The Dr. Hyman Show - From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Cory Richards has summited Everest without oxygen, survived avalanches, and photographed some of the world’s most remote regions. But his most grueling expeditions didn’t happen on a mountain—they happened within. In this revealing episode of The Dr. Hyman Show, you’ll hear how a life shaped by mental health struggles, institutionalization, and homelessness led Cory to push the limits of endurance—and how those experiences can offer powerful lessons on healing and self-discovery. We explore: • Why big achievements don’t guarantee fulfillment—and what actually does • How spending time in nature and solitude can help you reconnect with yourself and find clarity • What Cory’s journey through trauma and recovery can teach you about your own capacity to heal • Why creativity, purpose, and self-reflection are essential tools for building a meaningful life Don’t miss this powerful conversation about what it really takes to overcome adversity. View Show Notes From This EpisodeGet Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hymanhttps://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcastSign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journalhttps://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcastJoin the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Healthhttps://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detoxJoin the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Resultshttps://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Seed, BON CHARGE, Paleovalley, and Pique. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Go to boncharge.com and use code DRMARK to save 15% on your PEMF mat today. Get nutrient-dense, whole foods. Head to paleovalley.com/hyman for 15% off your first purchase. Head to piquelife.com/hyman to get 20% off + a free beaker and frother today.

Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show. The air blast of this avalanche just took us. I took a photograph after this of my face. Ended up on National Geographic cover. Right. And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil

that I was living with. Corey Richards is a world renowned photographer and climber. Known for capturing the raw edge of human experience, while battling his own inner extremes. If you're a regular listener, you already know how much I believe in optimizing gut health as the foundation for whole body wellness and longevity.

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by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey,

check out my membership community, the Hymen Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at drhyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to the Dr. Hyman Show. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter.

In today's conversation with Cory Richards Who's a world-renowned? photographer professional athlete climber best-selling author of the color of everything and bipolar Will be an incredible conversation because it dives deep into our own inner landscapes and how we navigate those in ways that teach us about and how we navigate those in ways that teach us about ourselves, the world around us, and how to navigate places that are pretty tough. And Cory has had a tough life.

He's struggled with mental illness. He's had a tough childhood on and off the streets and has spent his life pushing the boundaries of human potential, both in terms of extreme landscapes of our planet, climbing top peaks and doing crazy athletic feats, as well as in his deeply personal journey of self-discovery and transformation. All of us have stress in our life, traumas,

little T traumas, big T traumas, and many of us often don't know how to navigate through them. And I think through Corey's story, his book, The Color of Everything, his, his own metabolizing of his own struggles, I think we can learn a lot about ourselves. He's done crazy stuff, gone to the remotest corners of the earth. He's summited Everest without oxygen,

one of, I think 600 people to ever do that. Being the only American to climb one of the world's highest peaks in winter. And I don't, I mean, I always thought winter was, you saw Mount Everest, but that was summer, summer most of the time. So doing it in winter is pretty nuts. He survived an avalanche, which helped transform him and his work has been featured in National Geographic. He was actually named National Geographic Adventure of the Year. And his bigger journey in some ways had been his profound exploration of the depths of his own mind, and including PTSD addiction and bipolar disease. And I think he's really used his own story and advocacy

to sort of break the story of being broken. I tell a different story. So you're gonna love this conversation. Let's jump right in. It gets pretty deep, so stay with us. Corey, welcome to the Dr. Hyman show. It's so great to have you. Thanks for having me.

When I meet people who've done extraordinary things, like climbed the highest peaks in the world, done extreme feats of human endurance and stretched limits of what's possible for human beings, I'm always a little bit in awe because I'm like, damn, I don't think I could do that, like climb Mount Everest. And, you know, you know, these are outer challenges that are extraordinarily hard. They require massive amounts of training, planning, mental fortitude,

sort of a mental toughness that makes you go when your body says no. Yeah, yeah. And you've also had to climb very deep and hard places in your inside life. Yeah. And I'm very curious about how you sort of kind of leaned into the external challenges as a way of navigating your internal peaks that you had to climb.

Yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting journey because I think so often there's a natural tendency to try to solve like internal problems through external means. And that can be very, very healthy at times, and it can also be very maladaptive. And I think for me initially, it was, very healthy at times. And it can also be very maladaptive. And I think for me initially, it was a very healthy expression

because it gave me a way to anchor in the world. It gave me a way to try to counteract some of the stories that I had learned about myself in my adolescence when I was really going through sort of the introduction to a mental health journey. That's a nice way of putting it. Yeah, yeah. Being in psych units and living on the street.

Yeah. Yeah. In institutions for years. Yeah. I mean, I was institutionalized and then I was on the street and then I, you know, I dropped out of high school. And so when I rediscovered climbing, because I started when I was five and then I lost it. But when I rediscovered it, it was very much I rediscovered it, it was very much a way to anchor. And then photography as a sidecar to it sort of gave me a voice. And I think, but in many ways, it was more an examination of self. Initially, that was, I think, a very healthy thing.

And then over time, it became less healthy. You mean your attempt to kind of seek salvation in great achievements of human endurance, was not actually helping you on the inside. It never really does, at least in my experience. It never fully helps you resolve that internal turmoil. It gives it a vehicle to express, but it doesn't necessarily resolve it, if that makes sense.

You've done some of the hardest things, like climb Mount Everest without oxygen, very few human beings have ever done. And it seems like a crazy thing to do, what they call the death zone up there, for a reason. And those were extreme feats of what a human being could potentially do with their body, but the mental challenges, I wonder for you,

were those harder? Oh, by leaps and bounds. Mental challenges are always the harder thing in my experience because they're more complicated. There's this very hard reality of climbing mountains or descending rivers in Africa. It's a container and there's the physical world that you're moving through where in

your mind, it's a whole universe unto itself. So the barriers and boundaries in there are much more immaterial. And because of that, it is much harder to sort out where you are on the journey and what the progress is. And it's very, it's very, it's just difficult. So basically you've got a circumscribed task, which is climb a mountain or descend a river or do some crazy shit.

But it's a very circumscribed, defined. It's very clear, it's very delineated. Piece of work. But the piece of work to heal and sort through what's going on on the inside is a very different. It's just nebulous. How do you even define growth? The only way that I've found to define growth is messy.

It's not clear and you're backsliding and you're regressing and devolving at times and that feels like you're going backwards but it's always forward motion but it's just messy. Yeah. You know it's just a messy messy process. And you described a lot of this in your book which is sort of a memoir. Yeah. Call of everything a journey to quiet the chaos within and you know I've been in the mountains and it's so quiet there, it's so peaceful, it's so still. And you just feel like you can kind of hear

the sound of God there. And yet the internal turmoil was just still happening. I mean, in some ways it was almost amplified by those environments. Because when it's so quiet externally, you're made aware of how loud it is internally, right? And so I could find moments of calm and I could find moments of peace, but oftentimes that was when I was engaged with doing something very hard because it demanded a reduction of that noise

inside my mind simply to survive. Yeah. When you're about to die. Right, right, right. It's the only thing you can think about. It's like not dying. Exactly. How to not die. Exactly.

Yeah, I've been in those situations, not as many as you obviously, but you know, and it's like everything just kind of goes away and you just focus on the task in front of you so you don't fall off a cliff. Exactly. Or fall off a mountain or something. Whether it's a metaphorical mountain or not,

you know, anytime we're in survival mode, we're going to have an element of flow. And that is because, you know, we're uniquely programmed to survive. The funny thing about survival that I've found is that it's reaction based versus resilience, which is a response, right? And so the shift from reaction to response, I think is part of that internal growth because as somebody who's dealt with, you know, bipolar and these, these difficult, uh, mental struggles, it's very easy just to default to a reactionary thinking.

The other interesting thing about that is survival is not values based, right? Like when people are in survival mode, they'll do crazy shit. When people are in a resilience mode, it's slower and it's underwritten by value and the values are actually guiding it. So that shift into a resilience mindset

has been one of the most important things I've done. And I would say that climbing and photography was actually mostly survival. I mean, it's so brave of you because it's one, it's a brave thing to go climb Mount Everest, but it's a much braver thing to talk about the mental challenges that you have. They're still prevalent, you know,

25% of Americans struggle with mental illness, suicides, death to despair, opioid, people eating themselves to death, anything about the people that get to 1,000 pounds, 600 pounds, I mean, that is just a response to trauma. Not being able to navigate it and not having a path. And not having the tools to, not having the infrastructure.

Judith Herman, who's a Harvard psychologist, in 1995, she basically said, look, all psychological dysfunction is really one diagnosis, which is trauma. It's all an extension of trauma. I mean, for the most part, trauma has become a buzzword now, and everybody's learning about it, which is so important. And at the same time, there's this overcorrection where we're sort of believing that by knowing our trauma and being able to voice it and explain it that that is healing it, which isn't the case.

In fact, it becomes a new narrative that I've observed stops people on the- Self-identify with it. Exactly. We reinforce it by telling, oh, this happened to me. This is, and now this is my new story. And I did that for decades.

So maybe you can walk us back through your early life and what happened in your family and in your life where things broke down when you were a teenager and you ended up hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, institutionalized for months in the streets. What was that and what happened to you and what was going on in your internal world at that moment? Very early on I realized I had a loud interior landscape. And I remember that from a very, very young age.

And by virtue of that, there was a sense of isolation where I was almost trapped in my own mind. And thus engaging with the external world felt difficult. And there was a sense also of like on the outside looking in. Now I think that's pretty human. As I grew into adolescence, there was a lot of violence in my home.

And it was between my brother and I. He was only two years older, but to me, he was like, he was my adult. My parents were loving, they did the absolute best they could, but families are crazy intricate. The dynamics of families are wildly complicated. Yeah, you throw a bunch of humans with unsolved pass into a small container and daily basis. Yeah, see what happened.

And so that violence was, it wasn't as simple as brothers beating each other up. It was, it was rage based violence and rage. I would actually say was the more traumatic component of that. And it was his rage that perpetuated it. But then I learned also that when he beat the hell out of me, I got attention. So for many years from, from my parents, we both did right. It was, so it was a means of having our emotional needs met, both of us. But then because I looked like the victim, the attention that he was getting was very detrimental to his sort of sense of well-being and self-value. And I learned that, well, if I feed into this,

then guess what? Like, I get all the attention, I get all that soft attention. But ultimately, it didn't work. It just amplified the violence. And then I remember I was 12 and I just had this moment this night. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't just I was so unsettled and I was I was in my family's den and my mind just sped up to the point where I couldn't track my thoughts. And it was almost, it was just these, almost flashes of black and white. And the only thing I could remember

is I could track it to my heart beating. The noise was so profound. And I remember just sort of collapsing and pulling at my hair and trying to make sense of it. And it was at this time that, you know, I was a smart kid. I went to high school two years early, and I'd gone from getting straight A's to getting, basically failing everything.

And so then it was, that was the first time I was medicated with SSRIs. And then about, I'd say about a year later, eight months later, my mom was like, hey, can we go to Primary Children's Hospital and sort of try to get a handle on this? And I knew something was wrong, so, or something was off. So I agreed. And we went, there was sort of this evaluation.

I remember the therapist so clearly. I remember like Enya playing in the back. Wow. I remember the therapist so clearly I remember like Enya playing in the back. Wow. I remember the smell so vividly and um and then as we were leaving this guy his name was Ivan came up he's like oh we've just had a bed open up and I was like what so I thought I was leaving and then I never left. Your mom checked you in. She checked me in. And... I mean that's gotta be a very disorienting experience to be that young and be...

hugely disorienting. And I think what's so interesting is that at that point there's a splintering of stories. Her story and mine. So my story becomes one of abandonment, right? Her story is one of love. I'm trying to help my child Both those things exist concurrently, but they are conflicting. Yeah, right and Resolving that both individually and collectively over time is incredibly Hard, it's very hard work to do after that I was put in a long-term institution or care facility for eight months. I ran away three times.

And heavily medicated. Heavily medicated. Heavily medicated. I was on, it was actually there that I got diagnosed. And again, I'm very much like you. I don't love diagnoses because I think they come with tremendous baggage, huge stories, especially in mental health. There's a story of brokenness that's inherent in mental health issues. Something is wrong. Well, it's so stigmatized, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And the labels really are kind of just descriptions of symptoms. They don't talk about the cause or why or what's going on. They're just a container for a set of behaviors, right? But they come with this story of dysfunction, illness. I mean, we call it mental illness, right? Or we have. That implies something and it's a very hard story to get out of.

And like we were saying earlier, now we're in this culture of like, we're owning it sort of in not necessarily a healthy way. Right. And that actually perpetuates the stigma. Oh, I can't do that. I'm ADHD or I can't, you know, my triggers prohibit me from being in this environment. So that's hiding behind it and further stigmatizing it. Yeah. It's identifying with the diagnosis as opposed to saying, Oh, this is something that I can from being in this environment. So that's hiding behind it and further stigmatizing it.

Yeah, it's identifying with the diagnosis. Exactly. As opposed to saying, oh, this is something that I can heal or work with or shift. Or work alongside or turn into a superpower. During that time, you know, I ran away from this place three times. And the last time, my dad, who's very big on agency,

was like, great, you can run away. You can do whatever you want, but you can't come home. And how old are you? I was 15 at this point. And some people would say, well, that's the worst thing a parent can do. Child abuse. Child abuse, right? Quite frankly, I fault them in no way for that.

They were scared of me. I was erratic. I wouldn't listen. Really, home was just a bed and a source of food and then I'd leave and do whatever I wanted So there was a learning that rules and in every way are arbitrary and I just broke every rule because I had no respect for them and I remember watching them change the locks on the house and Just being like, well, now what? For the most part, I was kept off the street

by family friends and friends, but there were times that I was in chapter eight in the book, profoundly dark experience, that some people would categorize as rape, and some people, the way I describe it, is a much different interpretation of that. But all that to say that there were things that happened that almost certainly to you to to me, or there were things that happened in my life. I try to stay away from the language of to me, two or four. Yeah, yeah,

like this happened, right? And they had an impact. And that took years to like this sort of quasi homelessness took, I don't't know two years to really resolve You know and then I ended up in the hospital again When I was 17, so I imagine when you were out you were off your medication Sometimes like if I especially when I was running away The medications would just run out you know like I was actually still I would take them because one of the stories that I picked Up is that my mind was dangerous, and if I didn't take the medications. I was actually still I would take them because one of the stories that I picked up is that my mind was Dangerous and if I didn't take the medications I was gonna go crazy

That was so deeply ingrained in me that I didn't want to go crazy I didn't want to scream at trees So I kept taking them and I think that was actually to great benefit that I had that I had picked up that story that I Was gonna go crazy. Yeah, and then and then you when you kind of Were kind of out and about, Yeah. like something in you kind of kind of lifted up yourself up to kind of get back into place of doing something, right?

Yeah, I ended up living with my aunt and uncle in Seattle. And because I was out of Salt Lake, I think, and out of that environment, even though I had dropped out of high school, I'd gotten my GED by that point, but I think living in an environment where it was not the deeply ingrained tapestry of my home life was so beneficial. And it was there that I sort of rediscovered climbing, and I discovered photography and started to go down that path. And that was, again, that's where it became healthy.

That's when it was generative. So when you were, when you were in your teenagers, were using drugs and alcohol and were you self medicating as many people with mental illness do or? Yeah. Oh yeah. I love, I love drugs and I, and I still love drugs. Um, but in a very different, I have a very different relationship with them now for me, actually, I would say that the vast majority of my maladaptive behavior was focused mostly around drinking and sex, right? That was because I was so hungry for connection.

hungry for connection. That was a source that at least felt like there was some level of desire to have me in your life, even if it's like that, you know, even if it's very short lived thing. But I think that was actually those were my behaviors that really kind of were the most detrimental drugs again because I had this story of I was going to go crazy were a little bit more added more tenuous relationship with them. So those those alcohol those drugs you were more afraid of because you felt like they were and those drugs you were more afraid of because you felt like they were. Alcohol I wasn't, but like more psychoactive drugs like psychedelics and cocaine, all those things I was much more reticent of.

Later in life of course I've used psychedelics as part of my mental health journey and that's been wildly generative. And when you started sort of your journey back to unto yourself, which sounds like where you've come most full circle and like you've gone through this horrible childhood and traumatic childhood, which in itself was traumatizing from the trauma

of trying to deal with the trauma. Yeah, right. So meta. So meta, right? You kind of got back into a world of physical endurance and climbing and also trying to see the world through a lens, into a world of physical endurance in climbing and also trying to see the world through a lens, which I imagine was your way of reimagining the world

and your relationship to it. Yeah, beautifully put. Tell us about how you kind of got from that dark place, it's sort of this attempt to try to feel that through these external things. And what were the limitations of it? Did you think, oh, you've conquered so many things. You've pushed so many limits.

And yet, it didn't quite do what you wanted. It did until it didn't. So part of it was being with my aunt and uncle. I got three jobs. I started saving money because I wanted to go climbing. You know, I wasn't at school. And that was such a beautiful observation that photography was really a way for me to try to interpret and understand the world that I was moving through.

One of the things that I write in the book is that there was a sense that if I looked hard enough at anything or anybody, I could see my own reflection, because there is a shared experience, not just with other people, but with the natural world, in the entire world, our entire physical world that we live in. There's a reflection of ourselves that exists. And I think photography was a way to try to see that and anchor myself to the world. Also, it gave me a very real voice, meaning that coming from a place of feeling like I really didn't matter that much and I wasn't wanted, there was no belonging. To have my name printed To have my name printed in ink on a page with my expression sort of was this proof that I had a place in the world.

And I love that. And I also use that for validation. Over time it became it became maladaptive in its own way because I was mistaking validation for love or external attention for love Which is not the same thing. I mean, that's like the likes on Instagram, right? Oh, look at me like Everybody loves me and you're like, that's not love bro But then the physicality of it also was trying to I think Get out of my mind and marry somehow my mind and my body and and it was a way to get all the angst out

And then it just got harder and harder and harder, meaning like the climbs got more and more difficult. Then I got more and more attention because then I'm getting sponsored. I'm going on bigger trips and I was just filling myself with that. But it becomes much more dangerous to in what way just more dangerous climbs, right? More dangerous endeavors. You're going to higher altitudes, harder ways. And that, and that is sort of its own swelling of hubris and ego that allows you to escape what's actually happening inside, which is also driving it.

So you don't want to resolve it because you want it to keep fueling you. Yeah. There's the fear that if I, if I am actually somehow healthy, you're happy, then you want me to do fueling you. There's the fear that if I am actually somehow healthy. You're happy, then you won't wanna do the hard things. Exactly, exactly. Out of all success comes out of somebody chasing pain away somehow. Chasing pain away, getting their heart broken.

I mean, look at the vast majority of amazing art is all about getting your heart smashed, right? That's what I always wondered when I was in college, is there a place for art without suffering? Like did art come out of joy or light or beauty or magic or wonder? I actually think all art is an expression of love, but oftentimes it's coming through the lens of pain,

but it's in my mind, it's love trying to be expressed and so the reason we create during pain and and crisis is because the love feels suppressed it feels pushed down and so art is the expression of love coming through you. And you can see in your book, bipolar photographs from an unquiet mind. It's sort of double entendre, bipolar, like both poles and everything in between. It's an incredible book, a beautiful book of photographs from all around the world that you've taken

and how you see the world and what you see and the things you photograph that reflects who you are. And I imagine in some ways it was very healing to do that for you. It was healing. I mean, the photographs, putting the photographs in a book, putting them into bipolar as a collection was very healing. The memoir, The Color of Everything,

the way I often refer to them is they're actually one book. There's the internal exploration, and then there's the external manifestation of it. And so they're really companion books, where one you get to see how my mind was interpreting the world around me, but the other one you get to see what was really happening underneath it,

and what was at many times driving it. I mean, some of those pictures are just stunning. I often wanted to go see what it would be like to go to Mount Everest or K2. You should. The top peaks, but I'm like. Dude, come on, look at you. You're ready to go right now.

I actually had a dream of the backpack and hike and be in the mountains. And I had a dream of being an expedition doctor and wanted to be on expeditions. And I actually was a wilderness medicine doctor for awhile in Idaho. I was a family doctor and I was part of the back country rescue team. So we learned how to like, you know, rescue people from really rugged mountain conditions, but it wasn't climbing Mount Everest, but it would like to know oxygen. Well, my friend, Dr. Luanne Freer, she was the one that actually sort of was like, I went to Everest in 2012 and she was like, and got evacuated and she's like, I think

you had a panic attack. And this was after the avalanche. And she was like, I think you had a panic attack. And she was like, I went to Everest in 2012 and she was like, and got evacuated and she's like, I think you had a panic attack. And this was after the avalanche. My point in bringing that up is she never climbed Everest. She just created the Everest ER.

And that was her life for years and years and years was creating a medical facility to care for climbers and Sherpa, high altitude workers. If you followed me for a while, you know how important real whole foods are. But most so-called health bars are anything but healthy. Many contain as much sugar as a candy bar, plus artificial sweeteners and sugar alcohols that can wreak havoc on your gut. That's why I love Paleo Valley's superfood barsars made with 10 of the world's most powerful superfoods

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Just go to peaklife.com slash hymen, that's P-I-Q-U-E, life.com slash hymen. Try it risk-free with their 90-day money back guarantee and feel the difference. ["The Time of the Year"] Crazy, so I want you to take us to this moment where, and tell us the story of when you were climbing in winter, a mountain that had never been climbed in winter in Pakistan. And something catastrophic happened.

So tell us what happened in terms of the actual events, but also what happened on your inner landscape. Okay. So just so people know, there are 14 mountains in the world that are above 8,000 meters, so 26,240 feet roughly. Five of those are in Pakistan and the other nine are in right on the border of Nepal and Tibet and then there's one down in India. After all those peaks were climbed in the early 80s, there was this crazy idea and it

was really the Polish doing these sort of nationalist expeditions to start climbing these peaks in winter. So it was like, okay, now we've done it. Now we've been to the top. Now let's try to go there in a much harder way. So all nine that are south of Pakistan had been climbed, but over, I think, 26 years, 16 expeditions had gone to Pakistan to try to do one of the winter ascents and they had all failed and So in 2010 11, I was invited by us an Italian guy Simone Moro and a Russian guy Dennis the group go to try to do one of these peaks Gashabrum 2 and that is the 13th highest mountain in the world

So we ended up climbing it in this very short weather window About a 12-hour weather window and then weather window, about a 12 hour weather window. And then we got hit by a storm on the descent. You made it to the top. We made it to the top. And in winter, I mean, just to put a perspective for you, it was feeling Mount Everest, even climbing the summer, it's like snow and cold

and like 30 below. Like what is winter like? That's not winter, what is winter? If summer is 30 below, what's winter? Winter is like this. We got up on the summit day where we're at 6,800 meters. There's three of us smashed into the sardine can of a tent. That's really a two man.

We're sleeping head to toe. I mean, it's incredibly cramped and tight. We wake up in the, well, at 11 PM. And you can barely sleep at that altitude. Oh, my sleeping is like, yeah, no. That's like trying to sleep at an ACDC concert. So we like trying to sleep at, you know, an AC DC concert. So we got up at 11 and you know, I had my altimeter and my thermometer hanging from the ceiling. It was minus 51 centigrade in the tent without the windshield, without the windshield. So

that's like minus 60 Fahrenheit. It's terrible. Right. But is it like, I loved it at the time. I absolutely adored it. And we start climbing through the night, you know, six or eight hours later, we're sort of it was almost as if it just happened. We were on the summit. It's almost like a blacked out, you know, and then the weather came in. I think on the summit, it was registering at minus 80 without the wind chill. You get frostbite where you have enough clothes. I mean, how do you, how do you protect against that cold weather? Well, you're wearing these huge down suits that kind of look like space suits. And you've got a ton of layers on,

but it's tricky because if you layer up too much, you start sweating, which makes you cold. So if your feet are sweating in that kind of temperature, your toes are gonna get frostbitten. And it's very, very tenuous too. You's, you have to be very, very careful because if you say you drop a glove or a mitten, I mean, that hand is gone. Right. You know, you can't handle stuff at that temperature. It's kind of like grabbing dry ice. So we got to the summit and I was, I became, I didn't know this by the way, at the time I became the first and I still,

I'm the only American to summit any of the 8,000 meter peaks in winter. So we start descending and this storm hits us and it just starts dumping snow. And we got back to Camp One and we had a, it's relatively flat, but it's this huge glacial valley that's just, if you look at pictures of it, it looks like sliced bread, these crevasses just kind of, as the grade gets steeper,

they just spill over. I have video of it where the snow is up to our waist and I heard above us this sort of crack, sounds a little bit like thunder, and I know what's coming, and I turn and I look, and the cloud ceiling was very low, and then the air blast of this avalanche just took us, then we're in the snow and it and you're tumbling around. We're I mean, it's just like being in a washing machine.

It's very violent. It's very loud. Your mind goes absolutely crazy trying to make sense of what to do, how to make it stop, how to not die. And and yet it's flooding with memories at the same time. So the idea that like your life flashes before your eyes is accurate. But in my experience, what there was like, it wasn't poetic, right? It was just like random shit going through my head, but a million thoughts in a second. So you're living this, this, this elongated timeline

in a very short timeline. I just remember being angry and then I remember just kind of resigning to the fact that I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it. And then stopping and realizing my face and my head were kind of above the surface. And then my first thought was, well, Simone and Dennis are dead because there's no way all of us survive this. Your climbing partner. My climbing partners. And there's no way I'm gonna dig them up. I don't have a shovel

and the snow is gonna compact very quickly. I could pull the rope that we were tied to to see if I could get down to them. My thought was, well, there's no way I'm gonna get to them in time. Were your hands free? One hand was free. And so I started kind of thrashing and flopping

like a fish trying to get out of it before that my body heat would actually kind of freeze me in a sort of a cocoon. And then I heard Simone's voice. And it was so confusing, because I was like, you're dead. Right? You're dead. Like, there's no way you're alive. Yeah. And then I felt him on me. He was more in the periphery. Somehow when he was leading, he was ahead when we got hit. And somehow

I ended up ahead. When we stopped, we'd gone over several big crevasses. There were huge chunks of ice in the snow. So any one of these things could have killed any of us. And then I heard Dennis's voice too. So somehow we had all survived. And really that is because what, the impetus of the force was actually the air blast in front of the snow. And then we got hit by a little bit of the snow. And that's,

that's how we all were mostly on the surface. And then some kind of ahead of it in this. Yeah. Yeah. Because it, we were on basically flat ground. So what happens is it slides off the steep ground and the snow starts to slow down, but it actually amplifies the force of the air blast. And so we got thrown about 500 feet. And then I felt Simone's sort of hands on me and digging me out. What happens in those moments, the way trauma works is basically it stores a memory. So trauma is not the event itself. It's it's the mind storing the memory in the hippocampus. And when it's very traumatic, it then triggers the amygdala in this loop

into your sympathetic nervous system. And so that shuts down your prefrontal cortex. So you have no logic and reasoning, and you're just living in this recycling loop because your mind is telling you everything is a threat. That's what we call PTSD, right? And that recycling system becomes so problematic that then we search for any way to slow that down, to zone out from it. That's why there's so much substance abuse within people with PTSD.

That's why there's anger. That's why there's violence. Because you're trying to express that through it. Then by virtue of that, it becomes sort of a life path that you can't get out of. There's two ways to rewire the brain. Only two. One is through intense experience and one is through repetition. And so that's why when people have these intense experiences, it changes the brain entirely. And then oftentimes the only way out of that is repetition, which

is much, much harder. So what do you mean by repetition? Meaning meaning you have to change your neural pathways. You have to change what's going on in your head by repeating new patterns over and over and over again to get out of the trenches of the shift that happens during a traumatic event. You can also have profoundly intense experiences that are very positive that change the wiring of the brain. For example, psychedelic use can facilitate that.

That's why people have this big blowout experience and all of a sudden they're freed from years of addiction because they had a positive, intense experience. And so when you were in that avalanche and then you came out of that, you already had experienced in living with PTSD and trauma from your childhood, you're already having struggles with bipolar illness.

When you came out of that, what shifted? Did you kind of have an exacerbation of the PTSD experiences? Was it a vehicle for you to sort of navigate a new way out of all of those? What happened? Well, yes is the answer to that question. Both, all of it. When we have complex post-traumatic stress, which is, you know, deeply ingrained, repetitive, traumatic experiences, say for example, like my childhood, it's much

more likely that you'll have a PTSD episode when you when something big happens like that. So what happened was I took a photograph after this of my face. Ended up on National Geographic cover. Right. And this story blew up well beyond the climbing world. And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase, which was very, very positive and generative and changed the course of everything for me. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil

that I was living with. And so I started to unravel internally. There was the hyper stimulation of the external world, which was something that I knew how to navigate because of childhood. And yet the trauma inside started leading me down some very, very dark paths, specifically with substance abuse. And after this experience, after the, after the very dark paths, specifically with substance abuse. And after this experience, after the, after the avalanche, but it was subtle and then it kind of grew and then there was anger. There was a lack of memory. There was, um, it wasn't like, holy shit,

I survived. Now I have a new lease on life and let me be free. It was like the opposite. You went into a darker. Well, I wanted that again. Again, they existed concurrently, right? So I wanted intellectually the new lease on life. But what I was experiencing internally was why is this getting harder? Why is this actually louder in my brain? So I used the external success, again, to quiet that down. But internally, I was like, give me anything to make this stop.

Just like, give me anything. And when you say this, can you kind of describe what this feels like? It's like an internal hum that never goes away. It's like a, it's like the way I describe it in the book, it's like the, the, the edges of the world become fragmented and sharp. And yet there's a dullness to your perception and ability to function. It's like living in a haze where you've had too much coffee, you've gotten yelled at by somebody that you love, you know, like, it's like all the worst shit and

you're so you're stuck in these rumination loops, you know, having conversations and arguments with the person that cut you off in the Whole Foods parking lot. But it's like all the time, you know, it's it's just so deeply uncomfortable. It's like jagged edges in your mind that is ceaseless and constant and will never ever shut the fuck up. You can't find a moment of calm. Well, it's interesting that you call your photography book photographs from an unquiet mind

and in the color of everything, you kind of have a flip way of talking about that, which is really about how to get you to a place of quiet. So can you just kind of walk us through that? Well, the photographs were made throughout a life of very, this disquiet. And the memoir is all about the journey to find the quiet and where I found some of that,

which is not to say that I live with a very quiet mind, but it's about the process through which I've found ways to regulate and to manage the dysregulation and to manage the highs and lows. But again, it's not as if it just is an instant resolution or it all just goes away. I just went through something recently where I was like, just got my heart absolutely smashed.

And it was like, I feel good, I feel good, I feel, like, you know, in the past three months, there were the fires, nine of my friends lost their homes. Los Angeles. Yeah, I left a relationship that I had been in for a year and a half. My dad died. And then I fell madly in love,

and then it got, and then that just ended, super abruptly in a very confusing way. And so you look at like the kind of dysregulation that that causes. Yeah, any one of those things is enough to knock you off your feet. Right, and then you're doing four of them. Right.

A bunch of life comes at you. Yeah. And then you think, well, I've really done a lot of personal work. And then there's this. Vacuousness after all of this loss. And it was instantly back into these, these patterns, you know, these pathologies. And so in some ways it's like the narrative in your head, the narrative in your head and the behaviors and like, not, not necessarily substance abuse. It's different. It's a different expression now, but it's just like, wow, I'm grabbing for anything to

calm this and that it's a very, it's a good barometer and roadmap for, oh, this is still where I need to do some work, you know, it's because it's it's easy to be regulated when things are going your way It's much much harder to stay regulated when the world falls apart and that's usually where you see your markers for growth You see what I mean? Yeah That's when the shit goes down that you start to have a place for he'll have someone said to me either you're happy or you're growing I think that's really true. And it's what we do with that. And now some people come up against that and they hide, they run, they numb, they.

They tell a story of brokenness. Yeah. And they don't they don't actually use it as an opportunity for growth. Yeah, they use it as a sort of an excuse for fuckery. Yeah. You know, yeah, that's one way of putting it. And I think that, you know, it's easy to fall back into that, right? Because it's sort of easier, it's our culture sort of supports it.

We don't have structures and systems to help us navigate out of that. And I think the psychedelic revolution is really interesting to me because it's a way to talk about trauma collectively, talk about destigmatizing mental illness, to sort of understand that the brain has this plasticity that can shift out of trauma.

You know, there's this sort of funny joke in medicine that neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain. Right. And a lot of the things you're describing are brain dysfunction. That is a response to external triggers or external influences.

And it could be anything from actual psychological trauma to changes in your metabolic health to inflammatory change in the brain that come from toxins, diet, or various external factors that drive mental illness. So mental illness is sort of the end result of many potential causes. And I wrote a book, I don't know if you know this, but I wrote a book about 15 years ago

called The Ultra Mind Solution, How to Fix Your Broken Brain by Fixing Your Body First. And in that book I basically call myself the accidental psychiatrist because what I was doing was helping people address physical complaints that they had, not a new disease or digestive issues or psoriasis or whatever the heck it was.

And they would tell me that their ADD was better, that their bipolar disease was gone, that their schizophrenia was improved, that whatever it was, dementia would get better, depression would get better, PTSD would get better, panic attacks would go away. I mean, and I was like, well, what's going on here? This is not what I learned in medical school.

This is something fundamentally different. And it's sort of got me down this rabbit hole of asking the question about what the causes are and what does the brain need to heal in order for the mind to heal. It's a lot harder to heal the mind if the brain is not working. Right, right. It doesn't mean you don't have to do the work once your brain is healed.

Yeah. But it's a much easier path than dealing with all the physiological things that are driving brain dysfunction. And so like for example, this is like the ACEs scale, the adverse childhood experiences scale, right? Like so if you have, you know, it's basically a questionnaire of one to 10, did you have this happen in your childhood? Did you have this happen?

And if you- Like did you have a divorce in your family? Was somebody in jail? Were you abused? Were you yelled at? Exactly. Were you ever hungry, right? Did somebody ever were you raped? Were you ever hungry, right? Did somebody ever hit you so hard that there were marks?

And the more you add this up, there's this profound expression of both physical ailments and behavioral ailments, right? So like, I don't know the exact figures, but you're far more likely to be a smoker, you're far more likely to attempt suicide but you're far more likely to be a smoker. You're far more likely to attempt suicide. You're far more likely to. 30 times more likely to commit suicide.

Right. I mean, it's crazy. High score, much more likely to be depressed or get divorced. One of the things that's so beautiful that you're talking about. And one of the things that we miss is also the integrated system of the heart. Because the heart is not a metaphor. As we're learning so much more about it. There's mirror neurons in your heart and your mind and emotion processing in some way starts

in the heart. And then, you know, it's the signal for it travels up your Vegas nerve and then it starts this bilateral conversation between your mind and your heart. So it's not just this metaphor. So in my mind, wellness is the integration of the mind, the body and the heart. So it's not just this metaphor. So in my mind, wellness is the integration of the mind, the body, and the heart. And there's those three components that when they're working in in concert, you are stepping into a place of more holistic wellness. But you're absolutely right. It's an inside out and an outside in job and it can work both ways. Right.

And it does work both ways. As an elite athlete, when you, when you started working with all this on, you know, both internal and external, you know, you try to manage it in some ways by doing all these crazy things that most people think are nuts. Yeah. And it helped you in some ways. And I think it probably take you out of maladaptive behaviors. Although people say climbing the Mount Everest is crazy.

What's the scale? But it's sort of a socially acceptable crazy. It's like what we look up to. Were there things that you found helpful that helped quiet your mind that were not these extreme endurance things such as what you ate or, because you were obviously extremely fit and healthy and from that perspective,

but also what was food a part of this? How did you use things like meditation or supplements or other things that helped you to sort of regulate? Because you seem pretty well regulated now and I imagine compared to how you were, it's a big shift. It's a huge shift. And there were many modalities outside of therapy. That was one, right? But in my daily life,

there are some very basic things that I try to hit. One is journaling, like literally mind dumping. And it's not, I'm not trying to write well. I'm not trying to be pretty. It's mind vomit. Yeah. And it's not, I'm not trying to write well. I'm not trying to be pretty. It's mind vomit. Yeah. And it's purging. Yeah. Purging. I do that in the morning if I can just get to it, vomit what's going on and you just get it out. So you're basically we're talking about is your inner dialogue. That's your lower self, right? You're, you're not keeping it inside. You're basically it's like having shit, literally shit inside you. Instead of being constipated mentally, you literally keeping it inside. You're basically, it's like having shit,

literally shit inside you, instead of being constipated mentally, you literally get it out. And you just kind of purge or vomit. It's a mental suppository. Yeah, exactly. Basically. It's just. Yeah, it's so powerful. It's so powerful and consistency is key with it, right?

Doing it regardless is great, but consistency is really. Do you wake up every morning in your journal? I wake up in the morning I meditate one of the things I've really learned is to remove the roadblocks If you think that meditation has to be sitting up straight with your legs perfectly crossed Trying to get a blue light shooting out of the top of your head. You're missing the point if you remove all the roadblocks to these things, so I Wake up in the morning,

I prop myself up in my bed a little bit, and I meditate. I don't try to sit up straight because I've found that that means I won't do it. Then I go to the gym or I do my sort of morning pages or those can happen whatever time it happens. But by then, by the time nine o'clock rolls around or eight o'clock, meditated, journaled, exercised.

But it sets the foundation for your day. Exactly, it sets, and so again, I've tried to be the guy who does it at five o'clock and then you do that, that's, fuck that. Like that is a hurdle, right? And then you'll feel the sense of failure when you don't hit it. And then I have other pillars, which are community.

I do a lot of men's work now, where it's, we call it the tree house, and we are just a group of people who are committed to our own growth and the growth of other men through the messy work of change and accountability. And that provides the structure for one of the other pillars, which is community, right?

So spending time with other people. Dan Buettner, who started Blue Zones, has done a lot of research on this. He's a dear friend and a mentor where it's like, spending a lot of time with people is actually, healthy people is really good for you, you know? And then creativity. So you hit that creative, whatever it is doodle for 30

minutes while you're on the phone, just be creative in some way giving and that could be simple. That could be listening to a friend, not trying to fix it. Just listening. That is a huge gift. So there's I try to hit all these things and then diet. Of course. I try to hit all these things and then diet of course, I try to get enough food.

I try to bias protein basically for, for muscle function and get plenty of greens and veggies in and kind of stay away from sugars and bad carbs. And you notice that those adverse they affect you and you do go off the, I'm just foggier, foggier and foggier, and I don't feel as good in my body. I feel lethargic. It doesn't mean I don't love them. I mean, give me some pizza.

Right. You know, like just being mindful of that. And then with supplements, again, it's my supplement sort of regimen is very, very basic. It's vitamin D, it's omega-3s, it's maybe probiotics at different times. I also supplement with a super greens thing in my protein shakes and fiber because I have naturally high cholesterol.

So when you're eating a lot of meat and you have naturally high cholesterol, you gotta be careful. But it's very simple. And has that affected how your brain is in terms of how your mood is and cognitive function and inner dialogue and the swings of mood? I would say it has, but it's by virtue,

not only of the actual chemical reaction in my body and what that's doing and the reduction in inflammation, but it's also the consistency. Being consistent with things in your life in general creates a foundational sense of stasis because it's reliable. It gives you a sense of agency and not being at the effect of the world

but being in charge of your world. Agency, it's so interesting you say that. Agency is everything. How do you mean? Like you said, it puts you in control and it takes you out of a state of this is happening to me, to this is happening and I get to choose my response to it. Yeah. When you're not an agency, you're reacting to it and you're always back looking backward,

not having agency is living in a place of blame Yeah, so it's backward focus this happened to me and that's always in the victim blame Yeah, victimhood is like and we're fostering victimhood right now and that is we are a culture right now that is rewarding victims It's really true. We have a victim based culture. I mean, yeah, I mean the whole We have a victim based culture. I mean, the whole sort of woke movement is really about I'm the victim, I've been abused. It's the oppressed, oppressor narrative. Right, right.

Which has a place, but it seems to have gone kind of way over to the other end where. What's the extraction of agency? You know, it's like we get to just be in the trauma of it and we get to sit in it and we get to stay victims. I'm not saying that when terrible things happen, there's not a place for being a victim. You are a victim of something happening. There's a time and a place for that. The goal is not to get stuck in it.

When I was writing my book and I say this in the book, I started writing from a place of victimhood. Look at how hard my life has been, right? And look at what I've overcome and look what, I'm a survivor. And then I realized, oh my God, even claiming that I'm a survivor keeps me chained to the trauma because I'm still always in reference

to the thing that happened. Versus there's data and then there's the stories we create around it. The data is the event and then there's the stories that we spin up to find meaning and navigate life with that. But we have to be very careful about the stories we're telling. And right now, as you point out,

we are stuck in a story of this happened to me. But when I look back now, and I look at the relationship with my brother, I look at my family, I look at being institutional, I am literally profoundly grateful for it. And that's the shift. That's the alchemy that made you who you are. Exactly.

I literally would not be sitting here with you had all that stuff not happened. You wouldn't have gone literally would not be sitting here with you. Had all that stuff not happened. Right. You wouldn't have gone and do all these crazy things. I wouldn't have done it. And yeah, it's sort of, you know, sort of what you're talking about reminds me of the sort of profound extreme examples of where one would think that it would be impossible to have this perspective. There's three stories that I kind of, or things that I've heard that really kind of always echo in my mind. One was, you know, Victor Frankl's book, Man's First Search for Meaning. Man's Search for Meaning.

One of my favorite books. He realized he was in a concentration camp. And, you know, the only thing he could control was his response to his environment. Yeah. Couldn't change the environment. Right. Couldn't change what he was getting to eat or how he was being abused or the fact that people

were in crematoriums burning next to him. But he realized that, you know, he had agency over his mind. Yeah. And he said, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a pause. In that pause lies a choice, and that choice lies your freedom.

And so he was free even though he was in a prison. And I remember still I heard about Nelson Mandela where he was in Robben Island in a prison, you know, hard labor, splitting rocks with a sledgehammer. And there was a moment where he was so angry at his oppressors, at the white jailers and the guards. And he had this moment where he realized

that they were actually just human beings and that if he chose to love them instead of hate them, that he was no longer in prison. And during his inauguration, and I had news that people were at that inauguration, it wasn't filmed, but after the inauguration, there was sort of a lunch, and he had the Prime Minister here and the head of that

there, and he moved them away from the chairs next to him, and he invited in two of the jailers who he got to know, who were his jailers, the guards during his imprisonment in Robben Island and welcomed them and embraced them. And he had gotten to know them and they'd gotten to be human beings with him. It was really quite an astounding story. And the other story was when I was a young medical

sort of student and I went to Nepal on an expedition for Kachchonjunga which is where the college speaks there and I wasn't climbing it, I was just trekking and we were studying this small village and doing a public health survey and after I went down to the town in Nepal called Buranath which is where all the Tibetan refugees hang out and I was really interested in Tibetan medicine, and I wanted to learn about Tibetan medicine. And so I found there was this Tibetan doctor, this old Tibetan doctor that was practicing there.

And I found someone who was a translator, and I got to sit with him all day, and while he was seeing patient after patient. And he told me the story of how he spent 22 years in a Chinese gulag, where he was beaten and abused and tortured and they took away all of the things that mattered to him of his sort of sacred Buddhist sort of prayer.

And I said, what was the hardest moment for you there? He said, well, the hardest moments were those moments where I thought I might lose compassion for my Chinese jailer. I was like, wow. So it sort of speaks to how we see things. And Gabor Mati talks about the fact that trauma isn't what happens to you.

It's the meaning you make from what happens to you. And I think when you're little. The story you tell. The story you tell. And like when you're little, it's hard because, you know, you don't have the perspective. You don't, you can't kind of call in your higher self that easily.

You're, you know. You don't have agency. You have agency. You're a little kid. You're at the effect of your parents. I mean, you're kind of a, you are a dependent. That's why they call them dependents. Yeah, yeah.

But when you get older, like you have to sort of retell that story. You have to unlearn. And you have to retell that story in a way that doesn't hold you as that victim. And it sounds like your journey was through that dark tunnel of victimhood and survival. But out the other side of it, you figured out how to actually tell a different story. So can you walk us through how you got from that place where it was hard and you were a victim to the place where you were in power

and actually in charge of your own story and narrative and how you were able to retell that story in a way that allowed you to become more free. A lot of it was really writing the book, but that something happened concurrently with that where I did start doing more psychedelic work. And as I was writing the book, I was confronted by my own words, looking at them in black and white on a page

as I became more aware of my heart, my actual heart. I became more compassionate towards the external stimulus of my life. Because I started to see that like Mandela or like Viktor Frankl, when you start to see the world as a collection of complicated, contradictory beings, there is a necessary extension of compassion. And it also happens internally when you start to see yourself,

you take agency and you start to see that you are full of contradictions. You are full of polarities. You know, we are all hypocritical at different times. And the more we're in search for survival, the more binary we become. That's a natural response of the brain. In writing the book,

when I was confronted with my own stories, and I was coming more into contact with my heart, I realized that I could reframe the stories. I could abandon the narratives. I could literally rewrite them on the page. And what a powerful experience to do that as an exercise for people. Those are just sort of metabolized your life story

in the process of the writing. Yeah. It's almost like a way of metabolizing your life story. Yeah, yeah. It's sort of got transmuted into something else. Well, and I saw, I literally one day I had this sort of revelation. I love reading, one of my favorite books is The Power of Myth, where Joseph Campbell talks

about how there are basically archetypes of humans and there are stories that we consistently tell throughout history in half, right? And I started to see, there's this moment where I was like, oh my God, it's all a story. And I'm in charge of that. I have the agency to imagine, reimagine, and unlearn the stories that I've learned in a very conscious way. And it doesn't mean lie to yourself about it.

It doesn't mean these things didn't happen. It means that my interpretation of them and the meaning that I'm giving them is, is my responsibility. And I have control and agency over that. And so you step out of the blame mentality and into the gratitude mentality where you see that the shape of you and all of your contradictions and complexities, all of that beautiful mess is yours to own versus somebody else's to control or a memory to control.

And there's so much liberation and freedom in that moment. Consciousness is storytelling. That's important. I mean, I think most of us don't even realize we can retell the narrative of our life. Right. That we can change the meaning we ascribe to things. Yeah. That we can end our internal suffering

by actually re-imagining the narrative that we've created for ourselves. And I've had to do that. And if anybody who's sort of gotten to a place of more peace, like I said, the interesting titles of your books are so different. One is photographs from an unquiet mind, the other one's a journey to quiet the chaos within.

So it's an interesting kind of flip. What's polarity? And that has been, my life has been defined on some level by polarity. And there is in the Hermetic teachings, that's one of the principles. That was, I don't know if you meant to say that. My life has been defined by polarity, bipolar. Yeah. Nice dude.

That was great. I'm going to, I'm going to keep that one. In the Hermetic teachings, which are basically underlie all religious philosophy, one of the principles of the seven principles is basically based around polarity. And so the idea is that every truth is simply a half truth. And until you incorporate the other half truth, which naturally exists, you are living in half truths, which are falsehoods, right? It's it's and so part of my journey has been to become more compassionate towards those seemingly paradoxical relationships and allowing myself to expand to include both sides of everything.

And that that that extends to myself, meaning that like the highs that create things would not be the highs that create things without the lows that balance against them. And so to say that I want only one would betray the law of polarity. Well, it's true. I mean, most of us try to push away what's uncomfortable right and get seek pleasure. We avoid, we seek pleasure and in a way that that kind of misses the point of life, which is it's all part of life. It's all part of it. And, and, and, we avoid things, we seek pleasure. And in a way that kind of misses the point of life, which is that it's all part of life. It's all part of it. And you can't experience one without the other. Discovery demands discomfort.

So if we're trying to constantly avoid the things that make us uncomfortable, we will no longer discover. And another one of the things that I talk about oftentimes is that certainty kills curiosity. So as soon as you become certain of your story, certain of anything, you're done growing. There's no more exploration. There's no more discovery. You're done.

It's over. So grow your capacity for discomfort. Lean into the things that are hard, lose your certainty, take agency and grow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the questions. Yeah. I'm gonna sort of what real has a famous passage around that, which is beautiful about welcoming the questions because that's really where you find the answers. Right? Well, and it's funny that I opened the book with a real quick quote,

which is let everything happen to you beauty and terror. Just keep going No feeling is final It just you know the idea to avoid suffering There's a lot of that right now in the mindfulness wellness community where there's almost like a it's spiritual bypassing Where you're like trying to? almost escape the necessity of pain. You just like bypassing it. No, I'm just going to be mindful.

And I think it's a misinterpretation of non-attachment. I'm true. I, I, I, I'm going to share that Roko Koko. So it was so important to me as a young man and from a book called letters, you on a young poet, a young poet that actually helped, the poet kind of reflect on his own life. And it was this beautiful meditation, these letters were just mostly poetry,

but he said, be patient toward all that's unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now,

and perhaps you'll then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Yeah, it makes me emotional because it, Yeah, it makes me emotional because it, I mean the one thing that I, I still have tremendous amounts of questions and especially right now in my life, it feels almost more confusing than it ever has. Well I'll tell you what, I'm 65 and I still have

so many questions and so many unsolved things and so many things I'm still leaning into and learning and growing. And it doesn't matter what age you are, what point of life you are, your story is one of inspiration, but also I think it's one of giving people a sense that they're not alone in these struggles and trials and challenges,

whether it's just anxiety, depression, or just tough moments in life, or those where more serious mental illness, that there's a way through. The only way out is through. And you've clearly demonstrated that, just tough moments in life are those where more serious mental illness, that there's a way through, right? The only way out is through. And you've clearly demonstrated that, Corey, with your life and your life's work.

And I encourage everybody to learn more about Corey. Check out his book, Bipolar Photographs, We Want to Inquire Mine, his book that he just came out with, The Color of Everything, which is just a beautiful meditation on your life and experience. And in a way, you're sharing people the alchemy of your change and how you sort of shifted your narrative,

which is, I think it's almost like you get to see the work in progress of that. Yeah. You can follow me on Instagram at, and your handle is just Corey Richards, right? So no E. No E. C-O-R-Y. And yeah, there's films you've made,

there's all kinds of stuff out there, but I think we all find challenges in life and your story of overcoming those challenges and continuing to overcome those challenges is inspiration for all of us. So thanks for doing what you do, being who you are and coming on the show. Thanks for having me. This is great. Perfect. Loved So thanks for doing what you do, being who you are, and coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

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