It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the "F Word" here - Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same, and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it.
Bob: Alright. Welcome to the first-ever episode of the Alive and Free Podcast, where today, I've got something big for you. I want to reframe how you're thinking about anything that you've been struggling with today. We talk about what it means to be a real warrior. Okay, quick back story. I've been training in martial arts for the last 30 plus years. I've been involved in them since I was a kid. I love them. I've probably learned more about God by being punched in the face than I ever learned in a Sunday school class in church, not because they weren't teaching good things, but because for some reason, the way that I learn, maybe I needed to be hit in the face a few times, I don't know what it is. [0:01:13.0]
But martial arts became this arena that I lived in, and it became very, very pertinent to me as I was dealing with addiction, my own addiction, the depression, the suicidal tendencies and thoughts that I was dealing with. As I was growing up, I trained in all different kinds of martial arts, and I even ran a martial arts school, a Chinese Kung Fu school, down in Mesa, Arizona for about nine years. It was an amazing experience. I had tons of amazing students and loved it, and learned a lot. And I was into martial arts mostly because of the tradition, the kind of spiritual stuff I was getting from it, the way that it helped me learn, think about my life differently. It gave me a different angle and lens through which to learn about life than like the typical studies that I had been doing in other areas of life. And so it was a really valid and valuable experience for me. [0:02:00.6]
But, one day, while I was running my school, it was like in some rundown strip mall next door to a marijuana dispensary, of all places. While I was running my school, I was watching online some reruns of the first-ever UFC battles, and I saw Royce Gracie just destroy the competition in some of the most brutal ways that I'd seen, and I remember sitting inside and having this panic well up in my chest, like "I'm not sure I know how to fight on the ground like that. I'm not sure I know what to do if somebody came at me that way," and here I am, a 4th degree black belt at the time, freaking out about it, going like, "Can I honestly teach my students that what we're doing is effective if I can't handle something like that?" So naturally, I went to go look for an answer, and the answer I went looking for was basically on the order of "How can I beat that, How can I beat it down, How can I hit it hard enough that it never gets back up again, How can I beat it at its own game, How can I, you know, lock it into submission." [0:03:05.0]
And so I was learning all of these different techniques in Judo and Jujitsu and all these other types of things to figure out how to handle the ground game. Now why is this pertinent to you today? Because ever since I was a kid, everything I've ever learned about addiction meant that it's something you're stuck with, something you're going to be fighting for the rest of your life, and so, if you're going to fight, you might as well fight effectively, you might as well have the best tools for the job, you might as well use the optimum strategy for it. And so, everything that I was doing to fight my own 18-year addiction, and I was addicted to pornography and sex addiction; I dealt with video game stuff for a while. Before that, I was doing other types of behaviors to cope with the misery that I was dealing with on the inside. I learned that addiction was something you'll never get over, and that I would always have to fight it, and especially with pornography, that's stuff that's already in your head now. [0:04:00.5]
I mean, even if nobody shows it to you again, it's all going to be in there, and I had this miserable outlook on life because people told me that for the rest of my life, just because of some stupid mistake that I made when I was 14 years old, and I got curious about it, and then kind of got wrapped up in it, and because of that, like the rest of my life was going to be miserable and I would never be able to have the opportunities and the possibilities that I could’ve had if I just hadn’t made that dumb mistake. That maybe I came to this planet with prodigious potential, but none of that mattered anymore, because I'd already wrecked it, and there was nothing I could do about it. So I was hopeless. I felt so stuck and so hopeless and like not really able to do anything, if you get out of my predicament, as much as I kept trying. And so everything about what I was doing was trying to learn how to fight this off, until, I realized that fighting is a miserable way to win. And what I want you to get out of this is the possibility of approaching addiction and depression and anxiety and all this other stuff from a different place, approaching it from a place that doesn’t require you to fight for the rest of your life - that doesn't require you to do all the things that everybody else tells you to do. [0:05:15.8]
But that actually just allows you to leave it aside and move on with your life. So the first thing that I had to learn about this is that when you're fighting anything, for instance, the urge or the temptation to go look at pornography shows up or to go like just the hankering to go meet other women or to do whatever else that you have to do with all the clients we have worked with over the years. The hankering comes up and almost the first reaction in all of them is, "Oh no! I've got this thing, and I don’t want this in my life. I can't! I can't do this." And so the first reaction is to fight it, to resist it, to urge it to stuff it down, and the problem with that is maybe you win that time, maybe you beat it down, and you're good. Sometimes you lose. But as long as you are fighting it, you're still in the arena with it; the sun is shining outside the arena. [0:06:06.5]
Beautiful things are happening outside the arena, but you're still locked in combat, wasting energy and breath and whether you're sitting on its face or it's sitting on yours, you still get to smell its sweat, and the rest of your life is moving by. And I didn't want that anymore, and so I had to learn how to leave the arena, okay. And there's some powerful ways to do that, obviously, but one of the most important things to understand is fighting it will only keep it in place. You'll always, always be dealing with it. And the irony is that we live in society where we're fighting everything. There's a war on drugs. There's a war on obesity. There's a war on terror. There's a war on pornography - they call it "Fight The New Drug." There's a war on human sex trafficking. There's a war on cancer, for crying out loud. Cancer is your body at war with stuff, and we're declaring more war on top of it. War is a miserable way to run an economy, monetarily for a country. [0:07:03.5]
It's a miserable way to run a human system. When your body is at war, it cannot, it doesn't have the energy to enjoy life. It has the energy only for war and for battle, and when you're at war with addiction, it's the same thing. If you're busy fighting addiction, you're missing the entire point, and you're missing the rest of your life. What needs to be understood is that addiction itself, whatever that is for you or whatever you're struggling with - maybe it's not addiction, maybe it's bad habits or compulsive behaviors or someplace else that's getting stuck. It's a symptom of something else going on under the hood. Think of it this way - I feel miserable. I remember, oh, let me give it to you in an antidote form. This will make more sense. Some years ago I was out at a business mastermind. I was out in Dana Point, California. I was like right off the beach in the Marriot, and I got up at like 5:30 in the morning, and I was doing some workout stuff. I was out on the lawn. [0:08:00.9]
The fog was rolling in so it was kind of like cold and damp in the morning off of the ocean. There was a big field out front and there were like rabbits scampering to-and-fro, and I had just finished my morning workout and I was doing some stuff. Then I was running through some of the mental work that I do to kind of keep myself clear and present and free, and in the middle of that, I had this sudden dawning realization, and it sounded like this - "Oh, my goodness. I like porn. Like, I really like porn." And when I had that realization, it was like my whole world fell apart. I was like, "I'm not supposed to like porn. I'm the guy that like helps people stop looking at porn. What the heck's going on with this? I'm not supposed to like porn. It's bad. You're a bad person if you like porn." And thank heavens that I sat there with that for just a moment. Instead of trying to fight off that realization, I was just kind of exploring it and reacting to it. [0:08:56.6]
If you, or someone you know, is looking to drop the F Bomb of Freedom in your life, whether that's from addiction or depression and anxiety or just anything that's making you feel flat out stuck, but you have no clue how to shake it and just want help doing it, head on over to LiberateaMan.com and book a call, where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you've been missing.
Bob: And then the next question came - "Well, why? Why do you like porn?" And the reality was well I like porn because like it made me feel alive. It helped me escape the stresses and the pressures of life. I liked it because it got my heart beating and it made me feel like I was in control of something and I could do what I wanted. I liked it because like it was exciting and there was variation and control and I didn’t have to be something that everybody else wanted me to be. It never judged me or anything like that. It was just always there at my fingertips. It was, and I went on and on and on and on, and I realized all these things that it did for me. [0:10:03.6]
This was a really stark realization, because I realized that in the middle of that, there was nothing that I said that had anything to do with female anatomy. What I liked about it was the experience that it gave me of life that I didn't know how to create for myself. So here I am, trying to declare war on the very thing that’s giving me a better experience of life. It's like trying to take a pacifier from a baby. Baby's got a poopy diaper. There's something really stinky going on, and it's sitting it its own dung and it's creating a diaper (I know this is gross), it's creating a diaper rash and so the baby's just sitting in all that stuff and it's uncomfortable and it's crying and it has a pacifier and the pacifier's like the only thing that's helping it out. If you take the pacifier away from the baby without changing the diaper, it's just going to find another pacifier. It'll suck on its thumb. It'll reach for the pacifier you just took from it. It'll start sucking on the blanket. It'll grab a spoon from the … it'll do whatever it needs to. It'll find some other behavior to help it cope with the real pain on the inside. [0:11:07.9]
And that's all I was doing. All those years that I was fighting porn or if the addiction or whatever your struggle is, fighting off depression, fighting off food addiction or drugs or alcohol or smoking or whatever it is, and you're busy trying to suppress it, you got to ask yourself (1) Why does, what does it do for me? Why is it that I like it? And if you haven't admitted that you like it, then step one is admit that you like it. And as rough as that is in religious circles about pornography, if you can, step one - admit that you like it. Step two - you can get real about why. Then once you realize what it does for you, then you can ask the most critical question, the third question - what is going on inside me that is making it so that I need pornography or whatever the addiction is, in order to feel better about life? [0:12:01.5]
What is it that's making me so miserable on the inside that that is a step up the ladder for me? And what if I could just solve that? That's solving what we call a root issue and we'll probably get into that in some later episodes about what that looks like and stuff. But ultimately, I realized that I had to stop fighting. As long as I was fighting pornography because it meant something about me as long as I was fighting it because it was wrong or it was bad behavior, I wasn’t handling what was really there and healing. I was just fighting stuff and I was wasting energy and time and I would never, never, ever be free of it. You're a victim to anything that you're fighting. What you want to be doing is creating a life so powerful that there's no room in the other one. If you lived your life at such a level that porn was a step down, you'd never go there. And that's what I had to admit to myself, that that is what the case was. [0:13:00.6]
So, it's interesting in Chinese martial arts, and we're going to go back to this because this is powerful. Is it the character of the little like squiggly lines that they put on the page, for a warrior is, woo, now, I get it. I don’t speak Chinese and so I might have said that in the wrong tone and it's a tone of language, so if I said it and it made it sound like I was like cussing at your mom or something, I apologize. I'm referring to the term like martial or warrior, okay. Woo. And it's made up of two pictograms or two pictures that, put together, mean stop and spear. So a lot of people are like well, duh, that's what a warrior does. He stops other people's spears because back in the day, they used a lot of spears in warfare. Nowadays, it's bombs and stuff. So if the Chinese language were being invented now, it might look like an explosion happening, who knows. But then it was stop spear. What I want you to note is that it's etymologically, its origins are ambiguous in the sense that whose spear are we stopping? [0:14:00.5]
Most people think of a warrior as going to stop the enemy, but what if the warrior, the true, the real warrior is the one that can stop themselves? What if you could stop your own spear? And I get that when it comes to porn addiction, that can have like a certain imagery that's phallic in nature, but that's not the intent here. What if you could stop your own spear? What if you could stop your own attempts to go at war with life, and instead, just go live life in such a way that all the negativity that you're afraid of and are trying to fight off just disappears on its own? That was my experience with addiction. And time and time again, as I have studied martial arts over and over and over again, over the last 30 plus years, and I've gotten into places where we're looking at knives and guns and chains and sticks and fighting blindfolded in the woods at night, under water and dealing with the panic that mounts from drowning in frustration. Every time I'm fighting what is happening, I lose. [0:15:03.0]
I'm a victim to it, and now I'm fighting my own resistance to what's happening and I'm fighting the other person. But the moment I can just embrace the fact that this is happening, this has happened, and I can just look at what's real, I can do something with it. Every time that you decide to step up and fight something and declare war on something, all you're saying is reality has showed up and I don’t like it, which is going to create an emotional reaction in you and all kinds of other stuff that's actually going to make you in bondage to it. It's going to chain you up to what's really there. And so over there years, as I've learned this, and I've applied it to my own addiction, what I saw was, there was something much deeper. That if I just solve that, and stopped fighting all of these behaviors and stopped fighting off all the things that I didn’t want, and if I just looked at what was really at the bottom of it and put out the fire, instead of throwing water at smoke, then all that negative stuff kind of disappeared by itself, and my life became something so much more powerful. [0:16:05.8]
And as I lived life better and saw if it was making me so miserable in the first place, that it felt like porn was a step up on the ladder, then all of a sudden my desire for it went away. And I found no need to go back to it, at all. And so what I hope you're seeing from this is three questions to start asking yourself at the beginning of this, on anything that you're fighting in your life, so that you can step up and be a real warrior and leave the freaking arena, so that it doesn't, like the guy that you knock out doesn't like, you can wander around the arena with your little victory belt and stuff. But how long is it going to take for that guy to ask for a rematch? What if you left the arena? What if you retired your gloves and what if you just stepped out into the brilliant daylight of real life, and just lived a life that was powerful without ever having to fight it again? First question to ask yourself is - well, admit it. [0:17:02.3]
You really like what you're going to. As much as it may be destroying your life, as much as after the fact you may hate it. Admit it. You like it. It's doing something for you or you wouldn't be going back. Two - Why? Why do you like it? What is it doing for you? Three - What is going on inside your life that is making you so miserable that that is actually helping you, that that's a step up in those times when you go back to it? When you start asking those questions, then you can start focusing, not on fighting the thing that you hate, but on solving the real problem, which is causing you to live life at a lower level, and not really enjoy everything that life has to offer. So, ask yourself these questions today. Don’t restrict it to just addiction. Anything that you're getting stuck with in your life, even if it's business oriented and you're like wasting time on Facebook - well, why? Admit that you like it. Get what the payoff is for you and what you're getting out of it, and then ask yourself what's going on in the inside that’s making you so miserable that that's a step up. [0:18:08.4]
Even if it's destroying your long-term success. So wherever it is. Next time what we're going to be talking about is Shrugging The Shoulds (little teaser). Good stuff. To give you the possibility to step up into your life in a whole new way, instead of doing what is expected of you. And that's a wrap for today. We'll talk soon on this Alive and Free. And of course, obviously, if you want some help with getting out of these things on your own, we have helped hundreds of clients do it, so just give a buzz. So you can go to LiberateaMan.com and sign up for a chance to talk.
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
