The Rich Roll Podcast - Discovering Yourself In Tragedy: Steph Catudal On Love, Grief, Healing & Finding Meaning in Life’s Profound Moments

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Your darkest moments will either break you beyond repair—or make you stronger. This was the choice faced by Steph Catudal as she navigated mortality, motherhood, and the search for self while her husband—beloved ultra-runner Tommy Rivs—battled a rare form of lung cancer that nearly took his life. Beautiful and heart-wrenching, Steph relates the intimacies of this experience in her New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything All At Once—an arresting, must-read perspective on trauma, rebellion, faith, tragedy and the painful struggle to identify one’s place in the world. If you count yourself among the millions deeply impacted by Tommy Rivs’ brush with death and return to life—one of the most beloved episodes the history of this podcast—then today’s conversation is non-negotiable. This is a conversation about the big things in life: trauma, death, grief, pain, identity and faith. An artist with words, Steph shares the details of her complicated upbringing, the loss of faith that catalyzed a decade of rebellion, her journey with substance abuse, and the experience of very nearly losing her husband Tommy—juxtaposed agains the mirrored trauma of losing her father to lung cancer during her adolescence. This is about seeing healing as a never-ending journey—and the importance of assigning meaning to life’s profound moments. It’s also about how to cultivate gratitude—how to recognize love and beauty amid tragedy, while also holding space for pain, anger, and sorrow. In other words, how to allow everything all at once. I was very moved by Steph’s vulnerability—and the power with which she owns her story. May you find this conversation equally impactful. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: On: On.com Momentous: LiveMomentous.com/RICHROLL BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/RICHROLL Babbel: Babbel.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RICHROLL Seed: Seed.com/RICHROLL Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

Healing is an unending process, and that's okay. You're not alone. You can come back from anything. You know, you can hit rock bottom and still make something beautiful out of it. We are given a choice in those dark moments, in the moments of tragedy. Will you choose to allow it to make you stronger, or will you choose to allow it to break you beyond repair? to allow it to break you beyond repair.

One of the most beloved guests in the history of this podcast is ultra runner Tommy Rives. What he learned from a near fatal brush with a rare form of lung cancer and his remarkable return to both life and sport has and continues to touch millions of people. Yeah, I'm just stoked that I'm just still around, you know? If you count yourself among those impacted by his powerful story so beautifully told, then you are going to love Steph Kachidal, an equally soulful, gifted writer who shares her life and the experience of almost losing her husband Tommy

in her stunning and very intimate New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything All at Once. This conversation is really about all the big things. It's about trauma and grief and suffering. It's about faith. It's about rebellion. But it's also about how to recognize gratitude, love and beauty amid the tragedy, while also holding space for emotions like pain, anger, and sorrow. In other words, how to allow everything all at once. I was very moved by Steph's book. Her openness and vulnerability in this conversation is powerful. I think you'll find it quite impactful.

And it's all coming up. So here we go. This is me and Steph Kachidal. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, Thank you. to support and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

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again, go to recovery.com. you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Steph, it's so nice to meet you. I've been looking forward to this for such a long time. So, welcome to the show. I can't wait to get into your life, this fantastic new book that is now a New York Times bestseller. Congratulations. That's amazing. Everything all at once. The process of writing it, I'm interested in what that was like for you. And if you had any additional sort of discoveries about yourself in life as a result of doing that, that perhaps you wouldn't have had short of the writing itself. Yeah. Writing this book was really, really difficult for me. I had to heal. Well, it's an ongoing process. I was healing from the trauma of what happened to me in real time as I was writing. So I think that's why

the book is so raw. And because I was still in that emotionally raw state when I was writing it, I was deeply depressed when I was writing it as well. I feel like it was the comedown from this post-traumatic stress experience that I was having. And I think that comes out in the pages. And even when I read it now, I can't access that same depth of emotion. Right. And I think I had to write it in that state for it to be as true as it was when I was writing it. Yeah. I would suspect five years from now, 10 years from now, you may reflect back on it and have a different relationship with it or experience. And I think the process of then putting a book out into the world means that you

sit down with people like me and you talk a lot about what's in the book and and i think that in and of itself then continues to inform your own kind of journey of self-understanding like it will continue to reveal newer and newer layers of that yeah well what i'm one of the the most important things that i'm learning and learned throughout writing the book is that healing is never ending. It's an unending process and that's okay. And there's no finality in my book because I was realizing there's no finality to grief. And I'm sure I'll look back on this book, like you said, in five and ten years and kind of look back on myself as almost like a childlike

fondness, you know, that I was so new in my healing. And I think that's a beautiful thing to accept that we're just all on this healing journey and there's no final destination, you know, it's just ongoing. Yeah. I think that's a beautiful and healthy response to it. This book is actually an extrapolation of an earlier book that you were writing about you confronting and making peace with and healing the experience of losing your father to lung cancer. A story that you thought was complete at the time, and it was only through what happened with RIVS that you realize like that was just, sort of pre-intermission, right? And the story still had much to tell you. I think if you had put that book out prior,

you would have missed the magic and all the messiness and the pain of course, of what you experienced that now gives you kind of a gravitas to share from a new level. And the narrative of the book is structured such that you toggle back and forth between that original story, which is kind of a linear chronology of your life, peppered in between with chapters

about what is going on with Rives and how that reflects upon experiences you had as a younger person. Yeah. Well, that first half of the book, so all of the even chapters are roughly the book that I wrote from the past decade. And I actually finished that version of the book and I called it, This Is Where I Leave You, because I actually thought that I was leaving my grief behind, that grief was something that could be left behind. And I felt like as though I had finished grieving the death of my father, which now to me is just really interesting or even comical that I thought that you can finish grieving. And when Rives got sick, that narrative obviously got

cracked wide open. And one of the most impactful things that I learned about myself is that I hadn't finished grieving the death of my father because you never finish grieving. And in order to truly accept the wholeness of myself, I had to accept that that void left by my father's death would always be there and that's okay. And then it became, what tools do you use to fill that void that are not self-destructive? And that's the journey I'm on now currently.

I'm still real time. That's where I'm at because I learned that to accept that hole or that void inside of me. And now I'm trying to figure out ways to not fill it, but to just deal with it in more productive ways. Yeah. You're a seeker. You're somebody who at a very early age was looking for answers in lots of different ways, not always so healthy, right? You know, ran away from home at 16.

There's drugs and alcohol involved. You grappling with your relationship to being raised Mormon and what does spirituality mean? What does prayer mean? Things like this. You were always looking for answers. And I think part of this narrative is that you're running away in the searching, right?

You think you're running towards answers, but you're actually running away from what's right in front of you, which is confronting the truth of your father's passing and what that meant to you and how that affected you and trying to figure out, you know, what does God mean? And what is my purpose? And all these sort of unprogramming, you know,

some of the dogma that was instilled in you from a religious perspective as a young person. And it required what happened to Rives in order for you to stop because you couldn't turn away for the first time in your life and you had to confront it. And it's just fucking crazy because your dad passes from lung cancer and then Rivs gets lung cancer.

I mean, you cannot script this and make this up. It's like this insane like collision of you know truth that the universe conspired to put in your path in order for your own self-discovery and and growth yeah well there's a part in my book where um we i think it'd been two days since we got riv's final diagnosis which was the lung cancer and i was with my sister and we were just floating in an Airbnb pool, kind of in this purgatory of waiting for me to be able to visit Riv's in the hospital. And I said the words aloud, I said, my husband has fucking lung cancer. And we just laughed and laughed and laughed. It was just this cathartic, just recognizing this cruel irony that, like you said, just almost like the universe just shaking me saying, you need to learn this lesson. And I don't necessarily think that things happen for a reason. I don't like to think that my dad died for a reason or that Rivs got sick for a reason.

I think that's dangerous territory for me personally, but looking back, I can assign meaning to what happened for my own self. Yeah, that's a choice. Yeah, that's the choice I made was to say, my dad died. That was just purely tragic, but from his passing and from the response that his grief made me feel in the ways that I acted, taught me better and equipped me to better deal with my husband's diagnosis. And then my husband's diagnosis, in turn, in the cyclical nature, helped me heal from my father's passing. Right. And so it was this very, very, it felt like this cosmic, I felt like I was on a train and everything that was happening during that year and a half was

a stop that I was supposed to get off at and then get back on the train. That's how it felt. Right. With the question, where is the opportunity for my own personal evolution and all of this in the midst of the chaos and the pain and everything else. And I think also what we talked about me searching for answers and searching for meaning. I, during my adolescence and everything in the wake of my father's death, what I came to find was that I had been searching outside myself for this placation or for the answers. Don't we all? I mean, of course. And especially because I was raised Mormon.

And so I was taught that power lives outside of us, that we submit to the power. And I think that's good in some ways because it brings humility and, you know, lessening of the ego. But what I found was that I held the power inside of me and that I could find the healing and it wasn't an outside source. It was innate in me. I was born with that power and it was just learning how to access it. And it was love that taught me that. Yeah. The first stop being Mormonism and the final stop on that train tour being RIVS, thinking that the answers that you were seeking could be found in this relationship with this extraordinary human being. And not until the kind of frailness of his physical self became evident,

were you able to understand that he was not your solution either, right? That it's between you and you. Yeah. And that was a really sad reckoning because it wasn't until he was sedated and in a coma, essentially, that I realized that I had been blaming him for a lot of my deficiencies because he didn't heal me. He didn't make me whole. Therefore, there was something wrong with him.

And I only, as I was sitting by his bed, was I realizing how many moments and events I had blamed him for when it was really all my responsibility. My happiness was only mine. He couldn't give me that happiness, that wholeness. And I had been blaming him. And, and part of this urgency of wanting him to wake up was for me to apologize for saying,

I'm sorry, I expected you to heal me. What a tenable demand, you know, like how, but I think a lot of us do that. I, and I think that came from the wound of my father's death of this, of this, you know, feeling like you need to stay here because you're going to replace my dad, you know, which is. And thinking that you had resolved that grief and overcome that trauma only to discover that you hadn't, right? Yep. I've been thinking a lot about that.

That's beautifully said. And I, again, I made some notes that I, that I want to share. So I'm going gonna refer to them. I was thinking about what you just said and also reflecting on a recent personal experience that I had. And I posted this thing on social media yesterday about trauma. And I said, I'm convinced that one of,

if not the most important keys to living well requires redress and healing of past or childhood traumas. Basically arresting the dysfunctional behaviors that we've inherited by our ancestry that recur unconsciously and reactively, adopting new healthier ways of living and instilling these more adaptive patterns as default settings in the next generation is the most worthy and esteemable pursuit and the path to freedom. And as I think about your story and thinking about the many ways in which you were kind of running away from yourself and your pain through religion, prayer, geographics, drugs,

you're dabbling with sobriety and AA and psychedelics. But the truth and ultimately the lie is that this solace that you end up experiencing and believing that everything you were looking for, you end up finding in ribs, right? This empath, to use your own phrase, this very sensitive human being who's kind of like, from an outsider's perspective, almost like a Bodhisattva-like figure. You know, he's incredibly charismatic. He's larger than life. He's very strong and seemingly invincible, this protector.

But he also exudes this really beautiful quality of love and benevolence and kindness that ends up not just comforting you, but comforting a lot of people. But that is very bright sunlight, right? That power ends up eclipsing your own power and ultimately works at cross purposes with your own growth. It prevents and delays you from confronting yourself, confronting your past. It arrests your healing. It keeps you disconnected. And you can choose to believe

or perceive in this whole experience that on some level, his disease is this gift that he's giving you for your own evolution. Because finally, like I said earlier, you can't, for the said earlier, you can't, for the first time, you can't run away. You're compelled to confront your past and heal it and ultimately become whole. And in the telling of this story in this book, you are passing this on. You're not only passing it on in the way that you're parenting your daughters so that they don't

sort of inherit the same behavior response to trauma that you did. But by sharing it with your words, you have this vehicle to empower other people, which is just, you know, like that's it, man. Like that's the shit, right? That's what we're here to do. We're here to grow, evolve, and then share what we learned along the way. It's still a daily practice though. It's not as though I figured it out because I wrote this book and therefore I am now healed from codependency and all of these things

that I still have to make a conscious choice to not let the trauma child inside me act out because she's still there. We never get rid of our trauma selves, I don't think. But accepting and recognizing that that's what's causing us to act out in certain ways is liberating for me because then I can feel her yelling and being insecure and then I can recognize her rather than just pretend it's someone else's problem. And so that's a daily practice that I'm trying to work at is hearing my trauma self and then acting in a way that's not

blaming or destructive. But that's part of everything, you know, all at once, right? It's the full spectrum of emotions and learning how to be in a place of self-acceptance with those rather than trying to hold yourself up to some perfectionist standard of how you're supposed to respond to a difficult situation. Absolutely. And not fighting against it. I think I felt I tried so hard my whole life to fight against depression, fight against anxiety, to battle it and push it away. And it isn't until I'm beginning now to just allow it and accept it and almost make it my friend and my teacher and my companion that I'm able to move forward rather than staying stuck in the same patterns. Yeah. That might've come across in some of those AA meetings you went to when you were in your early 20s or whatever.

Surrender, acceptance. Yeah, surrender. I mean, but that's the thing is, and also what I'm learning is that truth is found everywhere. You know, truth is found in the Mormon religion and in AA and in psychedelics. It's found everywhere. It's just, you find your avenue that resonates most with you. And, but we're all saying the same thing. We're all saying the same thing. We're all saying the same thing, you know? And, and I think that's, that's beautiful when you can recognize

that we're all just little trauma kids trying to, trying to heal in this life. Yeah. It's, your story is unique to you and yet it's kind of the oldest story. It's like, I ran around the world looking for answers only to arrive back home and realize they were within me all the time. Yeah, I mean, it is. And that's what it's, I feel like pain is universal, but we experience it so personally and it feels so personal to us. And part of the reason I wrote this book was I wanted people to know that you're not alone. I wanted people to know that you're not alone. Like I gave every greedy detail to let people know that whatever they're doing to cope with their tragedy or their trauma, that if they could use it as a vehicle to self-improvement, then you can come back from anything. You know, you can hit

rock bottom like I more or less did and still make something beautiful out of it. It's one thing to navigate the challenges of a loved one who's succumbing to cancer. And it's another thing entirely to do that under the public eye, like you and your husband are both people who are sort of well-known. And I'm wondering how that impacted how you were dealing with it privately

and then realizing like there's a public out there that wants to be apprised of what's happening moment by moment and the tension between trying to protect your family and navigate a very personal thing with the demands of people that are in some kind of parasocial relationship with you that you've never met. Yeah. Well, and I think that was heightened by the fact that it was COVID. So everyone was isolated and lonely and living

virtually. So everyone was in these parasocial relationships at the time. And so I think that just heightened and intensified the connection people felt with our story. It was double-edged, I would from my friends. And, um, and at the same time, there was this, this expectation that, that their, their love bought a ticket to our lives. And, and I wasn't willing to share everything because some things were too sacred to share. And also Rives is a very, very private person. And I knew even though he was unconscious, I knew he wouldn't want me to be taking pictures and sharing them online. I never once took, shared a picture of him sick. I knew that when he, and if he woke up, he could tell the story how he wanted to. And that's why I chose to tell it only from my emotional self. I didn't really give many medical updates. I mostly gave emotional updates because that felt respectful.

Right. And the writing that you share on Instagram predates Riv's illness. I mean, this is something you've been doing for a long time. And there's lots of people out there who fell in love with you simply for your way with words. So the book in many ways

is just an extrapolation of that talent. It was only a matter of time before you wrote a book, whatever it was going to be about. I was already writing one, but yeah. Yeah. And there's a Zen Koan-like sort of flair to some of your posts, but they're always very sort of layered and deep and thoughtful and honest. But I'm wondering, I think there's this, before Rivs got sick, there's this sort of perception of an idealized life, right?

He's got this extraordinary physique, he's super handsome, he's just an athletic machine, you're very beautiful, you have these beautiful daughters, and the projection is one of maybe not perfection, but an aspirational life. And then suddenly, you know, that crashes into a wall and you're faced with, you know, I don't know if this is anything you even think about. But I'm just wondering, you know, as somebody, as an outsider looking in, like, wow, people are projecting onto you a version of your life that isn't reality. Then do you feel a responsibility to disabuse people of that or to try to communicate with people in a way that still is providing them with something like teachable moments or something aspirational out of what you were enduring in real time. Yeah. Well, the truth is the couple of years before Rives got sick were probably some of the hardest years for us personally and in our marriage. He was injured in the Houston marathon.

So he couldn't run. And when Rives can't run, he gets very dark. And as, I mean, we're just a normal married couple. We got married when I was 22 years old and he was 23. We were just babies. And so we had to learn to grow up together and we did not do it perfectly. And I think people have this idea that we've figured it out because he was able to reach his goal of to, you know, reach his goal of being a career athlete. And I was able to reach my goal of being a writer, but it did not come without many struggles and many fights and many resentments that we still work through now. And so to hear people say that, you know, we seem like we're the ideal couple or that we're a couple goals. We hate,

we cringe when people say couple goals only because we're not, we're definitely not like we've, but what we do well is we encourage each other's independence and we've always done that. And I think that for us is really important because we are both very lone wolf independent people. And I think that's what brought us together in the first place. Um, but I never felt a sense of duty to the public to, um, to give off any particular, um, I don't know, like image of who we were. I just, I'm sorry if we gave off the image that we were perfect because we're definitely not. No, I'm not saying it was intentional on your part, but I think it's easy to sort of like extrapolate from that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And, and Riv's especially really, really doesn't like that. I, I, I'm very, um, passive. Like I don't dwell on,

on things as much as he does. He is a, definitely, deep thinker, as you know, and he's always thinking about what will people garner from this. And so, we're trying to now kind of deconstruct the notion that we are this, I don't know, perfect couple that have it figured out. On an almost sort of mythic level, though, when I think about Riz and, you know, perfect couple that have it figured out. On an almost sort of mythic level though, when I think about Riz and, you know, to your point of him being this empath and being a very sensitive person. And even you write about this in the book,

the fact that he, you know, he needs to go out into nature and engage with solitude so that he can ground himself and, you know, process like all the energy that he takes on from from everyone around him it's almost like he's a he's a cleanser for others right yeah and i can't help but think like in this sort of archetypal way you know the the illness the illness that that that he got like is was, like, he reached his max in his ability to kind of process, you know, other people's toxicity and he was doing it, you know, in a selfless way for

others. Yeah. Well, he always talks about it as a gift and a curse and mostly a curse that his ability to absorb other people's emotions because to the person that he's helping obviously it's a gift but he doesn't know how to metabolize that emotion other than running and so when he doesn't get to run again it just sits in him and he always says I feel like I'm rotting and and I think that's really really heavy for him and and then to be partnered with someone like that, you do need to understand their need to be alone for hours and hours at a time. And that was part of my learning experience as a 22-year-old newly married to say, why does my husband want to be gone six or seven hours a day? And it took me a long time to realize that he needs that because he is, like you said, this archetypal figure that he is quite literally healing himself and others. And when he got sick, I felt this acute just realization that the sickness was not purely pathological. There was an element of the stress and the emotion that he had been absorbing was making him sick. And his inability to run was causing that. And I don't know,

I'm not saying with certitude that stress gave him cancer, but I think there was a component to that. And so a lot of times when he was in the coma, I would try to tell him as best I could to just let it go, just to release what he could because it wasn't his to bear. And I think that was all part of his healing. Yeah. The healing being multifaceted. On the one hand, you know, what is the opportunity for him, right? And, you know, what is the opportunity for him, right? Perhaps there are other ways for him to process all of this outside of running. And there's an opportunity for him to explore some other modalities.

There's an opportunity for him to figure out how to have some healthy boundaries. So he's not, you know, in this osmosis where he's just, you know, like a sponge for everybody else's bullshit. You know, I think there's something interesting there, you know, in this osmosis where he's just, you know, like a sponge for everybody else's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think there's something interesting there, you know? Yeah. And that's probably really uncomfortable for him, I would think, because like running is, you know. Well, especially now that he can't run.

And he can't do that. Yeah, he can't. So he's, now he can't run away from this. And he has to figure out other ways. Yeah. And that's, I mean, he still does go out for, you know, a couple hours a day, but it's not the same. He can't, there's not that catharsis of just endless, like just rigorous miles and glycogen depletion and all of that. So he's, yeah, we're both figuring out these new selves that we find ourselves in, um, the post illness. Um, so, and we're also getting to know each other in that way, you know, we're both very different people now.

So yeah. Who is he without being a professional runner? And yeah, you have to, you have to redefine what those roles look like and how you're interacting with each other. And learning how to just be, which for both of us is very hard, you know, just to be, and I think that...

It's the worst. We're both, he especially, and in reading your book, you and Rives are quite similar in a lot of ways, in self-discipline, self-determination, extremism. And he has a hard time not pushing the limits and not just having a goal and reaching the goal. And then what's the next goal? And so we're realizing that one of the hardest parts of being alive is to just be, and that doesn't mean being stagnant and just sitting around and doing

nothing, but feeling fulfilled being. And that's what I'm trying to do right now is this book didn't make me happier, you know? And I think in some part of my mind, I thought that reaching this goal would make me happier. And realizing that accomplishments don't do much but stroke our egos, you know? And then we're left with that kind of not crash, but just realizing, okay, I'm still me. I'm still a mom. I'm still, you know, I'm still Steph with all of my problems and issues, even though I accomplished this goal. And so my next goal is just be. It's a hard one. To be goalless. To be goalless. To be goalless, yeah. That's terrifying. It is.

And for Rivs too. And we're both in the same place where we're just really trying to just be. It's hard. I had my friend Light Watkins on the podcast the other day. He's a meditation teacher. And he said something along the lines of,

you know, the happiness that you will experience when you summit Everest is the happiness that you brought to the summit, right? It's not going to change, right? That's between you and you outside of any kind of externalities. And that is the Mount Everest decline, right? Yeah, absolutely. The whole thing.

Yeah. How is his health now? How is he doing? He's good. Yeah. I mean, other than the lung damage, which is more or less irreparable. I mean, I think they can have, see small improvements, but he basically has COPD from the tumor damage. But he's doing what he can and he's healthy.

He's cancer free. So that's all we can ask for, you know? Yeah. I want to go back and explore your background a little bit and your kind of relationship with religion and spirituality. Growing up in a Mormon household and being this sort of rebellious youth, like walk me through the salient aspects of that. Yeah. So I was raised in the LDS religion. My mom had converted when she was 14 years old and met and married my dad who was not Mormon, which in itself is kind of an anomaly was if you know Mormons, you know that you're taught to marry other Mormons. So I was already raised in a household that wasn't 100% culturally Mormon

or even genetically Mormon, you know. And still I had this firm belief in the faith. And when my father got sick, I truly believed that my faith could heal him. That if I prayed enough and that if I was obedient enough, that he would be healed. Because that's what I was taught, both like really overtly, actually, if you have a perfect faith, miracles will be granted. my 14th birthday, I completely dispelled any notion of not only religion, but of spirituality and inspiration and any notion of hope because I felt so deeply betrayed by those notions. And so if God and faith weren't real, then nothing was. And so I could do whatever I want. And so I drank, I think I was four days

after my 14th birthday and I got drunk at a house party and I cried. I spent the night crying under a dining room table. My big brother brought me home. And I feel like that was it. And I didn't ever realize that I was drinking because I was grieving. I really thought I was just making a normal teenage decision. It really took me maybe five or six years to realize that the path I was on, the destructive path I was on, maybe was a result of my father's death. And that's how disconnected I was from myself. Right. You're unconsciously reacting and responding to this trauma without really understanding why you're doing what you're doing and thinking it's for other reasons. This is the point.

This lives within you. It's an entity until you heal it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And so I went down. And so I went down, I kept, I also feel as though, and again, this is something I read in your book, which I appreciated, that there was something bigger than myself always looking out for me. And even though I didn't believe in that thing, I could have, should have been dead or in jail or, you know, so many things should have happened to me that didn't. And I feel like there was always something stopping me from going over, pushing the limit just that last little bit. And now I wonder if that was my dad, which was something I would have never, ever even entertained, that thought, up until Rivs got sick.

And I don't know. I still don't know, but I wonder. Was there a conscious impulse to numb the pain or was this just, I'm partying like everyone else? Or was there a sensibility of searching for some kind of answers that would replace that fall from grace that you had with Mormonism? I think it was this feedback loop where I drank because I wanted to, because I was angry. And I wanted to feel. And it was only, when I was drunk was the only time I allowed myself to cry. And it was the only time that I kind of allowed myself to feel anything at all. And so I was doing it, but then I was feeling guilty because I was raised Mormon and raised to

believe that, you know, any kind of drinking or any kind of partying was a sin. And then that made me feel guilty. So then I would drink more because I felt guilty. And so I was just in this just downward spiral and obviously none of it worked. Yeah. And when you were able to emote when you were under the influence, like I'm curious about what the relationship in your household growing up as a kid was with kind of sharing your emotions openly. I mean, how was that? Yeah, we didn't do that. Not a lot of that, right? Yeah, we didn't really do that. That's shocking. Yeah. I mean, and I talk Yeah, not a lot of that, right? Yeah, we didn't really do that. I mean... That's shocking.

Yeah, I mean, and I talk to my mom about it now, who, you know, I portray her in this book as this British Stoic, which she was. She was very, very Stoic and beautifully so. I think that her strength and her lack of showing emotion actually just carried us through. lack of showing emotion actually just carried us through. And then it was our responsibility later to learn how to grieve. And I feel like for me, that was the perfect way to do it. I know that people could say, yeah, you weren't able to show your emotions.

It wasn't that we weren't able to, it's just, we didn't know how. And when your father passed away, how was that explained to you by your mother? And what is the emotional residue of that experience? We didn't talk about it. We didn't talk about it. I came home, he had passed away while I was out at Walmart. And she looked at me, said, dad died. We were expecting it. It wasn't a shock. And, and that was kind of, that was that, you know, there was no, there was real. And I think now, and this is one of the wonderful parts of writing this book, um, is I realized why she did that. And because talking to your children about grief is an impossible task and one that I was having to confront. And it wasn't until I had to confront it for myself that I realized

that she did it perfectly because there's no way to do it. You're grieving and you're trying to tenure the pain of your own children. It's impossible. And you do whatever you do and that's the right way to do it. Right, it's another example of the universe lining up to infer an opportunity out of this. Dad lung cancer, Riz lung cancer. This is how my mom dealt with it and communicated to me when I was a kid. Now I'm in that position

and I have this very difficult choice and I now appreciate more deeply how difficult it was for my mother so I can forgive her, have more empathy for her, maybe make different choices, but heal whatever wounding existed over the way in which she parented you and communicated with you. Yeah, absolutely. And that I didn't actually realize the depth of that healing until I was writing the book. And a lot of times writing is how I make sense of the world. And it wasn't until I was writing all that she did for me and the parallels between our lives at really around the same age, when my dad was six, she was quite young too. And it was just kind of this aha moment that, oh my goodness, I am in my mother's position and I am doing pretty much the same thing that she did. I'm not able to talk to my kids very well about the possibility that Rives might die because I

don't know how to say these words to them. It's impossible. And I did show more emotion to my kids. But again, I don't think I did it perfectly. I'm sure in 10 years, they're going to turn around and criticize the way that I led them through that tragedy. And I'm expecting it. It's rigged that way. It wouldn't matter. Whatever choice you made, they're going to have their issues with it and they can talk to their therapist about it. Write a book about it. You know what I mean? And be mad about how you didn't do X, Y, or Z. Exactly. And that's the way it should be, right? This is how the species evolves. But it is, again, one of those dualities. Like you want to be strong, make sure that your kids feel safe and protected and that, you know, everything is going to be okay. but you also want to have that open channel of communication. You want to be able to model, you know, vulnerability and, you know, what it looks like to go through something

hard imperfectly. I think that's an important lesson as well. And those two things are in tension with each other. And I think probably every parent who's had to deal with some kind of difficult issue and how to communicate to their kids about it, you know, butts up against that. have any. I wish I had advice. I wish I could write out a formula for the perfect way to lead a child through tragedy, but there isn't one. And also each child is so different. Each of my children have dealt with RIV's illness so differently and it's not one size fits all, you know? And so it's, you just do your best and they'll be fucked up no matter what. I know, right? But I think that the other, yes, like it's important to not just give blanketed advice for this kind of thing.

But one thing that you make clear in the book is you had to overcome, like you were sort of operating under like, you know, like I'm protecting them, like they don't need to know the details. And then, you know, just the overwhelm of all of it leads you to a certain kind of breakdown and you end up opening up to your kids, you know, somewhat in a vulnerable way. And that was received well, like it was received with empathy. And I think what I take from that is when in doubt, like don't underestimate your children's ability to appreciate the humanness. And I think that they will end up respecting you more

if you're transparent with them. If you're hiding something, and even if you're doing it for the right reasons, like you wanna protect them, that's what leads to distrust and all kinds of other stuff. And that doesn't mean that you're just unfiltered in all of it, you have to protect them. That's what leads to, you know, distrust and all kinds of other stuff. And that doesn't mean that you're just, you know, unfiltered in all of it. You have to be responsible. But I think there's a lot of wisdom and understanding, even if they're young and obviously what age they are is important, that kids are resilient.

And maybe they can't handle everything, but they can probably handle more than you might suspect. Yeah. And I guess that's a good thing to point out was I was keeping from them some of the details of what was happening and the severity of those relief details that Rives could probably die. And that's what I was keeping from them. But I was not holding back with my emotion, especially with Harper. You're referencing me breaking down in Harper's arms. She was 10 at the time. And she pulled me in and she comforted me. And I hope that that was a beautiful moment for her.

Probably really tragic and sad, but also just realizing that my mom is human. Because growing up, my mom never felt completely human. my mom is human because growing up my mom never felt completely human she was just this great like incredibly strong powerful like just unmovable person and and i tried to emulate that it's hard to connect with someone yeah yeah and and i think that i hope that harper can learn from me um sadness it's okay to be sad that's something I never knew was it's okay to be sad. And I'm trying to model for my children that sadness isn't a negative emotion. I mean-

It's an appropriate response to a very difficult situation. And that we can feel like, as the premise of this book, Everything All at Once, we can feel sadness and fear and love and joy all in the same moment. We don't have to choose. And that was huge for me to learn. It's also an expansive definition of strength.

We think of strength in very narrow terms. Like to be strong is to be taciturn and to like keep your shit together or whatever. strong is to be taciturn and to like keep your shit together or whatever. But I think it's a different kind of strength to allow yourself to experience difficult emotions and to do it with people you care about because you have to trust them. And it takes a certain strength to do that, even if they're your children. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And Harper, for better or worse, is also an empath. She is Riv's incarnate.ate she is i see it in her and i think that's also why i felt comfortable breaking down in her arms because it was almost as though she was the wiser one in that moment i felt like she she could feel the the vastness of all of it

and she could take it and so as long as the only caveat I would add to that, as long as she doesn't feel, she isn't made to feel that it's her responsibility. Absolutely. Yep. And that's kind of how I ended that chapter was hoping that they knew that my sadness wasn't something that they would ever have to carry because someone else's sadness, you can't carry it. You can't take it upon yourself and you can just comfort them in those times. Back to the sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yeah. So I love stories like this where,

oh yeah, let's get into it. Despite your adventures with errant boyfriends and vans and trolling around the valley in los angeles etc i never i never got the sense that you really had a problem with drugs and alcohol i felt like you're being you're in you're in weird codependent relationships with boyfriends who had problems so you're going to a meetings because that's what they need? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, but then the problem is that because I don't, I don't have, well, this is going to sound weird with how many tattoos I have, but I actually don't have an addictive personality.

Like, Rives and I are different in that Rives is extreme and it's all or nothing. I'm actually quite moderate in a lot of ways that I am able to- But you like the extreme dudes. I do. And obviously. This is your addiction. This is the addiction. Yeah.

And the problem is, is that I can do things moderately and they can't. And so a lot of the guilt of my adolescence was I'm leading all of these people away from sobriety because I did it on a few occasions just in my book. Right. You're the temptress. I'm the temptress and I don't mean to be. I just, I like to have a good time and I could do it within parameters, you know? Without peril, yeah. But what is it you think inside of you that leads you to be

attracted to these extreme personalities? Yeah, good question. I don't know. I'll get back to you on that. But I think that there's something extreme about me. I mean, obviously, I'm covered in tattoos. And somehow, I am able to do moderation, or something is keeping me from going over the edge. And I still haven't figured that out. That's still what I'm trying to figure out is why am I not going over the edge? And so I'm still figuring all of this out. It's quite new. It's still new to me. Yeah. Well, you got lucky in picking an extreme dude in the form of RIVs because typically like they don't come in such a healthy package. He's extremely healthy. That's the extremism. Yeah. But, I mean, he has a tendency to, I know he spoke with you about this, the addiction of the opiates.

He is, and he's sober now. And that's huge for him and for me, too. Because it kind of, it helps me to, I feel like it's going to be a long path but i feel like i'll get there interesting yeah yeah i think it's tangled up in this ongoing reckoning with spirituality yeah at the core of of your searching yeah and in thinking about the inflection points along that timeline uh there's another interesting one, which is when you decide to go to BYU in Hawaii and you have this encounter with this bishop and you make this choice to be kind of more honest than perhaps that guy was used to. Yeah, or wanted. And getting a surprising response from him. Yeah. Yeah. So part of being admitted to BYU Hawaii, which is a Mormon, obviously, institution is you need to go through an ecclesiastical endorsement. And so basically there's a checklist that they ask you, do you abstain from drugs, sex, alcohol? It's like, no, no, no. And I knew I was going to quote unquote fail.

Right. And when I told him everything, I divul divulged everything and really at the time it did feel like a fuck you to to god it felt like because everyone else is just saying yes to pass the test yeah they're checking boxes yeah exactly and you can easily drink coffee no no no never and so that i also added that into my story him saying know, those things don't really matter. You're a good person. And I added that in, that true story in because I kind of, you know, dog on Mormonism a bit in my book, but I also wanted to show that there's good people there. There's good people everywhere. And just because that religion didn't resonate with me, it doesn't mean that it's all full of self-righteous bigots, you know, there are good people in those religions.

And he gave you kind of a surprisingly capacious response that allowed you to reframe that resentment. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But it didn't stop me from partying at BYU Hawaii. Also, the question is, why did I, it's almost like I, why did I choose a Mormon college? Right. You know, it's almost like I like to push. You'd already rejected that. Yeah. So, that was a question that I had.

Yeah. Like, how did you end up there? Yeah. And I think the answer is, and maybe going back to why am I, I think that I want so badly to be so, I don't know, I wanted so badly to be good. And I just didn't know how to do it. And I didn't know what good meant. And all I knew was good was what was taught to me in my religion, which was abstinence. And obviously it's so much more than just that. And that's something I'm

still learning. Yeah. Yeah. And that, but it's a search for, it's not, maybe not necessarily a search for goodness, but a search for somebody to tell you that you're good, right? Or to make you feel okay with who you are. And that's exactly what that bishop did. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It is fascinating that you ended up going there. Yeah, it is.

I still wonder. Yeah. And so what does that look like now? I mean, everything all at once. This is a non-dogmatic, expansive concept of spiritual energy and the way that the universe works that you can't quite put a name on it. You don't attempt to do that. It seems that the overarching energy here is love, but how do you define your relationship with the unseen?

Yeah. It's ongoing. It's evolving. It's different from even when I wrote the book. When I wrote the book, I felt very certain about what I had felt and seen. And now as I get farther away from that experience, I question more and more. I'm a cynic, so I will question no matter what. But when I reread the book, I realized that it was very true to me, the spirituality of it all. And I can't deny, as much as I want to deny, that there was a strong spiritual component to everything that happened. Yeah, it was. When I walked into Riv's room when he was sedated, I felt more connected to the universe than I ever had in my entire life. And the moments that should have been terrifying and tragic and sad were some of the most love-filled moments I'd ever experienced in my life, sitting next to my sedated husband on two different life support machines.

And the only way I was able to explain that, well, try to explain that, is that it was this otherworldly love that was just in the room and it was palpable. You walk in there and I even talked to the nurses and the doctors and the therapists that were in the room and they agree there was something transcendental happening in that room and I couldn't deny it and they can't deny it. Even the doctors were like, there was some miracle and magic going on in this room. And I can't explain it. And I don't know what it was. I like to believe it was part of my dad that was there. I love to believe that.

Some form of God, goddess. But it was love. No matter what you call it, it was love. but it was love, no matter what you call it, it was love. The doctors recounting their version of that story, being unique to Rivs, because they're in that scenario every single day with different people, right? So what is it about Rivs that helped co-create

that type of shared experience, do you think? Well, interestingly, what they said was it wasn't necessarily him, but it was the bond between us that felt transformative, which shocked me. One of his first nurses wrote me a letter about how she had never met him awake. She had never seen us interact. But somehow the palpable love that she could feel changed her whole idea of love. And I wasn't trying to do anything. And he was asleep. But I think it was a beautiful connection that not only between me and him, but the love that I was bringing from the world. And almost as though I was a conduit and, and kind of transferring that love into him. And it was, it was incredible.

And it was crazy. It felt like, I felt like a lot of times I would leave that hospital room and I felt like nauseous as though I, I was the empath all of a sudden, like I was absorbing and transferring, which is something i had never ever experienced before but i'd heard ribs talk about it a bunch and it's almost like we switched roles and i was able to do for him what he had been doing for other people right well you're also for the first time shouldering responsibility for your own growth and personal well-being right this transition from thinking ribs is going to take care of it. He's all powerful to suddenly, oh shit, I have to do this for myself. And then I have to go home and

figure out how to do it with these kids in private while I'm suffering and grieving all at the same time. And then on top of that, the doctors, or it was one doctor, I think, who said to you, listen, a huge part of whether or not he's gonna make it is up to you. You're a part of this healing process. Like, what are you bringing to this equation? Which speaks to exactly what you just shared. Like, are you contributing to his improvement

or are you sucking life out from underneath him because you're dealing with too much already and you're upset because he's not going to fix you anyway. Right, exactly. And that's what I found is every day that I went in there, it was, I think, 101 days. And he was sedated for 50 of those days. And I went in every, I didn't miss a single day. And every day that I went in, I felt more and more alive and connected to myself in a time where I should have been falling apart. And part of me was, but recognizing that the fullness of me is falling apart. That's okay. It's okay to feel strong and completely weak at the same time. It's

okay to feel anger and gratitude at the same time. And the more that I accepted the, really the monism, not even duality, like how complimentary these feelings were, not contradictory. And the more I allowed those complimentary emotions, the more powerful I felt. And as I get farther away from that, I don't feel it as much, you know, now. And I think that a lot of times we are, we have the choice to become our best selves in the worst times. And somehow I became my best self in the worst time of my life. I don't know how, again, I wish I had a guidebook, but it was just recognizing the power that had always been inside of me. And it wasn't in ribs, you know, and realizing that I was more powerful, not

necessarily on my own, but in this moment where I didn't depend on him. Yeah. You had a capacity that was latent within you and pain and challenge is the crucible for connecting with that and sort of bringing it forth into the world. So it was, that's the opportunity, right? The interesting thing is if you, if you co-sign to the idea that all of us have capacity and potential that we're walking around with that we're just not aware of,

or we haven't really brought forth in our own lives. Do we really need to be in that kind of a tragic event or to suffer extreme pain in order to manifest it? It's a choice. It just rarely happens. It rarely happens in the list. Short of basically being boxed into a corner in that kind of a way. Yeah.

Well, similarly, Rives and I are, for lack of a better word, happier together than we've ever been. And people are like, how are you so happy? I'm like, just make him almost die. And then you'll, you know what I mean? You'll go through together this recognition of how much you love each other and how important you are to each other and things that we take for granted that are sometimes only shown to us in the depths of despair sadly how do you access that feeling of gratitude and awareness when you're not in the depths and i'm struggling with that now even. Please tell me how to do that. Yeah, right. Oh, you don't know? Because I'm now even, I want to maintain the lessons I learned,

be present. There's no better moment than this moment right now. And all the love you ever need is inside of you. All of these truths, I know them, but it's harder to feel them when life is good. Right. And imagine your ribs where your whole life is oriented around connecting with suffering as a vehicle for growth and truth and self-understanding and appreciation. And suddenly that preferred voluntary version of suffering

is replaced with a different type of challenge, overcoming this illness. And then on the heels of that, stillness. The suffering is not being able to engage with your chosen version of suffering. It's a passive suffering. And I'm sure that is much more uncomfortable for him. It would be for me. Yeah. Well, and also, I think there's a physiological component to the metabolizing energy. That alone, I mean, he literally was using the energy that he absorbed from other people to metabolize his runs. Yeah, you had to transmute it.

Yeah, exactly. And now that he can't do that, he has a hard time being around people. Right. That's the truth. Yeah. Because he can't absorb, well, he absorbs what he can't metabolize. Is he actively searching for alternative ways of doing that? Yeah, yep.

I think he's, yeah, figuring it out. Yeah, but it's a journey for sure, yeah. I want to talk about the time malleability stuff, this sort of quantum idea. I mean, obviously, if you're RIVS and you're in a coma and you come out of it, you're going to have a unique relationship with time. Yeah. But time is a bendable concept that is influenced by the extremity of what you're experiencing. Time slows down, time speeds up, et cetera. But in this quantum sense, this idea that like there is no past

and there is no future, we're on this sort of recursive loop where everything is happening all the time in some dimension is a fascinating one. I'm curious as to whether that was initially prompted by your psychedelic experiences. I was going to say, yeah. And it's something that I'm dealing with right now. And in a different way, I've got a family member who's suffering from dementia. And to just observe that person, their relationship with time is complete. They could be one minute

they're living 10 years ago and then they're, and you know, so that's gotta be scary, but also, you know, it's bizarre because then you have to visit that timeline. And, you know, memory is an anchor for time, right? And our relationship to memory is a way of time traveling, I guess, on some level. So walk me through this whole concept that is really the whisper in the background

on every page of this book. Yeah, well, and that's even why I wrote, the memories that tethered me to myself throughout my life are written in present tense because what I learned and what I'm learning is that memory is the cursor to things that are always happening. These memories are actually ever-present, and we can access them and go back to that time in a moment. Well, they're consciously or unconsciously impacting every decision that we make, so they do live in the present.

impacting every decision that we make. So they do live in the present. They do. Absolutely. And I mean, the most, the like, the starkest example of this was when Rives was at the end of his life. And I went in there to say goodbye is what they told me to do. And I rested my head on his chest. And in a we were dancing together and we were living that moment together in the present and nobody could tell me that didn't happen that i was not metaphysically there because i was my body was here but i was there with him and we were dancing together and that that memory i feel drew us back together into into this world and called him back to this life. And I think that example was why I wanted to weave the malleability of time into my whole book. Because I realized that it was memory that was saving me over and over again,

memory that was saving me over and over again, mostly the memory of love. And, and that's what I feel kept me my whole life from going over the edge. These, these ever present moments of presence that I was called back to. And, and on the other hand, Rives, he lived lifetimes in his coma. He was, I mean, he has some incredible stories about where he was and where he went and how many different families he had. And who's to say that those weren't real, that those weren't really occurring lives, you know? I'm not, I would never say, he says some of those memories of when he was in the coma feel more real than this life memory, you know? Wow. So, I'm really, really interested in the quantum aspect that I don't, I wish I understood on a physics level. Yeah. But I, all I know is my experience with time and yeah. So, what do we take from that how are we supposed

to interpret that or how is that meant to from your perspective inform our lives i mean really it's that love is woven into every aspect of our lives in in the form of memory. And that in the most tragic moments, love or the memory of love is still there. And I like to think of my father, whether he exists in a spiritual realm or just in a memory, I think that the memory of his love is the same as saying that he lives in some spirit world. And that love is entwined in every aspect of my life. And it's in all of our lives. And if one of the most pivotal moments of my life to date was recognizing how that love had been in everything, absolutely everything. When I was drunk, crying under a table, when I was hitchhiking through Guatemala,

when I was, you know, everything that I did, love was there. I just didn't recognize it in myself, so I couldn't recognize it in other people. How do we tap into that? Do we have to, you know, do psilocybin? Like, can we, can I, how do I, I want some of that juice stuff. Have you know do psilocybin like can we can i how do i i want i want some of that juice stuff have you ever done psychedelics i haven't okay and i know okay so that's probably touchy because psychedelics it comes up all the time on the podcast yeah talk about it a lot

because you've had gabor mate here right so yeah i've had lots of people you know you know explored this extensively and i won't bore the listeners with my perspective on it, only to say that because I'm sober, I have trepidation around it, but I also can't dismiss or deny the efficacious benefits that I've seen many people have and the interesting science that's coming out about how it's helpful for people with depression and PTSD.

But on a purely kind of spiritual plane, I'm interested in the epiphanies and the truths that then seem to persist well beyond that experience. And in your case, clearly, you know, have informed your entire worldview. Yeah, well, I really do credit psychedelics with my ability to handle Riv's illness the way I did. It was only six months before he got sick that I did my hero mushroom journey. And that's what cracked me open to the possibility of spirituality. And I think had I not

had that experience, I might not have been open to even the idea that Rivs existed somewhere other than in his body. Maybe I wouldn't be open to the fact that I could conduct love into him through some spiritual cosmic channel. And I really think had I not had that mushroom experience, I wouldn't have been able to do the things that I did with and for him. But that being said, I know some people who are kind of militant about psychedelics and think it's the only way. I think it's the quickest way to get there, but I do believe there are other channels. My sister-in-law is a quantum healer and she does like the holotropic breathing, meditation, but course, that takes a lot more time and mental energy than just drinking a tea and going right there, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Although holotropic breathing, I'll bring you there pretty quick. I've never done it. I'm terrified. We do these retreats and Julie, my wife, takes people through holotropic breathing exercises. And in our past retreat, our most recent one, she took everyone through it like on day one. Like, let's just cut through the shit right now. And like people were having insane experiences. And everyone would go around the room and share afterwards.

And like, I was an eagle and I was flying. What's really cool and what I love about. Yeah, my mom is, you know, she's Mormon still. And she's on this whole journey where she went to Thailand. She's mostly vegan. She did a vegan cleanse and did a holotropic breathing experience. And, you know, coming from a really like Puritan religion, that's not accepted really, this outside spirituality. But she did it and she said she saw Jesus and Buddha and they were both equally important.

I'm like, there you go. And for her to just, I love that, you know, that she said she saw Jesus and Buddha and they were both equally important. I'm like, there you go. And for her to just, I love that, you know, that that's what she saw and they were both equally important. So I do think that psilocybin is wonderful. For me, it worked. I haven't done another hero trip since because what I needed at the time was- What does that mean, hero trip? Well, you take like five grams, like a massive dose where you complete dissolution of ego. Like I didn't know who I was, the time was- What does that mean, hero trip? Well, you take like five grams. Like a massive dose. Like a massive dose where you complete dissolution of ego.

Like I didn't know who I was, where I was. But I needed to do that because I was so dissociated from myself. So I needed something to, and this was only four years ago. I needed something to crack me open and to show me I had been compartmentalizing my grief. I'd been compartmentalizing my feelings. I wasn't fully healed. You never really are. It's okay to feel everything all at once.

I needed that shaking. But I don't need that now. I was shook. You know, Riv's illness cracked me even wider open. I don't need it right now. And I think it's recognizing when and if you need that rewiring or that, you know, restructuring of your brain and your thought patterns. And I'm recognizing that I'm still on the trip. You know what I mean?

I'm still going. And I know they recommend doing it something like every six months, but I cannot fathom they the mushroom people this my brain's like can I do it every day well you can microdose but that doesn't do it for me that didn't ever do it for me although it did help me get out of depression once microdosing but anyways I don't think it's a blanket. I think some people use it as the be-all end-all answer. I don't think anything is, you know? I think you got to see what works. Yeah. I mean, the way I think about it is it's a portal into a state of consciousness that

would otherwise be difficult to access, not impossible. And for some people, that's just enough to shift them and get them interested in a different way of navigating the world that otherwise they would never have, you know, been open to, I guess. And I got there when Ribs was sick every day without the need for any substance. I got there every time I was in his room, felt like that kind of transcendental experience. But like we've been saying, do you have to go there? Do you have to suffer to feel it? Maybe you do. Maybe you do.

I don't know. Maybe you do. It is a very hero's journey kind of architecture to this story. I'm sure when you're in the middle of it, like anybody who's challenged by life, you're thinking, why is this happening to me? I finally had this life and I worked so hard and I did all these things and suffered and explored and now I'm happy and then all of this is happening. Why? But when you look in the rear view mirror, it's like everything's lining up perfectly for this experience. Obviously you're choosing events and moments

and imbuing them with meaning to create a narrative, which is not any more real than some other, if you had chosen a whole bunch of other events to imbue them with meaning. So there's a lot of human imposed ingenuity on top of it. But when I look at, first of all, your dad wasn't the first person in your life to suffer from cancer.

You had a brother. Like you had, you met that at, how old were you? Four, 13 or something like that? I was six when my brother. You were super young, right? He was three, I was six. So that was your first, universe is knocking. Hey, here's a little thing.

How are you gonna deal with this? Oh, wasn't enough here. Well, let's throw your dad into the mix and see what happens here. I guess, she's gonna have some more adventures and then, okay, well, I'm gonna drop an anvil on this person's head in the form of, ribs and a rare form of lung cancer.

And also six months prior to that, you go off and do this psilocybin thing, which is sort of seeding you or preparing you to have a different experience this time with a new lens that would allow you to navigate it with an expanded perception of meaning. I'm, man, I'm really weary. I don't like saying that I see. But it is, I know what you're saying. But I do see it. The universe didn't decide to do all of these things for you. I understand that. But can you find meaning in that and extract that meaning to, you know, to kind of, you know, to grow and evolve? than that how could i look back and not see how it was a little eerily not predestined but

everything like you said lined up so perfectly i can't i hate it but i can't deny that it did feel very uh meant to be in some ways you're like luke skywalker yeah right movie you know what i i don't ask why did these bad things happen to me because far worse things happen to people. And I'm very aware of that. And I really am. And I don't think I've had some tragedy filled. I've had a very beautiful life. I chose to tell the tragedy side of my life, but I've had a pretty good life. all, you're being careful to not portray yourself or be perceived in any way as a victim. Right. Well, yeah. And also that you're not the main character in some grand, you know, architecture of the universe conspiring just for you. Right. Right. You're just a person living your life. Things happen. I never asked why did these bad things happen to me? I really never have. But I ask why did all these good

things happen around these bad things? Why did I get so much guidance and love and assistance throughout my life when so many people are left alone? And I think that's the why that I ask. It's almost like a survivor's guilt. Like why was I so lucky to have so much love in my life when I know a lot of people don't have that? And so in some way, that's why I wrote the book as this tribute to love itself, because I've had so much of it. And wanting to honor that is the thing that kept me alive my whole life. But that is the why that I ask. Why me? Why am I so lucky to have that help? Yeah. You were talking about goals earlier and certainly, you know, you had a goal of writing a book and having people enjoy it. I'm sure you've set other goals in your life, but at the same time,

and having people enjoy it. I'm sure you've set other goals in your life, but at the same time, you don't strike me as like a plotter and a planner. You strike me as somebody who is living your life based on gut instinct and you're making spontaneous decisions and you're not really thinking that far ahead, right? And life has worked out,

which maybe mystifies you because you didn't plan it or you're not thinking ahead. You're just, this is what my heart is telling me. I'm going to jump and go here, which I think is a really beautiful way to live. I know some other people that live that way. They're just like, I never worry about, as long as I'm connected to my heart and it feels right to me, I do it and I have faith and trust and I can make a leap. Yeah. But that requires like a level of trust in your own instincts to guide you. That's spot on.

Rives and I always joke that I'm just the ultimate coaster. And I always have been. I've just allowed life to happen, you know? And I allow it to happen and I'm just there for the ride. And bad things have happened along the way, but somehow it's always worked out for me. But there's, and then there's someone like Rives that plans every moment of every day

and knows what five years from now is gonna look like. And I don't even think about today. I don't know what I'm going to do this afternoon. But when you're not thinking ahead like that, things go well and you're surrounded by love. It's impossible to not believe that on some level you're being guided and taken care of. But you also can't prescribe that to other people because I think it's also could be dangerous to live that way. What's interesting is that it worked out given your level of disconnection from self because i would i would say to somebody who operates that way make sure you're really connected with who you are otherwise that gut instinct is just some weird memory that you're being prompted by and you don't

know why and that can all go terribly yeah wrong and often it does yeah Yeah. And that's why I do attribute some of my earlier life survival really to something I can't explain because I wasn't connected to myself and I was extremely reckless and still it all worked out. As a 22 year old, I chose to marry Rives, who I was partying at the time and I was reckless and wild and he was just off his mission like a really sweet Mormon boy and somehow he finds me. Where did he go on his mission? Brazil.

Yeah. Yeah. Did he have a beard at 22? No, you're not allowed. I can't even imagine what he looked like. You can't. He was really, well, he was handsome but he has like a really good jawline.

But again, I like, why, how did that? Yeah, what was it about him? Well, what about him? I mean, what wasn't it about him? But I mean, what was it about me? I feel like we just knew. And I, as I write in my book, when I saw him, it was almost like another one of those memories. Like, I know you. It doesn't make sense, but I know you somehow. you it doesn't make sense but i know you somehow and um kind of like how you said in your book that you said you were going to marry your wife right that day it's and i'd never felt that way before i didn't even think i was going to get married i thought i was just going to coast my whole life and be a beach bum and and then i he walked into class and it was just oh my gosh there you are you know and and some past life shit yeah exactly and that's just this cyclical nature of time and the bleeding of past and future together

into an interesting present present for now and and again like yeah that malleability of time it's we this isn't my friend vanessa in flagstaff, this isn't your first rodeo, Steph. You know, the things, the way that life has lined up for you, it's not your first time. You dove into this knowing exactly what you were going to do and who you were going to meet. And when she used to say that, I was like, oh my gosh, that's such bullshit, you know. And now I'm seeing it unfold and it's truer every day. Wow. Have you seen the movie Arrival? Yeah.

No. No, I don't think so. Oh, this is your homework stuff. Okay. I'm assigning this movie to you. Wait, Arrival? Denis Villeneuve. It's a science fiction movie.

Aliens Come. But it's really about our relationship with and our perception of time. That's really what the movie is about. And I think it's going to blow your mind. Okay. All right. So you're going to watch that's that's really what the movie is about and i think it's gonna blow your mind okay all right so you're gonna watch that that's what i'll do tonight now i have a plan for the first time in my life in addition to the quantum time past present stuff and the the you know the the duality themes there's also i guess this is sort of a cousin to the non-dualism aspects of the story, but the story is also about what lives in the between spaces, you know, the liminal spaces between death and life, right? Between day and night, between religion and spirituality and what lives in between anger and happiness, gratitude, et cetera, or the mundane and the sacred. So how do you think about that or how did you kind of plant your flag in that murkiness?

think about that or how did you kind of plant your flag in that murkiness? Well, that was a huge theme I wanted to explore because I was raised to believe in polarity and, you know, good and evil and sin and obedience. And that damaged me so much as a child because I believed that perfection was the goal. And if I wasn't perfect and living on that end of the spectrum, then I wasn't doing it right. And time and time again, life taught me that life exists between the extremes. It's not good or evil. It's not right and wrong. It's everything all at once, really, essentially. And when I came to accept that the best of life exists in the gray areas, in the liminal areas, then I was almost able to accept the wholeness of myself because I am good and bad and happy and angry. And I always tried to give moral weight to my emotions, you know, that gratitude

was a positive emotion and anger was a negative emotion. And I truly believed I had to choose between them. And then recognizing that there is no moral weight to emotion. They just are. And they're necessary. You know, anger is equally as necessary as gratitude in a lot of cases. That was shown to me by recognizing how anger in my adolescence actually fueled me and kept me alive. When I think had I not had anger kind of fueling me forward, I probably would have been far more self-destructive and just kind of desolate.

And it wasn't until Rives got sick that I learned to appreciate that side of myself, the rageful, angry side that was really essential to who I am. And then on the spiritual side of that, Riv's room was the in-between. It was that it wasn't life and it wasn't death. And it was a place that I still don't have words for, but it was like a sanctuary. And I felt more alive in that space between life and death and more connected than I ever had. And I think part of it is, again, going back to time. Time didn't exist in that room. Other than the monitors, you know, beeping and kind of like bringing me back to time time didn't exist in that room other than the monitors you know

beeping and kind of like bringing me back to to the present there time kind of suspended when i was with him and we could be in hawaii together and we could be caught up in all these memories or past lives whatever you want to call them um and time ceased to exist. And it was a really sacred, sacred space. But again, all of this happened in between. Yeah. I'm just wondering how I can connect with something, some semblance of that into my life. You know, it's a peak experience.

Yeah. And then it's about the judgments that we attach to it in thinking about your Mormon background, a very binary structure, right? Good, bad, evil, whatever. And then realizing to use your words that actually there's a fluidity to truth. And anger is not necessarily bad or being sad. It's a story that we attach to certain emotions. But to your point, these emotions are neutral. Can we embrace those aspects of ourselves with the same level of compassion that we would embrace the aspirational emotions that we're all seeking, right? Meaning, purpose, happiness, love, et cetera.

And that's a challenge because we have this programming, you know? We're supposed to be like this. And if we're not like that, then there's something wrong with us. And that judgment that we levy upon ourselves, that punishment is the antithesis of the compassion that we're striving to import to others and yet are incapable of providing for ourselves.

Yeah, absolutely. And what's interesting is it is a Christian notion that duality, light can exist without darkness. But what I found was it's not contradictory, it's complimentary. And that's a more Eastern Buddhist way of looking at things, that it's not light versus dark, it's light and dark together. And just like it is gratitude and anger together, they complement each other. And if they're complementary, why should we shun one or exclude one or favor one over the other?

I don't know. Why do we do that? Why do we do it? You know? I wish we didn't. There's so much freedom on the other side of that, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I felt it when Rives was sick, that love for my brokenness that, you know, I'm not feeling it as much anymore.

But during that time, I really, I was like, that's why I am who I am today is because I went through that and I was reckless and that built me to the person I am today. How could I regret those things if they've taught me what I know now, you know? Right, and those broken pieces, those fractured, splintered aspects of ourselves

ultimately you know on the other side of healing become the most beautiful pieces right what is that japanese art where when the china breaks or you know they piece it back together with beautiful glue and it becomes a much more prized cherished possession as a result of it because of its flaws. Yeah. That was in my head a lot as Rives was sick. I just had this feeling that something, no matter the outcome, I was going to choose to make this to make me stronger. But I knew it was a choice, you know. And I was going to choose to make it make me stronger. But it was obviously a conscious and still is a conscious choice that I have to make it make me stronger. But it was obviously a conscious and still is a conscious choice that I have to make.

Yeah. Is it going to be a crucible for your growth or are you going to allow it to destroy you or define you in some unhealthy way? Or are you gonna become a victim? The narrative that you associate with it becomes very powerful because it reinforces meaning. And that meaning can be fluid,

just like everything else that you speak about in the book, right? And that's a choice just like anything else. And I think my favorite, this is on a similar vein, like my favorite quote out of the entire book is when you say human frailty is the great mason of becoming. To me, that like says it all. So explain, you know, what's behind that for you.

Well, and again, it comes back to the danger of not wanting to say that being broken makes us stronger because it doesn't everyone, but it is, we are given a choice in those dark moments, in the moments of tragedy. Will you choose to make, like, allow this to make you stronger or will you choose to allow it to break you beyond repair? And I think that it's a choice we can make 10 years down the road. Because I think that my father's death, the narrative I told myself about my response to grief in my adolescence was that it broke me and I was reckless and I allowed it to break me. And now I look back and I say, wow, that was building me the whole time. And even though for over a decade, I told myself that I had been broken,

really now I reframe and say, I was being built that whole time. All of the recklessness was building me to the wisdom that I have today. And so it really is, that tragedy is a mason and we're building, we can choose to build ourselves stronger but it's again it's it's a tricky and it's a tight rope to walk um and that choice has to

be made daily it's not a choice that we make and then it's everlasting you know yeah yeah uh looming over this whole thing is this non-dualistic idea of love. It's all about love. Love permeates everything. There's a little bit of like, give me a fucking break. You know what I mean? I know. You know, it's like you're exposing yourself as an easy target for somebody who is maybe woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Totally. Yep. on the wrong side of the bed. Totally, yep. So help me understand what you're really getting at here.

Because when I think about love, I mean, I agree with you, but I also think of love showing up in different ways and in different forms. Some love is conditional. Some love is temporal. Certain relationships aren't meant to last forever. They come together, a beautiful thing happens and then time passes and that relationship is complete. And then there's the eternal love. Julie, my wife, likes to describe it

as the sun that is shining. The sun is not discerning. If the sun is emitting rays of light, which are love, it's not discerning where those rays are shining. It shines equally upon everyone without judgment, right? That's a different type of love. I suspect that's really what you're getting at here, but walk me through this for the skeptical naysayer, you know, brain that's listening to this right now. Had I read this book five years ago

i would have been like wow okay um really i mean the universal love this ineffable love that is everywhere and unconditional and how that exists easy for you to say. Beautiful kids. to give ourselves. And like I said earlier, I was searching for that love outside of myself over and over again. And I was trying to fight it in drugs and alcohol and men and countries. And it was an insatiable thing because it didn't have a receptacle inside of me. And so the love that I'm talking about is just a reflection of what we can give ourselves because it really is all around us all the time. You can see it in anyone walking by the street if you choose to see it, but you're not going to see it if you don't have that self-love inside of you. And again, it's a daily decision that I make to love myself and therefore feel more love

for humanity and more love from humanity. Is there a structure or a modality for practicing that? Like, what does that actually look like? You're asking me, I have no, no. My agent asked for an outline to my book. Here's my list of, here's how I do this every single day. I never wrote an outline for my book. It was just gonna happen.

But- That's why it took you 10 years. Well, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's true. But I thank God it did because it would have been a different book, you know, five years ago. Of course. Again, that timing, that cosmic timing thing. But I don't, again, yeah, you're right.

People are going to say, yeah, easy for you to say. You've had love throughout your life. But I also chose, I'm choosing to see in retrospect the love throughout my life. It's another choice that I'm making to say, I could also look back on my life and say, wow, I had a really tragedy-filled life. All I knew was hospitals when I was a little kid. My dad died when I was 14. 20 years later, the love of my life almost dies. I could choose that narrative. I could tell that. But I'm choosing to see the love woven in and out of all of those stories. And it's a choice I make. And it is easy for me to say, but it's also not. I could tell a very different story. tell a very different story. And I'm choosing in my book, I choose to show that universal love through the actions of other people, you know, but it didn't really matter who it was coming from, because I do believe that the source is the same. It's just our human interconnectedness. It's this

love that in psychedelics, you see very tangibly that God is love and that's the current that's connecting us all. And so you can, you just, it's a choice to see it or not see it, but there's no framework. Maybe there is, but not in my mind. Yeah. The truth that everything is one, like all the atoms are connected, you know, the, the, we're mostly open space, this table, our bodies, the energy that we share, it's all a common singular thing. Despite that truth, it's impossible for me to maintain that sensibility in a practical sense throughout my day. Me too.

Maybe psychedelics help get you there on some level. Certainly we'd probably be in a better place as a planet and a culture and whatever if we could really grok that. But I'm wondering about, and I know like advice, like when people ask you for advice, you start to cringe a little bit.

Like you have a discomfort with like telling anyone what to do, which I respect and appreciate. But the person who's suffering, who needs that healing and that message the most is the most difficult person to connect with because they're encased in that shell with a certain narrative and a pain body

that makes it very difficult. That's the person who will be the first to dismiss anything that you would have to say about this. Yeah. But I've also been that person. And so have I. Yeah. And that's the thing is, and I wrote this with old me in mind, With old me in mind, because I knew what I would say had I read certain lines in this book, you know, only four or five years ago. But I couldn't deny that that was the truth that I found. And I wasn't going to filter myself because old me would have torn it apart. And I know that my book isn't for everyone because I know it's not going to resonate with everyone, but someone who is suffering and without love and lonely, first of all, can you find that love inside yourself? Yeah, right. I mean,

in moments of despair, you can't. And I know that because I've been that person. But like the malleability of time, can you remember a memory of love? Is there something that tethers you to love a moment, even if it's a stranger? And what did that feel like? And where did that come from? And as a practice, choosing to recognize or remember those memories maybe can lead you more to seeing how love is all around us but or just do a hero dose and then you're like you're like shirking you know like just own it Steph that was beautiful just like this is about you standing in your power yeah I know right yeah that's what the book is about yeah don't shy away from it yeah

that was great yeah well thank you i just why i well on my way here actually i was having some self-talk about why do i have such a hard time why do i have such a hard time with advice i don't know i'm working on that i'll let you know i i do too like i like to have conversations with other people and ask them for advice yeah when people ask people ask me for advice, I'm like, why are you asking me? Yeah, right. Yeah, it's uncomfortable for me and I'm trying to figure out why. You know, that feels like a close cousin to taking someone's inventory. But the tension in the duality here is that you've had a certain set of life experiences that have taught you a few things that can be helpful to others when imparted in the right way. And you're a vehicle for that. The book does it.

It's not outright saying, do this, don't do this. But it's saying, here is an experience, take from it what you will. And my hope is that this will improve your life or maybe give you a few things to think about that can change your relationship with whatever your experience is. But it's doing it in, it's doing it, and this is like an A thing. It's like, we don't tell people what to do. We don't give advice. We share our experience.

Right. This book is you sharing your experience. So you're comfortable doing that. Yeah. I'm very comfortable. And so I think that's healthy. And maybe that's just because this is the way I see it too. And I want to feel like we got it right.

It's not a deficiency. Yeah. Especially when you're online and you're scrolling on Instagram or whatever, and people are like looking to camera and they're telling you what to do. There's something very powerful about that that people respond to. But it also makes me very,

like I don't think I'm the right person to be like that. Yeah, well, and also, cause I believe so firmly that most truths are relative to our own personal experiences. So who am I to say that this is... My partner has cancer. What should I tell my kids? There's supposed to be some general... I'm sure you get asked that question a lot, right? Yeah, I do. And I don't respond because I... Or I just stammer through some kind of

blanket statement because I... Nobody wants to hear, it depends. It depends. Do what you think is right. I mean, no, but I, yeah, it's just everything. And part of what I write in my book is that truth is so, it's like a kaleidoscope. It's just a twist of the risk depending on your perspective and your experiences. And my truth has changed so much throughout my life.

And again, me reading this book I wrote five years ago wouldn't have resonated. So I think I just have to understand and accept that my book, this book isn't for everyone, you know, it's... Who is it for? Well, really for me. And the truth is... That's what an artist does. Yeah, I wrote it for me. And even now, reading it back, I see how a lot of what it will be criticized for is because I wrote it for me. And I didn't really think much about other people reading it. And actually, the night before it came out, I had a total meltdown because I was like, oh, are gonna read it but if yeah if you had thought about that while you were writing you would have edited yeah yourself you can't do that yeah it's that's true and so I'm glad it is raw the way it is because that's what I that's the story I had to tell myself for myself that was me making sense of my life for me and if other people can gain something from that great but if not then I just have to be okay with it being me bearing my soul for myself.

Nothing great is for everybody. Yeah. It's a big world out there, as Seth Godin says. And my hope for you is that 10 years from now, you'll revisit this book, you'll read it, and in perfect non-duality or do a duality here there'll be part of you who's really proud of you for having the courage to tell this story and and being able to like recognize the beauty in it and another part of you is going to cringe and say oh my god i can't believe like i wrote that i already know i will because I'm already starting to be like, wow, I really did it. Because you have grown,

you've continued to grow. And so you've transcended, you know, some of the ideas that you were struggling with when you wrote it. Absolutely. Yeah. Yep.

I hope that for me too. Yeah. I guess as a final thing, is there, we covered a lot, but like, I guess I feel responsible in asking you, like, is there a core idea beyond what we've already discussed today that you were trying to express in this book that we didn't cover?

I mean, I think we covered it just between the lines, but just self-acceptance. And that was what I was really trying to do was accept myself throughout this book. Is write for me a narrative that would allow myself to accept and make sense of all of the recklessness and all of the craziness. And accept it all as the beauty that makes me me now. And that that couldn't have happened had I not gone down all of the dead ends that I thought were dead ends, which we're really now looking at it, we're probably like bridges to myself.

And so really it's just that self-love and self-acceptance. Yeah, again, it's that rear view thing. Like, well, when I went to Guatemala, all these things that probably in the moment, you're like, why am I doing this? Or what am I doing with my life now seem integral in, you know, building the person that you are today. I think the final thing I wanted to ask you also was that your relationship with shame, you know, coming out of the strictures of a religious upbringing and then being a rebel, right? Like there has to be some residue of like,

in that department of self-love, the other side of that is like the deep shame and unworthiness because you're a bad person. That seeking inside of you, like just tell me I'm a good person or how do i become a good person yeah absolutely is a shame is a response to that shame right an antidote to that yeah i try really hard not to dwell in shame because shame is something i want my children to rarely feel i know they can't come out unscathed, but shame is such a large part of Christianity, really. And I've seen how it crippled me for a long time and a lot of the people that I love. And I really try not to embody shame because I don't want my children,

especially as three girls, to grow up and trying to emulate that um i do think i think it's bernie brown that said the difference between guilt and shame and that guilt is actually actionable and and i do have guilt like when i read my book back i feel guilty for poor jane and she was sober for six months and then i she got drunk with me and i feel guilt for that um and and i think guilt is just taking responsibility but shame shame, I feel like, is just a dead end. There's no purpose for shame. It's just, yeah, there's no actionable purpose for it. And so I think I want what Brene said. Guilt is an emotion around something you did and shame is an emotion around who you are. Drinking makes you a bad person in the Mormon religion. And you really are taught that. And it's really ingrained. And so trying to separate those two things being, you know, what I do isn't necessarily who I am. And I think that was also exemplified by the bishop who told me, you know, I hear you list off all of these quote unquote sins, but you're still a good person. And that right there, I think that's the split between,

you know, action and what you do and what you, who you are. Exactly. And he wasn't exonerating you from taking responsibility for it, but he was distinguishing behavior from identity. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. I think we did it. I think we did it. Um, the book is fantastic. You're inspiring think we did it. I think we did it. Yeah.

The book is fantastic. You're inspiring. Tommy is inspiring. You Together is truly a one plus one equals 10 equation. And I just, I wish you guys the best. Thank you. And Tommy's continued recovery and I hope to see both of you in the future. Yeah. Thank you. What's coming

next for you? Are you into another book or is it day to day going from the gut? Is it going to take 10 years for another book? Well, who knows? I don't know. I'm, I am already, of course, I already started writing another book, but it's not a memoir. It's not a memoir. It's a novel. So we'll see where that goes. Yeah. I think I'm done with the memoir. Yeah. Well, I think you got a little bit more life. You know, it's like one year later, my next memoir. Yeah. No. Yeah.

Yeah. But in the interim. Yeah. And then also, like I said, just being, just learning just to be, and maybe it's okay not to have another project on the table. I don't know. We'll see. Yeah.

Yeah. I can, you're like, your skin is crawling. I'm squirming. I'm squirming. Right. As somebody who lives out of their gut instinct, you should be okay with that. I will. We'll see what happens. Yeah. All right. Well, absolute delight and pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Everybody pick up the book, everything all at once at your favorite bookseller, independent bookstores, hopefully, if not Amazon. Yeah, they should be everywhere. Or your website. I'll link up all that stuff in the show notes and come back and talk to me again sometime. Awesome. Thank you so much. Cheers. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated,

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