“Vulnerability Is Scary As F*** But So Worth It” - You Can Heal Through Creativity | IN-Q

0:00Emotion is energy in motion, so it has to move. And if it doesn't move, it gets trapped inside of us. You have to purge and pray. Wow. To be willing to be vulnerable from a place of strength. It's scary as and it is always worth it. Please welcome to the stage from Santa Monica, California, NQ. NQ is a beast. You have to be willing not to be liked in order to be loved. Ooh. People think that peace is a destination. Peace is a process. There's stages of peace. There's layers that you have to keep uncovering within yourself. Don't try to make something great. Make something true. It will automatically be great.

0:50Wow. I think hurt people hurt people, and I was really hurt. I think we tend to love other people how we love ourselves. I was pretty violent to myself. oh man now you're gonna make me cry don't make me cry bro if you could only share one poem with the world that the world needs to hear what would that be well welcome back everyone to the school of greatness very excited about our guests we have my good friend adam in queue in the house good to see you brother thank you for having me man welcome to the the basement of greatness in my home studio very excited that you're here i've known you for i think 10 years it's crazy i remember alexandra was like how did you first meet in q and i was like i couldn't remember if it was a boat or at a mountain but i'm pretty sure it was at a mountain summit series at a mountain i can't remember if it was tahoe or something like this but you were performing and i remember saying this is one of the greatest live performers i've ever seen in my life and it's still true today 10 years later and ever since then i was just like dude we need to connect i need to watch you more you've spoken as someone of greatness i don't know if times.

1:59You probably had the most standing ovations of any person that's ever been at my event. And I just really appreciate your genuine heart and your authenticity. So you're obviously you're extremely talented, but there's so much more about you. And I'm excited that you're here. And I saw a prompt that you gave online recently. You give people writing prompts with your poetry and you've got this journal out called the Never Ending Now Poetry Journal, which I want to talk about in a minute, but you put this prompt out that said, write a poem to your past self, telling them something they needed to hear at the time from your perspective.

2:35Now, I'm curious if you could go to your future self and give yourself a line, a poem, a message to something you needed to hear now from the future, what would that be for you? First of all, thank you for all your kind words. The feeling is more than mutual. I think the first thing that comes to my mind and heart is I would maybe do a poem about not giving up, but giving in. And being willing to surrender to the surprise of life more than needing to show up and control everything all the time. That would be your message to your current self. Yeah. It's something I'm still processing in real time.

3:23like i'm in the transition phase of that and you know there can be bumps in the transition phase but uh i'm definitely on the path yeah so i think if i crystallized that through creating a piece of art um it would probably help me to uh speed it up and that future self could reflect that back on myself now or i could reflect it to my future self and it would probably have a similar result which is one of the reasons that i created the journal in the first place can i also ask you if you have anything that you would um want to tell my current self from your future self i like asking these questions other people so i don't have to answer them but um I would probably say, I guess it depends the age, but if I'm like, you know, 40 years away from now, I would probably say keep loving bigger, keep your heart open, but create boundaries for the little Lewis inside of you so he feels safe, but don't stop your generosity towards humanity and the world, even if people betray you or take advantage of you, or if that's your interpretation of their actions, keep your heart open, but make sure you take care of little Lewis first.

4:51So he doesn't feel betrayed. And I would say, be willing to continue to go for it. Cause I feel like I've gone for it a lot in my life. I've just gone for life. Like I'm up for the adventure. I'm up for taking the risk for taking the shot, even if I make a mistake or fail. so i would say if you want to truly continue to live at a beautiful level you've got to keep going for it like don't stop because you feel like you've got something like keep giving keep creating keep serving and keep going for it that's probably what i'd say i love that yeah i think it's an amazing message and i feel like you're leading by example for yourself and for other people on the podcast and in other ways.

5:39I'm curious, you've been doing poetry for a long time. How do you feel, but I also know you've suffered emotionally in different areas of life, relationships, family, friends, different challenges. Yeah. How do you feel journaling, writing, you know, expressing your words or your thoughts on paper has allowed you to heal? And is there any research backing the power of journaling or writing poetry to help us transform our emotions and feel better and heal i'm definitely not the person to discuss research with that is not my strength or department of interest even um but i have personal research just from my life experience i think creating and sharing my art has brought me more clarity more peace more presence more compassion more self-awareness um and it's made me feel connected to others in a way that nothing else has yeah um i would say emotion is energy in motion so it has to move and if it doesn't move it gets trapped inside of us and it can become dis-ease you know dis-ease or you take it out on somebody in traffic for no reason right so you have to find ways to move the energy and to share the stories that are trapped in your mind and in your heart and your body and there's many modalities to do that you do breath work you can you know do yoga you can go to boxing even and have an intention behind your practice you can uh i don't know meditate go to therapy there's plenty of avenues but one that is uh underused is creativity you can create and move the energy and you can alchemize those things that are trapped inside of you so they transform into something else and you can feel energetically lighter and more free what is the poem that you've written whether it be recently or in the beginning of your creative process that is giving you the most healing personally like when you wrote it you felt you were healing every time you read it or perform it you feel like you're healing what is that poem well i have two immediate answers that come to mind the first one is a poem about my father not being around and ultimately finding forgiveness but i think that that's too easy of an answer okay and the real answer is going to sound cliche but it's everyone and then the next one the one that hasn't been written because it's the most current and in real time to my life and whatever it is that i choose to create around is something that i need to express it's a breadcrumb trail that i am following i'm the first person in my audience So I'm not thinking what other people want to hear.

8:53I'm paying attention in my daily life to when I get moved, when I get inspired, when I get pissed off and I pluck it out of reality and I put it down on paper. And then if I go back to that beginning place, the rest of the poem will almost write itself if I give it enough time and space. So every single one is a healing process. And it's one of the reasons I like to facilitate for other people to do the same thing, because if they choose something moving and meaningful, it can be surprisingly healing. Yes. You have another quote or poem that you put online that says, how do we talk about the problems without feeding them?

9:30If we ignore them, we most likely keep repeating them. If we explore them, we run the risk of reinforcing them. So how then do we get down to the source of them? So if we talk about our problems or write about them or create about them, are we feeding the problem or are we solving the problem by processing them? How do we not recreate old traumas or memories or wounds by sharing stories over and over again that we're trying to heal from? That is a great question. What you have to do is you have to hold two truths in the same space at the same time. Give me an example personally. holding on and letting go.

10:14When I wrote the piece about my father, it was a piece about my anger and ultimately forgiveness and gratitude, but I wasn't able to actualize it until many, many years later. It took me a long time to catch up with the piece. So the piece was almost like a prayer you have to purge and pray wow simultaneously and if you do i promise you you will wind up feeling like a different person on the other side and then when you share it with somebody and you're unconditionally loved and seen to really like see and be seen to be willing to be open to be willing to be vulnerable from a place of strength it's scary as and it is always worth it wow so when did you write this poem about your dad i was in my mid-20s really yeah so like 20 years ago something like that something like that 45 yeah yeah so when you wrote it um how long did it take for you to fully feel at peace with the relationship you had with him or lack of relationship you had with him how how long did it take you to be like i'm at peace to this.

11:31I forgive. I'm at peace. Well, I think people think that peace is a destination or like a product. Peace is a process. There's stages of peace. There's layers that you have to keep uncovering within yourself. So right now I can say I am as fully at peace as I have ever been i can't say that i'm fully at peace but one thing that i know about my life is every single thing that has ever happened to me whether i understood it or not in real time or in retrospect has become a part of the quilt of who i am i don't like to compare circumstances i don't like to compare pain but i've had a lot of pain in my life and everything that caused me pain is a part of my identity now so if i reject that thing i'm rejecting a part of who i am wow yeah and so you have to accept it in order to integrate it in order to alchemize it in order to move on with it what's the most painful thing that you've had to overcome emotionally or internally that

12:48maybe took you a long time to overcome or maybe it just was a really painful thing to overcome and you really wish didn't happen in the moment and maybe you still don't wish but you know you wouldn't be the identity you are and the man you are without that pain i think there's a lot of them that come to mind um i'm not going to share some of them because i'm not ready to put them on display but i go into a lot of those stories in the album and ultimately in the journal you know when i created the never ending now album i wasn't sure whether or not i wanted anybody to hear it i know remember you know i was there yeah because you were one of the few people that i sent it to yeah and was willing to trust because of your integrity because of our friendship and because i love you yeah and i know you've been through real things yeah and so i was like okay but it's scary putting it out there a hundred percent yeah i'm taking my own medicine you know so i was like all right let me i finished this thing this work of art that was like a reflection of my path to self-love and love with a partner through poetry and this conversation that was very intimate that I had with my wife.

14:15And then I was like, I don't know that I want to show this to people or even weirder, monetize this thing and leave it open for people to criticize it, to judge it, to validate it, to compliment it. It didn't really matter what their response was. I didn't want to externalize my self-worth that way because it was so close to my heart. And then I was like, all right, I'm going to send it to like five people. And I sent it to five people, including you and Mike Posner, who's a great friend. And Mike was the first person that got back to me. And my criteria for sending it out was, okay, if one person hears the album and hits me back and says, hey, this was moving and meaningful to me.

15:09like this landed then i would put it out but if everybody was like yeah this is good right i really like it i think you should then i wasn't gonna do it and so mike hit me back right away and he was like literally he goes if you don't put this album out he said i'll pry it out of your cold dead hands and then i sent it to you guys and you listened to it and had you know a similar but different response yeah then i was like all right let me let me lead by example even though it's hard and scary why is it so hard for most people to put out something that is their art or their expression but also has sadness pain loss embarrassment tied to it in some way why is that so challenging for anyone let alone artists because they're scared to be rejected for truly showing us who they are but the thing is like if i would get rejected if i put this project out and people don't respond to it or worse they really don't like it then at least i know they don't like something that's really me i mean i know that the art is separate from me it's not really me, but it is as close as tracing paper could come when I made it.

16:34And so I'm like, all right, if they don't like it, at least I know I showed up rather than making something that's perfect, that everybody's going to love. And then they say, wow, I love this thing and I love you but i don't even feel it because i was never there yeah it wasn't fully authentic it wasn't fully you yeah interesting how do you do that like for example i was thinking about many things that you have shared over the years driving over here and the courage that it took to do that well what was and is your process i think a lot of it was when i started opening up about vulnerable things to individuals to friends to family and then kind of publicly you know my expression to the world in different ways i think i was so depressed you know i this this line from like jim carrey comes to me where it's like depression is like you needing deep rest from the character you've been playing something like that it's like you are depressed because you need deep rest from the character you've been playing it's like you've been wearing some mask you've putting on some identity that's not truly you.

17:48Maybe parts of you are out there, but not all of you. And so a lot of me was out there, but there were other parts of me that were afraid if you or anyone actually knew who I was, what I'd been through, what had happened to me, would anyone like me or love me? And that was the ultimate fear. If people truly knew, they would never like me. And then I would be alone. And then I would die alone and suffer for the rest of my life. It's kind of the fear that I had. And so I think I just felt like I'd rather be alone and know a like me than everyone know just parts of me and not all of me. And I think it got to that point when I hit 30 that I realized there were parts of me that people weren't aware of.

18:34And I wasn't willing to face them myself, let alone share them with other people. And that just wasn't the life I wanted to live anymore. them. Now it was scary to, on the other end, cause I didn't want to live alone and I didn't want to have people not like me or love me or accept me. But I think that's the risk probably every artist has to take to put their expression out there that you may not be liked or understood or loved. You may be criticized or hated or whatever might be, you know, taken advantage of for who you truly are. And I think that's the biggest fear, but I'd rather feel free and have no friends than be a prisoner and have everyone like me i very much relate to that i have a line that says you have to be willing not to be liked in order to be loved otherwise it's your representative they're thinking of it's like uh that disguise thing that you're talking about that character that you're playing and you're doing it for good reasons survival you know mental emotional physical spiritual if you felt unsafe in your life that's where the character came from exactly but the thing is it's exhausting to walk around with all that armor draining what was that what's that poem called that you were just i think it's called bird song you know i never really like name my my pieces until i actually put them out can you share that one can you perform that one do you have that one yeah i actually do

20:09the birds aren't singing to win a grammy they're not trying to go platinum through their marketing or planning they're just jamming i listen without even understanding the truth without agenda is authentically astounding It makes me think of cheetahs. They don't run for our approval. They don't judge their spots or contemplate laser hair removal. It makes me think of wolves. They don't howl for validation. They don't have to get the perfect pic to post on their vacation. it makes me think of eagles they're not soaring to impress me although once i saw a dolphin back flip over a jet ski my point is neither one of them would sell me shit on etsy and i doubt a porcupine would ever try to come off sexy humans are the only animals pretending to be something that they're not.

21:15Wow. Why are we ashamed of what we've got? We should strut, chest out, head up. Let's be proud of ourselves for once. Isn't it exhausting sticking out your butt and sucking in your gut? And for what? It's a waste of energy. I'm giving up. In this moment, I'm enough. In this moment, you're enough. In this moment, we're enough. I'm dismantling my image. We are perfect in our flaws birds don't care whether we listen they don't wait for our applause i have built a lovely prison but i live behind the wall so if love is my religion i'll escape when freedom calls you have to be willing not to be liked in order to be loved otherwise it's your representative they're thinking of but to truly be yourself you have to let go of what was the past is like a prison it's an echo repeating just because cause cause we are many people in our lives so i'm not one to judge but if they love one part of you it's limited to what that does i want your whole soul i have no goal show me the unseen stuff don't invite me over only after you have cleaned up perfect makes me want to kick my feet up no one's living in a catalog ikea dreamed up have you ever seen a lion chase a hundred zebras have you ever seen a turtle hide inside a shell a caterpillar doesn't know that she'll become a butterfly so if you go to heaven are you still aware of hell

23:03wow when did you write that one I don't remember is it like a few years ago or is this like a decade ago no it's like a few years ago it's more recent yeah I was on the phone with a friend of mine and the birds were just like really loud and during the conversation I said something about the birds aren't singing to win a Grammy. And then I thought, you know what? I like that. That's a good line. Pause the conversation. I wrote it down and then started to build on it later. Of all the poems that you've written and performed, how many of them talk about love? I think all of them in some form or fashion, but I think some of them are self-love.

23:54Some of them are romantic love some of them are love of god some of them are our love of humanity nature all of it what would you say how long have you been doing poetry would you say like officially you know that's part of your thing not just like i did it when i was like seven a little bit here and there but like what was the year where you're like oh i'm doing this consistently do you remember i mean i think i'm past 30 years 30 years yeah it's like one of the longest, at least internal relationships of my life. You know, my, my relationship with rhythm and rhyme. Yeah. What do you feel like has been the biggest lesson around self-love in the last 30 years of writing and performing poetry that you've discovered and had to learn?

24:46Well, it's something that I try to teach other people. Like when I facilitate for the poetry workshops in person and why we created this journal uh in partnership with passion planner to scale those workshops without me having to be there i automatically take away anybody's blocks by saying don't try to make something great make something true and if you make something true it will automatically be great And I'm telling people stuff that I need to relearn over and over and over again. Because if I sit down and I say, I'm going to make something great. I'm just getting in my own way. I'm turning my back on the muse.

25:38I have to be willing to just take the ride. Some of the best poems for me are poems where I'm surprised where they go. Really? Yeah, because I don't get overly strategic before I start writing. I just start in some sort of a spark and then see what what fire it turns into. So it might be, OK, I heard the birds sing and you thought of this idea. You know, maybe you're on the phone with a music person. You're like, oh, they're not singing to win a Grammy. And you're like, OK, where could I take this in other areas of life? Is that kind of how it starts? Or. Yeah. The birds are this, the wolves, this, the bears, this, you know, it's like let's keep the analogies going.

26:17and then yeah it's like basically you're you're building um railroad tracks and you're the railroad tracks and you're the train and you're the conductor and you're the beginning middle and end the destination wherever you wind up and you're also none of those things because you're the the observer wow um so it's a spiritual practice creativity you have this other uh do you call them poems when you put something online like an instagram post is that like a short poem or is that like a phrase within a poem usually well uh yes it's a usually a phrase within a much larger poem which is to be quite honest very annoying to me you know i want of course please follow me on instagram but it's like i always feel like it's a truncated version of what the art is and that's why i'm excited to put out actual like finished pieces that people can experience on their own time so it's a great window into my work but um i'm not sure snippets it's not the full thing you have this uh you know poem within a poem i guess you call it about love that you shared recently it said love is not a guarantee it will come and it will leave it relies on your belief so it will bring you to your knees love is weak love is lost love is grief love is loss love is risk love is real but love is worth the pain we feel where did that come from let me say the next line yes and i won't let the fear of losing you limit how i'm loving you oh my gosh

28:08can you share that whole poem yeah yeah

28:15let me actually give you the behind the context give me the context so i was doing this collaboration piece um and it was like a marketing team and a brand that were involved in this project i don't want to go into the specifics because it really doesn't matter yeah yeah but they had liked this particular poem that had already been written and it ends save the day with love so we're on this like planning call about the piece of art collaborative project that we're doing and one of the guys goes hey is there any way we can change the final word because he goes love is a bit soft and he goes i want to end on something that has more like strength and pizzazz and i was like no because it's not your poem first of all yeah no respectfully second of all i don't look at love as soft i said i look at love as hard and he goes okay and then the conversation ended and i hung up and i wrote this piece

29:29love is not soft love is hard love is not smooth love is scarred love is not perfect love is flawed love is not quiet love is loud love is not pride love is proud but love is not certain love is doubt and love is not leaving love's turning around love's learning to fight for the middle ground. Love is not gentle. Love is rough. Love is not fragile. Love is tough. Love is not thinking that love is enough. So I choose to love you harder from the moment I wake up. love is a revolutionary act love is an attack love is not abstract love is a fact love is saying yes when i want to say no love is saying stay when i want to say go love is staying high even when i get low love is going with the flow holding on and letting go because love is not easy love is complex love is not right or wrong love is context love is not black or white love is progress because love is not a product love is a process yes so in the simple moments when the chaos fades away In the silence of the evening or the empty of my day, I remember what it feels like to give my heart away and think how lucky I have been to get to love someone this way.

31:26And how lucky we still are to get to love someone this way. It's a miracle to be alive. That's why I have to say love is not a guarantee. it will come and it will leave it relies on my belief so it will bring me to my knees love is weak love is lost love is grief love is lost love is risk love is real but love is worth the pain i feel and i won't let the fear of losing you limit how i'm loving you i'm gonna love you harder it's a privilege to be hugging you i'm gonna love you harder more than ever before. I'm at peace with knowing love is war. That's what we're fighting for. So love harder. First yourself, then your family.

32:22Your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors in your community. Then try to love a stranger. Try to tap into your empathy. Imagine that you've known them and protected them since infancy. Now try to love the people that you don't love at all. Even people you don't like, they probably need it most of all. And if you can't love them big, see if you can love them small.

32:58See if you can hold compassion for the assholes that they are. And they are. but love is not soft love is hard love is scarred love is flawed love is loud love is proud love is doubt and since love is most important when we do not know how I will choose to love you harder in the never ending now wow oh my god Now, I love this poem, but how do you love someone who's hurt you and continues to hurt you over and over again? How do you choose to love, accept, and forgive someone who's done horrible things to you? You're a great conversationalist and a great interviewer because that's a really, really strong question.

33:59And I have to search myself for the answer. I think I can't answer that for anybody else. How have you learned to? I mean, through this, the album that you put out, I mean, there's a lot of vulnerable, you know, things in there that you talk about and you share about. And I know personal stuff about you. I don't want to say it for you if you want to or not. It's fine. But how have you dealt with loving people who are the closest to you who have hurt you? and how do you do it even if they don't want to change their behaviors and even if they keep doing things that continue to hurt you knowing or unknowingly how do you choose to love them personally one day at a time one moment at a time knowing that the love is bigger than whatever the conflict is or the misunderstanding is and continuing to show up over and over again zooming out when you get too close to the television and all you see is the pixels you got to zoom out and get the full picture and you also have to acknowledge and recognize and remind yourself that you don't know everything.

35:18There's plenty of things that I thought were true at times in my life that I look back on and I'm like, man, what truth was I living? Like, that's not true to me anymore. And that's progress. That's growth. That's evolution. So I don't like regret anything that I've done, but there are things that I would do differently. and I'm sure there are things now that I don't understand or ways that I'll change in the future so like just remembering that I don't know everything and maybe there's some new information here for me to discover rather than to come into it with like my idea of what it is and then miss what it actually is I think both of me and you are on a have a similar journey that we're on which is

36:12get it personal here but we're both on a journey of wanting to become parents one day yeah but we're both not parents yet what do you think type of love will happen when we become fathers oh man now you're gonna make me cry don't make me cry bro I'm about to get emotional thinking about it but what do you think you've written about love you've experienced it but i don't think we've fully experienced it yeah i think we've scratched the surface of what we think love truly is what do you think will happen when we become fathers in that first you know few moments what type of love will there be that you think we'll experience i think it's going to be an explosion of love like the big bang the other night i was uh fast asleep i was like dreaming about something or other tony soprano we've been watching sopranos again it's brilliant show it's funny because this is complete separate thing like when i first watched the sopranos i was like 19 now i'm watching the sopranos i'm tony sopranos age it's crazy man you know it's a completely different show so So anyway, my wife had never seen it.

37:28So I'm like, you know, mid dream. And there's this like explosion outside of our window. It was something having to do with a power line and nothing happened. That was crazy, but it was a loud bang and sparks right outside the window. And we didn't know what it was. Gunshot. We, you know, had no idea you're coming out of your dream. and before i could even think i had dove on top of her literally and i was just covering her you know i know that i'm still the star of my own show but i would give up my role for my wife wow you know in a second wow and i imagine that it would be exponential you know once you have a kid so it's almost like and i don't want to like get overly like spiritual but i feel like you would finally know like god's love you know because there is a level of like unconditional that is beyond like a mental framing you know yeah no matter how much that kid messes up like you're just gonna love them and you'd probably give it all up for them in a second of course yeah any part of it i mean you know and and how do you still create boundaries within that yeah exactly love unconditionally but also okay you can't cross this boundary yeah yeah what about you like what do you think when when you let me answer that in a second yeah but have you written a poem for your child

39:16you know i wrote a poem about parenthood and whenever i do it everybody's like automatically assumes throughout the whole entire poem that i'm like a parent of like five kids you know because how does he know so much and i was just using my intuition and imagination but have you written a poem about your child no that is coming i'm gonna do that now but it but i'm not gonna write it from the standpoint of showing it to anybody or making it great of course i'm gonna do what i said earlier and i'm feeling the resonance of you saying that because it is something that we want to create so i should probably be creating around that creation I don't expect you to ever share, maybe you share the poem publicly in the future if you feel like it or not.

40:09But if you were to write a poem about your child that is coming, what would, do you think, would an unedited first line be? That maybe you use, maybe you wouldn't use. What would be like off the top of your mind that you think would be a line? And this may be not the thing you use in the future, but what's on your heart right now? thank you

40:37I love you you're welcome welcome

40:48that's not like a Moana song you're welcome you watch that movie yeah it's a great movie Martha loves that movie she is Moana yeah she is like that's her like disney character so that's who she identifies as nice everybody has like a yeah and i'm maui you are like we've taken the test there's like a disney quiz that you can be like what character are you of every disney movie and she is moana and i'm maui which you guys are destined it's crazy it's really crazy of all the movies uh what would you be what would your character be that you resonate with the most maybe you haven't seen all the disney movies but wow i don't know there's not one that give me some options i mean i don't beauty and the beast there's aladdin there's uh i don't know i don't know what other movies there are but i mean it's funny i've written like 50 songs for disney television you've done 50 songs for them yeah yeah yeah not for their uh tv movie movies but for the tv shows and i i literally can't lion king aladdin i mean yeah i did this he was that yeah i'll be that i'll be that little crab you could be the monkey in lion king sounds good who's got the wisdom sounds good you got the wisdom and you're like yeah yeah it's kind of rhyming in poetry yeah the crab is rhyming i don't know i actually it's something to explore i mean it's interesting that you guys i said to you upstairs i mean you're you're truly best friends which is what you need for a lifelong walk yeah um or at least it's what i need so i can recognize it when i see it in other people yeah man i felt like i needed peace and i feel like i don't feel like best friends are angry at each other a lot like you know matt is my best friend i've known for 20 years like we don't really argue with each other get angry maybe we have like disagreements but we're not angry at each other like screw you that's maybe happened like a couple times for like an hour were like, oh, my bad.

42:52I didn't mean to hurt you. It wasn't intentional. But I think if you're getting into an intimate relationship with someone and you're every week fighting, that doesn't seem like a best friend. That seems like a friend that you don't want to understand or choose to accept and vice versa if they're fighting with you. And maybe it doesn't mean you like the things they're doing, but for whatever reason, why do you think in intimate relationships, we struggle creating harmony and peace with the person we're choosing not me and you but in the past i have and i have too and we see this with a lot of people why do you think we choose intimate partners that we want to be best friends with but then we end up fighting with all the time and not seeing eye to eye why do you think that is in love and relationships it's a combination of things in my opinion one is I think we're learning about ourselves through these relationships.

43:50And a part of what we're learning is what is negotiable and what is non-negotiable. And the things that are non-negotiable are things that have to be in harmony. You're never going to have perfect harmony with any partner, any friendship, any business relationship. But you have to have harmony over the things that are non-negotiable otherwise you will wind up fighting over those things in various disguises forever and i think what happens is when we're lonely or when we really want to have a life partner we try to fit a square peg into a round hole we don't fully acknowledge the things that are non-negotiable for us and we don't fully acknowledge who we're actually with to truly see the person in front of you not who you want them to be to truly see um i always say that like relationships are like an archaeological dig and you don't want to use a jacket camera you know you want to use a brush just slowly brush away the relationship and keep showing up and getting to know each other over and over again you can't have a crash course in intimacy you can't know all of who someone is in six months you ever see people who are like newly in love and they're not even in love with each other they just have this like projection thought bubble that's in between the two of them perfect yeah they're perfect yeah and it's just the chemicals that they're in love with yeah the feeling of love right and then what happens is is the person doesn't live up to your unspoken expectations yes and the fantasies resent them and you fight them be what i want you to be so that i don't have to be lonely anymore wow You know, it's like if you actually knew who you were and you were willing to let go.