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: And welcome back, alright. It's time to look at the past folks, but not the way we've been talking about it before. How many of you grew up reading awesome books, fantasy books anyone? Fiction books, books that told stories. I mean, I remember I got really into The Hardy Boys as a kid, and I think I read every single Hardy Boys book that there was at the time, although there are probably some that I missed. I read a bunch of the Nancy Drew ones too, cause I really love the mystery of it. I read the Sherlock Holmes, their complete set there with Sherlock Holmes. And then I got into Lord of the Rings and I read some of those fantasy books that way. And I just loved, loved, loved these books. And I got into them and I remembered at a certain point always feeling a little bit nostalgic about the past, looking back at it and thinking, man, those were the good old days. Those were the days when everything was magical and life was cool. And there were all these adventures and nowadays life is kind of boring and hoham and humdrum and part of the problem was the way that we talked about it. [01:33.3]
Guess what this showed up in church. And I grew up and we would talk about early, early church stuff. So we're talking like Jew Jewish history and all these miracles that happened and all of these incredible healings and other types of things that occurred along the way that were written about an ancient text in ancient lore. And we were writing about prophets and we were writing about wizards and sorcerers and Kings and Queens and battles and Epic battles and Sears and, and all of these things happening in that history, right? And Moses crossing the red sea and the plagues and, and Manna coming from heaven. And all of it felt so exciting to me and so enjoyable to me and so then I hopped into superheroes and I loved Batman because that was a character that I really loved. And, you know, then we jump into the church history that I grew up in. I grew up in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints. I didn't grow up in the church; my family attended that church for those of you sticklers. Otherwise known as the Mormon Church. [02:35.0]
And so we had a lot of history about Joseph Smith talked to us and all of these miracles and amazing things that happened in his life and around that time. And you know, what happened with the pioneers who were driven out and crossed the Plains and there was all this talk about the past and how we needed to learn our lessons from history and how history was this powerful, powerful place to derive our identity as a people and our identity as, as individuals. And what's interesting is when you look at these books and how they were written and the way they were written, they are actually designed to galvanize people around an identity. I mean the old Testament more or less was pieced together from other texts, but put together around the time that King David was there reigning to create a sort of national identity. Granted there's more books that are written later and added later, but most of the whole purpose of it was to build some sense of national identity so that we could say that as a people, this wandering group of people, this is who we are, and this is how we interact in the world. And this is who our God is, and this is our belief system, right? [03:37.1]
And then the same thing with the, with the Mormon Church and the Mormon faith was like, this is who we are as a people. And this is where we stand out and we are in the world and not of the world. And we hold ourselves to a different standard. And you know, in that church we have the truth and all of that other stuff. And that was just kind of like the narrative and it helps people kind of develop an identity, but it also created in me a sense of total fantasy. Have you noticed this, how we fantasize and romanticize the past, how we look back? And we say, if only I had been at those days or we look forward and say, man, it'll be so cool when I go there. And so we romanticize the future, but we fail to see one, the key thing that you and I get to honor today. And that is that the past is really no different than right now, but what we've done, let's talk about it with different terms and so it makes us feel, feel like it's different. [04:34.1]
That's good news, because that means that all the good stuff that seems like, well, that was in another era and we'll never be able to achieve that—wrong. It's fully accessible, now. It also means that all the negative stuff that, Oh that was in another era, well that's also accessible now. So that might be bad news for you because that might also be going on. And so I want to lay this out for you cause I was thinking about this the other day, going on a walk with my dog and I started recognizing this one thing I was thinking about the idea of prophets. Now, the Mormon Church, you know, one of their major tenants of doctrine is that there is a prophet alive on the earth today, a living prophet. And you know, I've been through my own journey in terms of faith around religion. And I've looked at things very, very deeply, I had to because the religion I grew up in didn't have the answers that I was needing for my life. It might've had the answers, but they, I couldn't see them. And so I kept looking everywhere I knew how to look at, I looked in the religion and I looked out of the religion. I looked in other religions all over the map. [05:35.1]
So I mean, I looked at other forms of Christianity. I looked at Buddhism and I looked at Daoism and I looked at certain Shamanic traditions. I wasn't really interested in just pure like atheism or anything. I looked into Scientology, I mean I looked into a lot of different traditions to understand and get answers for myself. And as I looked around, I recognized that in all of them, I created this sort of fantasy and glamour with Daoism and the martial arts. I had this view of all these martial arts heroes in the past that could do amazing things and work all these miracles, just like Jesus could. And they were on par with him and they were doing all these incredible things and all these stories being told. And I had this fantastical idea of them in my head. Why? Because I hadn't experienced. So I thought what they were talking about and because I hadn't experienced what they were talking about, I made up based on my past, I took my past my experiences and I dressed it up in some fanciful way in order to make it make sense. But in, so doing, I basically created a lie, a Mirage that had nothing to do with what was really happening. [06:43.9]
And I fantasized about it. And I just thought about all of these cool things I'd be able to do when I learned all the death points in martial arts, all the 36 different death points in the 18 time dependent points and, you know seriously injured points. And then the other 54 time dependent points that you know, what time and which combinations and all that other stuff I thought, Oh man, I'm gonna be an amazing warrior and I'm going to be able to do all these things. And then I'm learning Tai Chi and I'm going to manipulate all this energy and I'm going to move people across the room and all this other stuff. And I didn't realize that what I had done was create a massive fantasy that was driving all kinds of cool experiences in life, but it wasn't actually true. And we glamorized the past and we glamorized history. In fact, we glamorize our own history and we also demonize our own history. And we turn things into these absolute states and these extremes, right. And we say that was the best of times and that was the worst of times. [07:34.8]
When the reality is I, we had a client come to us the other day, working, dealing with serious depression. And she's like, no, I'm just like, what do I do about it when I'm just depressed all day long? And so we challenged her on her. We said, I want you to go back and we want you to check in at certain periods of time and you tell us like, think back on your day and how depressed were you? Were you actually depressed all day long? She came back to us two days later. She says, I'm sorry, I didn't get back to you. But it was just such a revelation to me because I looked back and I realized just how much happiness I have and how happy I am during the day and how much that just fills me up on the inside. And I didn't even realize it. I had just said, you know what, I'm struggling with depression. And I had forgotten that it was only a few moments in the day and all the rest of the 24 hours, I was either sleeping or, you know, sometimes I was stressed or worried, but other times I was super happy and super content and I couldn't even see it. She couldn't see it because she had diagnosed her past as depression. And as soon as we made her go look at it, she realized, Oh my gosh, I'm not depressed at all. [08:32.6]
And people do that all the time, they come to us and they have these like compulsive behaviors. And then they're like, no, no, but I'm a really happy person. And then we're like, okay, cool. Like on an average day, how happy are you? And they give us some astronomically hall, tall number, whatever. And then we're like, okay, cool, so why are we on the phone then? Then so then they start telling us about all these problems they haven't, and I have to ask them, so you're happy about these problems? And then they finally get honest with it. History has this crazy ability to make us completely turn it into a fantasy and ignore the realities of what it could possibly be. And in, so doing, we lose some of the greatest lessons and greatest empowerment we could possibly get by looking at it. So what are some of the things that I had to look at? Well, first it started with me looking at what this thing called a prophet was. And I was like, okay, cool, if they have a living prophet, what's a prophet?, there's a couple of definitions of it. One would be a prophet is somebody who's in touch with God or the source of creation and is able by their ability to perceive some things to declare either what is happening, what needs to happen, or what will happen in the future, right. [09:34.8]
Or to say, this is what God wants me to say, right. But it all boils down to their connection with, or ability to perceive what the creator is telling them. And so I had to look at this and I was like, okay, cool. What is this thing called the creator then? What are they in touch with? And, you know, Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” And so if God's going to live in the kingdom of heaven, I'm assuming he's within you too, call that an assumption if you want. And so immediately I was going, okay, well so they are in touch with something inside them that is giving them direct access to knowledge without them having to logically deduce it. And in some ways you could call that intuition, in some ways you could call it whatever. But ultimately what it boiled down to was that this person we call the prophet is somebody who could simply see, they could perceive some things that maybe other people couldn't perceive and in so doing we're able to operate in different ways and to warn people in different ways. [10:27.7]
And as I thought about that, I was like, wait a second; the world is full of prophets. There are economists that having studied the economy and looked at its trends and seeing some things going on, they can see what's happening and they're operating and choosing stocks and they're choosing what to invest in. And they're choosing all kinds of different behaviors based on what they can see is coming and they're out there warning people about what's coming. Now, are there false prophets? Well, there were back in the old days too. What are false prophets? People who feel like maybe they even feel like they're right, but they claim to be in touch with some really deep understanding and they're out there warning people about it and convincing people to behave in certain ways. Are there lesser and greater prophets? Yes, Jesus said as much, he said that John, the Baptist is one of the greatest prophets around. And so if we're looking at nowadays, there are people all over the planet that have greater and lesser degrees of perception of things as they really are, and greater and lesser degrees of attunement or awareness of that, which is powering all of his creation. [11:28.1]
And from that place, they are speaking, they are teaching, they are advocating that people take certain behaviors and they themselves are behaving in certain ways. And so there are prophets and there are political pundits and there are business makers that go out and their business strategists, they can go out and like, see what the market is looking for. And they have really good sense of those things. Warren buffet is somebody who seems to be at the head of the financial game a lot and he's somebody who like people look at him like, wow, this guy's probably got some great advice. You know, James Altucher, there's another one that's out there. And I don't know how good their advice is, so I'm not advocating it or not because I don't really follow them, that world. But there's a lot of prophets out there in the world. People that are in touch with a kind of information that they feel is true and that is indicating what course of action to take as we move forward, based on the way things are going in the world. [12:21.1]
Now, to be fair, a prophet and typically is a word we use for religious context, meaning they're in touch with God or creation. But even that there are gurus all over the world, spiritual teachers, all over the world that have had tremendous, powerful, mystical experiences where they have seen God, or they have been in touch with that, which is the whole of creation. And they're speaking from that level of realization and that level of direct perception. And they're telling people based on that, what are the best ways to live and what are the best things to do? And they're giving them practices and stuff. So there are prophets everywhere on the planet, but in my mind, I had the fantasy that there weren't, because that's an old school thing. And so when, you know, in the church I grew up in, we're talking about there being prophets, it felt like Holy cow, we've resurrected the past and now all these miracles are gonna happen and everything else. Priests, there are priests everywhere nowadays, anyway, but nowadays the prophets obviously are these experts you could say that have the ability to see into a situation, see what's there. You can in a way, call me a prophet in a very, very limited scope, right? [13:21.1]
So inside of a person who's struggling with addiction in their life. I have a really good capacity to pinpoint what's going on and what's going to happen in the future, what's been happening in there. Some of them were like, wow, Holy cow, did you like, how do you know my life story? And it's not that I know their life story, it's just that I have the ability to see in their words, how they're behaving, how they're acting, how they're holding themselves, certain patterns. And from those I can extrapolate what likely has happened. And so in one sense, you could call it that I don't claim that as a title or a prophet, cause I don't think it's useful for me, but just experts in general. So who are the priests? The priests are the ones that are upholding the administration and preserving all the rights and the rituals and the tradition and the culture, there's lots of those around. In religions, especially, but also outside of religion, there's tons and tons and tons and tons of priests, right? Tons of them. And these are like bureaucracies and these are employees and these are, you know, high level executives and people who are out there running the administration’s day-to-days, these are the, the COO, the chief operations officers and stuff like that. These are the priests and the high priests and the people that are doing that. [14:25.7]
Who are the preachers? The preachers that are going around sending the good news. These are people that are doing marketing and they're using their words and their language to try and help people understand that there's something really powerful, something really good going on. And I don't mean sleazy marketing. Yes. There are false preachers. You could call it, there have been in the old days, but I'm talking about like people that are going out and preaching the good word. And the difficulty is that we use these terms, prophets, priests, and preachers only in religion and so, because of that, it feels like they're separate things. They're not, they're the same thing. [14:57.5]
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. [15:25.6]
And so in a spiritual life, in a spiritual setting, you're looking for an expert spiritually who has the ability to see and understand and capacity to be able to grasp what's going to be best in your life. When it comes to priests in a spiritual setting, you're looking for somebody who has the capacity and understanding about the rituals to be able to perform them in a way that's going to be the most powerful for you, right? But outside of that, setting in a, in an executive setting, you're looking for experts that are going to be able to help you advise you in that way in a financial setting experts, they're in a relationship setting experts there. If you're looking for help from the outside, you're looking for experts. And usually you're going to run into preachers that are going to point you to the experts. [16:11.6]
First, these are going to be marketers, these are going to be advertisers, these are going to be MLM people and people knocking on your door and pamphlets and leave people leaving pamphlets and flyers, missionaries like that. They're the same thing. Just like in the past, they were Kings and kingdoms. These are S these are CEOs and there are business empires. In fact, they talk about them as business empires nowadays, right? There were wizards. Well, okay. People who seem to have some secret knowledge that could do amazing things that nobody seemed to understand. There are those people today that seem to have some gift with healing and other types of things. People go to them, energy healers and other people who do healings. You know, I myself have done some things that some people might call miraculous that in my mind, they're not miraculous at all. I perfectly understand how they work, but to other people, they look like the casting out of demons and they look like exorcisms and they look like, but I'm not doing that at all. All I'm doing is working with their body and system in a way that's helping release stuff that's been held in there. [17:09.1]
And how they understand it is based on their paradigm and their worldview. There are, there were bards in the old days. Well, we have actors and we have movie stars and we have radio radio hosts, and we have podcasters and there's bars everywhere, singing songs and telling tales. And there's authors people, writing books, all that was in the past is available to us now. There were heroes of great renown that went off to battle and did amazing tasks and it did amazing things. Nowadays, there are people that are finding cures to things and people that have been through a lot and coming back and helping people with their knowledge. You know, I've done some of that to a certain extent and not, I'm not, I'm not trying to toot my horn there either like I'm just trying to help you see that everything that was in the history, everything that's in the past is available to you now. So if you're reading scriptural texts and you're wondering why is it that, you know, in the time of Joseph Smith, for instance, why, why aren't those miracles happening now? Well, they could, it's not just that time of thing. It's just a question of seeing into reality the way it is and understanding how it works, and then being able to work with it in a way that makes those things possible. [18:12.1]
And the same thing with, if you're looking into deeper scriptural texts and why isn't that happening there, these things were written in an exaggerated way to put a point across. And because they were written in a semi exaggerated way, and let's be honest, you and I exaggerate stuff all the time. If you listen to the last episode last week, it happens all the time, we're always exaggerating. Even when we write in our own journals, we're exaggerating. And so we're doing that in order to bring out dramatic irony and to bring out the point of the story and to make meaning out of things. And because of that, we're using all these kinds of terms to exaggerate it. Well, what that does is it hides from us all of the opportunities that are available to us. Instantaneous, miraculous healings that feels like a thing of the past, it feels like something only Jesus would do. Bunk, that's my dad's favorite term for that. I love it. Wrong! They're not a thing of the past. They happen now, we call it placebo studies. And we call it… [19:03.4]
There was a guy who had cancer. There was an experimental drug that they use. He was the one that got the drug. And within like it was a very short amount of time, I think it was a week. I forget the lady who did the TedTalk on it, but it was like a week later, he came back in all of his symptoms, total remission. And then there was a news article that said that, that drug wasn't very good. And he came back and all of a sudden his cancer was back. And so the people were like well, let's just tell him he got a special batch. And so then a week later, his symptoms are gone and then, or the next time he visited, I don't know if it was weekly. And then, well, then there was another release that said, yeah, pretty much all of that drug doesn't work at all. And so then he came back and all of the symptoms came back and he, I think he eventually died from it. And then we're watching this flip-flopping of his, body's holding of this cancerous scenario simply because of his beliefs about things. So if you want to talk about faith healing and you will, let's talk about placebos, it's the same thing. Let's talk about shifting your mindset and getting rid of stuff. I do stuff like this all the time. I don't look at it as miraculous. It's simply how the bind and body work. [20:03.9]
And so if you're like, look, it's going to take forever to heal stuff, that's not scientifically possible. That's one way to look at the world, but all the magic and all the wonder and everything that was possible in the past is possible to you and I right now, when you can really see that it only seems like it's not possible because it seems like the world was different back then. It wasn't. There were people and human beings have had pretty much the same physiology for a long time and your mind and your body work in a very, very similar way. And even though consciousness seems to have developed, and the way people talk seems to have developed in certain ways, depending on who you're talking about in the end, everything that's possible for a human being has always been possible for human being. And so if you wanted to dance on that side of things, if you want to jump into the deep end of the lake and experience life in a sort of magical way, not to defy laws of nature or anything like that, but just to be able to use them to your advantage, then like you should come to one of our events, jump in, or at least start looking at your life in a different way, because the reality is there is nothing holding you back and all the things that you thought were holding you back, well, they're not. [21:11.4]
And what you see is possible in the past, that's possible for you right now and it always has been. And that one mentality is the thing that enabled me to have the courage to go and figure out how to end addiction permanently without having to worry about going back to it. And without having to worry about temptation and urges and all the other stuff, and what allowed me to end depression for myself, what allowed me to end all the anxiety and the suicidal tendencies and everything else. And what has allowed me to step into a life where happiness is like really simple and easy, because Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” And I thought, well, shoot, if it was possible for that guy, I'd like it to be possible for me. If there's anything I want to imitate about Jesus, it's that. It's possible, all of it is. And so as you're going about your week and you're looking at what's possible, and what's not possible, I want you to take a moment and recognize that there really are no limitations on what's possible for you. [22:08.5]
Outside of, you know, even in the past, sometimes we say, well, no, that was possible for them or that was impossible, you know, at all times, you know. And sometimes we glamorize their abilities and we assume that their abilities were greater than they were and they weren't. And so recognizing that some of the histories were exaggerated and that a lot of the stories that have come down to us have been exaggerated in order to prove a point there's a lot of hyperbole in them and a lot of orchestration of the text in order to prove a point. So recognizing that that's the case, if you really look down deeply into them, just being humans, interacting with their life, you will be surprised at just how miraculous life can be. And that to me is a life worth living; is a life where, where things are just joyful and glorious and miraculous, and it isn't always this log that has to be proven and justified in order to be real. So hopefully today we've given you a break and a reprieve from history, hopefully we've given you the, the desire to go back and read some of those things and look at history from a new light. From a light that says, well, shoot, if that's them and that's possible for them, what if that's possible for me? [23:11.6]
And what, what would I have to believe or think in order to be that way? And in what ways might it have been possible and maybe it's already happening, right. Maybe it's already happening right here and right now. That's a really, really good thing to think about. As an example, when I remember wanting the gifts of healing, I'd read about that in scripture quite a bit and I was like, man, I really want the gifts of healing. I've read about it; it's like a spiritual gift and whatnot. And that's something I'd like, I was running a martial arts school. I was teaching people how to destroy each other to the extent that I knew how. Let's be honest, maybe I wasn't that great, who knows? Right. I'm not interested in finding out, but I'd had some students get injured and I was standing there helpless one day going, wow, like I have an ice pack, that's it. I have no idea how to help these people. And he was like riding on the focus, he bumped his head on the cement floor and he was having a hard time with it. And so he disappeared for a week and then came back and you know, he'd had a concussion and he couldn't go to school. And then he had met some lady who did biodynamic craniosacral therapy. [24:15.7]
And she went in and it was a form of kind of energy healing you could call it. And within 45 minutes, like all of his symptoms had gone away and he was perfectly fine and whatnot. And he was just telling me this amazing story, and I was like, tell me who this woman is? Now for a long time, before that, I had been wanting to be able to heal people like I did. I wasn't interested in, and I didn't understand fully at the time, but I wasn't interested in simply like learning how to destroy people that felt out of balance and I wanted to learn how to heal people. And so I went through all this training and then like a couple of years later, I was thinking back on my life, recognizing all the people that I'd helped and I was like, wait a second. I already, I already have this gift of healing. It's just that I didn't put it into the same category as all of the old school people in the scriptures and everything else, because they were more glorious than I was. The saints were always more saintly back then, you know, they were always more Holy back then. And I didn't realize just how possible it was for human life. If there's anything I read in the Jesus story, it's him saying? You're just like me. And if it's possible for me, it's possible for you too. [25:15.5]
And if there's any message that I could give to people, I want them to say that I want them to see that too. No matter what you're struggling with, you're just like me. And if it's possible for me, I guarantee you it's possible for you. So go through this week and let's, let's cut the glamour off the past a little bit, look into it so that you can see the glamour of the present. [25:33.1]
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. [25:51.3]
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