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. [00:27.6]
Bob: All right, welcome back to the alive and free podcast. Today's episode, we're going to talk about pedestals and pits. Yes, that's right, pedestals and pits. A long time ago, I mean, it's fairly recent probably a year ago, year and a half ago or something like that. I ran into the work of Dr. DeMartini, who he has a breakthrough experience. He wrote the book, The Values Factor and, and a number of other things. Some of it's been really kind of a fresh look at some things, but one of the things he started talking about was the idea of putting someone up on a pedestal or a pit. So, let's start with what that's like. I live a life where I have figured out some things around the human body and the way that the human body and mind work. And I've figured out ways to use them that help produce not just emotional wellbeing and health, but also physical wellbeing and health. We've seen literal blood work that shows decrease in inflammation, healing from and receiving of like auto-immune diseases, things like Hashimoto's and stuff like that. We've seen, and the jury still out on a lot of it like that, we're seeing more and more come in, blood pressure stuff, all kinds of things like that. And as well as figuring out ways of handling addiction and whatnot. [01:49.5]
So, I started running retreats about a year and a half ago. And as I started running these retreats, it was a chance for me to in a year and a half ago. Yeah. It was a chance for me to get people in a room and do all the things that I had learned and show them all the things I had learned in a way that would enable them to shortcut that process for themselves. See, I had to travel all over the world all over the country, looking for teachers, looking for people who could guide me through processes and experiences that would allow me to drop all the pieces and to learn how to build a system of living that wasn't about fighting off addiction like I had struggled with or fighting off mental illness or fighting off things, but was a system built around. This is how the human mind and the human body are designed to work. And if you work with them in the way that creation has designed them, beautiful things start to happen. You start having happiness, just burst out of you. You start having health happen for you in profound and remarkable ways. Pain, disappears, and incredible kinds of spiritual experiences can happen. For no other reason than that, you're operating with creation the way it's designed. And I've said this many times before, with a USB stick, you can USB stick to throw it at somebody and wake them up from a nap. You can use it as a paperweight. You can use it to stir your hot chocolate, but that's not what it's designed for. And you can have beautiful experiences using a USB stick for anything it's not designed for, but when you operate with it, the way that it's designed a whole new world opens up and different possibilities can be there. [03:19.9]
And the same with the human system, you can have a lot of beautiful experiences with it, but when you operate it the way it's designed to operate, all of a sudden, other things start to happen, a whole new world opens up that you never dreamed possible. So, I started figuring things out and I wanted to share them with people and a lot of it is not verbal. A lot of it is movement and breath and nervous system training. A lot of it is emotional release experiences and sematic releases. A lot of it is non-verbal and just purely emotional. And it's helping people go process these things in a really rapid manner, just like I had to learn. And in the process of doing that, all of a sudden people started showing up and they start looking at me like I'm some sort of superhuman in some way. I have a podcast, so when they talked to me on the phone, they think they're talking to a celebrity, they meet me in person. And they think that I'm some kind of enlightened being or something like that. [04:12.5]
And as a result, what happens is they start to glom onto me a little bit and think that I'm the one that's going to save them. And when they put me up on a pedestal, they put themselves down in the pit. Let me repeat that. When they put me up on a pedestal, they put themselves down in a pit. You cannot put anyone up on a pedestal, it doesn't matter who you are in miring, whether it's Jesus, himself, or whether it's your mom or dad or some hero in the marketplace or me or yourself or anyone else, you cannot put someone up on a pedestal. And at the same time, not be in the pit because it's comparison all the time. That doesn't mean you can't have beautiful experiences with people, you can't admire the work that they do. But the minute you put them up on a pedestal as somehow a better class of human as somehow, something more than you you've already put yourself into a pit. In other words, you've cut yourself down. And the fake etymology that I like with the word compare is that whenever we're learning words, we make associations with these words based on how they sound, the letters that make them up, where the word came from, where we first heard the word and all of that stuff. [05:20.5]
The word compare to pair something is also to couple it with something like a pair, P A I R but also to pair something down or to cut it down to compare is to cut two things down together, to cut them down together. You're cutting off a piece of you and then you're cutting off a piece of them and you're comparing them and pretending those are the whole thing. So, I get people that put me up on a pedestal all the time. Well, here's the deal in my experience with addiction to pornography, right? A lot of, I figured out a way to end the compulsive nonstop, bingeing to end the cycles of binge, and then I'm free for a little bit and all that other stuff. But that doesn't mean that I was a hundred percent free of that particular behavior from the moment I figured it out back then, until now, there have been times where life had gotten so stressful that I found myself looking, going back to either search for porn or having the desire to go look for it or something like that. And getting involved in that for a little bit. And what would happen was those became massive learning experiences that because the addiction was no longer there, because the compulsion was no longer there, it allowed me to look at that circumstance just for what it was. And each of them became massive eye-openers for me and lessons were learned along the way. [06:37.9]
And as a result, I started to see that all behaviors and all emotions and everything that happens in a person's life are just lights on the dashboard. They're just indicators of what's going on underneath the surface. And if we treat the lights on the dashboard as the problem, and I've said this many times before, what happens is you try to find ways to cut the lights off, to like disconnect the line of electricity from the battery to the light. You try to find ways to suppress it. We'll talk about that in another episode, coming soon, culture of suppression. But the main thing here to understand is when you don't see what's happening in your life, as indicators of all that's going on in life, going through you, then what happens is you start to want to suppress it. And you want to suppress who knows about it, you want to suppress the behavior itself. And as a result, the real thing under the surface, doesn't get taken care of. [07:27.6]
Well, now that I was no longer suppressing it and freaking out about the behaviors, now, each of them became beautiful experiences in ways for me to understand what was going on. Every time I got angry doesn't mean I never got angry again, but every time I got angry, what would happen? Oh, that became an opportunity for me to see other things happening and deeper and deeper healing could happen. Now it takes courage to look at your life and not just make diagnostic dictations about what's going on to look at it and instead of saying, well, I just have an addiction or that's a relapse to look at it and say, Oh, this happened, and this is my responsibility. And I need to pick myself up from here and do all the other pieces with it. And so, it takes a little bit more courage and a little more strength. Well along the way of me figuring out all the pieces and bits and parts around emotional health and physiological health and all of the stuff that I've put together, I also took a time to experiment with psychedelics. These are things like mushrooms, psilocybin, right? And some other plant medicines, as well as Bufo, which is toad medicine, which is kind of a toad venom that is vaped and then inhaled and, and it takes the body through this kind of detox process that can create some different things. And I was looking at that through the lens of how could this possibly help me to discover what's really at the bottom of things. [08:45.0]
And I had some beautiful experiences with it. I really did. And at the time they helped clear some things, but I didn't quite understand it and some of them didn't make any sense to me. And there was this up and down of experience with it. And, but I found that I would go like, Hmm, I don't really need this anymore because it's not really solving anything from me. And then I find myself, somebody would make a recommendation or I'd go try something different. So, over the course of about a year and a half, I tried out a bunch of different things. And I knew, I knew that, that my wife was not super comfortable with this. She didn't want anything like that in the home. She grew up in an environment where there were police officers around. Her dad was a police officer and then also dare programs and, you know, church cultural things. And so, she was not super comfortable with it. And not that I blame her, but at the time I was like, well, she's just not educated about it, right; if she only knew. And so, I would go and experiment with this stuff away from home, where there was nobody else around and I didn't mention it to her. And I thought that I was protecting her right. [09:43.2]
And all of this, because I was trying to fix me. My whole life, I thought I was the problem. And if I can just fix me, then everything will be okay. So here I am married to a person who we've both committed to be the other person's go-to, to be the other person's man on deck to be the other person, to be there for the other person, to be the safe place that they can go. And I was going someplace else and she would talk to her family and whatnot, and she would go other places. And so, both of us got to a point where we had a relationship that we were online looking one year at people saying on Facebook, how they'd had this beautiful relationship and how, even though it had been ups and downs, like they would do it all over again, just to be with that person. And she and I had this running joke that was, I wouldn't do it over again, if I had known that this is what I had to go through, I wouldn't do it over again. And it was this running joke until a little bit recently where I started looking at that thinking, maybe that's a problem. Maybe it's a problem to look at the other person in your life, the one you've committed to in some way, shape or form. And to say to them, you know what, you're really not worth that much. [10:46.4]
You know, I'm already losing on this investment here that I've made. And that was too much. You're not worth that much. Maybe it's a problem that you wouldn't want to go through hell with that person just because that person is there. You know, wouldn't it be a better sign of a relationship, if you could look at that person and say, I don't even care if I go through hell as long as I get a pinch your bum along the way I'm in. But no, instead our relationship was one where we had tremendous amounts of happiness and joy and excitement and yet we were both kind of okay on our own, being independently, fixing our stuff and not really together as one. [11:21.2]
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. [11:50.4]
So, a part of my explorations were to go and find things on my own and to solve things on my own. Well, she not okay with it, so I was protecting her. I thought I was protecting her and eventually it came to a point where I wanted to go and just tell her, right. And I had a hard time telling her, I kind of like asked questions and got her to coax it out of me and whatnot and did the best that I knew how. And as I told her, boom, all of a sudden, for the second time in my married life, we're looking at the possibility of separation. We're looking at this possibility now for the first time, though, not from a place of, Oh, Bob's a bad person and he did all this stuff. Not from a place of trauma, but from a place of like, are the two of us as we look at each other together, do we really want to be with each other for no other reason than that, that's the person we want to be with? Is the motive for staying together, one because of comfort or purity or anything else? Is the motive for staying together because we don't want the kids to know, or we don't want the neighbors to feel bad? Or is it simply because no, I just want to be there for all of what this other person is. And so, we had to step back and look at, you know, what, look at our relationship that we've built, look at what we've done. The two of us together built this. And, you know, we both created a place where neither of us felt like we could fully open up and fully be there and fully explore and experiment a place where both of us felt like, yeah, we could cope, we could manage. But we had built in some level, a relationship of mutual toleration. [13:20.8]
Now on the outside, I don't know that anybody would have like noticed that and stuff because we laughed a lot. We joke a lot. We were together a lot. We spend time together. We raised the kids and I think we raised them; we're doing a decent job. And yet still underneath the hood is this, it's not a place where either party is a hundred percent safe. Even if we're only 99% safe, are we a hundred percent safe to open up fully to let all of our bits and pieces be shown to the other person, knowing that they're going to do nothing, but celebrate all of the mistakes and all of the successes and everything along the way. So, when I told her that it was at the end of one of our retreats and I came home, I came downstairs after that. And I told all the guys that we were doing our morning routine and I told them what had happened. And I looked at him and I said, look, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if Jasmine and I'll stay together. I don't know if our marriage will, is on its last legs because of all the things I've done. And I've learned a lot of lessons that, you know, in an effort to try and experience all of life, there are certain pieces of life that you can't experience. And, you know, I shared a few things with him and I let him know like, don't put me on a pedestal, don't sit there and think that, okay, well, if Bob's going well, then everything's gonna go well for me. But if his life tanks then, so I guess this isn't going to work for me. Don't treat me as the reason why the stuff you've learned is going to work or isn't going to work. [14:42.6]
Look at what you've done for yourselves. Look at the kind of things you've learned. Look at the processes you've been through. Look at what you've been able to explore and let go of. And recognize that none of that has anything to do with me. It has everything to do with how your body and your mind work. It has nothing to do with me. So rather than put me up on a pedestal and put yourself down in the pit, like you don't know anything I'm telling you here and now look at what you have done. And yes, I've been able to show you some things and don't give up on those things that you've learned, just because I'm still figuring some other things out. Just remember, you've learned this, you've done this. And you need to start looking with your own eyes and your own ears. I think one of the most powerful phrases in scriptures of many, that there are, is the idea that, he, that hath ears to hear, let him hear that God gave you eyes and gave you ears and maybe it's time that instead of looking through my eyes and my ears and other people's eyes and other people's ears, that you start looking with your own eyes and your own ears and opening your own heart and understanding. Because it's too easy to outsource understanding because we can blame other people. I've seen too many people praying to God for confirmation, that they should do a thing because then it allows them off the hook if it doesn't work, they're busy trying to blame God for their decisions. And they can praise God if it works and they can blame, if it doesn't work and they can still treat themselves like a victim in their own life. [16:08.7]
Rather than stepping up and doing their best, it doesn't mean you don't include God in the mix. It doesn't mean you don't pray. It means that you step up and you do your best and you stop shifting responsibility. And the same thing goes here. When you put someone up on a pedestal, whoever it is, you put yourself in a pit. You make life harder for yourself. When you put yourself up on a pedestal, you put other people in a pit. And so, as my yoga guru teacher who I've learned many things from, he said, one time, he said, don't look up to me, don't look down at me, just look. If you can really see what's there, beautiful things can happen for you. But as soon as you're looking up and you're looking down, you're no longer seeing things clearly. And so today, as we're talking about pedestals and pits and what happens, I want you to think around all the people in your life that you admire and how many times you compare yourself with them. And how many times do you cut yourself down, thinking you're not as good as them because you haven't been through the same experiences as them. I can't tell you how many people come up and they're like, Holy cow, Bob, you've learned so many things you've done so much, it's. How does one people person do that in a lifetime? [17:13.8]
I guarantee you, if we looked at their life, the same thing would happen, but we discount and we put down our own past and our own history and our own path and our own pain. Because somebody else's looks a little bit more glamorous or a little more glorious or just different and we think, Oh, no fear of missing out FOMO. I didn't do what they did, so I'm not going to, it's not going to be possible for me. And this whole idea of having to be the same as someone else of comparing your life with somebody else's life is absolutely ridiculous. You were born to be you, no one else. And I don't care. Who's teaching it to you. Whether it's someone you Revere, whether it's a church official or anyone else, the creator didn't make a mistake when you were born. And I'm going to stand by that because I don't know what kid you could look at, what baby you could look at coming out of the wound where you're going to be like, Oh, see that one's imperfect right there. And yet how many people walk around the planet saying yes, while we're all imperfect, where have they seen this imperfection? They learned it. They learned about it from other humans, judging each other and then offering this story of, Oh, well, we're all imperfect as a way of comforting you. It is not a comfort to tell you, it's okay that you're judging yourself as imperfect. That's not comfortable at all. And it doesn't come from you looking with your own eyes and your own ears. It comes from you listening to other people's ideas. I don't think that creator made a mistake with you or me or anyone else. I don't think there's anything wrong with you or me or anyone else. It's just that we've been given a mind and body and we have learned to various degrees how to use them. And if you haven't learned, well, it's natural that if you don't know how to drive the vehicle, you're probably going to run into some fences or grind the engines or cause some problems it's natural. [18:55.2]
Does that mean there's something wrong with you or does it mean simply that you don't know how to do the thing yet? That's all. And so, when you're looking around, how many times are you comparing yourself with other people? How many times are you comparing yourself and making yourself feel better? Oh, well at least I didn't do that. Or worse, Oh my gosh I only, if only I wish I could have done this. Oh man. How many times are you comparing yourself with a vision of who you think you ought to be? Which is not what you are right now You've made up a fantasy of some ideal version of yourself and then you're comparing yourself to that also not true. Where is this ideal person that you think you ought to be, who you are right now is who you are meant to be. And that's perfect. And every moment you're trying to suppress that or turn that down or try and improve that instead of simply allow what is there to grow within you, which can be a beautiful, amazing, surprising experiences, and will take you to places that you never even dreamed of is the moment that you're cutting yourself down. You're putting yourself on a pedestal or you're putting that future version of yourself on a pedestal and yourself in the pit. And either way, all humans suffer when this kind of comparison happens. [20:02.4]
So, as we're rounding up today and we're closing down and we're looking at all of the things that go into this type of discussion around putting someone on a pedestal or pit, I'm going to invite you to, to learn from what I've shared with you, to try it out and test it out, but to don't put me on a pedestal and don't put yourself in a pit. And in like manner, when you've learned something or figures figured something out, don't put yourself on a pedestal and don't put me in a pit, just look at what's there. I'll probably repeat this at a future time, but I think one of the most beautiful messages that I see in the writings around Jesus happens at the time of the last supper. He's got his disciples convened and they're taking bread and whether or not you're Christian or not, this same kind of thing has happened in many traditions. So, listen carefully. He's got them around for a Passover supper and he breaks bread and he picks it up and he says, “This is my body, right. Eat this in remembrance of me.” And a lot of people take this to mean, this is literally Jesus's body or it transforms to become his body. Or Jesus is such a separate, unique individual that you know, we're doing this just to remember him and to take some of his goodness into us. And there's a lot of different interpretations about this. It's in remembrance and symbolism of them. It's all of these things. But I seem to recall that during his ministry, there were two separate statements written about that he had said, one of them was, I am the light of the world, but another one was that you are the light of the world. [21:33.4]
In this he seems to be saying, we're the same. And to me, I think it's a more powerful message to recognize that possibly just possibly, if Jesus is the same as us than what he's capable of so are we, but if he was some alien species of divinity, that was nothing like us, then there's no chance of us becoming like him and that we're victims. And I know a lot of you may disagree, but here he is sitting in the Passover supper, picking up a piece of bread and saying, this is my body. Why would he say that? Because when you eat bread, your body, your body turns it into you. You literally are what you eat. So he's holding up a piece of bread, going look, we're made of the same stuff. Don't look up to me. Don't look down to me, just look and see what's there. Some people do have tremendous capacities that you can take advantage of. There are grand possibility for humanity, but the possibility is in you too. And so as you're learning and doing things and seeking freedom from addictions or emotional struggles or past traumas or anything else, whether you come and come to a retreat with us, or whether you learn it from somebody else, whatever you're doing, take a moment and recognize that every time you put anyone on a pedestal, you cut yourself down and it's too easy to discount what someone says, because you've put them into a pit. And it's too easy to believe what someone says, because you've put them onto a pedestal. What matters is that you see what's really there and use what works. [23:08.4]
I honor, every single one of you who listens for the journeys you've gone on for the types of things you've had to learn and go through in order to come to this place in time. Not one of you do I look at as less than me, not one of you do I look at it as more than me, but I look, I have learned much from many of you and we'll probably continue to do that. And at the same time, I share what I've learned and don't discount what is possible, just because the person sharing it with you happens to still be figuring some other stuff up. And don't also believe what that person is saying, just because they've figured one thing out Try it in your own life, see if it works. And if it works for you, that means it works for you. It doesn't even mean it doesn't work for other people, if it doesn't work for you. It doesn't mean it'll work for everyone, if it works for you. But all that matters is that you live your life happy and joyful and free. And part of that is going to require not judging other people as better or worse than you. And finally, finally, just looking and seeing what's there and committing yourself to doing what brings happiness to you and walking your own path. Because that's the only path you were born to walk. You were born to be you, no one else. And this moment is never coming back. So don't waste it, trying to be anyone else, just enjoy your life and use the resources and the people and the things around you to enhance that. [24:33.1]
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. [24:51.3]
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