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: Welcome back to the Alive and Free Podcast. This is Episode #15 and we are talking today about the four levels of freedom and Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves and freedom. So let's go back to… way back in the day, the movie Speed. If you guys remember it - it had Sandra Bullock in it. The whole premise of the movie - maybe some of you don’t remember this, I didn't actually watch the movie, so I'm just giving you a synopsis - but let's go with this. The whole movie, Speed, is basically what - there's a bomb on a bus. If you were going to pitch this to a Hollywood producer, this is what's going to happen - there's a group of people on the bus. [0:01:05.8]
There's a bomb on the bus that if the bus goes below 55 miles an hour, the bomb will explode. The whole movie is them trying to figure out how to keep the people safe and the bus while also trying to figure out how to defuse the bomb. I don’t know how it ends, so there's no spoiler - no spoiler alert on this one, other than that I'm assuming everyone is safe or that everybody gets off before the bus explodes or what happens. But I want you to look at freedom, freedom from anything in your life - freedom from religious turmoil because a lot of people that have a lot of religious turmoil and baggage from growing up - some people I met who grew up in cults and were moving around across the borders between Mexico and Arizona and New Mexico and Texas and what not, evading authorities and these really nasty human trafficking kind of cults and cults that had people do all kinds of … like kids growing up learning to service the older men in the group and all of that kind of stuff going on. Right? So they've obviously got some turmoil and there's stuff that they're trying to be free of so that they can live their life, so that their life doesn’t have to be defined by what happened when they were kids. [0:02:08.4]
But guess what - you and I, like I had a pretty good childhood, like pretty darn amazing. My parents are frigging amazing and the biggest thing that happened in my childhood, well we moved a bunch, you know, I had a few injuries here and there, you know, I didn't have a lot of friends but that's because we moved a bunch because my dad was in the military. Like you might not have had a bad childhood or you might have had amazing things - like amazingly incredibly traumatic things happen to you, all kinds of stuff going on. But you don’t want your current life defined by what's happened to you in your life, good or bad. Can you imagine the guy who is still wearing his high school letterman jacket because that was the highlight of his life? That's not a good definition of yourself either, if your life is defined by the good thing you did 20 years ago. So freedom is to be able to be free of all of this - not just free of addiction, but free of traumatic stuff, free of habits and behaviors you don’t want anymore, free of depression, free of relationship problems, free of all kinds of stuff, free of health problems. [0:03:04.5]
So, how do we get to freedom? Well, let's look at the whole idea of Keanu Reeves. Okay? We're getting on a bus. We're all on a bus. We got on the bus. The bus is necessarily a kind of enclosed space. So you're stuck. There's a few seats on the bus. You can move around, but you're stuck. But you're not driving the bus and the bus is going along and there is a bomb on the bus, which means if the bus - it has to go a certain speed and if it doesn’t go that speed, it's going to explode. Great. So now we have set up a scenario. Guess what? Your world view, the way you look at the world, is a bus and you just got busted. The way you look at the world is literally a bus, a bus you got on to take a ride on and when you got on the bus, you didn't know the bomb that was in it. You didn't know what other people would get on the bus, but that's the world view that you're carrying. How you think of yourself, how you think of your life, how you think of what's going to happen - the way you see it has to be out the windows of that bus. [0:04:04.1]
If those windows are tinted, you're going to see the world tinted. If those windows are warped, you're going to see the world warped. If those windows are non existent, you won't see the world. Right? If there's people on the bus in front of the window, you will have a smaller viewpoint. You'll feel like the bus is your world and you just navigate that. You'll get comfortable. You'll have your favorite seat on the bus. All this stuff happens. That is the way that you look at life. Sometimes I have people tell me, you know, what is life, and I had one guy tell me, life is like, you know, you're trying, you go along, but you know, every two steps or so, then you got to get humbled again so that you remember your place and then you move on. I was like, that's a miserable definition of life. Why would you want to live life that way? Life is hard. Why would you want to live life that way? We talked about this in a previous episode on life versus life. Go back and listen to it, if you haven’t listened to that one. So here we are, we're on a bus. You have your world view, who you believe you are, your socioeconomic status, your money limitations, your addictions and habits and behaviors - it's just the way I am. [0:05:04.9]
It's my personality. I am introverted. I am this. I am that. This is all the identities we pick up. You know, from the time we're a kid, starting with our body, all the way up through like our favorite sports team and our religion, and oh my gosh, if someone insults my religion, they've insulted me. Like we believe all this stuff. Right? So you get on the bus and the bus starts rolling and we don’t realize what things could explode along the way if it stops rolling. Right? So we just get in these world views and we run with it, and they work for us for the time being. Like the bus is getting you places, but then all of a sudden, there's certain places that it won't stop anymore or there's a certain speed that it can't go below and if you take the whole 55 mile an hour thing down the freeway, you've got to merge under the freeway. You can merge off; that's fine, but any 90-degree turn is kind of out of the question. You're going to have to like cut corners and do other things. There's just things that are not possible when you're on a bus that's got those limitations. So what's the first step to finding freedom? [0:06:01.3]
First step to finding freedom is at least get to the point where you can defuse the bomb so that you can slow the bus down. What that will do is it will give you the opportunity to take certain turns and certain corners so that you can stop at a stop sign eventually, but we're just slowing it down now. Maybe the brake pedal doesn’t work, but at least we don’t have to be pushing on the gas the whole time. So we can coast. There's more opportunities available to us, and then eventually what happens is - okay, now let's be able to use the brake pedal. Now we can come to a complete stop. Sweet. We can come to a complete stop. Awesome. Then we can go. There's way more options available for where we can head in our life and then the next level of freedom from this whole thing is okay, well what if we open the bus doors and actually got off the bus for a second? We can get off the bus, look around, enjoy some things, get back on and go. The final level would obviously be just get off the bus and go to the playground and go get in a car and whatever and anytime you want to use the bus, you can use the bus, but anytime you want to use something else, you can use something else. That's like total freedom - to do what it is that you want to do in your life, to the level you want to do it. Cool. [0:07:07.4]
So here we have all of these stages of freedom. You wouldn’t need this if you hadn’t gotten on the bus in the first place, but the bus was getting you places and so it felt like a really powerful thing for you until you realized that you were stuck on the bus. So to get off it, the first thing you've got to be able to do is defuse the bomb that's keeping it and it's breaking that acceleration. Then you got to slow it down. Then you got to stop it. Then you got to get out of the bus and open the door, you know, and get off. Then you also, you know, go explore. Use other vehicles and test some other things. So what does that mean in terms of freedom from your own world view? Okay. So we're going to talk about four levels of freedom. Okay?
Four levels of freedom are going to be, in this order. The first level of freedom you will get is a level of behavior freedom. Meaning, if you're stuck in addiction and you're looking at porn, you stop looking at porn. You're drinking alcohol? You stop drinking alcohol. This is what people call sobriety. It is a powerful level of freedom. [0:08:02.8]
Nobody should knock a level of freedom like this. Okay? Not even me. Even though sometimes I think I have, but in context, nobody should knock this. It's powerful to be able to say, look, I stopped doing this thing. I cannot tell you how many people I've talked to that's like, no, I just finally got to the point where I was fed up and I walked away. That didn't work for me. I had to do some other processes to enable me to do it, but I really, really honor these people that have that level of freedom where they just didn't do it. There is a freedom that comes from being able to control your behavior. But what it is that actually causes you to behave a certain way? Think about it. You got a fly buzzing around your face. What is it that's making you swat at it? Well, you don’t like the fly there. If you liked it, you wouldn't be swatting at it. You'd be like, oh, this feels so good - I love that sound - can I have another fly land on me? Let's not talk about where the flies have been, okay. What is it that's making it? It's your likes and dislikes. In other words, your thoughts and emotions. Your emotions are first. They're going to drive all kinds of behavior. [0:09:07.5]
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: So if someone calls you a name and you don’t like the name, you'll have a reaction. If someone… let me… let's talk about PS4 and Xbox. My second son just bought a PS4 with his some money that he earned from doing some work for me. So he bought a Playstation 4 and bought a Spiderman game with it. Was super excited about it. Like he's taking good care of it. He's playing it. We gave him some limits on how much he could play it each day, so he's taking his time. [0:10:03.8 ]
He's really taking care of it, for the first time in his life, he's really caring for his belongings, which we were excited. The other day, he comes to me, he's like, "Dad, dad - Xbox is better than PS4." And I know all you Xbox fans are going, like "Yesss, finally - someone has seen the light." - but he's coming to me in this emotional state. I was like, "Well, what do you mean, son?" He was like, "Oh, it's just like, you know, the controls are easier and you know, there's more that you can do on it and PS4 is like more complicated." I was like, "What do you mean it's more complicated?" So he starts telling me about menus and he starts telling me about options that he sees on Xbox that he doesn’t have on PS4. The dude literally has one game on his PS4, so of course, there's like zero options because he's only got one game. Anyway, it turns out what had really gone on was that he had a friend over, and I won't name the friend, but the friend came over and was having a hard time with the controls on the PS4. [0:11:00.5]
He couldn’t play it right. He was having a hard time remembering what does what, and so he started complaining, like ,"Man, oh, the Xbox is really, it's like way better, you know, you can play all these other games too, and all this stuff going on." And so, my son, super impressionable, goes, you know, starts to feel bad about himself, starts to feel like, oh man, maybe he's right and I want to have this friend and so because like this friend doesn’t like my PS4, he's not going to want to play and now my PS4 is kind of dumpy because my friends don’t like it and if my friends don’t like it, maybe it's bad. So he's coming to me, talking to me about it. But when we get down to the bottom of it, it's just that no, his friend likes the Xbox because he owns an Xbox and knows how to play an Xbox and because his friend isn't very good at playing the PS4, he's decided that Xbox is better. It's like blaming your basketball skills on your Nike shoes. I mean, let's be honest. But why did the friend do that? Well he didn't like it. He didn't like the PS4 because he wasn’t succeeding. He was having an emotional thought about it. Like emotion, like ohhh noooo and a thought like well if I'm not good at something and the controls are here…and we don’t need to argue about it, Xbox people, you can still win - it's okay. [0:12:11.0]
I don’t own either gaming system. My son owns it. So, he didn't like it. He didn't like feeling like he wasn’t succeeding at the game and because of that, he had a behavior show up, which was complain about the PS4. My son didn't like feeling like his friends didn't like his game. He just wants to have a good time with his friends and also a good time playing his games and he really loves it. Just like he loves playing with his scooter outside and like working on tricks and all kinds of other stuff, too. You know? And so, he loves that and when his friends are not having a good time and what not, he feels like it's his fault and it's his game's fault and because he feels that way, he starts to come and tell me that the Xbox is better and he wants to get an Xbox. Where did the behavior come from? A thought and an emotion. They come together. So second level of freedom will be emotion, meaning if I'm mad and it's controlling me, I will do things when I'm mad. I'll…even if all I'm doing is breathing heavy, it will control my behavior. [0:13:04.0]
Some people punch. Some people flip the bird. Some people cuss. Some people stomp. We have seen all of that in my house. Oh, I don't know about the bird. Maybe we haven’t done that in our house. But one of my sons did point with his middle finger at one point in time. The emotion is controlling the behavior. It doesn’t matter if you even know the thoughts behind the emotion, the emotion is controlling the behavior. The other day, my oldest son was going to school. It's 30 some odd degrees in the morning here and so he's walking to school and my wife, like a good mom, says, "Bring a jacket." He doesn’t want to bring a jacket. He thinks it's too much weight on his backpack. It's uncool. It's whatever. Refuses to bring the jacket. Mom, my wife, Jasmine, who you met, she tells him to get a jacket anyway because she wants him to. It's cold in the mornings. He doesn’t have to wear it on the way home from school. So I walk out of the bedroom in time to see him stomping down the hallway, teeth clenched, jaw clenched, "It's not that cold outside…" doing all that stuff. [0:14:07.2]
Stomps down the stairs, grabs his sweatshirt, comes back up. He ended up leaving his sweatshirt in the car and not actually bringing it and finally my wife is like, "Fine. I'm never going to… I'm just not going to bring it up again. He can do his thing." Why did he behave that way? It's unfair. I'm not cool when I wear a jacket. A thought. That leads to an emotion. Life is unfair. I don’t get to say what I want to do. Nobody thinks that I have good opinions. Whatever he was thinking - leads to an emotion where he's frustrated and angry and he starts, his jaw clenches - behavior - his breathing changes - behavior. He stomps down the hall - behavior. He stomps down the stairs - behavior. Grabs his coat - behavior. Comes back up, gets in the car, pretends that he's going to take it and then doesn’t and leaves it in the car on purpose. All because of thoughts and emotions. You want to be free of some behavior that you've got, some bad habit? You got to figure out what the emotions are that are leading to it. [0:15:02.8]
And you need to learn skills - we call this emotional ninjitsu in my home and at the Freedom Specialists, you know, where we're working, Liberate a Man. We call it emotional ninjitsu. You got to develop the skills to be able to have a choice, and I'll tell you this much - this nation needs to grow up with a generation of people that understand that their emotions are a choice. This is one subject in school that I'm very, very passionate about. I'll share with you in the next episode a little bit more about this vision of mine that I've got because I could definitely use your help spreading the word and getting this to happen, but we need to have kids who understand that they have a choice in how they feel and to have the tools to be able to do it because if they don’t have the tools to be able to do it, it's not - what's the point? Okay, so I have a choice, but I don't know how to make that choice. Okay? You've got to be free of your emotional state. If you're in depression, you need to know what to do and how to do it so that you're not in depression anymore. We had a guy come to our event six weeks ago, seven weeks ago. He had been on Adderall and in depression most of his life. This is a kid who, 9 years old, ran away from home for 9 months. [0:16:04.0]
The parents didn't care, didn't go looking for him. He came back later just to get some stuff, to see what was going on. He ran away multiple times when he was a kid. Really abysmal relationship with his family. All kinds of other stuff. He had been doing some coaching with us. He came to one of our physical events where do a lot of the physical side of the work and after that, I was just talking to him like a week ago, and he's like, "No. I was on Adderall. I was doing all this other stuff and I stopped doing it. Like the way you taught me to breathe, the way you taught me to move, the way you taught me to handle my emotions, I'm way happier than I have ever been and that I can remember being since I was a little kid, and it's better than any of the medication ever went." And I was like, "Well when did you stop taking the medication?" He said, "Well, right after that event." Like he literally stopped cold turkey because he has a choice now in his emotions. That's freedom. You don’t have to be depressed. You don’t have to be angry. You don’t have to be sad. You don’t have to be upset. You don’t have to be bored, kids. It's your choice. [0:16:57.1]
Next, thoughts. Well, what are the thoughts that generate the emotion? Your body is reacting to your mind, as we have said in some of the previous episodes. So - what are the thoughts? Freedom from the thought, freedom from the thought is going to enable you not to have the emotion that comes up. So what do I mean, "Freedom from a thought?" Freedom from a thought does not mean that you don’t have thoughts, but that you use them for your benefit, and you're not entangled in them. Okay? So, if I'm thinking something, "Oh, I can't get that song unstuck in my head." That's not freedom from a thought. Literally, your mind is creating a feedback, like a nonstop loop, and you're stuck inside that loop. Someone sends something to you and you can't get over it, or with a lot of the guys that we work with, they see pornographic imagery and they can't get the image out of their head or they have a bad dream - kids have a bad dream and the bad dream is scaring them - their thoughts are literally controlling their emotions and their behavior. Right? Oh, your wife does something or your husband does something that irks you and you're having a hard time … I saw a meme one time that was so good - it was one of those some e-card things, and it was a question, and it said, "Did you actually have a bad day, or did you have a bad 5 minutes that you milked for a whole day?" That's not freedom from thought. [0:18:09.1]
Okay. Where do thoughts come from then? The last piece of the puzzle is identity or world view or these ideas, the bus that you got on. Right? And as you got on the bus, you adopted a world view that now you have to cope with, "I'm on the bus. I've got to deal with people on the bus and all this other stuff." Getting on the bus is the problem. Believing you are something that you're not, believing that you're worthless, believing you're not good enough, believing that life is hard and it's miserable, believing that things work out for other people but they don’t work out for you, believing that making money is hard, believing that you always have to work hard in order to succeed, believing that you can only play after the chores are done, believing that it's juvenile to be loud and obnoxious, believing … all these things that you have, all of these buses that you've gotten on in your life and you haven’t seen to get off of them yet, they're driving around at breakneck speeds and you're just trying to cope with the fact that these buses are driving you places that you don’t necessarily won't to go. [0:19:08.1]
You want to get off the bus, but you don’t know how to defuse the bomb, let alone use the brake pedals or open the door and get off. And then it's so terrifying to get off. It's like, "Well, well …now I got to walk to a new place or I got to come up with another way of getting places. What if don’t like the playground?" People don’t get off the bus because they're terrified of life, even thought life is amazing. Your fourth level of freedom is that. The bus that you're on that makes you believe that the way your life currently is is inescapable. And if you want real freedom from addiction or from anything else - you not only have to learn to defuse the bomb, meaning the behavior; you not only have to learn how to hit the brake pedal so you can slow down and eventually stop, meaning the emotions; you not only have to learn how to open the door, meaning you can actually let go of the thoughts; but you also have to learn how to get off the bus and never get back on it again if you don’t want to. [0:20:00.7]
There are some world views and some thoughts you can have about life that are useful to have at times. You can get on the bus whenever you want, but nobody is compelling you to be on the bus anymore. You want total freedom from addiction, you've got to defuse the bomb, hit the brakes, open the door and get off the bus. And that is not like simple … I mean, it is simple work, but it's not like necessarily easy because you're the one on the bus. You can't see it. You didn't plant the bomb there. You don’t know how to do that stuff and figuring it out on your own while you're on the bus is tough. It's better if you can call the police and have them walk you through it or get a coach or get a mentor or someone who can help you, not because you can't do it on your own, but it's really risky. If the bomb goes off before you manage it or if life ends before you manage it or if, you know, anything could happen where you just like do it in a weird way and it makes more problems happen. It's always better, if you really want to get off the bus, to find someone who can help you and hopefully, they're not a crappy teacher like we talked about last time. So go start paying attention to people who feel like they have an answer for you and when you feel like it, when you feel like they've got the answer, do everything you can to get the answer from them. Right? Do everything you can. Do what it takes to finally make the snow red so that you can find the freedom that you've been looking for. Okay? And if you don’t know what I'm talking about, go listen to the last episode. [0:21:21.1]
Okay. Next time, we're going to talk about an entirely different topic. It'll be yummy, awesome, amazing, so look forward to it. But we're going to hit money. Freedom…money and freedom and all that other stuff - they're connected because money has been a huge topic in life these days for a lot of people. There's a lot of people that struggle with it. There's all kinds of different opinions about it. Mine is not necessarily the best opinion on the planet, but I'm going to give you a different angle as we talk about Jesus and capitalism. Yes, my friends, was Jesus a capitalist? Uh-oh - this could get hairy.
And that's it for today's Alive and Free Podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from, and while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you, and plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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