The Unconscious Mind, Identity, and Finding Your Way Back with Paul Conti

25:02then there's going to be a huge bias inside of us, right? There's going to be a bias towards choosing, towards deciding to do the next thing. So then we could think, well, here I am thinking about this possibility and deciding if I'm going to do it or not. And I may think, well, I have a clear mind when I'm doing this, but what I don't know is that there's a very strong climate bias inside of me that is pushing me towards the doing because it's saying, no, you have to choose that. You should choose that, right? That's what's going to make you better. You do, and that's what you feel better about yourself, and that's how you show your worth.

25:37And, you know, we don't know this, and then we think, well, I just made this choice, but we don't realize I was so over-primed and over-determined to make that choice. And there are ways to understand it and to say, oh, here's a bias inside of me that I may not want there. When I read that part of the book, I was like, well, that's exactly, I think what, you know, was at the root of a lot of my pain and suffering all these years was this core wound that I identified of not feeling enough, you know. And so I was able to go back to childhood. I was able to see that every step of my life, I never felt that I was enough.

26:13Whether it was becoming a championship tennis player, starting all these businesses, building toms, giving hundreds of millions of shoes away. Yes. I kept thinking achievement would quiet that I'm not enough voice. But really, the achievement just made it louder because I just had to keep doing more and more. One of the things that was a big part of my healing was the therapist I was working with asked me to do this 40-day mantra meditation practice to, in a sense, kind of reprogram that unconscious. And because that unconscious had been telling me I'm not enough for 48 years. So, you know, what if we tell it the opposite?

26:49So every day in the morning for 20 minutes, I'd close my eyes and I would just go, I am enough. I've always been enough. I am enough. I've always been enough. And then 20 minutes at night, right before going to bed, I'd do it again. I am enough. I've always been enough. And I'm telling you, it felt so silly and stupid at first. First couple of weeks, nothing different. And then around the fourth or fifth week, I was doing it for six to 40 days. I was doing a session, Paul, and like I felt something in my body. And it was like this release. I mean, literally, I mean, like I could get emotional time.

27:25I mean, it's like I felt like just this like relaxation I had never felt before. And as I said the words and continued, it wasn't like this generic mantra anymore. It was actually like they felt true. And I was almost sarcastic with myself. I was like, of course, I'm enough. Like I've always been enough. I'm like, what the? Like, I mean, literally. And I felt it like. And I mean, even not saying it. And so like, like what happened there, you think? Because ever since then, I've still had ups and downs. But I mean, from that moment on, things have, that was the beginning of my, you know, kind of being able to get the generative drive and really start living, you know, from a place of purpose again and not trying to prove myself with everything.

28:06So like from a brain chemistry standpoint or psychiatry, like what do you think happened with that mantra-based meditation? Well, I think it very much helped you because it was anchored to insight. Okay. So I think here the reason that it helped you is you were giving the unconscious mind an insight and you were pushing upon it to take that insight in and essentially think about it, even thinking about it onto the surface. Yeah. Because you were saying, hey, I'm going through this process and I've seen what hasn't worked for me. I'm anchoring to something that really seems real and true and I'm doing this good therapy.

28:40And you know what? I understand that I am enough. Yeah. I actually know that, right? But just because I know it doesn't mean that I feel it, right? You may know it in your conscious mind, but it doesn't matter unless your whole self is anchored to it and you can feel it. So what you start saying is, it's like what you used to call the tapestry theory to understand something complicated, right? If you're standing right up next to it, like your nose is touching the tapestry, you can't see the beautiful picture, the story that the tapestry is telling you. So when you're standing so up close to your life, you don't think that all those achievements were enough.

29:16Yeah. Right? And then your brain is saying, no, no, do more, do more. And you think of really how it just doesn't make sense. You know, are we going to go to Mars? And they're like, that wouldn't be enough, right? There's a way of saying, hey, it doesn't make sense. If you can't feel good about yourself with this much achievement, more achievement isn't going to get you there. Right? So what you do through the therapy process is you take some steps back from the tapestry. And you see, oh, I see that there's a story here, right? It was a story of a guy who by any standard I would ever impose upon anyone has been good enough, right?

29:47Who doesn't know that he is. And wow, it's interesting that how far back does that go? Oh, it goes back to childhood. And I've never thought that I was enough. So I haven't been able to see that I am enough, even as I've shown that over and over again. Now, it's that insight that you are anchored to when you're saying that to yourself. And you're almost saying to the unconscious mind, come on, I'll keep saying it, right? Until we get it, all of us. The whole thing. The whole iceberg. Right, right. The whole iceberg gets it, right? And then at some point you do, and you have what I think I'm hearing you describe as a holistic feeling of self, of like, oh, I know that I'm good enough.

30:26And it just seems simple and obvious, right? And that's why what we're talking about and what I've written about in the book is not a meta level of something. It's not a complexifying of something. What it is is trying to get us through clear language and clear processes to the simple goodness of what is real and true in us. So in your book, you talk about a few questions that people can ask themselves to potentially uncover something that is in the unconscious. Can you take us through a few of those? Because I found them really helpful. We can't, of course, just ask the unconscious mind. You know, tell the whole me what you're thinking about.

31:01But we can use these strategies to get at what's going on inside of us. And one way of doing that is to take stock of what we say to ourselves inside during quiet moments. So in the elevator when it's between floors or the car stopped at a red light or in the shower, whatever it may be where we're not actively doing something and our minds often are open. And then we can get a very significant insight into what's going on in our unconscious mind. Am I telling myself all the time, like, oh, it's not going to be okay, or it's not going to work out? Or am I telling myself, oh, you're not good enough, right?

31:37What's wrong with you, right? So we can get at that by observing that and also by observing our reactions if something highly emotional, including negative, happens. So if I drop something or make a mistake, what do I say to myself, right? So I get this insight into what's going on in my unconscious mind and also the fear that's inside of it and the attempts to over-control and make some sort of perfection so that nothing is wrong and it won't be faulted. And it helps give us insight into what's going on in our mental health and not only how that's affecting us, but how we can bring change. I can't stop them from coming, but what I can do now is recognize them and guide my mind away from them.

32:17Another way that we can do that is to write about our lives. So even writing a page or so or several paragraphs of what was my life narrative? What's what's going on in my life if I just just sit and write it down? Right. And then we can stop and look over that and say, do I believe that? It's remarkable how many times a person can write down, oh, this is my story. And they write it down. And then we look over it and we bring the whole self to it. And then the person may see like the majority of that. I don't believe at all. I think this is one of the great practices. You can either write it journaling, going back to AI, you can speak it into an AI model and have it repeat it back to you, narrate your life back to you.

32:57I mean, there's so many ways, but really reading or hearing back what you think is going on, and then you find out, oh my gosh, that's not how I feel about myself, or that's not what I want to do. This is not living in integrity. I mean, that's one of the big things I think when I talk to people now, one of the questions I ask them and I've asked myself is like, what is not an integrity in your life right now? I mean, Jim Carrey has this great quote about how he realized he did not want to be the avatar he created anymore when he was depressed. And he said that the depression was like a check engine light.

33:38Like something is not right here. And I think that this idea you just shared about writing a page of your life, writing that narrative and reading that, and is that narrative actually true is so great. Because what's going on in our mind that we would write down is often so far from how we really feel. But the good news about that someone being you who's bringing those lies is you can change that. Yes. You have that power. To change that. Yes. And I think if anyone's listening or watching and they feel they're plagued like I was for so long with just negative thoughts and lack of confidence in oneself and, you know, constantly telling themselves what they've made mistakes and their regrets and just living in that rumination, which I was for years, is that all can change.

34:29We are all human and we're all susceptible to the same thing. So someone who's watching or listening and might think, wow, you know, I wouldn't think that you would feel like not enough. Sure. Right. But the answer is, no, you're human. Yeah. And that humanizes it. Right. That it's not that, oh, I feel that because there's something wrong with me or I feel that because I'm not good enough. And someone who is good enough never feels this. It's like, no, we can all feel this. And this anchors to that point of our shared humanity. That's why we have shared humanity in our physicality. We're generally not afraid to talk about our physical health.

35:02I guess, you know, I'm feeling like I'm taking some steps to be healthier. I'd like to be a little healthier. Maybe I'll do this or that. You know, we respond in just a normal, reasonable way, very different than how we do to mental health. And that's all through the lens of stigma and fear. And it's just unacceptable that at this stage of knowledge of everything we know, that we would be here and still have that stigma drive people away from the very thing that we all need in order to take care of ourselves and sometimes in order to just survive. Okay, so during this break, I'm going to tell you about two more things that I'm super excited about.

35:39And the first one is something that I talked to Michael Pollan about on my episode with him. And it's this AI therapy app called Sonia. Now, I met the founders at this mental health conference, and they encouraged me to try it. And at first, I was super skeptical. And then after about two weeks, I was blown away at how deep these conversations were going and how helpful it was. And now I've been using it for six months, and there's not a week that I don't use it. I mean, I still have my therapist, but I don't know about you, but if I wake up at 4 a.m. on a Thursday with a bunch of anxiety, my therapist isn't available.

36:15And that's when I go to Sonya. And so I just want to share it today because it has had such a huge impact on my mental health and on my healing journey. And I kind of want everyone in the world to know about it. The company just launched. It's in the Apple App Store. And I think it's free for the first couple of weeks. So you can just try it. And I just I just think it's incredible. And I think it really is going to help a lot of people, whether they have a therapist or not. And the other thing that's really interesting is it's also become like a coach to me. Like it will text me on Wednesdays when I'm supposed to work out to check if I'm doing my workout.

36:49So it's like I have a life coach and a therapist in my pocket. And I'm going to play a clip right now because you got to kind of see it to believe it. Hi, Blake. I'm here. What's on your mind right now? Oh, I'm just feeling a little stressed about things right now because I feel like I've got so much going on. I really don't know how to prioritize it. When everything stacks up at once, it can blur what actually matters and make that old not enough story get louder. Let's slow this down by picking one thread to start with, what feels most pressing in this moment. The important reframe is this. The projects did not cure the depression.

37:26They arrived because you healed. And when you overworked to prevent relapse, you actually undermined the things that keep you well, like sleep, presence, movement, and connection. When that edge shows up, it is a signal to reduce load and restore choice, not to push harder. Okay, one more thing, and this might sound crazy at first, but this year I met some engineers from Nike who invented a new type of office chair that has not only changed my life, but actually saved my back. Especially because I am on about five hours of Zoom calls every day. The MoveLab chair has two different pivot points under the seat, which keeps your body in continuous micro-movements all day.

38:08The founders told me it is the equivalent of taking 3 ,000 steps. And all the lubrication of your joints and the blood flow is why my back no longer hurts. And I can focus on my work so much better. I loved it so much that I actually joined the team as a co-founder. And I will be sending one to every person I know when we launch this fall. If you're interested in learning more or pre-ordering one, we only have 500 in the first run. You can check us out at movlab.com. And that's spelled M-O-O-V-L-A-B dot com. When we think about stigma, I also think a lot about defense mechanisms. And you talk about this some in the book.

38:48Like, what are some of the defense mechanisms that people have that are hardest to spot within themselves? Because our defense mechanisms are unconscious. In the structure of self, the unconscious mind is at the deepest level. Then on top of it is the conscious mind, the part of the iceberg above the water. Then the next step, there are five steps in the structure and the function, the third step up is our defense mechanisms. Now, we can understand them just like we can understand the unconscious mind to a very significant extent, but they're not obvious to us because they're deployed unconsciously.

39:20So we have to look at ourselves in order to see what they are. Okay. Right. So, so as an example, I might think, well, how do I react when someone disagrees with me or someone says something I really don't like? Or I might think, you know, I, I, I kind of react strongly when that happens. I know because people have said something to me or I can tell that there's a lot of emotion in me. What might be going on in me? Right. And then we might, through that process of inquiry, see that, well, I get, I get very defensive. and then that defensiveness leads me to get aggressive. What I'm trying to do is avoid challenge.

39:57I don't like that a person said to me something that disagreed. So what I'm doing is I'm trying to avoid that or I'm trying to even deny that there's a problem. People have come and talked to me about that seven times and I don't want to hear it. And I think, well, there's denial. I don't want to look at the fact that there's an issue. So that's how we might get to, oh, I'm using avoidance or I'm using denial or I'm using aggression. Or in cases that could be positive, we may use, for example, altruism where I might say, well, what do I do if someone wronged me? I think, you know, I try and do a good turn by that person.

40:33We say, okay, that's interesting. And maybe that's using altruism or it might be a different kind of defense where I'm trying to then please someone so that they don't come at me again. So we have to understand what are our behaviors and what's the meaning of those behaviors. It can also, I think, be fun and interesting. I want to understand myself better. Shed some light on myself. No harm, no foul. I'm not trying to do it so I can beat up on myself. I just want to understand so that I can bring healthy change. Yeah. I mean, I think what I'm hearing is these defense mechanisms are kind of breadcrumbs into the unconscious.

41:09You know, if you can really see the patterns of those defense mechanisms, then that can lead you to understanding the unconscious. Right. Which seems to be just such a key, key takeaway here is that, you know, it's not something to be afraid of. It's something that is creating a lot of, you know, the decisions that are happening in your life. And the more that you understand it, the more you can decide what's serving you and what's not. Right. Yeah. We're kind of playing Sherlock Holmes with ourselves, which I think is great. I feel like a lot of what I do for a living is detective work. And I think that's great.

41:46I could see you being a detective. I think I'd like that. From our past therapy sessions, I'm thinking back now, Paul, and I'm thinking of the way that you ask questions. And it's very much a Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to get myself one of those pipes, right? Yeah, a little monocle. Yes, yes. Because the detective work is so much fun. Yeah. Especially because we are often hiding ourselves from ourselves. One example is, let's say I notice or other people reflect to me that I respond in a very negative way to things. And I'm very just cynical and negative. I might think, have I always been like that?

42:22Or I might even think that I've always been like that. But if I scratch the surface a little bit, I might find that I've not always been like that. And it's interesting because I may not know that. But let's say I ask three or four people around me and they say, yeah, I mean, you've been kind of irritable or even obnoxious or aggressive and you've been that way for a little while now. But no, you weren't that way. And maybe people start reflecting to me that, oh, a lot of that changed around the new year. I'm just making that up. And I think, well, why might that have been? Did something happen then?

42:51Yeah. Right? Did something change in me? Because I'm getting a very different response from people. So maybe at work I got good reviews and I got along well with others. and in the new year, I'm getting really negative reviews. So I see this is really having an effect on me. It's noticed in the world around me. Now that makes me curious, why might that have happened? And if we go and look there, very, very often we do find an answer. Something difficult, stressful, traumatic, however it may be, happened then and then there's a change in me and I'm not even aware of it, even though it's affecting me in a negative way.

43:23And if we don't shine the light there, how are we ever going to learn? And then that affects our story. So maybe six months from then, I'm saying a story that, no, I'm just a person who's easily frustrated. And, you know, I don't put up with people who don't know what they're doing very well. And yes, I get, you know, I get offended. And I think like I'm just telling the story of this is how I am. And that is not how I've always been. Yeah. And I think what I love about this and going back to the Sherlock Holmes analogy is oftentimes if someone is feeling trapped or hopeless or depressed, there was a triggering event.

43:56and they might not be aware of the event. And so in order to kind of figure out what that event is, one method could be is to go to your closest five friends and family who spend the most time with you and say, hey, I haven't been feeling great the last six months. Is there any patterns that you've noticed? Right. And when did they start? Right. And oftentimes, I think I can think in my own life, some of those patterns all started around a specific event. Right. And then I could go back and deal with that event, which I maybe just swept under the rug, never dealt with. And then that could, you know, kind of unravel in a beautiful way.

44:34Absolutely. Wow. That's really, I mean, I think that's really powerful for someone who's kind of trying, because so much of it is like when you're in it, you're just trying to be like, how did I get here? Like, that's the question. I mean, I'm sure that's the question that you get when a new client comes to you is like, I used to be this way and my life was great and I had this and I was that. And then now I have no self-confidence and I can't be in a good relationship. And like, what happened? Right. Which also can be said, what's wrong with me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's wrong with me? Now we're getting down on ourselves.

45:04Yeah. And at that point, we have no hope of understanding. Yeah. Right? Unless we can pick our heads up and we can turn the lights on and we can look around us, we have no hope of understanding. And this kind of links to trauma, right? Where the traumas can happen in all sorts of ways, but the kind of trauma we're talking about, what people will say often is big T trauma, overwhelms our coping skills and then leaves us different going forward. So it's not a soft concept. It's actually a hard neuroscience concept that we see the changes in our brain after trauma. And because it creates a reflex of guilt and shame, then we often hide away from it.

45:41so very very often there's a clear trauma in a person's life that has created massive change often massive change for the negative and the person isn't aware of that at all or they'll say well no it couldn't be that that was three months ago or that was ten years ago or whatever it may be but you can see the problems are anchored to that and if they go back and look they can change things and in a mental health system that often wants to take the arrow in the quiver or the tool in the toolbox and make the whole story about it and polish the hood when there's a problem in the engine, then what we're often saying is, well, just change.

46:18Change your behaviors. Yeah. Just be different. If it was that easy. Right, if it were that easy. And then when people can't do that, they get more down on themselves. And I would say, if something has changed in you as a result of something, why would we think you could change that back without understanding where it came from in the first place? I mean, maybe you can, but for most of us, we will not be able to do that. Yeah. So we are living within a mental health system that does not prioritize understanding. Yeah. Right. It wants to see what's going wrong and how many numbers can we give you?

46:49And, OK, we want your mood to be better. Let's give you this medicine or that medicine or maybe a bipolar two or whatever it is. Just making things up. Right. Even whether it's in a well-meaning way or not, it's misguided. Yeah. And it keeps us from what is really just common sense. You know, if the car is rattling, you know, after I went over some giant bump, like, let's anchor it to that. Maybe that's what happened. And what was that really like? And where do I hear that rattling? And that will bring insight and the ability to change. Now we don't have to be afraid of it anymore. Yeah, yeah.

47:18And also the fact that, you know, instead of just focusing on what's wrong, like looking at what's right. And, I mean, that, you know, kind of leads to this third drive that I'm really excited for you to talk about, the generative drive. The generative drive is our birthright as human beings, and it explains the humanness in us. It explains our survival as a species. It is a drive in us to leave the world better than we found it. Whether that's at the end of our lives or it's just today, it's a drive that pushes us towards love and care and concern and altruism. It's in us when we're together and we're creating.

47:56It is so much easier to destroy than it is to create. Look at the wonderful things that we create, medical treatments, bridges, buildings. We create so many amazing things, and we do that through collaboration, through the idea, even here, that you and I feel. You know what? We could do something together, and good could come of it. Yeah. It explains our humanness and our traditions, our literary traditions, our philosophical traditions, going back hundreds and thousands of years of human tradition. Tell us this. It's how we construct meaning. It's not a Pollyanna concept. It's saying this is what is true of us when we are happy.

48:36And we have enough studies and enough data to tell us, well, what does it mean when we say we want to be happy? When people feel that way, even at advanced stages of life, what is it that they're telling us? What humans mean when we say we want to be happy is we want to find peace, contentment, and the capacity for delight. We want to be able to just be and to feel okay. We want to be able to look at something of beauty around us and to be actually able to take that in. We want to look at someone we love and to be able to take that person in and just feel good about being with that person without a bunch of thoughts, a bunch intruding upon us.

49:09We want to find peace and we want to find contentment, which means that we're aware of the facts of our life. We're aware of the things, good, bad, and otherwise. I'm aware of the tragedies in my life. I'm aware of things that I didn't do as well as I wanted to that I find disappointing. I can be aware of all those things and still feel good about my life. We're in the best place, just like we want to be with our physical health if challenges come. And we're also in the best place to enjoy life. Good physical health means we get more out of life. The same is true of good mental health. Yeah. No, I think the generative drive spoke so much to me because for seven years, I did not have a single idea.

49:48And then since I really, I feel like really did the work to heal this and really feel that I am enough, not based on what I do or what I accomplish or what the world thinks of me, but just because I exist. I then stepped into the most creative 13 months of my life. I mean, I literally, in 13 months, I started, you know, launched the Enough Bracelet. I have now filmed, I think, 16 podcast episodes. I've co-founded three companies, one of them the chair you're sitting in, the MoveLab chair. and all that's come in 13 months, and I've never felt more life. And I just take it, I credit it to this idea of this generative drive.

50:28Like I'm just, I'm in this flow, and I don't feel pressure. I mean, I'm like, okay, like if you like the chair, great. If you didn't like the chair, that's fine too. Like it's not my self-worth whether the chair works for you or not. And I really, really love this part of the book, and I just so encourage someone to really, not only read the book, but really think about like, how am I fostering this generative drive? And the one thing I would like to ask is, as you said, you know, more is better with the generative drive. If someone like myself, you know, I'm very entrepreneurial, I'm doing all these things that are helping people, I'm hoping to help people's backs with the chair and all these things with enough trying to spread this message.

51:08Is more always better or is there a point of potential backlash or diminishing return? More is always better with the generative drive because it is a drive of goodness. So think about the difference. So you're doing a lot now, right? You're being very assertive. Your assertion drive is in high gear. Why is that okay now? Because it's not an end in and of itself. Or say, I must assert because that's how I prove myself. That's how I make myself worthwhile, right? I have to do more. I have to do more, right? Then doing more is just serving doing more. Now you're asserting too much. So in that situation, you might feel very invested where everyone has to like the chair.

51:51Then if someone does it, now you want them to. You want to make them to. You don't feel good enough if they don't. It's too much assertion. You're a person who clearly does best and functions best and is happiest with a lot of assertion. But it can't be an end in and of itself. Otherwise, even that will be too high. So the generative drive says, okay, be very, very assertive. but we have to balance this with something, right? And that has to be pleasure, right? You have to feel good about what you're doing and to take pride in what you're doing and to value what you put of yourself into what you're doing.

52:24Now you're very assertive, but you're balancing assertion with pleasure and lo and behold, you feel good about yourself, right? This is being governed by the generative drive, but it's saying the more we are the best of what makes us human, the better we are. For someone who is either struggling themselves or maybe concerned about a friend or family member, you know, poor mental health doesn't always look like someone's not getting out of bed. You know, what are some of the more subtle ways you see it starting to show up so they can recognize it earlier so that they can get help faster? Very often, if there's a change in us, we are aware of it.

53:06But it comes to us for fleeting moments. and then we push it down. Yeah. And those fleeting moments are moments of opportunity. Okay. Right? Very, very often a person who will come and let's say a relationship ends and the person says, oh my God, I don't know how it ended. I'm shocked. You know, they can't imagine. Then when you sit and you talk with them, whether it's a relationship or losing a job, just examples like this, that person was aware that things weren't going okay. They were aware, but in a kind of deer in the headlights way we want to turn away from that if we don't know what to make of it so if I see for example normally alarm goes off in the morning and I feel pretty good and I get out of bed and maybe it takes a little bit of time where I really get going but I'm okay with getting out of bed and now I see and that alarm goes off and my first response is one of fear I just don't feel good and then I don't want to kind of hide away and then that doesn't feel good What's wrong?

54:06Why do I feel the way? Then I yak myself out of bed, I have a cup of coffee, and I forget about it. It's not good. The person's ignoring evidence, data that says, hey, something is shifting. Well, sometimes it's hard to see those things. I mean, I think it does take, like you said, curiosity. It takes a mindfulness, a pause. One of the areas in my life are ways that I have been able to see things that maybe weren't as obvious to me was using psychedelic therapy. I know you're in Oregon, and I've helped fund some different trials down there with psilocybin, and I know your clinic does ketamine.

54:46What have you found is like, how is that becoming, is that becoming more a part of your practice? Is it helpful in helping someone see something that's maybe getting in their way that they can't see in a conscious form? I think we're seeing more and more in a very clear way that these are very powerful tools and we have to be respectful, of course, of any very powerful tool. But if we are respectful of the power that the tool can bring, they can be used to gain a significant insight. And I think that's true of the psychedelic modalities, it's true of ketamine, that we have seen that there is a lot of evidence that used respectfully, used carefully, used judiciously, we can learn what it may be very, very difficult for us to learn otherwise.

55:32Because what often happens is a lot of the noise in us, a lot of the shoulds is dialed down or even turned off by these modalities and then we're able to see clearly. So one example might be if you're listening to music and you really want to hear the words of the music that you're listening to and the music is coming out of a speaker at a reasonable volume, you probably could do that. You could listen, you could learn. Unless there's 10 other speakers that are surrounding you and they're playing different music. Now it's going to be very, very hard for you to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to and to hear the answer.

56:09But these are very powerful ways, these medicines, of saying, hey, let's shut a lot of the noise off. And the noise may be the lies that you're telling yourself to try and keep yourself safe or are you going to continue the beatings until everything is better? That we're doing this to ourselves. Let's quiet that down. and then what is it that we hear and that we learn in a healthier way. So I think they're very powerful modalities for understanding ourselves and bringing healthy change. Yeah. I mean, it's just so exciting to see that this is being accepted more and more as a therapeutic modality.

56:40I mean, Michael Pollan sat in that same chair and we had a great conversation just about, you know, how these medicines, especially if you're in the right setting setting and with the right therapist, they're very powerful tools so they have to be very careful with who is the person helping you use these tools just like any other tool but it is exciting that it is helping us see things that we just wouldn't see and I think your analogy of the 10 speakers is a great one I found that in my life where there's a lot of noise and sometimes with a psychedelic assisted therapy session I've been able to see things so clearly And then you have to obviously use the integration and you have to act on it.

57:22I mean, that's just one part of the process. Two things I want to just clarify very quickly. One to say is we want to be also careful about ourselves because there are those of us who can be in certain places where we're not in a place to benefit from the medicines. We just want to be careful about that too. Like any powerful tool, I mean, surgery saves so many lives, right? But if a surgery happens when it shouldn't, then that can be a negative. So to seek the right help and the right guidance to learn, is this good for me now? And if it is great and if it isn't, how can I get to a place where it's good for me?

57:56So I wanted to make sure to say that. And then to also say, you said once we have the insight, we need to act on it. But it so often becomes so much easier to do that when the insight is grounded to simple goodness. Like when you realize like, oh, I am good enough. You didn't have to keep telling yourself that. Totally. And then you bring change that's consistent with that because it's not like, well, now, you know, you have to go through this arduous process of change, right? It's not that change is easy, but then you want to go about that process. You're like, I've learned something about myself and I've learned how to make life better.

58:31So often it does make it easier to do those things that are not necessarily easy to do, right, to make real change in our lives. So I just wanted to really point those two things. No, I think that that's so, so important. And, you know, as I think about all the different people you've worked with and all the different modalities that you're currently working with, you know, one of the questions I had at the beginning of the interview that I wanted to ask is, you know, what is the difference between someone who really heals and then someone who just kind of copes? Right. Like, what is that characteristic that you find in that client or patient that really makes the jump between coping and healing?

59:07Because that's what this show is really all about. I think it's insight. Yeah, okay. It's knowledge. It's information. It's understanding. It goes back to that. Right. Real insight brings real change. Yeah. If we don't have insight, then we may even do a decent job of polishing the hood, right? And even though the car may look better, it doesn't fix the problem that's in the engine. So we need to understand. We do need insight. We don't necessarily need to understand absolutely everything, but we need to understand in some basic way, hey, here's what's going on in me. Here's what it anchors to.

59:39And here's how I can bring change. then we're truly empowered. And if we're empowered, we'll interface with life through the lens of agency. Yes. And that also brings the humility of letting ourselves be human, of I don't have to be perfect. I can have made mistakes and still deserve to have a good life and to make my life better. If we're taking care of ourselves and we have this sense of empowerment and of humility in us, and again, it's not false humility, it's the humility to let ourselves be human and to let ourselves make mistakes and to let ourselves strive. And when we do that, then we're interfacing with the world through agency and active gratitude, which means, okay, I feel grateful that I'm here and that I have the capacity to think and to do and to bring good change to myself and to the world.

1:00:25So it's through that lens that I'm going to now give it the best effort that I can, right? Agency and gratitude come hand in hand. And when that's how we interface with the world, our assertion and pleasure drives are in balance. And we are then governed by the generative drive, which there's no better way to put ourselves on the front foot for the next second, the next minute, the next hour, the next day of life than being governed by the generative drive. I love it. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Paul, thank you so much for this conversation. And I've learned a lot, and I think a lot of people have as well.

1:00:58So I want to thank you by giving you one of our Enough bracelets. So you get two here in the box. So you get one for you and then one to give to someone else. And I think that some of the most important part is the act of giving one. So if you'll hold out your hand. And what I hope long term is that it becomes a signal that we can talk about things. You know, there's been someone, if I'm at Starbucks and I see you wearing one and you see me, we might go up and have a conversation that we wouldn't have had. And I think that's what so much of this conversation has been about is like, this is not stuff to be afraid of.

1:01:35Like this is stuff that we should be able to talk about. So thank you for coming on today, No Magic Pill. And thank you for this awesome conversation. And just, you're amazing. We appreciate you. You're very, very welcome. Thank you for such a kind and thoughtful interview. I appreciate you having me on. Thanks for watching or listening to No Magic Pill. I would love to send you an Enough bracelet as a thank you for being a member of our new community. Just go to weareenough.co forward slash no magic pill and claim this gift from me. And please help us spread this important message out into the world.

1:02:08I am enough. You are enough. And we are enough. If this episode spoke to you, please share it with a friend, family member, or someone you love. Because No Magic Pill is not just a podcast. It's a resource to help us all live better lives. Hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode and let us know what you think by leaving a comment. A quick note that this episode is for informational and entertainment purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional regarding any medical questions or concerns you may have.