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.
(00:35): Welcome back to the alive and free podcast. Today. I wanna go in through the back door a little bit about human wellbeing, about what at 10 aches to get rid of things like depression, anxiety, and addiction, and trauma and all those things. But more than that, around what it takes to build a life that is by default filled with a feeling of freedom of happiness and all the other things that we tend to be chasing most of the time in our life. What's interesting is that the United States itself was built on the notion of the pursuit of happiness. And I want you to take a stop and just think about that for a second. We give everyone the chance to pursue happiness, not to have happiness, not to be happy in their own, right? No, no. We're gonna sit here and we're gonna pursue happiness.
(01:21): And how many of the people in the United States spend their entire life pursuing and never actually achieving never actually feeling, never actually experiencing the happiness that they've been chasing, because the very idea that you can pursue happiness means that it's somehow outside of you, which is backwards to the way it's actually built. That's backwards to the way your body is built. And so often we pursue that on the outside. Cuz we think that outside appearances are the thing or we think that some achievement or something else is the thing, but let's today back up and talk about some things that may seem tangentially related, but are all sort of examples of the same process. If you go to a supermarket today, you walk into the super a market, you're looking for some fruit to buy and you happen upon some oranges. You look at the outside of the orange and the main question you're asking yourself, or is, does it look juicy?
(02:13): Does it look ripe? Does it look like a really good orange to eat? And when you cut into it and you see the color on the inside, as long as it's juicy and whatnot and tasty, you think that you've gotten all of the nutrition to that, that orange could give you. But the reality is on the inside because of what we have done to the soil on the planet and a lot of the farming processes and other things that we've used over over time, the orange that you eat today, you would need to eat eight or nine of them in order to be able to have the same amount of nutrition that comes to you from that same orange that would've been there like a hundred years ago, you have to eat that much more fruit and vegetables, even though they're tasty. Even though they look plump and ripe, even though on the outside in the supermarket, they all seem to see, to look healthy and happy and whole on the inside, they are devoid of nutrition and they cease to produce the kind of wellbeing that we're hoping to, to give ourselves.
(03:07): Now think about that for a second. With regard to human life, there are so many things that we dress up in different clothing and we make them look, imaculate on the outside, but on the inside, they're still not all that great. You see black tie affairs, you see you know, church meetings and every, everybody is putting clothes on to look their best. But the funny thing about clothing is in Hebrew, in the Hebrew language, the word for clothing, the root word for to clothe where the word for clothing comes from. And there's actually two words, one for a robe that the priest would wear. And one for just the general word for clothing, both of them have this meaning of, to act treacherously or to be faithless or to lie basically. Now why would the word for clothing be synonymous with the word for a faithless act or a treacherous act or a lie?
(03:59): Why would that be the case? Why would a language who has a word for clothing, which is something that everybody's using have that word mean? That it's something about falsehood and the reality is this. When you cover yourself up, you cover yourself up, you hide what you don't want other people to see you clothe yourself in other clothes. And hu humans are basically like Camille in many ways, we don't do it maliciously. And many times we're doing it to just protect ourselves from the elements, but that's, what's going on. We're protecting ourselves with our clothing. I gotta dress up. I gotta look my best. You can only ever be yourself. But somehow we have to put on makeup. That is, I have to make myself up to seem like I'm different than what it is now because I've judged myself as not good enough for this scenario.
(04:43): And there's a lot of self-judgment in that kind of thing. It's no different than in our food choices. We have engineered our food to look and taste the way we want it to look and taste. But the real reason we have food is for nourishment. And that is what is missing. The more we contrived engineer going on with our food sources, the more problems we start having with nutrition from the same food sources. And this comes all the way back down to soil. So basically soil is filled with loads of microorganisms. The, the top 12 to 15 inches of top soil is just loaded with all kinds of bacterial life, POS viral life, all kinds of microorganisms, all over the place in the soil. And it's those bacteria that actually produce this fertile area for plants to grow. If you take the microorganisms out of the soil, what you get is sand.
(05:34): And there's not a lot that can grow in sand. That's why we have desertification happening all over the planets and rivers drying up and all kinds of other stuff. It's not necessarily because, oh, well, it's just getting hotter. The back the bacteria, the microorganisms in the soil are dying off and now the soil can't hold moisture. Can't retain heat, can't grow plants. The ground cover. Doesn't fix nitrogen back into the soil. It's not this self-sustaining loop anymore. And the, the desert seem to go that direction. It's actually these micro organisms that are inside of the soil that are the tiny building blocks out of which the food that we eat comes from. It's an incredible diverse scenario that goes on. That's why you do mulch. And that's why you do compost and all of different things in order to make sure that the soil has a richness to it and tons of minerals and what not from which the plants can grow.
(06:25): There's some we can get away with fertilizing it and adding more mineral salts to the soil that include increases sort of electrical conductivity in the soil and stuff. You can do that for a while. That's what fertilizer is and does. But over time, if there isn't organic plant material that dies off and is reintroduced into the soil. And if there isn't organic animal material that dies off and is reintroduced to the soil so that it continues to decompose decay and become rich fertile ground for new growth to come from, then what happens is you just have a buildup of salts in the soil and that depletes its ability to continue to produce. And then on top of that, when you plow up the first 12 to 15 inches of top soil, all those microorganisms are now exposed to the sun for no reason at all.
(07:15): When all you needed was to dig one hole to plant something. And so now you have an entire field of microorganisms that are being killed off and baked in the sun and where they can't live anymore. That's why they're underground. And so slowly, all of the fertility of the earth itself is dying off just because of the way that we are operating with it. Not that it's not capable of regenerating, but the way we continue to operate it actually is robbing us of what we are hoping to get from it. We're tilling it so that we can plant things so that we can eat. And in the method that we're tilling, it we're ending up causing more problems for ourselves down the line. Even though right now, there might be a little boost of a payoff. This same thing happens with our diet. And so we take from soil, we get these plant material and we go in and do you know that most of what it is that actually fuels your body isn't food, but it's bacteria poop.
(08:05): It's stuff that the bacteria inside of your gut, one of the most diverse microorganism forests in the entire planet and each person's gut microbiome is different. Just like your immune system. They are as different as fingerprints, really. And it has to do with what you feed yourself and what's going on and the, and how chemically you hold yourself and all these different things that are happening. 90% of the serotonin that is produced in the body is produced inside of your gut. That's right. We're talking about feel good things that come from activities that we have, that we engage with on the planet. And a lot of people 'em to us for pornography addiction or depression and whatnot. And they're dealing with this like slump. Well, the serotonin, it, a lot of it is produced in the gut, which is why a lot of people feel good when eating, but it doesn't actually, it's not gonna be able to produce it as well.
(08:54): If we continue to have a, an unbalanced ecosystem inside of our gut, those bacteria eat and break down the food in such a way that it can be passed through the intestinal wall into us. If you think about it really, really clearly, there's a tube that runs from your mouth to your butt. Yes, I did just use the word butt, get over it. Anything inside that tube, isn't part of you yet. It only becomes part of you when it passes through the intestinal wall and then enters the bloodstream and is, you know, processed by the liver or other places, and then moved around through the system until that happens. It isn't a part of you. It is a part of the microbiome, so to speak, it's a part of the little forest that lives inside of your intestines. And if that forest isn't treated well, if it's not maintained well, if it's not fed the right materials and so on and the right building blocks, then it can't poop out the right stuff and have waste products of the right stuff.
(09:53): That then is vegetable by humankind. And so the more we try to eat and pump our fruits and vegetables and foods for all of this flavor where we're trying to just have our tongue be satisfied instead of the rest of our body. Pretty soon, we're not able to produce the kinds of things that our bodies want. So yeah, we might be able to build big muscles and pound a whole bunch of caffeine and have energy and all of these other things that have been going on for a long time, but the cost down the road is malnutrition. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of the research that happens today around what your average American is and, and what is healthy and what is not healthy. One of the reasons why there's some flaw in that kind of research, as much as scientists try to, to correct for it is that everybody that's doing the research, designing the research and involved in the search is malnourished is under slept, is overstressed is, you know, hopped up on YouTube and Netflix binging.
(10:49): And isn't very physically active and is a chronically misaligned with their posture. And there's all these different things that have been going on for a long period of time. And those are the people that we're studying. And those are the people who are designing the studies, meaning they're blind to some of the things that they're suffering. And those are the people that are interpreting the data of the studies. And so there's necessarily a lot of interesting flaws that come into the studies. Like I mentioned last week where it's not by any malicious intent do generally speaking, it's not like there are, I'm sure there are people that falsify evidence and whatnot, but generally speaking, these are people out searching for the truth, but out searching for the truth with blinders on because they think they've done everything that's needed in order to nourish themselves. But they've actually missed the boat in many ways.
(11:32): So humans, we are nourished by all of these little building blocks and it's out of those building box that come these feel good chemicals, by the way, one whiff of really good fertile soil releases oxytocin in the system. In other words, one deep smell of rich soil releases, the same chemical that is released when you touch another human being and to build connection, because we are part of the earth, the stuff we eat eventually becomes the human body. We make the human body out of those building blocks. And so it does build connection back to the source from where we came. So being, this is why I walked barefoot a lot, right? Being in the soil, being in contact with the planet. It's very important. But if that planet is poorly fed and poorly nourished, then we have some other issues that start to build up because we're not able to find that same level of nourishment for ourselves as well.
(12:23): And the connection and some of the other after effects that come from it, aren't there at the same time, right? There are visual stimuli that come from being in contact with the soil, all these other things. But basically what we're talking about is building blocks. Now at the beginning, I said, Hey, I want to talk about kind of a back door to human wellbeing. And that back door is called, is building blocks. I was just walking down the street today on a walk and I was passing by some builders. There's some new homes and a new subdivision being built in the area. And I was looking at these people who were starting to frame up a new house. The foundation had been laid and they're laying some of the, the base plates and they're getting the walls started to be built up. And one kid was observing some more experienced framer there.
(13:06): And as I was looking at him, I thought to myself, you know, what would it be like if instead of, you know, two by fours and the stuff that they're given, we just give them RO two by fours or hollow two by fours to the point where they don't really know that it's hollow. It did, the boards are maybe a little bit lighter. Maybe they're marketed as something that's a more, that's more efficient and it costs less to transport them because there's less of a load and they're marketed as stronger, but really they're hollow on the inside. And that's really the thing. And there isn't the same level of strength, foundational strength that comes to this wood. Well, if we start building a house out of wood, that's hollow, not a single one of you, I would guess, would be okay with that would be okay with the builder of your home, swapping out normal wood for wood that is missing a part of itself on the inside without some significant reinforcement, nor do I think any of you would be okay with someone swapping out the kind of carpet or tile or floor or, or fixtures or things that you had chosen to be in your home for a cheaper version of it long time ago.
(14:05): And I doubt this is I maybe it's maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But a long time ago, I heard that even Walmart used to have separate warehouse, like some manufacturers would've separate warehouses for stuff, they for Walmart, because Walmart demanded that they'd be such a low price that these other warehouses would sell the same product, but they would make it cheaper to sell at Walmart. Now, I don't know if that's actually true. It made me skitish to buy anything electronic at Walmart for a long time. It may not be the case at all, but you can see how that would be problematic, right? And yet right under our noses, the same thing is not only happening with their food, it's happening with our wellbeing. If you or someone, you know, is looking to drop the FBO 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 want some help doing it. Head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now 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
(15:11): Everywhere you look, people are using all kinds of interesting flashy, kind of exotic looking methods for wellbeing, or very, very meticulous sort of pharmaceutical ones, meaning take this drug or take this thing and it'll improve your memory, take this thing and it'll stop your brain from malfunctioning this way, take this thing and it'll get rid of your or depressive moods. Take this, take this take that what's happened is that the building blocks out of what you've built your life. Aren't there to produce the wellbeing you want. And so all of these little things that you see out there as ways of getting wellbeing are literally shortcuts. They're like bandaids in a way they're attempts to kind of gloss over what's there and make it seem like everything's okay. And everything's not okay if you're not giving the right building blocks. If I S stock a vending machine full of rotten fish, it doesn't matter which buttons you push.
(16:02): You're gonna get rotten fish, but you know, maybe a rotten fish comes out. And instead I give you this really amazing kind of powder to sprinkle on 'em that is, has an overpowering smell to that kind of kills the smell or neutralizes the smell of the rotting fish and adds this kind of cool flavor to your tongue. So it tricks your body into thinking, wow, this is amazing. Now, all of a sudden you don't realize, oh no, no, it's okay. I can live a life with rotten fish. It's not a big deal because I have this powerful medication or this powerful process that helps get rid of that. And what happens over time is that your body, your whole life is fed this rotten product, this rotten thing that isn't nourishing you at all. And you're just kind of like biting your time with surface measures.
(16:44): The building blocks of wellbeing are not pharmaceuticals. The building blocks of wellbeing are not fancy techniques and tools. They're not talk therapy. They're not any of those things. The building blocks of wellbeing are the same building blocks that build just a healthy human life. They're the same, your thoughts, your emotions, your behaviors, every single one of them is a byproduct. And it's only a byproduct. The building blocks that you have put together in your life. And if you are, if you have bad raw materials to start with it doesn't matter what you build out of it. It might be shiny and last for a bit, but then it'll crumble. I remember when I was learning to do framing like frames for fancy pictures and stuff at a museum that the carpenter there, he was like, yeah, a little putty and a little paint makes a harped or what he ate.
(17:35): In other words, he's not building homes. He just has to build display cases. And so if, if it doesn't work perfectly, that's okay. We can put it in. We can paint it over. No one will know that there are gaps in holes and it doesn't quite line up. And it's not the dirtiest thing in the planet because it's just a showcase. It's just a display. It's not actually real. It's like building stage props. It's not a rock folks. It's paper mache. It might look like a rock from a distance. And if you have a really good painter, it might be convincing that that's a rock from a distance. And yet still it's just paper mache, throw that at something. And it's not really gonna knock, knock down the door to help you escape, try to stand on it. It might hold your weight for a little bit.
(18:14): Depends on how much, you know, what they put in the armature or something like that. But it's not gonna be the same. It's not a rock. And we've done that with our wellbeing. We've bypassed all of the building blocks. And now what we're doing is only working with byproducts. We're only season the rotten fish instead of stalking the vending machine with something much, much better. So what does that mean in terms of practical stuff day to day? Well, what does that mean? That means in therapy sessions, what are we doing? We're talking about our thoughts and our memories, but memories and thoughts are inherently things that our reactions to what's happening inside of us and outside of us, your mind is in some ways a reflex organ and your memories are reenactments in the moment of something that you think and everything that is going on right now, you are reinterpreting the past based on what's real right now, our language is built this way.
(19:06): When you say a sentence, like the meaning of a sentence changes with each word that you add. So the very first word of a sentence, let's say the first word is the, that doesn't really mean much. Then if I say cherry, oh, now you have not just Cher, but a particular cherry in mind. And then I say was, oh, something happened to the cherry. Now you're reinterpreting it. And I can say Eaton, and now you're imagining bites in it. And I can say, bye. And now expectation is there. Oh, it was an, it was an, an object thing. And then I could say a magical pinata. And now the whole meaning of the sentence changes just based on each word that's added. And we, this is, we practice this all day long by talking, which means that you are practicing it all day long when you think as well.
(19:51): And every memory, every thought you have is the same way. The, the events that have happened in your life, you stack together, just like you stack words in a sentence, and then you go in and when a new event happens, you reinterpret all the old stuff as if it had a new meaning, which is why, for instance, a wife comes up and she sees, she catches her husband. Like she sees some porn on his, on his phone or something like that. And so as soon as she sees that, and then, you know, he divulges stuff that's been going on. Her thought process is I thought everything was okay. And apparently it wasn't. And Jasmine has told this to me in the past several times throughout the course of our marriage and what happened in that moment, she had another piece of information added. And then she went and reinterpreted all of her past experiences, the ones that she was genuinely happy in, she literally robbed herself of the happiness of those memories with a new piece of information, because that's the way language works.
(20:48): That's the way our minds have been trained to operate, because that's how our language is built. Now that doesn't make her a bad person. And that doesn't mean it. It's not happening like that. We're gonna somehow stop it magically in this moment. But once you can see what's happening, that will change things. But Bob, isn't irresponsible to not take into well, if he was lying that whole time, then our marriage whole thing was a sham. Technically your experience of it was what it was. And if you enjoyed the whole thing, oblivious to all this negative stuff going on, why Rob yourself of all the good stuff, just because you've got some new information, the new information will determine what you wanna do next that's okay. That's wisdom, but it doesn't have to Rob you of all the past, right? So we start, we go into therapy session.
(21:33): We start talking about our memories, but our memories are influenced by how we feel by what's been going on around us. It's a, it's a trap. You can't fix the mind that way in the same way, thoughts and in the same way, behaviors years are a means of coping with the thoughts and feelings that we're having. That's it? So yes, talking about them and adjusting them, paying attention to these are all important pieces of the puzzle, but we've put the part cart before the horse. And so what has a lot of medicine done? They go, well, obviously, well, it's a chemical imbalance. They've gone back to the body, which I think is brilliant it's wise. But what they're trying to do is sprinkle the seasoning on the rotten fish and not learn how to restock the thing. They keep trying to tweak the human mind.
(22:17): They keep trying to change human genetics. They keep trying to make a new technology that will stop the human body from doing what it's been designed to do. Here's a new flash, depression and anxiety, addiction, PTSD, all of these other things, not a single one of them is a problem. They are natural and normal outcomes of human behavior. Given the raw materials you've been building with, if you want a different experience, you have to have different raw materials, but they are not problems. They are normal express of human life, given the kinds of inputs and the kinds of stimulus and the kinds of environments and the kind of building blocks you you've been working with. But what we do is we've gone in and we've been like, I don't like that. The body does this. I want to continue living this lifestyle. I want to continue building with these cheap materials, but I just want the body to be as powerful and long lasting.
(23:10): And as eternal as some of the old ancient structures that have been built in centuries past, yeah, I don't want my home breaking down in the next 50 to a hundred years. No, no. I want it to last like the ancient temples of the Egyptians and some of these others that have just been there forever, these monumental architecture, but I still wanna build with this cheap kind of material. Can you see the problem with that? The building blocks are where you have to start focusing. And that's what we focus with with our clients all the time. We're literally teaching them very specific ways to breathe and to just practice that and to move and to just practice that and to like think and to how to relax their muscles and how to be aware of what's changed when things are happening and how to come back and center themselves inside of their body.
(23:56): Oh, what's your posture like? And we spend a lot of time helping them stabilize their wellbeing with better building blocks. Before we ever go, go to the byproducts of thought and behavior and beliefs about self and stuff, because almost all of it can be taken care of when you put the body in a better space. And that includes nutritional things that we have them do. That includes a bunch of other things and it's not hard work. What's cool is it's a lot of fun. It's a cool exploration. It's about learning how to drive this incredible machine. The most sophisticated machine on the planet called the human body and mind it's about learning how to read what's going on with it and how to practically work with it in such a way that by default, the natural byproduct of it is freedom is health and happiness and wellbeing.
(24:46): And it's not like some weird ancient secret that only a few people are no it's there. It's right in front of us. It's just that we've got so hung up on the external appearances, the clothing, the thoughts, the behaviors, what it looks like is happening. That we forgot that it's the building blocks always that need to be attended to when you want flower to grow. It's not sitting there thinking about flowers, growing, talking about how beautiful it's gonna be giving it affirmations. There is some evidence. It seems there's some research that seems that there is some positive influence on plant growth. If you are, you know, offering it kind words or playing certain kinds of music around it, stuff like that, for sure. But if you don't give it soil and sunlight and water, it doesn't matter how much you jam Mozart at it. It doesn't matter how many words of gratitude you expel toward it.
(25:40): It doesn't matter if the building blocks of life aren't there, the flower will not bloom your life. And mine is like a flower. Most often too many people die as seeds because nobody ever taught them about building blocks. When you go to school, what are the subjects? You learn their thoughts, their behaviors, their skills. They don't teach you about emotions and where they come from. They don't teach you about your breath. They don't teach you about how posture and movement and tension patterns and all the, and how thoughts inter inter lace in there and how the body produces these. That's not taught in schools. We forgot about the building box. We assumed maybe that they were gonna be taught at home, but that went away a long time ago, if it was ever present in Western society. And what we're left with is a lot of people who are basically sitting in VAs of acid all day long, their own acidic pH in their own blood.
(26:36): And wondering why they're irritable, wondering why they're anxious, wondering why they're depressed. Anybody would be if they had to sit in acid all day long. And the only reason they're sitting there isn't because they're incapable or because they're dumb or because they're imoral is because nobody taught them the building blocks. If you want to learn how, at least the stuff that I've figured out so far, and I'm still learning, but if you wanna learn what the basics of are, how to start with better building blocks so that your body and your mind produce wellbeing and freedom by default, naturally on their own, as a normal expression of human life. Then by all means either, you know, sign up, schedule calls, see if one of the programs we have is, is available to you, go to the freedom specialist.com, check out some of those. And if you ask me the best place to do it is at the retreat, cuz it's a very intensive four days with a lot of cool prep, work in advance and, and some great support afterwards to just jumpstart that process for you to where you don't have to spend another year or two, trying to learn it all, you can get it, jump started and then you can go and we have retreats coming up one for the women here in a couple weeks now.
(27:45): And then we only do one of those, I think a year. And then we have another one for the men in may and then another one at the end of the summer. And so if that's of interest to you, please schedule, call, sign up. But whatever you do, I want you to start paying attention to the building blocks of your life. That might mean for you food. What kinds of food don't think about getting rid of the bad? Just think about starting to add the good. Okay. Think of it as an additive process that maybe crowds out some of the bad. Do you do a green smoothie in the morning? Try that. Do you understand breathing? Maybe start there. Maybe it's just getting up and going on a walk every day, cuz there's a more sedentary lifestyle than maybe you'd like and get your body moving.
(28:24): Whatever is start with some better building blocks. And you might surprise yourself how quickly you can turn some things around that you thought were only mental, emotional problems. Nope. Those are byproducts. It's the building blocks you need to focus on and that's it for today's alive and free podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more free gum bombs landing in your earbuds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcast 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.
(29:04): This the podcast factory.com.
