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. [00:27.9]
Bob: All right, welcome back to the “Alive and Free Podcast” today. Today, we're going to take a detour and this week, and next week, we're going to hit a couple of topics that are huge in Christian circles. But I want, I don't want you to feel left out here if you're a Muslim, Hindu, Spiritist, Atheist, it doesn't matter if you have a religious tradition. This is about practicalities, stepping into scriptural texts and pulling out of them practical things you can do in your life to help you feel life more fully, to come fully alive and to be free of the compulsion's, the angers, the depressions, anxieties, the addictions, the traumas, and everything else that have been keeping you stuck and holding you down. And if you've experienced any of that, then this is going to be exceptionally helpful for you. As we talk about the Armor of God. [01:17.9]
Now, this is something that comes from Ephesians chapter six. I don't want you to feel like you have to be Christian or in any way, shape or form in order to benefit from this. But we're just going to use these words specifically to help you find something practical you can do in your life today. Scripture itself is something that it's very useful to kind of look at it and say, look, what are these things called scriptures? And on a certain sense, there's a whole different set, Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada and the Yoga Sutras and, and the, the Talmud and the Quran and, and the book of Mormon and the Bible and all of these different traditions have different books that they hold on to as scripture, meaning the word of God, meaning that which has come down from above to show me how to live my life. Right? [02:00.6]
And I remember there was a, I was going to Brigham Young University and there was a guy, one of the main leaders of the, of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. His name was Henry B. Eyring. He came and he gave a speech and he was talking about a time when he was in school and he was reading his thermodynamics book, you know, Yippy Skippy. And he remembers a time where there was one point on the page, halfway down the page where he's reading about thermodynamics and it became very apparent to him. Like he had this internal experience, this ‘Aha’ moment that's that he calls a very spiritual witness. That, that piece, that he was reading was truth. And he has kept the book since then for decades because of the, what he calls a spiritual witness that he got from that book. [02:41.8]
And it wasn't any of these scriptural texts. It was literally some textbook on thermodynamics written by some professor, somewhere who might've gotten some other things wrong in the middle of the textbook. And yet that one piece became a very, very powerful experience for him. And so consider that scripture just an opportunity for you to have these moments of insight. And it doesn't necessarily matter where the scripture came from. If you're getting these moments of insight that are improving your life, call that scripture if you want, keep ahold of it, if you want and use that insight to improve your life. That's what we're going to do here as we jump into Paul. Now, the Armor of God, I want you to consider this from a priest. I'm going to give you some insights about Hebrew and some other things just to help you think about this differently, because if you're a Christian at all, you've heard this a lot. [03:28.1]
And a lot of this is about protecting yourself from this schemes of the devil and in the, in these verses Ephesians six, 11 to 17, you know, he's, he's saying, look, our struggle isn't against flesh and blood. So putting on the Armor of God is not some attempt to figure out how to be a martial arts master doing it. It's not an attempt to to do anything of the sort. It's not an attempt to become a proficient at knife training, or it to be a good army officer or a general or anything like that. It is literally an attempt or a way of talking about helping protect yourself against all the invisible internal battles that a person struggles with. Now, have you ever struggled with those? Have you ever gone to do something and worried about whether or not you're doing the right thing? That's an internal struggle. Have you ever gone there and worried about what other people are going to think about you? That's an internal struggle. Have you ever gone to do something and then worried that you're not capable of doing it? That's an internal struggle. Have you ever gone to do something and felt like you were going to fail and you were just afraid of failure? That's an internal struggle. [04:30.4]
All of these internal struggles that we come up with and we deal with on a regular basis, this is the point for which Paul is talking about handling this, this Armor of God. And you can include in that, if that is your religious persuasion, you can include evil spirits and temptations and thoughts and feelings and negative beliefs and energies and auras and spirits, and anything else that creates this invisible battle in you. And the whole point of the Armor of God is to make it so that you can eliminate that battle. [05:00.5]
Now I'm going to make it super practical for you over this week and next week, because I really want you to get a lot out of it. And I want it to help you start to shift some things in your life today and not be like, Oh, I learned some cool thing and I felt really happy, really happy while I listened to a podcast. STOP IT. I want you to feel happy. YES. But I would much prefer that you become happiness instead of just feel happiness from time to time. And that's what this is about. So let's take, let's take a detour into Armor for a second. The word for armor often used in not often, but sometimes used in the Hebrew Bible. It's funny because the Hebrew language is a concrete language. Meaning you, like, if you're angry, they'll say your noses on fire. Like that's kind of where the original meanings of the terms came from in, in biblical Hebrew. Right? [05:41.7]
So because, you know, have you ever been angry and your nose crinkles, and then there's those white lines that come up on it. Right? And so like they're using these concrete concepts in order to convey things that later on in Greek thought and the Greek language uses a lot of abstract things. Funny thing is kids don't understand abstract language. So if you tell them, be nice, they don't understand it. And they still turn around and punch their sister. How do I know this? I watch it happen pretty frequently. But if you tell them don't punch your sister, okay. Or you tell them, be soft with your sister, like you soft hands with your sister. Then that's something they understand because they know what that feels like. It's more concrete. And the Hebrew language is very concrete. So when they're using the term for armor, even though that's a concrete thing, the word for it comes from the phrase for heaviness, right or a burden or a weight or something that's weighty. And so armor is one of the things that we're waiting like it originally meant armor in battle, these heavy things that you carry around. Right? [06:38.4]
Well, get this who was rich enough to have armor, right? So then you have, it starts to be linked with wealth and honor and dignity. And then eventually it came to mean glory. So when they're talking about the glory of the Lord, they're referring to the Armor of the Lord and the light shining off the armor as they stand on the hill and the sunlight glinting off of it and blinding the enemies that his enemies would go blind from sheer awesomeness. Oh God, I love Kung Fu Panda. And this, this is linked to armor. And how would you hear the glory of the Lord coming? Well, what is the sound of metal armor riding along on horses or running across the grass, right? [07:17.0]
The, the sound of the glory of the Lord, all of this stuff is inextricably linked. So when you're putting on the Armor of God, in a way you're also putting on the glory of God in this kind of Hebrew thought, which is, is a fascinating thing for some of you that might be like, okay, get on with it. Fair enough. Okay. We're going to go in order. And the first three today, the next three the last time, the first three today are gird ‘having your loins girt about with truth’, then the ‘breastplate, breastplate of righteousness’, then your ‘feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.’ The next time we'll do ‘the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit.’ They're going to be a little bit longer episodes. These two, I probably could have done them in three, but I decided to do them in two. [07:59.5]
So we're going to start with ‘Loins girt with truth.’ Now, in those days that people wore tunics, it's not a dress, it's a tunic. I have shown you. It was the height of fashion 2000 years ago. That is good old Hank Azaria from the Night at the Museum II: Battle of the Smithsonian when so this dress you were wearing, you know, that sort of scene, it was basically a long kind of night gown and they would wear a belt and so when they had to gird up their loins, they'd pull up the middle of it and tuck it into the belt. Another way that this is translated is the belt of truth buckled around your waist, right? So it's a belt that you're sticking in there. Why so that when you're running your dresses and catching on stuff in between your legs, you're not tripping all over yourself. The point of girding yourself with truth is so that you don't trip all over yourself. [08:48.0]
Now I have a friend who studied some poker. One of the things he told me was, he's like, yeah, when you want to figure things out, the first thing you do is you go up, you introduce yourself and you're like, hi, my name's so, and so what's your name? And you watch how they introduce themselves because the person only tells the truth one way, but they lie millions of other twice. Have you ever tried to tell a lie and then forgot what the lie was? Or you had to do it one way. You have to get really cunning and crafty and conniving. There's a lot of thought and energy that goes into telling a lie because, well, you're not trying to deceive them, but you don't feel like they need to know, or whatever else needs to happen. Maybe it's a small lie or your wife says, Hey, how does this look? And you're like, Oh, why do you keep asking me this question? Whatever it is or your husband's like, Hey honey, can I get this? And the wife's like, please don't ask me about this again and sure, whatever you want, honey, right? This lie. [09:40.0]
And so as he's studying this poker thing, he's like, look, you, they, you just have them learn to tell the truth because they only tell the truth one way. Cause it's clear, it's easy, it's honest. And they don't trip over themselves later with all their tells. You and I have tells every time we're, we're not truthful, it's a tell. The other person picks it up. My wife picked it up all the time. Even if she didn't realize she was picking it up, she would just get this weird vibe about me and be like, I don't know something's up - meant I wasn't telling her everything. It doesn't mean that I was necessarily lieing, but sometimes I was deliberately withholding information or didn't want to share stuff with her because it was bothering me or, and, and so she would ask and then I'd be like, no, I'm fine. That's a lie. That's a lie. And she knows it because she can read all the tells. Just like I know it when I she's lying. Cause I can read a lot of those tells. Now. Sometimes I read them wrong admittedly, and that's always a fun conversation, but we have tells, right? [10:33.4]
And so we're walking around and what's going to prevent you from tripping all over yourself in your life and feeling like everything is so hard and stubbing your toe on every little incident that happens and feeling like you're walking blindfolded into the street and falling into things and bumping into posts and people and getting run over by cars and everything else is to start to tell the truth, take the blindfold off, to look deeply inside yourself and to go, this is what's real for me. Start with you. You don't necessarily have to go spouting this out to the world, but start with you admit how you're feeling on the inside. [11:03.8]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [11:31.3]
I have a good friend his name's Eden and he's like, what would it be like if we walked around and instead of saying sentences, we just walked around describing our feelings. We walked around, going confused, a little upset, tired and another person says concerned, worried, and a little scared. And we just did it that way, how honest would that be? And how much easier would it be to finally be free of the need to hide everything that we've been hiding. The more you hide, the more you are not truthful with yourself, the more problems you're going to run into in your life. Cause you're just stuffing things down and then they bubble up again later. But now they bubble up with the other stuff they got stuffed and pretty soon you're fine, fine, fine and then you explode and then you're fine, fine, fine and then you explode. And the people you love are the ones that get the explosion most often. And so what's going to prevent you from tripping all over everything in your life. A simple practice is to start to admit what you're feeling. [12:31.2]
We teach people this in emotional ninjitsu, which is part of our, Choose Your Own Emotion program to teach people these core skills in life and in a very, very deep way. But just for now, just start with a simple narration. This is what's real for me. And you can just say it to yourself to start, doesn't have to be to everybody else. Start there, so you're not tripping all over yourself every time, not getting snagged on every little thing, because you have an emotion, but you're not, you don't want to hurt other people's feelings and stuff. Go be honest with how you're feeling. Wow! I'm really angry right now. Holy cow, that's pretty amazing, right? And just start to get clear on that. Then we move into the ‘breastplate of righteousness.’ Now this is going to protect your heart. This is the hearts, the organ of understanding in old Hebrew thought, it's not like the brain is the thinker. Sure. But if you really want to understand it's this place from feeling and understanding, it's not, it's not your, your logic or your ration or your reason, your rationalization or your reason or anything else like that you understand from your heart. So what is going to protect your heart is the breastplate of righteousness. Meaning what's going to keep you from having a broken heart, broken, understanding, confusion, and all the other stuff that comes with it. What's going to protect you is righteousness the word for that in Hebrew ‘Sadiq’, it means ‘on the path.’ [13:44.3]
Think about it. If you're going somewhere and you don't know if you're headed the right direction, how do you feel? Lost, confused, worried, paranoid, you know, like jittery hyper focused. But if you're going and you know, you're on the path, how do you feel easy? You're at ease. Life is great. And you can move forward in with tremendous confidence and hope and it's, you don't even have to worry about it, like your you're all you're aligned and you're on the path, right? On the path of what is the question? Your heart is what's being protected. Now we read in the Bible and other places that God gives people according to the desires of their hearts. So there's a lot of ways to think about this. I want you to just think about it, just this one today, which is that, which is most deeply valuable to you. [14:30.3]
And I don't mean like in a selfish way that a lot of people tend to take this. Like, well, I only do what's right for me. And that's it. I mean like literally if you were a flower that flower has a blossom inside, it's trying to come out. And if you aligned with that blossom and so if you're, if you're religious and spiritual and you want to about it as God created me for a specific purpose, and if you aligned with that, it'd be great. But deeper, deeper, still each person is so uniquely different that there's kind of a unique fragrance to each soul. And one simple way of looking into like really getting a grasp of and becoming aware of the things that really make you tick. You might all be so far advanced on this, that you don't need this, but a good, just a wonderful, very simple assessment is on Dr Demartini’s website, drdemartini.com. [15:17.2]
I think his values assessment it's like 13 questions, technically 15 but 13 that you answer. And then you got to go rearrange it a little bit. It takes about 20, 30 minutes. And it just helps you look into your life and help you see patterns of things that maybe you've missed before that are clear patterns about the things that you like. And get this, if you just said, did the smallest simplest thing every day, that lined up with that, you would find such levels of joy and happiness show up in your life. It doesn't have to be big. Like, Oh, I got to go change my job and I gotta go. I gotta go divorce and remarry and I got to go do whatever. It can be the smallest simplest thing like it can take one minute. And if you did that for 365 days, that's 365 steps in the direction of what you know within you is the, is the thing that's going to bring you the greatest joy and the greatest hope. [16:03.2]
And that is going to change how you're experiencing life, the way that you see your life in some powerful ways. And it will protect your heart from feeling like you're not worth being alive. You're not worth being here. You're not worth effort and time and energy that all that's supposed to supposed to be sacrificed and you're supposed to give it to everybody else. And the funny thing about that way of thinking is that if everybody is sacrificing to give to everybody else, then nobody gets helped because we're all kind of passing the buck to the next guy. But if we can all learn to receive as well as to give and give to ourselves as well, then something really magical happens and your heart gets protected by the breastplate of being righteous or on the path or aligned with that deep thing within you that's trying to blossom. [16:48.4]
Third ‘feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace.’ Now, what's the point of a shoe folks? A shoe is literally a covering on your foot that allows you to step into thorny places and rocky places and river beds and scary places and to jump and all kinds of other, it cushions your feet so that you can do more than you ever could do before and with more comfort than maybe you could have, even just doing the limited things when you were barefoot. Now I'm not talking about the people who have like inch thick calluses on their feet. In Brazil, there are a bunch of people that played like on these cobblestone streets, barefoot soccer, like their feet were, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about in general and they still would put on like flip flops and stuff. We're talking about some kind of protection for your feet. And the protection is coming from when you think about all the thorny places in your life, the stuff you're like, Oh, I don't want to have that conversation. [17:41.7]
Or, Oh god, I hate that I got to go do that. All the rocky places, they’re like, ‘Wow, this is a really rough situation that we're in’ and ‘Oh, my, I got laid off or I'm running through financial struggles’ or ‘Wow, my relationship is falling apart’ or ‘my faith is, is in struggle.’ And all these other rocky places, if you're prepared with peace, then you can do those things and you can walk there and it won't hurt you. Not amazing. So when I look at this and I hear, I see the phrase of the preparation of the gospel of peace, that to me seems to indicate like preparing soil for the flower. Like I'm not actually growing the flower. I'm just water, sunlight, soil, that's it. And that preparation makes it so that the flower grows by itself. Same thing here. So the preparation to me seems to indicate routines, simple little things that you can do day in and day out that put you in a state of peace, because think about it when you're peaceful, do you like you react in a weird way? [18:40.0]
I've used the gorilla on the back analogy before. Like if you're really dealing with a lot of stuff, this is the last straw. Well, if you didn't have so much straw in your back, that wouldn't be the last straw. And so this idea of priming, which is how Tony Robbins talks about it and doing simple little rituals that puts you into a space of real clarity, really fast. It's amazing. And that if we think about it on a chemical level, your blood has a certain pH right? 7.4. And in that 7.4 pH what's happening. Well, all of the muscles and bones and fluids and organs are working at their optimal level, right? Obviously each pH changes depending on where you're at in the body, we're just talking about the blood. If it goes one way or another way too far, then there's trouble and things start to shut down. Well, guess what? Stress worry, anxiety, depression, all of these things radically shift the system and they alter it. And especially all of these like hopped up ones, they're very acidic to the body. They break down organs, they shorten your lifespan. [19:37.9]
They did a study on anger once where people who routinely are running into anger, the correlation in there was that they tend to have like a lifespans that are like a few years less and they have like a much higher risk for heart disease. The heart is in disease, when it's being bathed in acid, right? Now, why does your body do this? It wants to get out of these situations. I mean, if I poured acid on your arm, wouldn't you like move it away really fast. Shoot, you would do that if a mosquito landed on your arm and you felt it, same thing here. And mosquitoes probably got some weird kind of acid in its mouth anyway. So like this happens and you would move. So what happens in the body? Well, the body then says, well, we have to neutralize this acid so it leaches alkaline based stuff from the bones and shoves that into the bloodstream so that it can neutralize them. What that means, and, and some of the bicarbonate is like dumped in from the kidneys and other places. And what that means is it's neutralizing it by leaching, from your own resources, which means the bones eventually become brittle. And now you're at risk for osteoporosis and all kinds of other stuff going on, right? Your system starts to break down in a real way when you're in this spot. [20:43.9]
But what if, what if you primed the with neutralizers, like put a little barrier in there so that the second an acid comes, it's like Bfzzzzzz, Bfzzzzzz it's like shooting flaming arrows into water. That's it? You know, over time. Yeah. Eventually if you have a lot of acid coming in, it's going to neutralize all the basic stuff and then you'll still be in the same situation. But if you prime it in a certain way, and a lot of the stuff we teach our clients to do in our, ‘Choose Your Own Emotion program’, and others are these routines that are simple, easy, straightforward. You just plug them into your life and they don't take long. And like you, you derive benefit from them for hours at a stretch to where you are so peaceful and so clear that you walk into your life and your kids are screaming and your wife's struggling and then you've got to go to work and the boss is a deadline and everything else is going on, but you feel great because you've primed your system with something that neutralizes it. [21:37.3]
In other words, you've prepared yourself with the good news - gospel of peace. And it is good news when you're feeling peaceful, because it means you can handle life and you can walk on rocky ground and it doesn't bother you. Phrase, I like to say is, ‘Look, when heaven is inside you, you can handle any hell. But when hell is inside, not even heaven can help you’, think about that. We want to remove the hell from the inside, these invisible struggles, the invisible battle, the invisible armageddon that's happening inside of your system. That's the whole point of this Armor of God. And we're doing that here with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Now there's millions, there are probably millions, at least thousands of different routines out there, all over the place from miracle morning to the core four from wake up warrior to, to meditation and yoga and scripture study and prayer and, and religious practices and you name it, there's workouts and routines. There's tons of things that you can do. [22:33.2]
My suggestion to you is keep it simple, stupid the KISS thing, right? Give yourself a little bit of a kiss. Keep it simple. Your life, there's so much more you want to do with your life that. I want you to think about, what is the smallest simplest thing I could do that would integrate into what I'm doing already that makes it easy. With our clients, we give them a couple simple programs, a couple of simple things to do that create massively beautiful results inside their life, because they just simply go to town. I'm going to play you one of them really briefly so that you can hear it. This was just sent to me this morning from a guy doing these routines. And I want you to notice what he's experiencing. [23:08.6]
Recording: This is pretty wild, I feel like…
Bob: Ahhmm…Apparently.
Recording: I just woke up at 5:30 just on my own. After I came last night, I stayed up till probably I worked until like 1130. Then I stayed up, I even later got to finish, the the body scan until 12, 12:15 or so. And then I just woke up at 5:30 fully energized this morning and it went right into my my hip one, which is just I never would have guessed that I’d get so much energy. I feel pretty great and I just thought I’d share. This is pretty wild. [23:31.8]
Bob: So that is the kind of thing that happens
Recording: Pretty much.
Bob: When you have a simple routine that you can do that energizes you and all of a sudden, he's like, I got more energy than I ever thought I would. I'm in it's beautiful space. And I can go about my now I can. And I never believed that this could happen. Simple, easy technique. If you want to participate in that, by all means, go to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow jump into the, ‘Choose Your Own Emotion program’ so its just a couple of hundred bucks. And it, you know, over the course of three, four weeks, it'll take you through a process of helping you train simple routines. It'll help you work on girding your loins with truth in terms of becoming very, very clear in a very deep way, not only how you're feeling, but how to like clean yourself up, all that other stuff so that you can walk free and clear and then start to move through your life in a really powerful manner, because ultimately in the end, remember, we're just trying to end the Armageddon on the inside so that you can walk through your life, the way that Jesus did when he said, “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” The only times we have any record of him feeling any different is when we switched yolks and he took our yoke on him and he gave us his, right? [24:37.9]
And whether you believe in him as the son of God, or just a moral teacher, or just a fictional character where whatever you think of it, remember scripture is a place to get deep insight that allows you to live your life in an, in a happier, more joyful way. And even if it come from Harry Potter, if you're getting deep insight trust it, use it, embody it in your life. And here from the Bible, here we are, we're looking with a guy who was homeless, who had people thronging him all the time, didn't get much sleep, was being woken up in the middle of storms and asked about tax problems, all kinds of other stuff. And he, he, by his own declaration says “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” Let's go through life that way guys and we'll continue the series next time as we address the last part of the Armor of God. [25:20.8]
And that's it for todays “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. [25:39.7]
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