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: I was walking down the street one day, in the very, very month of May, when I … I don't know the words.
Once upon a time, many, many moons ago, or in the last several weeks and months of my life, and even before that, I have run into a lot of people that are talking about addiction, depression, trauma, betrayal and all of these negative things in their life, and they're talking about them from the perspective of “I need to heal from my addiction. I need to heal from what's happened in my life. I need to heal from my wounds from earlier, of my marriage,” and all of these things. [0:01:17]
And I talked to a lot of women whose husbands are overcoming stuff, and the women are trying to heal from their trauma and they're talking about trauma.
It occurred to me that this focus, focusing on healing is the absolute worst thing you can do, and I'm going to add that we're going to talk about that today. We're literally going to open up the can of worms on why focusing on healing is the worst thing to do.
Welcome to the Alive and Free Podcast once again.
This all started when I was looking at what was going on and focusing on healing something, and it was no different than back when I was in addiction when the focus was on fighting something and overcoming something. Back then, I realized, man, if I'm fighting something and I'm overcoming something, then my focus is on it. [0:02:03]
What you focus on grows in your mind and what you resist persists, and so there I was resisting something, and because I was hating it, because I was afraid of it, because I was trying to kill it and overcome it, my whole life ended up being wrapped around it. I went deeper and deeper into this hole of despair, depression, suicidal tendencies and all kinds of stuff, because I was so focused on overcoming and fighting something.
To heal something, that's the gentle side of it. I'm going to focus on things, these things to heal it.
Now, notice here, a caveat, a little disclaimer in the beginning. I am not saying don't pay attention to what's happening in your life and use that to make decisions about having a better life. That is not what I am saying here. I'm talking about the idea that there is something that needs to be healed in the first place.
The day that I realized that this was not only a negative trait, but it was a purely man-made one, was the day that I also realized that healing doesn't actually exist. [0:03:04]
Bob, hold the f … what are you talking about? We're talking, I see people with cuts. Their skin heals. I see people with wounds. That heals. I see people with emotional wounds and they've been healed from that. I see people who've had spiritual wounds and they've been healed by Christ. There are stories of healings and all this other stuff. You're trying to tell me that that didn't happen, that that doesn't exist?
No. I'm not trying to tell you that those things don't happen and I'm not trying to tell you that they don't exist.
What I'm trying to tell you is that healing itself is a concept. It is a way of thinking about something happening that, actually, itself, doesn't reflect what's really going on. When you understand what's really going on, it opens up a brand new spectrum of possibilities that maybe you’ve never considered and a whole lot easier way to move forward in your life, without having to heal from a whole bunch of stuff that you don't need to heal from. [0:04:03]
We need to take this in a couple of different directions today. The first setup is to understand one basic thing. Maybe I should do this in another episode, but I'm going to do it here. The body doesn't hold on to anything necessarily. It doesn't store up stuff other than what it thinks it needs, and that's a decision it's making moment by moment, and the moment it decides it doesn't need something anymore, it just starts to let it go.
The slowest things to let go of are things like body material, like body fat and stuff, just because thoughts are way easier to let go of and to stop having. Body, okay, we have to dissolve fat and whatnot, so it does take a little bit longer—and this is a story definitely for another time—but I had a bone spur that disappeared on me within 20 minutes.
It was three-eighths of an inch tall and it was sticking out of my finger, and it disappeared on me within 20 minutes, because I had handled some other things in my life and created some space for myself, and, all of a sudden, my body decided it didn't need that anymore and it was gone.
Now, my natural reaction was to freak out like, Oh my gosh, it's going to my heart. I'm going to die. I have a shred of bone running through my veins and arteries, and it's going to clog my heart and I'm going to keel over and die. [0:05:11]
Once I got over the panic, I realized, Wait a second, how is that possible? Did this thing that had been causing me immense amounts of pain for months that I was considering having surgically removed, literally vanish within 30 minutes because I had done something different in my life?
That's healing.
What had I done different? Hmm, maybe I'll share this with you at the end of this episode, so it might be a little bit of a longer one, too.
The body doesn't store things that it doesn't need. When we say—and there are a lot of books out there—that the body keeps score, meaning it's holding onto a score. Emotions buried alive, never die.
First off, emotion is an experience. Your body doesn't store experience. It stores things. The emotion isn't alive; you're alive. And so, to say that you can bury something that isn't alive, but bury it alive, and then say that it's going to stay alive forever as long as it's buried, this brings a metaphor into your life that is completely unnecessary. [0:06:10]
Your body doesn't do that. It doesn't store stuff. It experiences emotions and the chemistry of that emotion does run through your system. If there are tension patterns and other things, maybe your circulation isn't good enough and the nutrients in your body aren't good enough to shift the chemistry, so that chemical can sit in there for a while and cause deterioration and other things. But your body is not storing that like some vast warehouse ready to let go.
The same thing with body fat. It's not storing up for the winter, so to speak. It's storing up what it thinks it needs. It's holding from moment to moment, not storing, but holding from moment to moment, in its arms, what it thinks it needs. That's why sometimes you can't manage more information in your head, because you're holding this thinking, I need to hold onto this, and now there's no more space or there's the thought that there's no more space.
Remember that. When we're talking about letting go of things and healing, even though we're going to dismantle that today, remember it's not about digging into this big warehouse and digging up a bunch of stuff, and bringing it out like a silo and letting it go. It's not that at all. [0:07:09]
It's there already readily accessible, ready for you to let go of anytime you finally know or your body finally says, We don't need this anymore. Cool, let's start getting rid of it. No big deal. It can just start putting it down, which is why this can happen. These radical life shifts can happen really fast.
Now that we've got that out of the way, let's go back and look at what healing is. What is happening? Yes, skin, the cuts are going away. Bones are regrowing and all that other good stuff.
Is that healing?
Healing, the concept of healing comes from the word “whole” or “to make whole.” It comes from the idea that something is broken in the first place. This is a purely human idea. If you take a twig and you break it, what you have is still the same material that was all there. Nothing has changed. It's just in two parts. If I break it into 10 pieces and put some behind someplace else, all of the material is still there. There's nothing broken but my idea of the original twig. All the materials are still there, but it just happens to be in multiple places at once. [0:08:10]
In fact, what I have are 10 twigs. It multiplied. It didn't divide, right? Over and over again, this happens. It's my concept of what it's supposed to be that gets broken that is missing a piece. What is real and what is alive right now is functioning whole and complete. Your body is whole and complete. If you didn't have a whole body, you wouldn't be functioning, meaning the essentials. Obviously, people have amputations and stuff. I'm talking about all the necessary parts to function. If you're missing a piece, then …
As soon as we get rid of this idea that there is there's a brokenness, we realize there's nothing that needs to be made whole in the first place. If you're going to go in a spiritual vein, Jesus said, “Be ye therefore perfect,” and “perfect” means thoroughly done or complete or whole. Be whole. Stop being broken, right? [0:09:02]
That's the idea. The word healing comes from that, and the notion of saying that something needs to be healed comes from this idea that the thing is broken. It also encapsulates an idea in most people's minds that there is a cut that I have to go back and fix. There's a wound that I have to go back and fix. But that idea is totally erroneous to what's actually happening in reality.
If you look at nature, let's start with a plant. If you go back and you cut off a branch of a plant, does the plant heal that? No. What the plant does do is what it's been doing all along. It has been creating new plant cells, and metabolizing sunlight and stuff, and if you chop off a branch, it's going to create new plant cells.
Still, all it's doing is creating. It's doing the same thing it's been doing the whole time. It's just that when you cut open a piece, some of the material on the inside of the plant responds to air in a certain way. Because of that new environment, that particular area creates what it knows how to create. Basically, you get a branch that is cordoned off or you get sap coming out of it, or you get whatever else happens. But the plant continues to grow. [0:10:23]
It continues to create new plant cells to the extent that it's capable of. When it's no longer capable of doing that, then life leaves the plant. But in no point in time is the plant going, Oh my gosh, let me go back and fix that. The whole time the plant is simply creating, creating, responding to life, continuing to create and continuing to metabolize sunlight. If, all of a sudden, its capacity to do that is locked off on one side, it will continue to create plant cells and metabolize sunlight, because that's what it does.
Skin. Now, let's go to human bodies. If I have skin and I give a cut in the skin, what's happening? Your skin is regenerating. All of your skin cells regenerate every month, so every month you have a new set of skin. So, if someone asks you how old you are, you can tell them you're a month old or less. You're less than a month old. Okay? [0:11:12]
All of your skin, every month is regenerating. That's what the organ does. It's naturally creating new skin cells. If you cut it open and some of the blood pours out, and the blood vessels are open, what happens? Those cells create what they're designed to create and the body goes and creates a scab first, and then your skin continues to create new skin cells. It doesn't fix the old ones that were cut. It literally creates new skin cells, so there is no fixing of what's going on even in your own body.
If you break a bone, what happens? Yeah, we go back and we put it together as best we can. If you don't put it together back in its situation, line it back up and set the bone, then what tends to happen is that it grows in a new configuration. In other words, the bone is just creating new bone cells. If you line it up in the right way, then it'll create new bone cells that more or less matched the configuration of the old one. That's nice. [0:12:12]
But some people have deliberately broken bones and whatnot to create different deformities or different variations on the human system, in the past, as we have had in different societies, like when you're binding feet in the Chinese society. That creates a different formation of bone, and the body just grows according to what it's capable of doing and the environment that it's in. It isn't healing anything. It's continuously creating. That's the shift we need to make in your mind.
Instead of trying to heal your past trauma, go create a powerful life. If there's an obstacle in the way, create around it. There are some things we can do to remove obstacles, but that also is the creation of space. It's not about healing the past. The past does not exist. It never existed. It was always a present moment that has now passed. There are remnants of that moment, but the past itself doesn't exist. [0:13:03]
Even in your mind as we talked about in the last episode, what you experience as the past is literally a present moment, a live performance of a bunch of information that you're recreating. You and I both know that if you go to a live show, no two live shows are exactly the same.
It doesn't matter how rehearsed the actors, actresses or players are. No two live shows are the same. Take it from someone who danced on stage with a dance troop for a number of years, and would sing with choirs and whatnot. There are mistakes, mishaps. Things change all the time.
Same with your memory. The past that you think you need to heal from is a creation of your mind in this moment. So, create something different, like we talked about last time. Train your mind to create something new. All the trauma and all the betrayal that you have, if it's not happening in this moment, it means you're creating it in your mind in this moment. It is happening, but it’s your creation, and that's a hard truth to take, especially if you weren't the one to create the circumstances. [0:14:01]
If you're the wife of an addict or the husband of an addict, you are not creating their behavior, but you are creating your own trauma out of it. You could, a hundred percent, and that is a hard pill to swallow because it means that you can no longer lay the finger of blame and expect that blame is really going to help you live a powerful life.
It does help you feel better for a second, because it gives you a sense of control and power when you have been feeling powerless and helpless. But doesn't actually help you create a powerful life. It's just a temporary coping mechanism. Blame is a temporary coping mechanism.
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.
All this stuff that you think you need to heal from, instead of trying to go back and fix it, don't fix it. What if today you can walk into your life with a certain kind of selective amnesia to where all the things that really just irk you just vanish?
You go to sleep tonight. A miracle happens and you're not aware of it because you're asleep, but something happens to where all of those things are reconfigured in your mind, in your body and whatever else, and you wake up the next morning. You have no idea that it happened because it happened in your sleep. What would you create in your life, if that were no longer there? How would you feel? What would be the first thing you'd notice? What would life be like? What would you do? What would you go create, if you no longer had all of these things that you were creating before in your mind called traumas, betrayals, addictions and all the other stuff? If you no longer have that piece in your mind, what would you go create? [0:16:01]
It's not about going and healing something. It's about creating a new possibility. As you're going through your life and if you're dealing with whatever it is you're dealing with—whether it's depression and anxiety as emotional struggles; whether it's addiction or habits or compulsive behaviors like overeating or something in terms of behaviors; whether it's just fears of things that you're dealing with in life; whether it's worry and paranoia about; or whether it's even events that you have to deal with like a family member that's dying and whatnot—the question needs to become not “How do I heal with this? How do I cope with this? How do I manage?” but “What can I create out of this?” instead of going back and healing. The focus on healing will keep you focused on the very things that you're using to create misery in your life.
A lot of people use that in powerful ways, don't get me wrong. People use that to create life lessons and revelations, and then they turn around and they're really grateful for all their struggles, all their pain and whatnot. They're now using that experience to create a powerful emotion. They're getting a payoff out of it. I'm not saying it's wrong here. [0:17:11]
But the fastest way is to move forward to do as Jesus said, “Go and sin no more,” not go and think about this a lot, not go and rehash it, not go and retell your story, not go and go to meetings for the rest of your life. Just go and do something different. Go create something new out of your life. That's what we're trying to do here.
If you want to have the capacity to have something happen in your life, whether you did it or someone else did it, or it was just a feeling, and to have the capacity to go and use it from there and create something amazing for yourself, that is what we're after, not “This happened and now I need to go heal from it.” Nope, not that.
That doesn't mean you don't need to take time to go create a new experience inside of you, but the focus is on creation. The focus is on “How do I want to feel right now? How do I want to experience my life right now?” accepting that everything that's happened has already happened. I can't do anything about that, so what do I want to create out of this? That's powerful. [0:18:07]
When your focus is on creation, all the powers of creation come to your aid, and there's a totally different experience of life. When the focus is on healing, all of your life turns around and creates, and molds itself around the thing that you don't think should be there.
Instead of saying, this shouldn't be there, the better question is “What can I do now to create a better life for myself moving forward, an even better life?” and this works with physical pain and physical diseases. It works, certainly, with emotional struggles and mental health stuff. It also works with addictions and behaviors, and compulsive behaviors. It works inside of the business realm with whatever you're dealing with. If you find yourself complaining, it means that you have mastered the ability of taking something outside yourself and creating misery for yourself on the inside.
There's this beautiful saying in Zen that I wish you didn't have to explain and I wish it were common in our culture, but this beautiful saying in Zen where, if you have crap on your nose, a little piece of poop on your nose, then it doesn't matter where you go. Everything's going to smell like poop, right? If you find yourself complaining, it's because it stinks. Man, life stinks. This is tough. [0:19:20]
The saying in Zen is go wash your face. Remove the stink. Go create something new.
That's what we want to do. We want to focus instead of bringing the stink everywhere, so we have to heal it and always have to deal with it. Focus on creation.
It's not that healing doesn't exist. In the natural world, what does exist is creation, the creation of something new. Even decay is the creation of something new by other organisms that have a stronger will to create. All that's happening is creation, a constant, constant evolving creation, and in the real world, that's what's happening.
Instead of making up this fantasy that healing has to occur, let's focus on doing what nature already does by itself, what your body already does, what your mind already does—focus on creating and not fixing.
Don't go fix something. Go create something amazing out of it. [0:20:12]
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. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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