding therapists and eventually became a therapist but a long way around know, I feel like we really need to combine the learning how to be human with the transcendent stuff, because when I was watching a very famous teacher, Rupert Sp I thought, right, that's why I like to do what I do.

I want to put the two together. They belong together. You have to know how to be a human being and master what to do with your thoughts and feelings and physical sensations and what to do with your trauma and your flashback. You have to master that before you have the bandwidth to transcend for any length of time. And, you know, we've heard stories too, and people in the audience may have experienced this, where you're meditating, like I've been on long meditation retreats with Adyashanti, where you're meditating, you know, you're in silence for six days and you're sitting for 40 minute sessions, you know, six or seven of them a day, I think, or five or six. And some people in

those report that there's a lot of fear and a lot of thought that comes up and just really freaks them out. I had a client come to me after a 10 day meditation retreat on the West Coast, is totally flipped out because all this psychic material, this emotional material that was held inside was out. And I've just had another client come after ketamine therapy and all of this emotional stuff is out and nobody's ever taught him how to deal with it. And so really, I think that we have to wed the psychological and the spiritual together, or at least that's what I feel like my mission is. We're multidimensional. Absolutely. That's right. So you talk about being outside and in connection with nature, and it's so wonderful for me too. I try to work in a permaculture garden, although it's been a

labor of fail better next year. It's an interesting thing, you know, what's going to work and what doesn't. But, you know, being in touch with nature and now with many years of meditation, you can walk outside and disappear into the sky. There's no boundary. But you couldn't do that if you were embroiled in your own thoughts and your own drama. Your listeners, if they're struggling to transcend, if they learn also the piece about how to deal with thought and emotion and how to recognize where emotion is coming from, is it coming from really something that happened or your misinterpretation of that or something you're making up in your head? Because I went to New York after working with that first therapist because I had a trained voice.

I had been a singer most of my life. And I worked with Betty Buckley's voice coach. She was the star of Cats and another voice coach. And they said, well, you're going to have to learn the method acting. And so I learned the method acting and I learned about living in the moment on the stage. Later, I heard about that for the first time in around 88 in spiritual circles. And the next kind of transformation occurred because in that first spiritual circle that was in New York City, I was living in

Philadelphia. I would take a train every night after work. We had no internet in those days and traveled to New York and walk to this meeting and sit with these people until about 9.30 at night and get back on the train, go to Philadelphia, go to work the next day. So I was enthralled to hear that I could live in the moment, not just in some exercise in the class, but I could live that spontaneously and know what I felt and know what I was thinking. But I also learned that we can make up stuff in our heads that makes us feel in our bodies real feelings, but that they're coming from falsehoods. That's how actors are trained.

I actually can relate to that. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a young adult. And I was medicated for so long for anxiety and ADHD. And my memory was getting weird. So I went to my doctor, I said, I think I need to get off these meds. It's affecting me. I mean, I'm not reacting when my kids are on the roof. I mean, this is a problem, you know? And I was always a very emotional person. And I couldn't even cry, John. I mean, I've always been known as a ninny baby. I was so masked and numb. And so I got off the meds, but I said, I'm going to have to do something. So I went to therapy. And they suggested mindfulness, which put me in that present moment. But that's when I heard that voice. I'm like, who's talking shit to me? Who is that? Right. And they started to do cognitive therapy with me. Yeah. And then they made me fill out a form like when my thoughts came through. Was it true or was it false? That's right. 90% of it was false. And

it wasn't even me. It was some voice, you know, from when I was younger, you know, some teacher or my dad or my partner. But when I sat with it, did I know that to be true about me? And I'd say more than probably almost all of it was no. Right, right. And it's astonishing, isn't it? It's totally astonishing. The listeners who may have done cognitive behavioral therapy, or I recommend a book called Loving What Is by Byron Katie, really turned my life around. And then I created a model from that, that I call taming the three ring circus of your mind. Right? I know that circus. Yeah. There's a ring about all your thoughts about yourself. There's a ring about all your thoughts about others. There's a ring about the future. And almost always all of the thoughts

are false and all the false thoughts cause us anxiety or anger or sadness. Just like, why does a lie detector machine work? It's because if we're telling a lie, the body is a truth meter. Adyashanti taught me this. The body doesn't respond well to lies. So if you're hooked up to a polygraph machine and you're telling a lie, your heart rate goes up, your perspiration goes up, your respiration goes up, your blood pressure goes up. I mean, it's not always accurate, but it's pretty good at registering the change in the body. Whether the lie is external speaker out of your mouth,

or you're just listening to your mind generate those lies from memory, still has the same impact. You go like this. You physiologically contract. You get anxious. You get sad. You get angry. Or all three happen. Usually there's an adrenal release, right? And the emotion that comes from that is useless. So, yeah, listeners, pay attention. If the emotion that you're feeling is coming from a lie in your head it's useless don't pay any attention to trying to use it for any good it won't work right but if you figure out i'm really like i need to set a boundary because somebody's really been nasty to me and there's anger that comes up because anger is the appropriate emotion that says I need to set a boundary, then I really need to pay attention to that anger, not just stifle it, but be assertive.

I don't need to be a jerk. I don't need to be insulting. But I can say, you know, you can't talk to me like that. And so where there's real emotion coming from real events, that's useful. And there's wisdom there. If it's emotion coming from false events, just like when I was inventing an emotion to go into a scene in my acting class, that emotion is useless.

It won't move anything in a good direction. Right. And so once we have some idea of how to master and pay attention to our thoughts and our feelings and figure out what they're good for, if they're good for anything. Now, suddenly, you know, with a couple of years of work, I discovered CBT. I mean, I studied it in grad school, but I discovered it for myself reading Byron Katie's book. And originally, I threw that book across the room. I was like, you telling me that I've been suffering all the fact that I didn't know that all these years. I was suffering unnecessarily all that time. And there's often sadness when we drop a paradigm and we pick up a new one. Like I've been, you know, you're in audiences and anybody who's been a spiritual seeker, you're going to go through that series of changes, right? But that is a profoundly helpful change. And when that drama

starts to drop, and when you stop believing your thoughts about the future, all kinds of possibilities open up. And then also, you stop believing that you're not worthy of being enlightened or liberated. Because a lot of people have that problem they think i'm wicked i'm shameful if listeners are survivors of abuse they've been taught that they were guilty and wrong and bad not the abusers often that's the case and so when you start to see like you did that all those thoughts are false and then some of core ones, like I'm wicked or I'm bad or I'm wrong or I'm guilty or I'm the reason that this abuse happened, they can be kind of busted through too. They can be dissolved. And then there's room for, oh, I can be liberated.

And my meditation, right, and my mindfulness practices are all about moving my awareness away from false thought and into the three-dimensional reality of the senses. Absolutely. It is important to see counselors, you know, do your meditation, you know, have that, have a team, right? We'll call it a multidimensional team. Because they are. Yes. Because when all of these things start falling, when you realize, oh my gosh, I've been listening to this false voice. I realize I've been leaving this false belief. Everything falls and trust becomes an issue. Who do I trust? And I believe it's what you said. It is learning how to discern within myself. Does this feel right in my body?

Right. And if it does, you're not tense. You're relaxed and you're warm and it feels good. And when it's not, your body will tell you. It's such an important aspect of spirituality that I don't think many people speak of as clearly as you just did, which is that your body is the means by which you experience the totality of consciousness, the absolute or the divine or whatever we want to call it. Of course, words really fail. And you don't have any felt experience of a future or a past. There's no sense experience of past or future. They're purely mental constructs.

So we only live in the eternal now. And if we lose the words that separate us from everything else, it's really words that make us distinguish even awareness from what it's aware of. So sort of kind of toward the end of liberation is, I don't actually need to be an internal awareness that's separate from what I'm aware of anymore. That was useful when I was separating awareness from thought. But separating awareness from thought is just another thought construct. Awareness is always inextricably tied to the phenomenal universe, the three-dimensional world, the world of the senses. And a lot of what's produced up here, I now call non-sense, because it's not based on the senses,

it's iterations on thought or iterations on what just happened a minute ago. So the real experience of liberation is living in a body, being aware of all the sensations, and also being aware that a lot of the constructs that we've been given about reality are just thought forms. They're not reality. We don't even know what a full experience of reality would be because our sensory apparatus is limited to bandwidths of light and bandwidths of sound. When you start to learn to pay attention to your truth sense in your body, you free yourself from slavery to anybody else and their path. Because even my path or your path is going to be different, as you well know, from any of your listeners' paths. And everybody's got to keep going back to that truth sense, like you said, does it relax my body?

Oh, okay. And usually it's very simple when it relaxes the body. And also, will I be deceiving myself in some way or another? Even in the very late stages, the last time I worked with a teacher, this question came up. Am I going to deceive myself if I don't have somebody watching over my shoulder? And I thought, wait a minute. I have a truth sense in my body. why do i need this person over here in in another country telling me that you know i've finished the sixth fetter in the buddhist fetter work it's all based even the fetters are based on thought right i can relate because i remember and i teach reiki now even still but i really was depending on the pendulum to show me there was times where I was like, oh my God, I don't have my pendulum. I didn't bring it. Will I be able to sense this person's

energy without my pendulum? Of course. And your pendulum is only an extension of your own consciousness. Right. So the tools eventually and the practices eventually, you get to drop them all. But you won't deceive yourself for very long if you're paying attention to your body and you notice you're going into contraction. There's some kind of self-deceit probably going on. Either that or you're being triggered in flashback from some emotional issue in the past. And the other thing I would say to listeners in particular is we all have a response to anything at all that's new to us, right? You're new to me, so my adrenaline ramps up when I'm going to meet you for the first time.

And there's nothing to worry about. That'll go away. The half-life of adrenaline is 20 minutes. That'll go away. But beyond those few things, you will have a sense if you're deceiving yourself. If you're uncomfortable over a period of time, you're pursuing something that you think is right, but something inside of you doesn't agree, your body will tell you, this doesn't feel right. Right? Yeah. Something wrong with this.'t it amazing it's so true i always laugh you know like having you know four children i remember how hard it was with my first one not really knowing what to do and i was in my early 20s and nervous i'm bringing this baby home with me. Well, God, where's my mom? Everyone had lots of advice, you know, as all people do of how to do it. Then they had this

big book, what to expect when you're expecting, and then they have it for children too. And no offense, but a lot of it's written by men. And, you know, What do we know about birthing babies? Right. Or I remember people saying, cause you know, with my, I have kids from different generations, they would say, let them cry, you know, don't run to them. But everything in my body, John, I mean, I was almost sick. You know, I was like, I can't like my entire body wanted to go to it. And I just kept on getting fussed at by everybody. You got to let that baby cry. And I was like I can't like my entire body wanted to go to it and I I just kept on getting fussed at by everybody you gotta let that baby cry and I was like well he's not crying right now

because I just went god I mean like they tell you put your baby on their back don't put your baby on the back put him on the stomach not I mean you know there's this instinct in you, you know, animals don't have books on how to raise their babies. We are even, you know, it's true though. There's a natural thing. We will get by if you, and especially if you trust yourself. That's right. But, you know, we're taught from the very beginning with those dogmas about original sin and being wicked or being bad or being too stupid or whatever. We're taught that we're supposed to trust them and we're not supposed to ask questions. When we ask questions in those religious settings, you know, I wasn't allowed to ask a question in the cult. And, you know, even in some of the other religious settings, you know, even the very last spiritual one I was in, I raised a question about the self and the no self. And I was kind of like chastised by somebody on a comment.

How dare you question the dogma? Like, well, how dare I not question the dogma? I better question it because like you said, your personal experience is the only thing that you can verify reliably. Other people can tell you and you can believe them, yes. But if you haven't had the experience yourself, you don't absolutely know that it's absolutely true. So you don't have to believe what people tell you and you don't have to spout it. And, you know, it becomes simpler and simpler and simpler what is what is all this sometimes now because a friend of mine calls it like this he says it's just this you and all of this out here it's just this it's not separate right there's no separation the separation is

artificial and based on constructs of the mind we are totally integrated with everything that we sense and of course we know with the planet that's why destroying the planet is such a bad idea bad idea yeah i can't believe you're a mom of four. You look so young. My God, guess what? So my oldest is 27, but today my third, my number three, is 21. How? Well, congratulations. You made it through being a parent and you're still sane?

It's an achievement by itself, right? No, they keep me sane, if anything. That's wonderful. Yeah. My son, who's 21, he is on the spectrum. Ah, and so, you know, a lot of the challenges of being human. And yet here you are doing these podcasts, asking these great questions, interacting, letting people talk and share what they've learned. It's quite a gift to the audience

you know and to god and to the world and the rest of us that's nice of you to say well that's what we're doing here i never thought i would and i for sure was not the person who ever spoke out in fact i used to think that sharing my story being vulnerable was a weakness. You know, I'm definitely from a family that was like, you don't tell people your business. That's right. Well, I mean, and that's, you know, as I work with Irish Catholics, it's very true for many American Irish Catholics. And many people in general, don't tell your don't tell your business to anybody. But look, how do we really learn how to be human if we don't share these human stories how does your audience know they weren't taught any of that in school either right and and so i think that's where you know what what we do in

these kinds of venues is a different kind of education. And I feel more like an educator than a spiritual teacher or a therapist or, you know, it's like, hey, folks, it's okay to be human and be vulnerable. And I heard one of your guests, I think Dr. Smith, was it Michael Smith? Love Michael Smith. Super. I didn't get to listen to all of it because it's just before we went on, but he was talking about how originally all, always it was women coming to him. And I would say the same for me, 20 years ago, it was gay men and women who were my clients. And now the number of, I'm going to say it like the, you know, the culture, cisgender, heterosexual males coming to me is like off the charts.

Same. And it's so wonderful that men are getting it, that they also know that it actually takes tremendous courage to express what you feel. And vulnerability requires strength and sharing your struggles requires strength it's like okay i'm not going to fall apart and if people don't like me oh well like it's okay to heal and be healed you know and experience you know that i mean i've had on i mean i've had in my practice, even just as a massage therapist, so, I mean, it's at least 50-50 now. I mean, for myself, maybe even sometimes more men. I mean, I've seen men cry on my table and they can't even leave afterwards because I just gave them the space to do so and they hadn't had it before. And, you know, it's a beautiful thing.

And I think that is, you know, and I'm a big cheerleader of the divine feminine rising in all of us, you know, and also the divine masculine. And I think it's very beautiful because we're all the same. We're all one. We're all divine children of God. And Jesus taught something to the Pharisees, which the churches never seem to teach us. He said, the Father and I are one essence. They pick up stones to stone him for blasphemy. And he turns to them and says, basically, you idiots.

The Bible says we're all the sons of God. In other words, you're the same essence of God that I am. But you know what the churches have done is make that into a blasphemy. But in the Hindu tradition, this individual consciousness is god itself in the sanskrit and it's only i've only learned a few sanskrit words i am atman brahman this individual consciousness is the divine consciousness and our true nature is sat chitit, ananda. And sat is truth, and chit is awareness and consciousness. Ananda is love, contentment or bliss, freedom and peace. That's what we are. That's why we can look here and find it here. I love that so much. You know, I've been studying the Gnostic Gospels for years

now. I've heard you talk about that, and I've read the Gospel of Thomas not too long ago, and I thought it was just brilliant. Yeah. I know you said you studied the New Testament as well. I became curious also, right? Everything falls and you become curious, right? That's right. You learn new things.

And I also learned that in my lineage as my dad, I'm actually Jewish as well. And that was something hidden, right?'s, I'm actually Jewish as well. And so, and that was something hidden, right? And they came here and they became Catholics. And what's interesting is that I looked at my last name. I just learned like a few days ago. So Vavra, so Vav is of course the six letter of the alphabet. And I've been connecting with the sun. It's a whole nother story.

But I also just learned, I never ever knew knew this I don't know how I never but I found Vavra is as a Sanskrit word and it means like hidden and I said isn't that very interesting there's so much etymology and everything and everything but I've been chanting my last name for some time because of the suggestion from the her talks who wrote keys of Enoch and they suggested I chant and I have been for years now since they suggested it not even realizing I was chanting Sanskrit as well I mean it's a journey that is so unpredictable and so limitless when you don't have expectations and you have to surrender. And what is there is magical. And like you said, like going out into nature and it just it's almost it's like being a child again.

Right. it's almost it's like being a child again right you don't feel any separation and all of us who feel so isolated and alone in front of our little machines you know every day with our phones and our computers just have to put them down for a moment and go outside and breathe the fresh air and just kind of disappear into your senses and that's your very first taste of mindfulness and of being present in the moment and of your nature as that awareness that's inextricably intertwined with everything else. It's not complicated. And what I've seen, too, is because so many people of intellect have worked these spiritual paths, they seem very complex. But the actual tools that are needed are really simple, right? The simple chanting, some people like that. But even if you don't chant, the meditation and the

mindfulness, which is really just meditation, really just paying attention to your senses, that's pretty much all you need. And so I wrote a book recently called Being Human and Waking Up. And I just summarized all these very simple things. And I'm going to teach a course about it in January. But these are all the principles that I've learned. But what I've learned as a therapist, too, as well as a teacher teacher is you have to make it really simple because people aren't going to remember complicated stuff when they're in crisis or when they're in a high level of anxiety they've got to keep it you've got to keep it really simple remember to breathe remember

to go to your senses if you have to count numbers instead of, if you get into a panicky thought set, you just can count from one to ten or ten to one. Or count as you breathe, as you inhale and you exhale and make your inhale like two really deep breaths and your exhale six seconds of slow breath. And those very simple tools are what work the best yeah and i've had all kinds of esoteric experiences bending spoons and you know i i what yeah you don't know about bending spoons i'll show you you can actually bend it i haven't done it since the first time the first class i was in but this guy taught 50 of us in a local classroom here how to merge with the energy of the spoon and now you don't bend it with your mind you bend it with your hands but you couldn't do that you'd break the thing right if you just bend it cold so there's all

kinds of great experiences you can have right yeah i studied energy healing and psychic healing for three years. But what I found again was I actually wanted to empower the individuals. I didn't want to just be the healer. I wanted to teach people to heal themselves. yes like you do yeah and so the bells and whistles the funny things like you know spoon bending even the energy healing energy healing was all about the emotional life it was the emotion and psychological stuff that was twisting people up in their chakras and like you we learned just to use the pendulum to read the chakras and then they made us put the pendulum down and all that was really cool and i loved it but at the end i thought you know i want to teach people how to heal themselves yeah and so that's i think the direction i really hope the culture is moving in that we're moving away from sort of hierarchical king-like spiritual settings where the guru is the king and rules everything or my you know my cult members were the kings and queens

and back to hey wait you actually have everything you need right here in your own heart and your own mind and you can figure it out you need a a little start. I tell people that if I don't become obsolete in their lives, unless they're really seriously traumatized, some people need a lot of therapy, then I'm not doing my job. You know, I also am really receiving right now is that in my life, and it seems like with you too, to not really hold on so tightly to certain concepts even if you believe them so strongly now I have evolved through many many different experiences of what I believe or or what I see right now to be true and then me shift and find a more open or a different way. Just don't be so attached, I guess is what I'm saying to constructs. Well, you know, your listeners who are on

spiritual path know the word surrender. And that doesn't mean give up to people who are abusing you, by the way. It means surrender to what is that you have no power to change. We can all influence things around us with our energy, like the spoon bending. That was really the lesson of that, that your energy can influence what's around you. But the thing is that reality is in charge and your ego is not. Your ego is a necessary interface with other people. And as Dr. Smith was saying, to keep you safe, right? Distinguish X from Y. That's what Adyashanti taught us. But otherwise, it's not true.

There isn't a self there. There's a set of words. And when you take a self away, you also take limitations of what can happen away. Right? Because if I'm defining myself and then defending myself when somebody challenges my little word word definitions of myself that creates a lot of destructive energy and the other thing about ego is it's like i'm going to try to put the ocean into a little glass of water i'm going to put eternity infinity that's

expressing in this human vessel i'm going to put eternity infinity that's expressing in this human vessel. I'm going to put it into this little tiny container of words. And that's just, it's just so not necessary. And so it's so much an impediment. So, you know, what I hope for those listening is that they continue to find their heart, their spiritual path, their sense of truth, their own intuition, and that they ferret out, don't believe everybody you see or hear. Let your spidey sense tell you whether it sounds a little too good to be true, because it is, or whether the people want a little too much of you, they want your money or they want your loyalty or God forbid, they want your body, which happens in certain

spiritual circles still. I'm still hearing about that. You have what you need inside. And that's what I teach people. Amen. And woman. That's great. I love that. Man, John, thank you so much. I feel in my body right now very relaxed, very aligned with you. I'm resonating big time. And I appreciate you so very much for coming on and sharing your story. It's my pleasure. And because of your generosity, I want to give a gift to your listeners as well, which is that I will give them a 15 minute free consult and or a copy of my book, a PDF of my book, Being Human and Waking Up

for free if they will just DM me on Instagram at John Labman. So that that's at sign, J-O-N as in Nancy, L-A-B-M as in Mary, A-M as in Nancy again. So if you DM me at John Labman on Instagram, I will send you the book and or the link to make a free 15-minute consult appointment with me. I love working with students and it's all I want to do now. I'm almost 70. I don't know how much time I have left. That's really what I want to do with my life. So thank you for that. I want to remind your listeners again, please send this wonderful person some love, like the podcast, the five-star rating,

you know, the comment, get involved and say thank you to Shana for all she's doing with her very busy life. Thank you so much. That's so nice of you. It's a pleasure. Tell everybody your website. My website is simplyawake.com.

Okay. Love it. Yeah. Thank you so much, John. Wonderful to meet you. Wonderful to meet you. And many blessings for you too. Where you can work with me one-on-one or help support Sons of Soul Podcast by donating to my coffee fund. Thanks for listening.