Psychotherapist John W. Price Unpacks Ancient Wisdom For Modern Healing

32:17And when they say something or behave in a way that upsets you or inflames you in some way to see that as a window of opportunity to reflect upon why you're reacting that way and what's to be learned by kind of examining that. Yeah. And even when I hear God, you say, God, I immediately thought of this profound gift that we are all consciousness, conscious of consciousness. You know, that's like a holy shit. Like that is, if that's not miraculous to you, then. But also, sorry to interrupt you. On top of that, that our like awareness, our consciousness of consciousness is also just an appearance in consciousness.

33:08Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so when you see someone as a fixed image of how you believe them to be, you then are afforded a way to behave that could be harmful to self or other. But when you are in relationship with this kind of ineffable reality that we are all particular expressions of a deeper consciousness, then I think you then behave in different ways. And not to say that you're boundaryless, but because you also need to have your boundaries, but the possibilities and potential of transformation and simply just a beautiful connection with another person is richer and more potent. And so to get at that point of like what it is that I do, I think it's something that I've done a lot of my life.

34:09I immediately think of this time when I used to play music professionally and I was at a show opening up for this big act. you know, in town. And I played my gig and I was cruising around doing my thing as a young 20-year-old lunatic would. And I went to the bathroom and this man who was probably in his mid-40s was crying. And I stopped and I sat in the bathroom with him for about three hours. And I just talked about his life and he was suicidal. He was really in a tough spot. Probably had a few too many drinks. I don't know where his life went, but I know that something happened that was powerful, that helped him suffer the burden with somebody else.

34:56And that in and of itself is pretty immeasurable and profoundly powerful. And for you or any of the viewers and listeners, just think of a time when some random relationship buoyed you up in a way that you could never have predicted. and one might say that's miraculous. And so that kind of essence, I think is profound and I can't get a glimpse of the nature of reality from outside of this. And so whatever that is, I just know that our suffering, our deepest suffering is penetrated on some level by people willing to witness and connect with the depths of our darkness.

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37:15This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So I just read this book called Dealing with Feeling. That's right, Dealing with Feeling. It's by this Yale psychology professor called Dr. Mark Brackett. And it's all about emotional intelligence and why learning to understand and regulate our emotions is like the most important skill you can learn to live a better life, but also to better help others with their emotions. He calls it co-regulation, which in some sense kind of means that we can all act as therapists for each other in some way, which is an amazing thing. Very cool. But, and this is a big but, it's not a replacement for talking with someone who's actually trained to help you.

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39:05Suffering is always a teacher. You don't quite appreciate it though until you're past it and you have - That's right. You know, the gift of being able to look in the rear view mirror and see it for what it was. But they are these like initiations if you choose to grab onto them that become these powerful levers for transformation. I mean, was that experience in the bathroom part of one of the inciting incidents that led you to transition from being a professional musician into being a therapist? It was much more aggressive and violent than that. Yeah. No, it's funny because I look back on it now.

39:45That's kind of like those little pebbles and breadcrumbs along the road that you look back and go, oh yeah, I saw that kind of emerging. And to your point about, yeah, because if in the depth of my most painful experiences, I'm not thinking, oh, how cool this is. I'm in change. Because that would take me out of the purge. And I need to be totally connected and kind of in a state of non-awareness. Because parts of my psyche are releasing that are beneath my own ego. so um yeah i i think it has to be in some kind of retrospect yeah so yeah i can look back on my life i ended up and this is a narrative for a lot of therapists i mean i became a therapist on a therapist couch and i was going through one of the most destabilizing experiences that i i that i ever thought possible i was a professional musician i had a record deal i was on tour i was from my standards, I had made it.

40:50I signed a record contract and I was professional and life had other plans. And so a son was born and I could never have planned it. I could never have willed it, but my life was met by a Mack truck. And I went in directions that I never have even contemplated. And so I don't know what you call that, but I know you don't call it coincidence. And I certainly looking back on my life, I can't imagine it to have been any other way. I don't know much about your early life experience with alcohol and drugs. I lived as excessive as you can live as a night crawling rock and roll person. I loved the night and everything that came with it.

41:55And all of a sudden I had, it was 1.30 in the morning and I'd look over and this little being was bouncing in his crib with a glow-in-the-dark pacifier. And, you know, the light that used to be cigarettes and, you know, stage lights was now a glow-in-the-dark pacifier. And I sat reverently with this circle of women, you know, because I was raising a four-month-old. I mean, the woman that his biological mother very quickly left. And for all kinds of reasons that formed me into a therapist. And I remember sitting with all these moms, these yoga moms, just soaking up information saying, how do you do this?

42:50And I never intended on that being my life. And so it's one example, I think, because my life has been so totally disrupted. I wanted to play music from the time I was six and I achieved it. And then all of a sudden I'm raising a child and going back to school and becoming a therapist when I never imagined being a therapist. And it was really perfect. So only in retrospect, because if you would have seen me then, I weighed about 30 pounds less and I discovered Buddhism as a contemplative practice and actually started building my life back, I would say, with a spiritual and disciplined Buddhist practice, and also one that created a mothering in me that I wasn't conscious of.

43:39Yeah, that's wild. It's kind of amazing how many musicians, and then when you layer on top of that, like, you know, an affinity for substances, end up kind of in a more therapeutical realm later on. Like just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of my friend Guru Singh or like, I don't know if you know, Raghunath Kapo. Like these are like musicians who then kind of get into this more expansive work. And I think what I see in that is like the soul of a seeker. You know, like you're seeking truth through music, you're seeking answers to your discomfort or some kind of higher state of consciousness through substances.

44:19And ultimately, you know, with growth and evolution and maturity, you find yourself in the seat of the therapist, you know, because this is what interests you and this is what brought you peace. And this is where you're finding answers that then in turn become helpful for other people. Yeah, that collision between art and science. And what I just did was tell a story, you know, and you talk a lot about, you know, storytelling and the role that it plays and how we make sense of the world and create a perceptual lens, you know, through which to interpret it. You call it like storying, right? Yeah, yeah.

44:56And this is what we're made to do. And in many ways, it's through stories that we connect with other people and create a frame for the world that allows us to survive. But these stories become entrenched and very often kind of lead us astray because they're based upon untruths or misapprehensions of reality. Something just to add to that house of mirrors we were designing earlier about consciousness being conscious of consciousness. And story is the same kind of dynamic, I think, in that we story just inherently, you know, you and I are creating stories right now of, you know, who we are and what we're thinking.

45:39And we're, our mind is working, creating story and narrative. And I have a story. We are in a story, a greater story. And my mentor, Richard Rohr talks about this, the my story, our story, and the story. And certainly the opportunity to teach through story or to communicate through story is important because we are able to contextualize ourselves, come to know somebody else, come to understand how they think and feel. But it's quite miraculous in that we story our existence and sometimes those stories, to one of your points, our perceptions are off. You know, I even wrote about this recently today.

46:23I was going over my material for our conversation and I was thinking about how often I meet with somebody who has a story of their mother or their father. And it's one that is rigid. You know, my mother, not mine, but the story here is an individual who has a very rigid mother. And then upon reflection, when they kind of work that story over and over like a, you know, like a pearl, their perception changes because other elements start to come in. And, and so, yeah, we are story, we are storying beings that seek out story and, and relate through story. And I think that there's healing in story.

47:06I'm curious about you actually. Here comes the therapist part. Well, I'm curious about, because as I'm thinking about what you do, and I really respect this project that you've been working on, I mean, to put it lightly, and how has connecting with people in this way affected you, listening to people's stories and preparing for it? In what ways have you changed since you started doing this? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. You know, I have a story about that, you know, that I could spit out. Is that story true? I'm not sure. I mean, I think the truth of it is that it's complicated. Like on the higher awareness side of things, like it certainly made me a better human being.

47:53And I can't say, oh, this person said this and then I changed this. It doesn't work like that. It goes into, you know, it's like it goes into the soup, you know, and how that gets spit back out in terms of how I behave and interact with people and respond to the world, I couldn't put a finger on. but there's no possibility that it isn't impacting that in a positive way. And then there's the kind of darker side of it. Like, how is this infecting my ego and how I carry myself in the world and think about myself in relation to other human beings in ways that maybe aren't so good. It's like everything, it's not black or white.

48:36There's a lot of contours to this thing. I mean, but it's a gift, you know, I can't, and it also, you were like, oh, there was no coincidence that, you know, this, you know, I don't know how this happened with this child and this path that you went on, but I know it's not coincidence. And I can't believe that I'm sitting here by coincidence either. It wasn't something that I, you know, visioned for myself or set about achieving as a goal. It like unfolded as a process of committing to my own personal growth and evolution and following my curiosity that led me here. And I believe that on some level, like that was, it's meant to be, or whether you call that, you know, divinely inspired, I don't know, but I am in relationship with it from a place of gratitude.

49:21Like I realized that like I've been given this gift and with that gift comes a responsibility. Yeah. Because there are people, you know, we're doing this, but, you know, people will watch this and interpret it in their own ways. And I wanna make sure, to the extent that I'm capable of doing this to make sure that it is helpful to the human beings out there and that it's meaningful, not on a surface level, but the goal is always like, how can we co-create something that will have a substantial impact in a positive way on the people who are choosing to carve out time in their day to focus their attention on it?

50:02Thanks. I relate in that, you know, I do the show that I do, The Sacred Speaks is a, you know, I'm, I'm similarly minded. I mean, one of the reasons why Elise, you know, thought you and I were connected, I'm sure is mutual interest, but also a kind of mutuality and who we are and how we show up in the world. And I know that my intention, as I wrote in an email to you, was really to sit down and have a deeply connected conversation. And of course, have some ideas on intention, but really just see where the conversation takes us. and I think that, you know, the nature of the way that you show up in the world is that you do have a desire to serve and to help others, but you also show your kind of inner hurt self.

51:00And I think that's a story that people can connect with because in seeing you own that hurt allows for others to own their hurts, which is, you know, we don't really have a culture that says, let's do that. You know, let's show up and be creatures who oddly enough, self-protect in ways that harm us because we show up inauthentically. And so just, I've been excited to connect because I think the nature of the way that you've shown up here is not simply as an intellectual that's on, you know, charging to understand a subject, which certainly you do, but it's deeper than that and it's more erotic.

51:42And I use that term, which sometimes drives people nuts because they think of gag balls and whips, you know, but erotic at its core is about arrows and connecting and being deeply connected. And, and, and so to, to, to kind of hold that together is to allow for our stories to connect. but I think one thing that we struggle to do is actually open to the fact that we're all hurting. And I do think it's ironic that vulnerability is the word we use for like the pinnacle of authenticity. And it's also the word for a weakness in the structural integrity of a fort or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what you're getting at is, when you use the word Eros, like you're talking about like the heart, like somatically feeling connected to our feelings.

52:38And I would say that I am somebody who struggles in that kind of super highway between head and heart. And I think this is probably familiar for anyone who's listening, who feels like they have a grip on their own personal dilemma. Like I have a story and my story goes like this, and I have a great deal of self-awareness. And I delude myself into believing that that self-awareness, which is an intellectualization of like, what happened, what it did to me, how it set me back and why it made me the way that I am. But that's not really part of the solution. It's a piece, right? But there's a difference between having a heady understanding of your past and the kind of formative experiences that you've had and how they've crafted you into this individual that has an identity and a story to go with it versus like feeling into it and trying to resolve it or make peace with it or transcend it, which is something that you really can't do within the confines of the mind.

53:49Yeah. And if I were God, I would hide the most profound realizations beneath disgust, the places that we tend to avoid the most. And if we have a series of ideas, we can call it, I immediately started thinking about how frequently people who are self-aware are involved in a really problematic spiritual bypass. you know that they're they're hiding out in a lot of intellectual connections and ideas because frankly if a friend of mine hunt priest who runs a non-profit called legare he says he's talking about churches here but i think this is the truth for for anything or any one of us that if the church or the person isn't about working with healing our wounds, then it needs to shut its doors.

54:46And we could take that as a personal orientation, that if your entire life is devoted to expanding your own capacities and reach and not helping or connecting with others, then reevaluate. I think that's an important note that We cannot imagine ourselves as separate from others. and we have the capabilities to imagine ourselves as separate from others. Never underestimate the human mind's capacity for self-delusion because spiritual bypass can come in many forms. It can come in the costuming of a variety of spiritual traditions in which you delude yourself into believing that you are a spiritual being having a human experience when in fact you're rationalizing some bypass of the one thing that actually you really should be looking at, but aren't courageous enough to.

55:51Yeah, it's performative. Yeah. It's totally performative. So, I mean, you're, to put a kind of blunt word to it, I mean, your solution, and you've said as much, is basically confronting the questions that modern life has taught us to avoid. Yeah, and I, just to articulate that a little bit, I think one of the things our culture has done is has created materialists out of us. And I don't just mean that from economics. I mean it also the metaphysics of materialism. And things are changing, but we have imagined that life is matter. We have disconnected ourselves from the cycles and flow of reality.

56:33We are disconnected from cosmic changes. We do not have a culture that facilitates rites of passage and ritual. We have not answered the call to show up as caregivers for our families and for our communities. And so we're all alienated and isolated. And in its place, we've had productivity. So we are incredible producers. And so I think that in the absence of a culture that really helps us to become human, we forgot that you know what does it mean to be human and this is an ancient question when i was reading peter kingsley he's got an incredible book catafalque and he he says this that we forget of all the archetypes that we live out we forget the number one archetype that we're living out is the archetype of human that we have a lens of what human is and we live that lens out and at times that lens is not necessarily connected with the depths of our needs.

57:44And so we're performing what it means to be a spiritual person or what it means to be a human even. And the process of self-discovery is a reclamation act of saying, what is this really? And we no longer have our sacred institutions that really help us have those kinds of communions with the story and our story. And so we've become commodified. And then of course we suffer because we are at a distance from the truest expression, I think, of who we are and who we can be. And Jung articulated this really well in the Red Book when he begins it saying, there's a difference between the spirit of the times and the spirit of the depths.

58:30and spirit of the times, of course, is the zeitgeist. And, you know, of course we can, we all know what that is, how fashions change and ideas change and cityscapes change. But the deeper aspects of our longing is universal and arguably won't change all that much. And to tap into that deep instinctuality and truest part of our expression that's beyond the politeness and niceties of our social conditions and the secularized busyness and productivity that we must have in order to matter, we suffer that split. And addiction here is a wonderful surrogate. You said it earlier that I had this thought that addicts are, Jung said this, deeply spiritual people.

59:22They've just found the wrong spirits. I connected once this woman, Tracy, who is Stevie Ray Vaughan's photographer. and we did a class together at the Young Center. And in her book, I was reading her book, this really cool depiction of her work with Stevie Ray Vaughan. She previously had a methamphetamine addiction and said, you know, I suffer deeply. Methamphetamines ruin my life. But also for anybody who's never known the desire of a deep addiction, I pity you. That's Eros. Deeply connected. So in the absence of that devotion to the great mysteries of existence, methamphetamines and cocaine and alcohol are surrogates that take the space.

1:00:11Yeah. But the drive is this deep desire to feel connected, to feel accepted and loved unconditionally. And communing with some kind of - Something, yeah, something, yeah, some aspect of the beyond, right? Yeah. Yeah. I like that.

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1:03:26I like that you frame addiction in a way that is very similar to the way that I see it. You know, I've said this before, but, you know, we tend to think of addiction in the context of certain behaviors or substances. And we think of the heroin addict and the, you know, the gutter drunk and things like that. But addiction is a condition that lives on a spectrum. And we all are on that spectrum to one degree or another. And the way you identify that is by evaluating your choices, your decisions and your behaviors and getting objective about how we do the things we do either to progress us towards some degree of greater truth about ourselves in the world or to distract ourselves or to numb ourselves from whatever happens to be making us uncomfortable in the moment as an avoidance strategy.

1:04:30I wanna go there. How do you, when you think of truth, what do you think of? I'm running an experiment here. Yeah, I mean, you know, like, wow, how do I answer that question? I guess, I don't know that I have an absolute answer to the idea of absolute truth, But I would say, what is real, what is objectively real when you remove the human impulse from it? Desire, ego, attachment, all of these things that are kind of operating unconsciously within us. It's fun. I've used the word and I hear the word. You know, recently a friend of mine, he's a translator of ancient Greek, Mark Airy. He told me in a profound moment that the word truth in Greek is a combination of two concepts, a-lethe, a-lethe, and it means without forgetting.

1:05:35and speaking of the spirit of the times we took a word like truth and made it about what is objective what is verifiable what is replicatable you know and this is probably a conversation for the philosophy department but there's another part of this which is truth is not forgetting the essence, the very core of your nature, and to look outside of yourself for something to address an inner conflict is part of our issue. We've consistently been looking outside of ourselves for salve and balm. And on some level, the deepest of spiritual truths are those realities that we discover or remember within.

1:06:28Let me say like metaphysically, I really like dual aspect theory. Have you discovered much about dual aspect monism? No, explain that to me. So dual aspect monism is that there's one stuff, the universe is one stuff, but there are two expressions of that one stuff. And we might call it matter and mental or image or imagination, psyche. And so, but at its core, it's just one thing, energy, right? We could say that. And so when we get into these kinds of conversations, there's the part of us that is connected with matter. What is, this is here. You know, I can measure it and feel it. We can, it's verifiable.

1:07:08Until quantum physics comes along and says, ah, wait a second. Hold my beer. Hang on. There's a whole, another aspect of reality that's beyond our capacity to image it. And so the light spectrum is a really good example here of that we can see all this and our eyes take in what it does, but there's more to this than meets the eye. There's more to this than meets the touch. There's more to this conversation that meets our words. There's more to me than I can possibly be conscious of and you too. So truth, you said that and I thought, wow, I really love that word. I've been thinking about it a lot Because from a more, from a psychological perspective, truth is, and I speak religion.

1:07:55I like all religions. I'm obsessed. Religion, I think, is this way of encoding mysteries of human experience, I think. And what the sciences can't measure, what the senses can't measure over here, this mystery, mysterious world that we have words that approximate and point to something. And so truth is, yes, verifiable, but truth is also not forgetting. And I think in addiction, in a lot of ways, we've forgotten that we are interwoven and interdependent with the entirety of all of nature. And we've not realized that. And so we seek out a spiritual experience in an external to try to enrich what our current understanding of ourselves in the world can't possibly fathom.

1:08:56So thanks for running that experiment with me. So for the people that you work with that are suffering from addiction, what is the path, the counsel to move them towards a better direction? Yeah, I mean, I think that's so dependent on where they are in their process. And I've done work in adolescent residential treatment. I've worked in group practices and all kinds of different settings. And for younger people, a lot of times it's skill building and ego strengthening. You have to do things like teach people how to say no and how to give affirmation and how to just look you in the eye and be connected.

1:09:46I can't help but go to early attachment theory. Have you been into this much? I love it. So early attachment theory, I think of all of Bulby's experiments with rhesus monkeys, and we can't, of course, replicate these now. They're harmed to animals, but we can't, of course, observe what he and others like Mary Ainsworth have observed. The scene that comes to mind is when you take a monkey and raise it outside of the tribe and then reintroduce it to the tribe, once they've established all their social norms and grooming techniques and ways of communicating and interacting, they will beat it and ridicule it and harm it.

1:10:32You're not us, your other. And the only way that you can smooth that transition is by pairing that monkey with a younger monkey. And what happens is you pair them up and just over time, the instinctuality takes over and they become conditioned and normed into the kind of tribal, how you monkey. And so I think that's a really good example of, in younger years, that's what we have to do. It's because a lot of times people on some level didn't get what the culture needed to give them. And I don't blame the individual parents, or I think it's an issue with our culture. I mean, I am completely critical on our culture.

1:11:18We have actually not done the things that we need to do to serve people's development effectively. We are way too busy with our own bank accounts and our own, you know, what's that great quote of, don't tell me what you value, show me your calendar and your checkbook and I'll tell you what you value. So as a culture, I'm critical. And when it comes to the connection, presence, needs, communion that young people in development need, we are not serving them. and then we have to deal with that. So I think that's first half of life. A lot of it is skill building, is time, presence, repetition. One of the things I did with this young guy I worked with, he was a boxer.

1:12:11He was one of my first people that I worked with in this inpatient center. And he was a feisty guy. I remember him to this day. I won't say his name, but man, if you're out there, I remember you and think of you often.

1:12:25And we were kind of knee to knee together. And he's a boxer, right? He could probably do some work on me. And he's crying and crying and crying. And I gave him some interpretation. And he looks up at me through tears and was like, fuck you, Mr. John. And I looked at him and I was like, I'll call him Billy. I said, Billy, I'm so proud of you. and he goes, what the fuck? What are you talking about? I said, man, because two months ago you would have punched me and now you didn't, you know? And so to look at in that moment, he has this expectation that not only his aggression is gonna be met with aggression, but it wasn't.

1:13:16And that experiential process is what you need. I think that's the gold is that you over time need to have experiences of people not behaving how you assume they're going to behave. And then people teaching you what the culture didn't teach you. And that takes time. For adults, it's different. I mean, I think for adults, it's deeply relational, deeply community oriented. I do think Buddhism had it right here. And I think AA gets it right in a lot of ways that part of the three jewels of Buddhism is you need a teacher and a path and a community. And in the absence of those, you're not gonna have the spirit of the depths speak through the spirit of the times.

1:13:55And you're not gonna solve somebody's methamphetamines addiction or their alcohol. So that's my first swing at that question. Yeah, and we're in an era in which community is fractured. Community centers are no longer. There are, you know, we're lacking in those spaces and gathering places that used to be part and parcel of every village and every town and every city. And those have sort of vanished. The path is being dictated by the mores of Western capitalist society, which says your value and your entitlement to be loved and accepted is indelibly tied to your ability to, produce, achieve, distinguish yourself.

1:14:47And that's a poisonous, noxious message where you feel like your self-worth is only in so far as you're able to kind of like acquit yourself in this material world. Like there's a violence to that. And the teachers who can disabuse you of that and set you on a different course are few and far between, you know what I mean? Like you're not gonna find them in the public schools and you're not gonna find them in the community centers that no longer exist. Right. And occasionally, that coach will come along or that special one person that makes a difference, but it seems to me that there's less and less of that and that's a greater challenge.

1:15:28And my sense is that this is noxious for the culture and for all people, but I think it has an outsized impact on men and particularly young men. and when you share the story of the crying boxer, like that's sort of the encapsulation of like this whole like dilemma that so many men are facing right now who are more or less because they don't have a teacher, they don't have a path and they don't have a community. A thought about two things. I was thinking in that, when I worked in that inpatient residential center, Sorry to every therapist out there in the world, but the thing that people remember the most is not the therapist.

1:16:14It's not some interpretation the therapist made, and it's not some theoretical orientation that created some skills-based approach that they learned how to do X, Y, or Z. when people are asked about what mattered the most, it is an event like the lady behind the counter at the cafeteria saved the favorite dessert of the person. You know, it's these very loving, very relational, very kind, connected moments. And the other thing I wanted to address is as you're talking about men and certainly the development of young men, Richard always brings up this one image of these elephants that were, you know, in India or somewhere that were just ransacking the town, running, rushing people, stepping on cars, you know, doing things that elephants tend not to do.

1:17:14And they bring in this behaviorist, this elephant expert and says, what's happening here? And they're like, oh, I get it. They're three adolescent male elephants that the father and grandfather generations have been poached. And so they are without initiation. So they said, not funny, but I love the solution. They bring in two granddaddy elephants. And if any of you know Richard Rohr, I love him when he does this because he says these elephants just kind of move their ears around. And the adolescent young ones are like, well, what is that? And we see that in gangs, for example, that the same spells that we need for healthy initiation and community process are utilized and co-opted by what I would consider to be uninitiated people.

1:18:14or people at least that are using the spells in service to some kind of harm to culture as opposed to the opposite. And so that, I mean, just a full disclaimer, I mean, I don't want to get into necessarily a conversation that seems to paint capitalism or free market enterprise as negative. Again, it's just incomplete. When the enterprise doesn't recognize that there are people being left out by this equation and do the things necessary to bring along those who are being lost or forgotten, that's the problem. So if you're going to have whatever kind of economic or philosophical or political orientation, okay, run the experiment, see if it works.

1:19:00All over the world, we're going to do that. But any orientation is going to create some kind of neglect, no matter what you're doing. And so if you're not doing things, I think, to nourish and nurture those who are left, then that's the problem. So I think when it comes to men, the statistic that really came out as you were beginning your question or thought about men is that men right now have 50 % less friends than we did 20 years ago. And I could give you statistics all day long about suffering of men, but to me, that's the most important. Because? Because I think it's the catalyst for all the others.

1:19:42I think in the absence of real genuine connection, intimacy, presence, the experiential process of bumping up against another human being, of being known, of being seen and witnessed, of being held accountable, of being beholden to relationships and forces that are outside of your own desires. I think that's a real travesty in our culture and men all over are suffering the burden of our issue. What is your sense of what's driving this loneliness? Well, I think that see kind of item number one around a culture that doesn't have initiation. You know, we're telling, it's back to the spirit of the depths, You know, we're telling men how to be producers, but we're not telling men how to be in relationship.

1:20:38One of the things we do at the Center for Healing Arts, the Integrative Wellness Center that my wife and I have, is we look at the human as biological, psychological, social, and spiritual. And really try to address all these levels of the ways in which we show up. And the social is one of those levels. and we don't teach men how to be social, how to be connected, how to be in the mix with other men. And I do think that when you're not beholden to a community and really known deeply, differently than you are with a romantic partner, whoever it might be. But with a community of men, I just think that there are elements of our psyches that get untethered.

1:21:25And I don't know how you measure that necessarily, but I certainly know that I work with it a great deal. And the kinds of addictions and depressions and alienations and isolations that happen as a result are paramount. And there's a reason why in our prison systems, which I could be deeply critical of, there's a reason in our prison systems, the kind of worst consequence that you can give to somebody is isolation. That says something about our needs. And if we're creating a culture that is essentially knowingly, because we know the consequences, with men that are disconnected from each other and feeling more and more isolated, that's a problem because we're taking a pretty aggressive part of our species and creating a pretty aimless hurt.

1:22:19Yeah, that's gonna go out into the world and like those elephants, you know, just stomp cars. Wreck shit. Yeah. Yeah. And again, there's this ethnobotanist named Mark Plotkin that I interviewed once who had been, he spent a lot of time down in South America working with all these different tribes. And he said, you know, really with the shaman, like it's all the same spells. You know, they're all reading from the same spell books, Whether you're doing what could be considered dark magic or light magic, same spells. It's just your intention. And so gangs use the same spells that we might have in a community that creates rites of passage, that creates kind of in-group, inside jokes, you know, markers of being a part of the group.

1:23:05Processes to go through together to bond each other closely. I mean, all kinds of dynamics that we need, that gangs will capitalize on, that the military capitalizes on. But for everybody that is not called into those arenas, we're without a process of moving through. I mean, I think in the best rites of passage, this is really hard for people to hear a lot of times. My favorite rite of passage, which seems really kind of messed up, is a process down, I believe it's in Columbia, where they take, it tends to be young boys at about 12 years old, and they take these bullet ants. Have you heard of this before?

1:23:49Bullet ants. So bullet ants are these ants that are given the name bullet ants because their bite feels like a gunshot. and what they do to these kids is they smoke all these ants out, so they're stunned. They weave these palm gloves and they weave the ants inside the palm gloves so that when they wake up, they begin to sting or bite the children. So you see these images of these children that have these palm gloves on and for 10 minutes, they're to sit there and take it. And then 24 hours, it's gone. I mean, it doesn't last. Can you endure this? And it's an experiential process where you're saying, I've done hard things.

1:24:30I've done hard things. And most importantly, then those hard things that I've done created in me a community of connection and the community conspires. They want you to be a part of this. They want to fold you in. They're supporting this. And they fold you in after you pass this test, so to speak. And they give you all the ethics and moral dynamics and right, all the cultural accoutrement of being a member of the tribe. You can then be in relationship, you achieve something important. You know, when you talk to a young person, you're like, what are your rites of passage? You know what they'll say?

1:25:07I mean, they'll take a stab. I mean, short of a bar mitzvah or, you know, being on a sports team, I suppose, on some level, or going through the process of, what do they call it? When you're trying to get into a fraternity or like these are very like low hang, like very low grade versions of that. They're almost like vestiges of this ancient practice that has existed for as long as humans have congregated and formed communities together. But this is kind of all that remains. That's it. The culture doesn't conspire, right? Arguably the fraternity thing does, but still you might argue that a kind of immature, sorry guys, but a kind of immaturity is running the show there.

1:25:59Yeah, there's no wise elder like lording over the rite of passage and making sure that everyone understands like the greater purpose here or what the aim is. So most people that I talk to when I ask them questions about rites of passage, they will say the first time they drank, the first time they had sex, and when they got a car. And fine. But those, again, aren't supported. You're not having the celebration of your community and your elders and your family, because now you're a part of something and you can fight for the community and you can serve the community. The stakes are, I mean, I think in a lot of ways we're warriors that don't have a war and don't have a process to, I mean that spiritually.

1:26:50I don't mean that about going out and hurting other people. Again, I'm masculine in that way. And that this spiritual war of working through your own impulses, your own tendencies, your own hedonism, your own desire to retreat and isolate, your own narcissism and your own self-indulgence. That tension is something you must fight against. And so, no, I'm not a tribal person in South America, but I do need a marker in my life to say I was once this way and now I am this way. And I've achieved something great and I've learned that I can do hard things. And the reason – one of the things you were referencing earlier about what I call the little teachers, these emotional experiences that are teachers.

1:27:36I need to learn how to endure the difficulty of grief, of shame, and not act out on it, and query it, and sit with it, and learn from it. This miraculous universal experience that everybody has the capacity to experience that takes me into a deeper orientation with myself and with others, they're not just pathologies, and they're certainly not just momentary experiences to try to get rid of or to fix. They're powerful images and affects of nature, seemingly, that take us over. And the ancients referred to them as the gods. But now, as Jung and Nietzsche both articulate, the gods have descended from Olympus and landed in the solar plexus.

1:28:28And as Jung articulated in that thought, now they've landed in the doctor's treatment room to be fixed, not aspects of our psyche and consciousness that are to be served. What is my shame showing to me? Oftentimes my shame reveals to me the ways my culture told me I was not enough or too much. That's a story back to your earlier point. Is that true for me? right as am i not enough of course not but is that a belief pattern that shows up for me that can change the way i show up in the world absolutely so i i have a story that i shared with a group recently one time when i was uh again i wanted to be a musician for the time i was six i was 19 years old or 18 years old i was at this gathering i was playing music i was so excited you know new, going off to college, playing around the campfire, really beautiful experience.

1:29:27And I was ready to show off some songs I've been working with. And here I was saying, I'm going to be a musician. I had this as part of my identity. And, and I, guitar is being passed around the circle. And I played my song and, you know, felt good about it. And then the song goes to this other guy who plays one of the best songs I've ever heard. And he was wanting to go into like finance or oil, you know, like he had no aspirations of being a musician. I was shattered. I mean, you just got your ass handed to me. Shattered. And, and I stopped. I was not conscious at the time of this, but I went through a stage of withdrawing, totally ashamed.

1:30:12Totally. If you would have said you're feeling shame right now, I'd have gone, you're full of shit. I did not have the awareness of my own body at the time. But looking back on it through the bread trails, I saw that I deviated. Later, it took a phone call from another friend of mine who called me on a Tuesday and said, hey man, what are you doing Thursday night? This is when I was 19. I said, nothing. I got a test on Thursday morning in history, but nothing, no plans. What do you got? He said, I booked you a show at the Aardvark and I hung up the phone. The Aardvark was this cool club in the area.

1:30:50And essentially I was thrust into learning about 25 songs because I'd pretty much hung it up. And with his wisdom, I then started that path. But for a year, I was imagining to be a business major and that was not my bag. But this happened because you had a friend who was able to see you and know what you needed and like intervene on your behalf to like do what you weren't gonna do on your own, right? That's right. Which speaks to, you know, friendship and, you know, why we all need, you know, people in our lives to, you know, hold ourselves accountable and to be able to like really see us, right?

1:31:32And I think in the context of men and, you know, the peril that they're in right now, like, of course, none of this has anything to do with, you know, the progress that we've made in terms of like women and the place that they now occupy and there's plenty of work to be done there as well. But as Richard Rohr says, and you often repeat, like in the absence of mythology, we have pathology. And so we don't have this mythology when it comes to men and rites of passage and what they mean and why they're important. And as you also say, as Joseph Campbell said, the day the culture gets rid of the men's clubs is the day the culture begins to deteriorate.

1:32:16And that's sort of a provocative statement in 2025. But what he's getting at is this need that isn't being met in terms of like how men are relating to each other. And the reason that's important is because when it's not met, we reap the consequences of that because masculinity is unleashed in a toxic manner and we all pay the price for that, right? And I think right now we're in a situation where we're reckoning with masculinity. What does it mean? And there is this idea that masculinity in and of itself is toxic by definition when, of course, it's not. Like masculinity is a beautiful thing when it's healthy.

1:32:57There is a virulent toxic strain of that that we're seeing right now. but that is because these needs are not being met in the way that we need them to be met to have a healthy society and a society of healthy men. I mean, is that accurate? Would you agree with that? I do. And I think that what we know, and I'll bounce this to you. I mean, think of all of the people that you know who have achieved success. Did it do it? Did it do that thing that they were looking for? And of all the people that I know, the answer's no. They get to some pinnacle, some mountaintop of what our culture would say is successful.

1:33:43Track for you? Sure. Yeah. And they say that that wasn't it. And so now I've got to go looking for something else. Yeah. But not before suffering an existential crisis. I'm sorry. And without guardrails, that's where you really see you know, like weird masculinity run awry with like sports cars and affairs and like, you know, all kinds of bad behavior. All of it. Yes. The potentials are in service to lesser gods. And that may ruffle feathers, but the things we worship that we pay homage to, that we devote our lives to become the gods that we worship. And if it is the cars and the self-worth tied to the bank account, then that's the God.

1:34:26And so what happens is that we know this, we know this, and why don't we change? Because we all think we're going to be the exception to the rule. That's why. Exceptionalism, yes. So there may be some real beautiful opportunity for those who are, if you're out there and you have reached that success, you have hit that opportunity to see the hollowness of these ideas that we continue to imagine are the pinnacle of success. We've not redefined what success is. It's an illusion. And so we stay with all of our resources devoted to productivity. We have people in leadership positions that have walked this path, that have learned that, and here's the cynical side of me, is that unfortunately they've not actually learned it.

1:35:15What they're doing is trying to amass more and more and more, thinking that it will one day be that. But we don't have people that are up at the top of that, whatever it is, saying, shit, we need to redefine for our culture what success is and how this game is played. The problem with that, though, is that there are people who do give voice to that, but they're sort of a curiosity. I mean, I would say Jim Carrey does that. Oh, yeah. Every time he does any press, Like this is his core message. It is. It is, thankfully. Thankfully. And there, I think, are forces in narcissism, I would say, in our culture that is in service to that God that is not going to wake up.

1:35:58And so I champion Jim Carrey. I mean, that's one of the people that I referenced there. I really appreciate the message that he's been bringing because he is a person that has reached a great deal of success. but we continue to define it economically. We don't define it relationally. How much money do you make is a question, not how rich are your relationships. Amy Winehouse in her documentary said something about defining success as continuing to get to work with people whom she admires and respects. I really like that definition. It starts to get closer to something relational, but I don't think we're going to solve narcissism.

1:36:37I certainly don't, But I do wish that we had more people who unfortunately suffered that existential crisis and were doing the work to congregate people. Richard Rohr certainly did it. He led men's rights of passage for years, decades, seeing the problem. He worked in prisons. He saw the problem of masculinity in the 90s, along with guys like Robert Bly. Bly was like the first guy who kind of came out, you know, the whole drum circle thing. Absolutely. Like how long? That was a long time ago. It was in the 90s. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do a different kind of drum circle every Monday night, but yeah, you bang the drum.

1:37:14All of that happened in the 90s and still it's radical to me. I heard this, so please somebody check this. I think this is right. that 2014 was the first year that the humanities department had a degree in masculinity studies. And so what is that about? Like, so men essentially have been asking, we've been defining our identity by what we're not. And second is we're equating weakness with types of people, expressions of humanity. What is, I mean, that's horribly fucked up. So that creates in men a great deal of conflict. I mean, to, okay, don't be that. That, you know, wondrous, beautiful soul over there who's an emanation of divinity.

1:38:06And now I'm supposed to not be that because it's somehow reduced to weakness. women in mass because of enormous cultural issues. I mean, to put it lightly, I mean, we have, we have millennia of cleanup work to do with what we've done to women. And we also have a great deal of work to discover what men are. and to ask meaningful questions about who we are and what matters. And I think we haven't had those conversations. And most men that I work with are deeply sensitive, but also deeply guarded. I think of my son, he's 20, you know, and he's, his idea of strength, when he kind of acts out the ways that men are supposed to be, I'll say you realize that's a total compensation for a felt sense of insecurity.

1:39:14You know, your need to dominate is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, okay, boomer, you know, right. When you're raised by like, you know, around this idea of what you're not supposed to be, like what fills in for the vacancy of like what you are supposed to be. And when you're young and adolescent and you're trying to, you know, figure out what that definition is, you're looking around at the people who, you know, kind of embody what you think at that time are the admirable qualities or what is the kind of expression of masculinity. And so, you're gonna gravitate towards very, you know, confident, you know, versions of that that aren't always equally, you know, conscious, I guess I would say.

1:40:03Well, I facilitate two men's groups every week. These are psychodynamic men's groups, process-oriented groups. My co-facilitator is a gay man. And it's one of the most beautiful opportunities to bring together men who have not been exposed to different expressions of masculinity so that we can start to understand that masculinity is not so specific. and that's part of the issue is that I think the violence that we do to men is that we say, this is as far as you can go, as far as you can be. It tends to be a dominant, aggressive force. I know a bunch of really beautiful and incredible men that are not that, that don't want anything to do with that.

1:41:02And so again, we have an issue with our culture that is consistently producing an image of this idealized specimen. And then men measure themselves against that and feel insecure and seek to meet that image. And I think we are desperate to increase the flexibility of masculinity. And I would think that one element that's necessary to be on that list would be the most profound and potent authenticity and honesty and genuineness. And so if we're creating men who are working together with each other to be more honest, genuine, and real, if you and I are in a friend group and you call me out because I've not shown up authentically, that's a good thing.

1:41:56and without relationship where we can bump up against each other, then our narcissism and our insecurities are running the show. Yeah, left unchecked. Yeah. When I look out on culture, I'm sort of two minds. On the one hand, I feel like this conversation that we're having, versions of this are happening all over the place now. Like I think that there is a dialogue that is occurring around all of the topics that you've raised, all the issues that you've raised. And I see young people, Generation Z, growing up into a world that they don't quite like and they're searching for how to find their place in it and meaning within it, right?

1:42:49And that's sort of at the tip of the spear rather than like, what school am I gonna get into and what job am I gonna get? It's like, what's meaningful here? How do I find meaning? How can I find purpose? You know, because it's so crazy right now and chaotic. And I find that to be hopeful. Young people like grappling with stuff that I didn't start thinking about until my 40s and 50s at a very early age. and on some level you can credit social media for that because there's people like yourself talking about this and these things are just widely accessible in a way that they weren't when we were kids.

1:43:25And there's a general dissatisfaction with so many people's lot, like these young people have parents who are dissatisfied and they, you know, so that's all getting internalized into the young mind, right? And I think that's really cool. You know, I think there is an opportunity, like the pendulum is swinging and there has to be a reaction to this loneliness and this missing ballast that people have in their lives and what's going to replace that. At the same time, when you look from the top down, there's just a lack of ethics that we see in leadership, a lack of appreciation for honesty that can't help but kind of trickle down into culture.

1:44:11And I think when you look at young men in particular who are disenfranchised to one extent or another, don't see opportunities all that available to them. They become vulnerable to voices out there who are gonna tell them that it's not their fault. It's because of this group of people or that group of people. And their vulnerability becomes easily weaponized. And so that's happening kind of simultaneously, these two things. And they're like countervailing forces right now. Yeah, it's funny. When I've worked with young people now, I noticed that I don't have to do as much table setting about these ideas.

1:44:53They're there faster. Masculinity, sexuality, spirituality. Like it's very interesting that I had that thought about social media certainly democratizing and distributing information faster. You know, like I use music as a metaphor. My daughter is eight and, you know, for so long, we were just, we just listened to playlists and you wouldn't even care what's on the radio. And so our interest in music was like, okay, whatever, you just play me whatever playlist is the algorithm creates and you never listen to lyrics you know you just listen to music but she now reads all the music or all the lyrics on all the songs and is reconnecting with the artists and it's a magical time for young people right now certainly hard but i see a great deal of strength in in what they've got going on and and yet i think their anger is is is valid and and necessary because we have not invested in looking at our cultural issues and working to right the ship.

1:46:07I mean, to your point, I think a lot of people, there are conversations that are happening more and more, and we're hopefully able to have more flexibility in our conversations. But I stay pretty impressed with young folks. I spend a lot of time working with adolescents. I don't do it as much now, but when I do, I stay really impressed with these kids. And I think probably through the lack of all these issues we're talking about, they have had to figure it out on their own. And they are having all kinds of radical relationships online talking about these ideas. Yeah, I get concerned, however, though, knowing that the algorithm is going to serve, for every video of you saying a version of what you just said, being shown to a young person, the algorithm is gonna serve up, you know, 10 videos of someone like Andrew Tate, you know, saying something toxic and unhelpful.

1:47:01Yeah, I know. And I don't know how you untangle that knot, but. Well, I think that, you know, we have this inherent negative, I call it a negative attributional bias. You know, essentially that our media exploits our fear-based systems and it will provide us what most activates that fear system. Because we'll watch that rather than watching flowers grow, you know, which I think is pretty fun to do, you know. And just to, I spend a lot of time, I was just recently sitting outside just listening to the locusts. And that's pretty beautiful and miraculous. I don't know how many people are spending their time doing that.

1:47:45Not many. Yeah. Probably not that many. So - But you know, for every action, there's a countervailing reaction. Like I just became aware that there is a YouTube channel where there's this guy in Norway and he drives, I believe, I haven't checked it out. I was just like, somebody was sharing this idea with me. I believe he drives like a semi-truck. And basically he just videos, like he just has a camera out the windshield of his truck. I could be getting this wrong. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it. And he just drives and the video is just a feed of like an unedited feed of like what his drive looks like.

1:48:27And it will just be a nine hour video of like nothing happening. And apparently like, this is very popular. Soothing, thank God. Like people are like, you know, like, so it's sort of like, yeah, this is modern day, you know, a modern day antidote to maybe the chaos and insanity of everything else out there. But I wanna step back a minute here and kind of just your ideas are somewhat, there's an ethereal aspect of what you're talking about. You're talking about myth and connection and learning how to lean into the heart. And for a lot of people and probably more with men than others, like these are challenging ideas to understand, let alone translate into practice.

1:49:10Like how do you drill down on these concepts and turn them into actionable tools that people can practice so that they can start to shift and embody what it is that you're talking about? Yeah, great question. So one of the things I'm working on a lot right now is creating a process. And what I will, what I hopefully create enough trust with folks to guide them through a process that they discover on their own. and I get it that that's not an easy sell today because in our cultural milieu, you know, what matters tend to be, uh, matter money, you know, and, um, but I, I think one of the things I do is appeal to that just little bit of doubt, uh, based on what we were saying about Jim Carrey, you know, the, I tend to work with a lot of guys who have had an opportunity to experience a great deal of success.

1:50:13And then part of what I'm trying to do is, there's a line from the Bible that I like very much, which is they will know us by our fruit. And these concepts are shown in all kinds of religious traditions, but I tend to like that, is that at the end of it, many of us are interested in legacy and many men that I connect with know what matters. And so if you give men a process where they can connect with other men and go through a transformation and they experience it on their own, it tends to be pretty potent. I can't speak to the groups and people out there who are saying this is the get rich quick scheme.

1:51:04You know, those aren't the people that I'm reaching. And so what I'm doing is trying to say – They have to play out the scheme first. That's it. Yeah. And many have. And I think that's where I step in, which is trying to catch folks who are a bit underserved by a system that has said, this is what matters and this is how you fit in it. and their doubt, back to this little teacher idea, their doubt is what initiates them into moving into territories that they would otherwise not have gone into. So I'm not suggesting that it's an easy sell or you can cast a wide net, but I am suggesting for those that are feeling that doubt and that have suffered the burdens of knowing that what you imagined would help you arrive at where you thought it would help you arrive didn't, then there's a little wedge in that belief system that I can move in there and start to build relationship with.

1:52:06And so the book that I'm writing, for example, is a process. It's something like what the 12 steps are or what the hero's journey is. It's my take on a psychological and spiritual process that I've observed people go through in my office in psychotherapy. So what I did is I simply put a container to that and can help guide people through that. It's not a manualized treatment and that do these six steps and then you're fine. It's you can locate yourself in a particular process so that you become aware of what might be coming next. And then you follow that thread and you can discover from within what might be lacking.

1:52:46At the core of this, there is this thing that you call sacred refusal. Yeah. Can you explain that? I will, yeah. So I referenced it earlier a little bit about what was happening with the rhesus monkeys and the cranial size of the human being at birth. we have scripts and adaptations, behaviors, ways of being in the world that we adopted just by the nature of our existence. And these are in some ways social, you know, what you wear, how you speak, how you walk. They are also deeper than that. And on a very deep level, some of our most potent adaptations involve our most inherent needs as humans.

1:53:47Survival, of course, one of them, need for love, another one, that we essentially adapt to our environments early on and create these contracts with ourselves in the world. And we carry those out throughout our lives until they don't serve us any longer, or until we run into issues with addiction or relationship or trauma or crisis. So the refusal, putting the sacred in front of it is that you create an opportunity to grieve that vessel that helps you throughout a large part of your life, but is no longer serving you. And of course, addiction is a great example. I was told by Jungian analysts that I worked with years ago, she was a professor of mine.

1:54:35When we were speaking in one of our classes, she mentioned a young woman who was sexually abused through much of her early life. So by the age of nine or 10, she had a pretty significant alcohol dependence. Nine or 10. Hardcore. So this was a horrible sexual abuse. The way that Priscilla spoke about it, she said that she was drinking anywhere from half a bottle to a bottle of vodka a day, I'm sure supported by some of the adults in her life. So this is as bad as it can get. And so at 16, the abuser was no longer in the home and yet she still had the alcohol problem. The alcohol dependence, I should say.

1:55:24Okay. So I would argue that's not wrong. That was based in her need to do everything that she could to numb out from the catastrophic mistreatment that was happening. An almost appropriate adaptation to survive. Absolutely. Just an absolutely overwhelming trauma. Yeah. So then how do you take somebody who for the formative years of their life has connected with this substance and it has helped them navigate their development? And how do you then, because now the alcohol is killing her. And that's an extreme image of what happens to us all. that we have these early adaptations about, think about when you were in a relationship and you got your heart broken and you determined that you will never love again, or you were sexually violated and you made a proclamation about others in the world.

1:56:40This belief becomes ingrained. I will never do that. Or they will never hurt me again. Or I will never have this happened. We have these agreements. It's a contract with reality. So the sacred refusal is when we eventually recognize that we have to go through a process of grief and begin to unravel our connection with whatever that adaptation is. And oftentimes it's done so in a trauma or a crisis. You know, that this is what in AA would be referred to as a rock bottom, that you have to hit that and eventually say, this is no longer tenable. I have to consider something else. I don't know what it is.

1:57:26So I will surrender over to a process that I can't possibly fathom, but I'll trust you enough, hopefully, that you will guide me through that process, saying it to the community or to the sponsor or to the therapist or whomever it may be. So sacred refusal is an opportunity for us to ritualize that process where we can honor the adaptation. We can commune with it in a way that recognizes its value in our lives, that it served a great and holy purpose in a lot of ways. but now we need to, on some level, kill it off and surrender it to the forces and the powers that be. And I think that process takes time.

1:58:15And in the best of times, it would be done with a ritual. But again, if you're not surrounded by elders who've gone through this experience and can find ways to ritualize that process, you're kind of left going at it alone. And that can be a scary and terrifying experience. And that's why in therapy, one of the things I help folks do is try to recognize that the both end of the dance. Thank you, thank you. And I set you free. And now I go through a stage of disorient, what I call disorientation, where my favorite example here is a hermit crab. And I thought about the hermit crab early on and come to find out they actually do this.

1:58:59the hermit crab outgrows its shell and it has to go looking for a new shell. And of course, the moment of transition from the old shell to the new shell is the most vulnerable time of its life. Yeah. And the second thing that I thought was really fascinating when I started looking this up is that it also goes through a phase of adjusting to the new shell because it doesn't quite fit right. And so it's got to take time to grow into that shell. So this is a stage of liminality, the in-between. And we, in our ego's need for control, for clarity, for certainty, we suffer the burdens of ambiguity, anxiety, and ambivalence.

1:59:50And during that stage, just not intellectually necessarily, but just our bodies are shaking and needing ground. You know, I need my familiarity. We're in the uncomfortable transitional phase of the unknown. And so disorientation is a stage that really needs a kind of midwifing. And you need somebody to sit along and reflect for you where you are in your journey. Or else you will regress into patterns that existed and were very effective before. hence the nature of our entire addiction treatment process. I think that's a great way to think about that. When you're in that liminal state, it's very confusing.

2:00:35Like you can't find your footing. And I think people have this sense that when you're in it, you can kind of like see where you're heading or like how it's gonna work out or whatever. And it's like, no, that's the antithesis of what's happening. Like the whole point of it is that, you know, your compass is just spinning like this and you're very uncertain and unclear and it's a scary time. But it's necessary, this dismantling. My friend, Alexi Pappas calls it glop. Like if you think of the caterpillar and the chrysalis, you know, before it can emerge as the butterfly, it's not a process of like, you know, gradually shifting from one to the other.

2:01:16It has to dissolve into a goo and completely disappear. Like it has to, there is this shedding, right? Yeah. With the shell, et cetera. And that's just the deal, right? Like if you're gonna move from where you were into this new and unclear space, you're taking this identity that you have inherited or co-signed and you're dismantling it, right? And that is the process of reckoning with your inner authenticity. Becoming. Yeah, becoming, right? Yeah. You know, I don't know that you can do that alone successfully. Yes. And on top of that, you know, I often think a lot about how these things are designed because if you're behaving in a way that is leading your life in a not so good direction, Like, what is the importance of those rock bottom moments of reckoning?

2:02:17Like, obviously, when we're in acute pain and suffering, it's easier to make the change or to do the uncomfortable thing because you're up against it, right? The pain of your circumstances exceeds the fear of doing something different. But that change is always available to us. Like, we don't need to go through this, right? And yet, like, this is the way it works. Right? Like, it's like, why can't we just be, you know, more kind of robotic about it and be like, you know, like Spock would look at it and go like, well, I have to stop doing this because this is not working and I have to do this. And there's no friction in that process.

2:02:59I think of the idea from Buddhism, interdependent co-arising, that the flower and the bumblebee are not separate. and they're interdependent. The same can be said of the sunlight and the dirt and the rain. It's a collective orientation and that is us. And we become interdependent, co-arising with these various stages of our lives. Except unfortunately, what we do is we cling to history. And that's - Yeah, what does that mean? Jung defined a complex as an autonomous bundle of intra-psychic energy that had a feeling and thought pattern. And it is essentially our history manifest in the present moment.

2:03:51So the need to reach for alcohol or the need to call that person again or the need to go back to that job is our interdependence on how that was at one point serving us and our resistance to move into that next phase of hermit crab existence. Or a butterfly existence. And we know very well that we are creatures that are resistant to the unknown. And one of the ways I think about this is that the ego is an exceptional colonizer. It likes to grasp and hold what it can know, and it will get involved even sometimes to, this is strange, isn't it? In opposition to our survival, the ego will cling to our history and play out once useful or supportive or familiar ideas and ways of being in the world.

2:05:04And that's strange. Freud called it the repetition compulsion. and it's an odd dance that we do because we do have the capacities to repeat. Again, that magic can be used in service to something harmful or something expansive. And maybe harmful, I like contracting. It makes us contract. It keeps us small versus expands us into something larger. That was probably a better comparison. So our history shows up. we can't imagine what we can't imagine. And we can't imagine the future. We can only imagine what happened in our past. And so, because that has been so present in our psyches that we'll cling to that history, despite the fact of being something that will create our undoing.

2:05:53This deep discomfort with uncertainty, like I said, right here on my first, Dan, that will opt for the pain it knows over the unknown liberation, you know, that is on the other side of the different choice. Like every time until the pain of that known is just too much. My friend, Jeff Kripal says this, we have to have the explosion of at least one worldview than to get better at the next one. And then the next one to realize that any worldview we have is not about meeting the present moment. It's about seeing the world through a particular lens with some certainty that once served us. So as you were showing uncertainty, I was thinking about how many fundamentalisms in our spiritual traditions are certain.

2:06:59Yeah, they're selves to our discomfort with uncertainty. Exactly. So when you get into the more mystical orientation, you have a more fluid, not only are you fluid culturally, like you bring a mystical Christian with a mystical Buddhist and they're saying the same things about, but fundamentalist Buddhists and Christians, they fight each other. because the idea of difference challenges the ego's supremacy. And then we will be motivated to eradicate any suggestion or reminder of the fallibility of our certainty. And that's part of the insecurity there is that I'm going to kill you because you make me feel uncomfortable with the things that I've deemed to be certain.

2:07:43And because my relationship with certainty is so fragile, I will direct that agitation and anger and fear out on you and hurt you for it. And that's something that plays out in all of our lives. Sure, we're seeing it writ large, you know, across the globe right now. It is the source of so much that divides us. And truly, I wrote this in the margin of a book once that I loved very much, where I realized I'm a fundamentalist. You know, and I thought, wow, that's a really radical thing because I'm so anti-fundamentalism. But what I'm saying there is, hi, I'm John. I'm a fundamentalist. I need to recognize the ways that my psyche and ego inevitably create the concrete where there is fluidity.

2:08:32I need to recognize the ways that I try to replicate my history in service to previous ways of being in the world in the face of opportunities to dismantle those agreements that I made long ago, to encounter a reality that's beyond my current comprehension, that I have to be in process and relationship with those endeavors. And until I become attuned to my body's reactions and responses to the ways in which I cling to my previous orientations and expand myself and open to the new possibilities, I will continue to replicate that which served me once before. And I think that's true spirituality.

2:09:17I think true spirituality is a preparation for encountering the opposition of paradox and the confusion of the unknown and the willingness to experience the fact that I am simultaneously an incredibly large and brilliant expression of consciousness and also a totally meaningless speck of sand in the most radical play of existence that the cosmos continues to expand beyond our comprehension that mystery continues to move like the horizon beyond where I can see it and as soon as I think I'm summiting one mountain I realize that there is about three million mountains to summit in the expanses of my visual field.

2:10:04Beautifully put. And yet of this, you still cannot be certain, right? You have to hold this loosely as well because it is the certainties that when challenged inflame us most are the ones that we use to construct our identities, right? So when they're challenged, it's like a threat to like our whole belief system around who we are or our worldview, right? And as somebody who has this expansive kind of worldview and is holding their identity loosely, to even speak to that speaks to a certainty that you still then also have to be in a state of surrender around, right? Totally. Yeah. You've beautifully articulated the paradox.

2:10:58Yeah, which is why I have a preference for like Buddhism and it's Zen Coens. And it's basically like these things, they're pretzels. And the more you try to get to the bottom of them, the more confounding they become for their seemingly inherent conflicts. Because these are things that we never will get to the bottom of. And it's not about the answers. It's about living in the question and being in relationship with those questions. Well, and that's the gold. I mean, that's the juice, I think, is to be in this existence and to live that as fully as possible, which is why I think that, of course, I have need for certainty.

2:11:44And of course I have things that I believe are certain. And I don't presume to think that knowing any of this exempts you from the inevitabilities of life. however what i do believe is that we are in a powerful process and there are aspects of that process that we can intuit and observe and if that process is leading you to an idea that has certainty at its roots then i think reject it yeah danger yeah yeah yeah i mean because because that people say that a lot of times you know i get this really weird look as a therapist when i'm sitting at a dinner table you know and somebody says what do you do and i'm like i'm a psychotherapist and they kind of oh shit you know like knowing you psychotherapizing me right now knowing none of this stuff the the defenses and the walls come up like yeah you can see something in me, I'm like, no, no.

2:12:49The ass clench. It is an ass clench. You see it in the face. And then that's fear. Oh my God. Like what, you know, this person is gonna see me as I actually am. Yeah. They know something about me. And why is that fear inducing? Yeah. Why is that fear inducing? Because if people knew who I actually was, John, I would be rejected and Yeah. Exiled and alone. Yeah. Isn't that, thank you. Isn't that the problem? Is that actually we would be brothers. Because me too. You know, I have all those same things. We all do. Right. And we just simply don't create sacred circles, display our guts on the table and say, this is who I am.

2:13:42And this is how I show up. And this is how I view myself. and this is where I feel weak. And this is where I feel shitty. And this is where I'm narcissistic. And this is where I'm self-important. And this is where I'm insecure. And the witnessing is the miracle, is that there is not a single person out there who doesn't have that. What we have are a lot of people out there who are resistant to sharing that truth. They've forgotten that that is the truth. That is the nature of our nature. You know, that, again, back to disgust. That's why I think in these, in fundamentalist religious traditions, there are, they just, so many purity codes, you know?

2:14:26And I think that shows us something about us, is that those systems are based on the certainties of this is what is pure, and that is not in avoidance of something that's very real and messy. And so again, I think God hides our most profound spiritual realities beneath disgust. So can we look at what's disgusting? Are you curious or interested in what's disgusting in your life? What you've deemed to be disgusting? Have you ever shared that with another human being? I mean, I said to my wife recently, I've got a really cool business thing happening that may or may not happen. And I've been feeling really insecure and really anxious about the whole thing.

2:15:09And it's just uncertainty. And I said, God, I just feel so vulnerable. I got to do something about this vulnerability. She's sitting behind me. She goes, like, feel it? I was like, yeah, yeah. Like, feel it. Yeah. Yeah. These complicated emotions that we harbor, our shame, our guilt, our fear, our secrets, our regret over things that we've done, that we keep to ourselves out of fear that should anyone know them, that they will be rejected for that sharing. And it's obviously the opposite, as you said. Those things hold you prisoner. You're basically shackled by them. And when you can share them in a safe environment with honesty, you liberate yourself from them.

2:15:59I mean, Brene Brown, like, you know, shame can't survive the light, bad idea. And I just know this from, you know, being in AA for a very long time, where someone gets up in front of people and they tell this insane story of all the crazy shit that they did. Like, you're like, oh my God, you know, like he did that and he's like telling it and he's laughing about it. Like it holds no charge over him. He is free of it because he's not self-identifying with it anymore. and the community of people that are on the receiving end of that feel less alone for the sharing because although the facts of that person's experience are different from theirs, the emotions are familiar.

2:16:41Like they can see themselves in that behavior, in that courageous act of sharing and that brings everybody closer together. Like this is how you connect through that type of honest interaction. Yeah. And in part, one of the reasons why I started this podcast was because I wanted to model and demonstrate that for a non-AA audience, like how powerful that is. And so, you know, a core piece of this is always having people on who, you know, it doesn't have to be an addiction recovery story, but a story of transformation or a story in which somebody is comfortable enough to, you know, share the intimate, vulnerable details of their struggle and how they got through it.

2:17:23because this is the connective tissue that makes us feel less alone in a world that is increasingly, you know, more and more divided and acrimonious and isolated in our own little worlds and our indulgences of self-obsession. That's beautiful. Thank you. I love it because you referenced Brene there and I wanted to add another Breneism, which is with somebody who's worthy to receive it. You know, we share ourselves with somebody who's worthy to receive it. You have to be careful who you're, you choose your audience wisely. There's this guy, Lionel Corbett, who's a Jungian analyst, and he actually just died.

2:18:07Blessings to his work. He wrote one of my favorite books called The Religious Function of the Psyche. And in it, he says, the fundamental difference between a psychosis and a genuine religious experience is that somebody who's experiencing a psychosis can't discern who to share it with and who not to share it with. I've never heard that before. So good. Are you on the side of the road saying the world's gonna end? Uh-huh. Or are you sharing with a beloved person that you're terrified about death and that you're feeling, you're realizing your finiteness And as beautiful and miraculous as this is, this consciousness ends at some point as we know it, and we don't know what happens next.

2:18:57And if that doesn't scare you, then you're not paying attention, you know? So I had your expression when I first heard that because it's... Yeah, it's pretty good. It goes back to the discernment prayer in AA. hey, for somebody who is listening or watching this, who is in pain because we're all in pain over one thing or another, but isn't steeped in therapy speak, maybe has never even gone to a therapist or someone the courage to like share a secret with another. What is your counsel for how this person can take an initial step towards addressing that pain and getting on a path of healing for themselves.

2:19:45You know, I had a fantasy, thank you. This is such a good question. I had this fantasy about somebody beginning to speak it to the sky, you know, to speak it to a tree. For anybody who thinks that's crazy, I don't think it is. And I think that you looked at this journal when we first started and I worked with - Yeah, which I said like, that looks like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Like I've never seen such dense, you know, like writing page to page. Well, there was a time I was working with a person that I was his therapist and I cultivated a love for this man that I just was thinking about him. I just feel love.

2:20:35I was working with him to start journaling and he grew up in a really, um, harsh environment. And so we were talking about how he begins to journal and he came to me and he said, um, Hey, I started journaling. Um, but I, I've been like trying to find out where I hide it in my house. And I was like, you live alone. And he was like, I don't know. What do I do? What if somebody finds it? You know? And it was like, well, shit, you know, we can't even, and that's one of my, in my own journaling, that's one of my agreements with myself is not to pull my punches. Don't edit. Editing happens later. So even having a process of honesty with yourself, I think it begins there.

2:21:26First of all, the opportunity to cultivate relationships where you do have somebody who's worthy to receive it. Because arguably, sitting drunk at a bar, I used to bartend when I was a young guy, you know, tons of vulnerability there. That's forgotten or that there's mistakes in that game. You know, there's no real risk. So I think speaking it to the sky is one of the first recommendations. just begin to let it cross your lips out loud. Next, if you were to start journaling, notice how often, and it's often, and this is almost my practice in journaling, you would rather not write that thing down that you want to write down.

2:22:10And you get distracted or move on to something else. And so having a practice of a sacred refusal here. Sacred refusal not to give in to the urge to hide. And it starts within, right? It's an inside job. And so it's long-term work, right? I think the act of becoming is what this life on some level is. I think that this entire existence on some level is an initiation and death is a part of it and a portal. But part of our orientation is to learn how to show up. And if I can hide from myself, I can certainly hide from others. And I do, and we do, and own it and that's fine. And God, I feel so insecure sometimes about the fact that I do that.

2:23:05And my wife is like my, the most incredible sparring partner in the world on this, you know, and that she, she does get to see the parts of me that I'd rather not show. And she gets to hold me accountable to that. Yeah. And call me out when I'm like, here I sit all day long talking to people about being vulnerable. And the moment that it comes of me being vulnerable. She's like, hey, motherfucker, feel that. I'm like, oh shit. And like, you can't do anything but laugh. I just laughed. Well, yeah, but it's healthy to get right sized like that, you know? A little humility injection and a little accountability, Mr.

2:23:45Big Shot Therapist. That's right, sit your ass down. It's true. I don't know where I'd be without that. Certainly with her. She's an amazing sparring partner. And I do, I think that's one of the, One of my favorite elements of this guy, Kohut, he's a psychoanalytic theorist and therapist that says our ego development, one of the things we need is a benign adversary. And did you ever do martial arts? I box right now and I've done a bit of martial arts. So I like the metaphor a lot. I would imagine you get it from pushing yourself just to limits. I mean, you've pushed yourself far in so many ways.

2:24:25Yeah, but it doesn't involve like, you know, an opposing force, you know, another human being. I don't, I mean, I'm sure you face a lot of interopposing forces. Sure. Yeah, there's plenty of internal conflict. I just don't need it. I don't need another human being to, you know, find, you know, my antagonist is inside my head. Yeah. Well, that's another one. And so how wonderful to project that out onto a relational dynamic and see it and give it a face kind of and have it have an autonomy. And we need that. We need a benign adversary to push up against us and to be vulnerable enough to allow somebody to reflect us, to mirror back the parts of us that we would rather not look at.

2:25:14I mean, I'd love to be the dude who's like, I am levitating and spiritually realized. And no, I mean, one of my favorite clinical books to give people, I have two, two of my favorite clinical books. One is Everyone Poops by Teronomi. It's a beautiful children's book. And all it is, is a bunch of animals taking a shit. And I think it's perfect to say, hey, look, we all shit. And as much as you want to hide it, that's what we do. The other is other places you'll go. That's a fantastic Dr. Seuss book. But to have a life partner who is, you use the word sparring partner, which could be interpreted pejoratively, but really somebody who is able to see you and see through you and is not afraid to push back and hold up the mirror is an incredible gift for your growth and evolution, but also makes your life less easy than had you chosen a partner who just is like in constant, you know, kind of like a supplicant, you know, like a guru's supplicant.

2:26:18Give me the bliss of an opium den. Yeah, so it's like, I mean, I share this with my wife who we just celebrated 22 years together. And I love my wife more than anything. And she's been, you know, my greatest teacher in many ways. And is that person who pushes me and can see through my bullshit. And when I'm, you know, feeling sorry for myself or down some kind of shame spiral or whatever, like she can be the anchor, but also like the clarity, like, oh, you're not seeing the opportunity here or like, here's an opportunity for you to really like get real with yourself about this pattern that you've been doing for 25 years so you don't pass it on to our kids.

2:27:03Like, are you gonna deal with this or not? And so it's not always comfortable. Like, I don't wanna look at that stuff. I don't wanna deal with that stuff. That's a disgust. But it's like, I don't wanna be in a relationship where I'm always being, but like, of course, like this is the beauty and this is what makes life real and meaningful. Like to commit to that and say, okay, do I have the courage to look at that and confront it and work through it? Even if I fail or have my weak moments where I do what humans do, which is resort back into my hermit crab shell and try to pretend like everything's fine.

2:27:40I wrote this down as you were talking because it's funny to be on this subject. You know, gratify me. You know, like - Oh, please. Please, just gratify. And that's what we say. Life, gratify me. Like my existence, gratify me. My partner, gratify me. My friends, gratify me. Can't you see? This is, you know, yes. And like life has different ideas about like your, your desires, if you could have them met in all the ways that you desire to have them met, I would argue you would not be satisfied. I don't think that's the path of satisfaction. Yeah. And I think that back to your question very early on.

2:28:25Which kind of sucks. Fuck this. Back to your question about suffering. It's like, well, like interestingly enough on this subject it's not to be fixed it it is the thing that is the great revealer it's the great revealer of truths that are beneath the the ideas that i have about what this whole dance and play is and it it confronts me with levels of consciousness that i would never have connected with otherwise and in this context it's how how beautiful that in in our cases, we have partners who are willing to spar. And I get your note about, that could be pejorative. Like when I spar, I'm just getting to the point in boxing where my coach is starting to swing at me a little bit and we laugh.

2:29:17He's not hitting me hard, but what he does is I've done two different martial arts and I've not in depth by no means, But since I was a kid, I always liked him. So boxing has been the one I've kept with the most. I did jiu-jitsu for a little bit, which was fascinating. And in jiu-jitsu, what's interesting about that model, which I tend to really like, certainly for men's development, I like the Greek educational model a whole lot because they taught strategy, rhetoric, war, wrestling, that there's a knowledge in the physicality of the experience. and you get confronted physically. It's not arguable and it's not intellectual with your own limitations.

2:29:59And there's a ritual to it. Like this is a, yeah, this speaks to all the things we were talking about earlier. And so I think in jujitsu, this metaphor is, okay, we go into class and you're partnered up with somebody. They, in my case, always knew more than I did. And so I was low man on the totem pole. And what would happen is eventually I would get submitted here. and at the end of it, I'm not angry at the slightest. I'm not mad at all. In fact, what I do is say, how did you do that? Teach me. Because what he did was expose a weakness or a blind spot or the area that I needed to grow. And I willingly submitted to that process despite the fact that often there was a bit of pain.

2:30:44Great, boxing, same thing. My coach takes a swing at me. What he's done is he's helped me understand that I'm not blocking here, I'm not blocking here. And I'm learning experientially how to do those things. And I think it's a fantastic metaphor for marriage or for long-term partnership that I and my partner are interwoven in an opportunity to show up in ways that men typically, oddly enough, let's see if this is your experience, men typically avoid conflict. and I've seen that with most men despite the fact that we're supposedly this aggressive dominant yet men are like totally sidestepping shit all the time 100 and and so I don't want to ruffle feathers I don't want to so we swallow shit all the time and I am no exception so I swallow shit and get in my head and try to rationalize and justify and then of course it comes out in some passive aggressive way or some withdraw or whatever it does.

2:31:53And my partner's going, Hey, what is that bullshit? You know, what are you doing? She says it not like that, by the way, that's, she says it beautifully. She's amazing, but she's pointing out part of those adaptations that I internalized early on about what matters, what my value is, what my worth is. Can I communicate about parts of myself that are hurting? Can I communicate about parts of myself that are angry or agitated? Like I can certainly do that with men because men have two switches, rage and withdraw. Good. Like I can do that. Guys, we can bump up against each other. But in this dance, it's different.

2:32:33And I'm, I'm most men I know swallow, swallow. They just take it in and take it in and withdraw and reject themselves. And the dance of the partnership is to incarnate an opportunity to communicate about what is genuine. I'm hurting. You know, I'm feeling something that I was not raised to communicate. It's all contingent upon a deep level of trust, though, because short of that, you're venturing a risk that when you share that, that you will indeed be rejected, right? So, the bond has to be pretty deep in order to create the container where that can be not only shared, but received in a way that doesn't threaten the relationship.

2:33:23And that's something that's difficult to really create. I think there are a lot of men out there who suffer that thing of repressing their emotions out of fear of what might happen if they share it. And in partnerships where, you know, if they do share that thing, it will be weaponized against them. Yep, and it is. So, and correspondingly, I totally agree. And I think that's an important point. There are a lot of partners out there, whoever they may be in this romantic dance, that, because it's not just men or women, it's polarity. Yeah, it goes. Whoever's on the other side of this dance is in need of witnessing and not weaponizing and not taking advantage of that opportunity.

2:34:09And so that's the dance that we do. I take a risk. You meet me there. We're more likely to create that bond of trust. And so I do think in a similar way, as much as we're talking about men needing to open up and communicate and move into moments of communication and honesty, their partners are in need of giving them a few wins. You know, giving us, I love Terry Real talks about this, us, giving us a few wins. And I want my partner to win. when I'm my most whole self, when I am my, what he called the, he calls the adaptive child. When I'm in my adaptation, I am probably wanting to fight. And that does not set the situation for trust building.

2:35:05And so then I do the repair work and say, well, hey, I messed up there. So sorry. and then we can dance. But yeah, I think that the irony of men typically being the part of this dynamic that tends to avoid conflict yet needs to learn how to communicate clearly. And that's one of the things we do in the men's group that Rodney Waters and I facilitate. As I say to these guys, look, we operate on three levels, the inner life, the outer life, and the life amongst us. And so I want you to talk about your outer life, what's going on, what's happening in your marriages and your partnerships and with your kids and with your work and with your family history and all those things, valid and important.

2:35:47And this is a safe place to talk about it. Also your inner life, which is the parts of yourself that you probably don't communicate about. This is the private part of your life that you may not have ever opened up and written down in a journal or shared with a tree. I think even probably more difficult is the life amongst us. When you circle up with eight other men each week and one of them annoys the shit out of you, just gets under your skin all the time. The way they talk, the way they talk over people, the way they hide, whatever it is, whatever your particular complex is that constellates in that space.

2:36:28And then how not to attack them for it or blame them for it, but own that it's actually about you. It's not about them. They're doing whatever it is they do. You probably have some early experience that we could locate in your history that somewhat created and contributed to the conditions that are activated in that moment and projected out onto that other person. So the dance is really, how do you withdraw the projection? And how do you start to take ownership for the fact that that thing, not only do I do it to you, I do it to me. So I now need to tangle with this and say, I'm projecting that, right?

2:37:11I'm disowning that experience, painting your face with it, and then getting mad at you for it. And that's what happens oftentimes. I get mad at you. I'm sorry. We do the thing. you apologize, shake hands. Okay, great. But in a therapeutic dynamic, one of the opportunities there is to say, hey, this thing might be about you and we need to figure that out. But primarily it's about what stirs for me. And can I communicate with you and the group what's happening with me in those moments? You're talking over me. I feel agitated. You're speaking about somebody with like contempt and it bothers me. Whatever it is, own it.

2:37:50It's not about the person or their behavior. it's about your reaction to it or your internal turmoil over it. Like what is being triggered and agitated in you and like, what is that about, right? And there's agency in that because you can't control what that other person is doing or not doing. You can walk around and resent them for it, but it's beyond your ability to, you know, kind of like control. So what can you control? Well, you can ultimately control your response to them. and if you can like look inward and like figure out what that thing is and set about healing it, then the trigger, the button gets removed.

2:38:31It does. It does. You kind of liberate yourself and that's the brilliance of how all of this is really an inside job. We are to a large extent unconscious of all of those and I'll use the term complexes because that's part of the tradition that I was raised in. Those autonomous bundles of energy that just take over. And then I see the world through its lens. I'm no longer this guy. I'm a different expression of this guy. And there's an identity there. And there's a history there. And there's a belief system there. And there's a language system. And there's kind of a patterned way of existing, like an eddy in a river.

2:39:14And I get caught by that spiral. and cycle. And I can stay caught in that for years. I can stay caught in that for a lifetime. You know, back to that earlier example I was giving about heartbreak, you know, like I, all of us, hopefully, suffered the catastrophic destabilizing experience of heartbreak. And guaranteed, we made some conclusions about ourselves and about the world. And if we're not conscious enough, we will continue that agreement and project that dynamic onto everybody else in the world. And we'll continue to live as if that is absolute and complete truth. Never realizing that that was a conclusion that was made from one experience and then generalized and projected onto all others.

2:40:07And that's sad that you're, you're in fact living out of your history. You're not living in a present connection. This is like an Eckhart Tolle wouldn't talk about the pain body here. There's a sadness there because you've limited your capacities to show up in the world. That's back to that contraction as opposed to expansion. My expansion is that really hurt. That's extremely painful. I go through a grieving process. I do whatever I need to do to feel fully and completely. Robert Black said something I loved, which is we need to be grief eaters. God, I love that. I'm scared of that. Grief eaters.

2:40:46Yeah. Preparing to consume and to be consumed by grief. I went to a funeral of a friend recently and it was a pretty stale funeral.

2:41:02There was no Eros. There was no feeling. Even my tears, they started to come. I could feel his presence and then they went away. I thought that's a weird way to grieve. You know, everybody hit their marks and everybody did their thing and they said what they needed to be said and they did this and did that and stand up and sit down. And I went to this, another friend of mine's funeral, beautiful beloved friends, Hunt and Chuck were married. And then one of the pastors is from the South. She's a black pastor who, who we'd got into this beautiful conversation. and I told her about this funeral. It was a white funeral, you know, white folks.

2:41:41And she goes, have you ever been to a black funeral? And I said, no. She goes, oh, it's not over until it's over. I thought, oh, God, I wish, I wish. She says, oh, we go and grieve and purge and scream and yell and let everything come out in community, connected, purge that out. I think that's such a great metaphor for where we are right now. The absence of that. We don't know how to grieve. So I had a conversation once with a friend who was going to join our practice, but she ended up starting her own practice. And she was initiated as a whaler in this community in Mexico, in this tribal community in Mexico.

2:42:34So, whaler as in screaming, not whaler as in hunting whales. No whales. Yeah, no whales here. So, the tribe had anointed a family system to be the designated whaler. And they would train and practice how to emote in that way. Knowing that because socializing is so important, we want to mimic each other and do what's socially appropriate. No one's going to whale unless someone whales first. That's it. Right. And so the culture knows this. And what they did is they anointed this group of people to pass on this tradition generation to generation so they could teach the entire community how to grieve, how to wail, how to fully express the absolute and complete devastation of losing those with whom we love.

2:43:29That's beautiful. Oh. Yeah, we're proclaimed, we shove it down, we're trying to adhere to the strictures of our social conventions and all of that. And this is a kind of betrayal of what the human heart needs to do in order to reconstitute itself, I suppose, and be transformed by that experience to truly feel it from the heart rather than intellectualize it in the mind, go to the funeral, check the box. Okay, we did that and now life moves on. And so much of our earlier conversations coming back. So what do you do in the absence of that? Well, you go buy something, you go drink something, you go smoke something or fuck something or tune out.

2:44:25Totally beneath your awareness. Yeah, it's coming out somewhere. So beneath your consciousness, you are expressing that in ways that it has to leak out. So the culture hasn't set up the entire communion to allow for those very universal realities to have a container. And I would suggest that any culture that doesn't recognize and harmonize with the nature of our psychological, spiritual, social, and physiological selves is doing some kind of harm. And probably knows it on some level. because it doesn't take somebody who has got a doctorate to realize that this is the truth. Anybody on a string corner knows that this is the truth.

2:45:32I have tear ducts for a reason. They are to purge. And they are activated in moments of complete joy and they are activated in moments of devastating pain. And for me to be participating in a culture that doesn't teach me how to be most fully human that's harmful. I wanna end with something he wrote that I feel like has something to say about everything that we've said today. And what you wrote was, you're not broken, you're being hollowed for something more enduring. You're not failing, you are being invited to love more fully. You are not alone, you are speaking the souls oldest language. So perhaps you can end this conversation with a reflection on that.

2:46:31God, you've finished with soul.

2:46:38And this word, this idea of soul has captivated me in many ways. Something that's universal, an experience that's universal and also particular, that whatever that is has a deep, private, and personal relationship with each of us that is observing our lives, that is communicating to us in emotion, in thought, in dreams, in images, and in fantasies. sometimes well beneath what we would imagine to be ourselves way to the side of what we could imagine and comprehend to be us and those depths are longing for i think relationship and we've created social spaces that are oblivious to this universal reality that we all experience that beckons us for deeper communion when i started doing this work my friend sean i was i started reading young and i didn't understand a word of it i felt so insecure I called him.

2:48:03I said, what have I done? Like, I don't understand what the fuck this guy's saying. This is horrible. And he said, hang with it. He said, psyche's like a lover. If you attend to her, she'll attend to you. I thought, oof, I can work with that. So self-love is not about necessarily just affirming yourself. it's about communing with the deepest most uniquely particular expression of consciousness that is simultaneously universal and that we all have that experience communing with that doing so in the recesses of our own private lives but also doing so in our communities in our social spaces because we all know it's there but unfortunately we deny it and we repress it and we reject it and we go quiet.

2:49:03So I think just taking that opportunity to notice, because it's not a voice in that it has words, but it's a nudging, it's a fluidity, it's a movement, it's a dance. And do you dance with it? It's a beautiful play. this is a beautiful game so thank you I'm really honored by being here with you and I'm grateful for the time and the space to be able to connect in this way. The gratitude is shared that was really beautiful what you just expressed and just the entire conversation. I'm delighted to have spent this time with you it was a real treat and I'll be thinking about everything that you shared for a long time.

2:49:56So thank you for that. And I'm gonna thank you on behalf of the audience who's gonna enjoy this. So, wow, amazing, man. Thank you. Thank you. Where would you like people, where would you like to direct people who wanna learn more about what you're doing? I have a website that's up. It's Dr. John W. Price, D-R-J-O-H-N-W-P-R-I-C-E. It was a joke that I - A couple John Price's out there if you're Googling. I have to put these signifiers of Dr. and W. So D.R., John W. Price. Because there's a John W. Price. If you don't put the doctor up, you're going to get the other guy. There's a lot of us in the world.

2:50:34And so that is the website that I've got. And I've got a number of opportunities for people to connect. I lead a number of monthly online groups. One's called The Open Gate, where we explore the little teachers. One's called The Lantern, where we explore, I would say, kind of the meat and potatoes of the book that I'm writing, which are elements like the different levels of consciousness, the little teachers, the three attributes of spirituality. It's kind of the nuts and bolts of what I believe to be spiritual practice. Of course, check us out at the Center for Healing Arts and Sciences at thecenterforhas.com.

2:51:09Which is in the physical... Brick and mortar space. Yeah, it's in Houston. It is in Houston. And I've got some stuff online, you know, Instagram at The Sacred Speaks. Of course, check out the podcast. I've had a really enriching experience doing that. So thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, very cool. Amazing. We did it, man. How do you feel? We did it. How do you feel? Good. Thank you. Somatically. What is your body? I'm sweating like crazy. No, come on. Yeah. This is great. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

2:51:49that's it for today thank you for listening i truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guests including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. 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. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful.

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2:53:09And of course, our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.

2:53:32Thank you.