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've 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): And welcome back to the alive and free podcast. Today, we get to talk about giving up. Yes, my friends, you and I get to be quitters today. Isn't that amazing? So many people are trying to overcome addiction or they're trying to overcome depression, or they're trying to overcome anxiety or trying to overcome relationship struggles or trying to conquer their trauma or become a survivor. And I am inviting everybody to give up, to quit, to quit all the effort they say to me, Bob, it's so much work to be happy. I go, no, it's not. When you're happy, it's effortless. It's just your work to try to get happy. That's where it's so hard. I'm so busy trying to be happy. I need to do this. I need to accomplish these goals. I need to be this successful. I need to have this in my relationship.
(01:15): My wife needs to want this in our intimacy. I have to have these foods. I can't be happy without this thing. Oh, I need to go on these trips. Oh my kids need to be in this stuff. And they have all of this effort that they put into trying to be happy. My friends happiness is your birthright. You were built for freedom. That's the title of the book that's coming up. At least that's the, the working title. If it changes, I'll let you know. And in that book, I'm laying out the fundamentals of how to work with this system. So that freedom becomes a natural experience of life. It's your birthright. It will happen if you just stop doing the things to counteract it. I think a long time ago, I shared with you just how miraculous the body is. Think about it. You have every cell in your body divides by itself.
(02:03): You don't have to do any of that. And it repairs its own DNA by itself and skin heals itself. And the liver digests your food and all of that stuff is happening. And every ounce of it is designed to continue to sustain a life and to continue to operate that life on the highest possible levels. So it's not a miracle when a person is healthy, it's not a miracle at all. Even a person who's been through so many health struggles in their life. When they finally get healthy, that's not the miracle. The miracle is that they've been able to override everything that is within their body, trying to make them healthy and make themselves sick. Instead, that's the miraculous, that's the nocebo. Only we do it with food. We do it with the way we move our bodies. We do it with injuries sometimes too.
(02:47): We do it with sicknesses and illnesses. We do it with stress and we do it with negative emotions and we do it with so many different things and we actually downregulate and completely destroy the body's possibility for health and then have this Mira. Wow. I can't believe he's so healthy. Of course you can't believe he's so healthy. Given how much people have been doing to compromise their health. Of course not. But in order to get healthy, it's not that you have to do something. You just have to stop undoing it. In other words, you get a quit. Isn't that beautiful? What if you could take your whole life that way? What if all the things that were difficult for you? You realized if you quit making them difficult, then they would be easy. Now, Bob, come on. I'm not making this difficult. It is difficult.
(03:30): Yes. That is your way of looking at it for sure. And that feels real to you. But if you considered the possibility that your interpretation of it, isn't actually accurate, have you considered the possibility that it's only, you've only experienced it as difficult? And a lot of the reason that that experience is there is because you're thinking of it as difficult or something hard or something that takes a long time and that you need it to happen now. And so it's impossible. And all those things, when we're talking about really finding freedom, not just from pain, chronic pain, even, and physical stuff and, and health issues. But, but particularly also from human suffering, from all the emotional struggles that people go through from the stresses they undergo from the kinds of requirements that they place on themselves through life, just to keep up a period appearances and to live up to expectations at which we, uh, can declare now after a couple episodes ago and say those are cancer causing ideas.
(04:27): Californians already knew this. All the Californians already know everything that causes cancer. I'm pretty sure cuz I see it on every label. so, so we're slow to the, we're slow to the table guys, but either way, right? I'm I'm inviting you today to just try out being a quitter, to quit, trying so hard and to maybe try smarter now, why do we do this? Well, I, I mentioned this in a podcast a while ago, how we've turned work into a virtue ever since you've been born, you've grown up and people have told you, you work hard, you'll be successful. You work hard, you'll be successful. That's not true. The key to success, as I mentioned is simply to do the thing needed at the time needed. In order to have the result you want, that doesn't have to be experienced as difficult at all.
(05:12): It can be experienced as ju love and joy and playfulness. It can be experienced as difficulty. It can be experienced as excitement or it can be experienced as hard, difficult, impossible, but we've developed this sense of hard work as a virtue. And as a result, people will make anything into hard work. And in fact, complicate things that don't need to be that hard, just so that it can feel like they're doing something. In fact, many people, if they're not doing anything, feel like, oh no, I'm being unproductive. And they pass that onto their children. Not in, not maliciously. My mom used to say like, why are you sitting there with like a bump on a log? Is there something wrong with sitting and being a human being instead of a constant human doing no, but she was taught that you have to be productive or she had things she wanted me to do.
(05:56): And the way that she expressed it was simply sitting there and being lazy and all those things. So what if we quit making life so difficult for ourselves? You know, we don't have to worry about things. Worry itself is just pretending to do something about a situation without actually doing anything. So you , you just end up poisoning yourself. But Bob, you know, I'm a mom and I worry about my kids. How exactly is worrying, improving their life or yours being aware of something that might cause them harm. Sure. But why do you have to worry? You don't have to experience that as negative. You can simply be aware. You're aware of the car driving next to you in the lane next to you. You're driving down the road at 70 miles an hour. They're next to you at 70 miles an hour, just a slight swerve on the meal.
(06:39): They on the wheel, they sneeze weird and jerk the wheel. And both of you could be in dire straits, but you're not worried about that. You just are aware of it and you move so that they're not in your blind spot, you move so that you're safe and whatnot. And there's no issue there. So pretending that worry is somehow a virtue is actually poisoning you. And how is poisoning yourself, making you a great parent? How is poisoning yourself making you a great employee? That's you know, no employer wants their, their employees to show up at work that day dump some like strict nine into their system or, or low levels of arsenic or some other poison and then go to work. Nobody wants that. And yet we do it all the time and we consider it a virtue. When you consider that what we call negative emotions are literally poisonous to the human system.
(07:24): So I wanna invite you to quit. Now, I'm gonna tell you about an experience I I've had recently as I've been working on postural alignment and realigning all the load joints in my body so that they don't wear out overtime and create pain and all the other things going on, I started going gung-ho on it. You know, I was like, cool, I'm gonna get this posture to change and I'm gonna make everything happen. So what happens is that over time, just by virtue of use, if we use our legs in one way only, then they start to adapt to that because our nerves are built that way. They just respond to stimulus. So whatever stimulus they're given, they start to adapt and learn from and, and mold to. So for instance, a baseball pitcher has 300% more bone mass in his pitching arm than in his non pitching arm because of the amount of extreme torque and forces that are placed on that, that side of the body.
(08:14): Well, when you have that disparity in the body, well, then the body can start to compensate in other ways to handle the fact of bone mass differential. And then you can get an offset thoracic like an offset shoulders. You can get a pelvic disparity where one hip is higher or where the hips are rotated in a certain way. You can get legs that are offset. And so you can get a twist in the spine in a certain way. And all of these different things can happen. And the athlete doesn't really know it because they're doing well. And they're great at compensating for all of these little dysfunctions that have showed up. But then over time, what happens to these major league athletes and these major athletes injuries, the injuries are there. It's not because the sport's dangerous, but because the body going into that sport is out of alignment.
(08:53): So I'm sitting there trying to get my body realigned after years of working with it in a certain way with Kung Fu and whatnot. So where my shoulders are rounded forward a little bit in a sparring position. And I wasn't doing like exercises to balance that out every time or anything like that. And so I'm doing these exercises and I start doing 'em, I start doing 'em and I'm seeing some things change and I'm super duper excited about it, but I'm also noticing that like, I'm starting to get frustrated and some of my muscles are getting fatigued and tired. And so one of my coaches, the, the specialist that's working with me, she looks at me and she's like, I bet that you're spending most of your day really focusing on, on correcting your posture, aren't you. And I was like, of course I am.
(09:33): That's what I'm here to do. I wanna correct my posture. I wanna get it right. And she's like, no, that's part of the problem, Bob. And I'm like what she says, that's part of the problem. You see, you have something that's off your muscles are working a certain way. And when you try to force them to work another way, that's two steps away from neutral. That's two steps away from ideal because your compensation pattern is now one. We also have to get rid of, we have to get rid of how you're compensating for the problem. And then we have to get rid of the problem. So the more you're spending, forcing yourself into a good posture all day long, the more you're actually covering over and putting a bandage over the real problem. Yes, it's important to train good posture. So we wanna do it in increments, but that's why we're doing these specific exercises and things.
(10:20): And I've since trained in that method of doing things that have been sharing these things with people at retreats and whatnot for a while, helping them like assessing their posture and showing them particularly what's going on with them and what are some exercises that they can do in order to align that for themselves. And so that each person can walk away, not just with like, oh yeah, well, you should stand better because posture is related to how well you feel, but actually, Hey, do these things in your body will stand better naturally on its own without you having to try. Isn't that beautiful folks that your body, when it's aligned will do it for you without you having to try. That means freedom from addictions, freedom, from compulsions freedom, from anger, freedom, from hatred, freedom, from anxiety, freedom from disease, all these things. When the body is, is operated correctly, when it's aligned well, it'll do it for you without you having to do it. That means it's easy. 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.
(11:42): Happiness is easy. It's happening on autopilot and you don't have to force yourself to be happy at all. That's the beauty of everything that I've been working for with, for so many years, and trying to show people and trying teach people that if you're trying to overcome something you're automatically going the wrong direction. What you need to do is just start at the basics and build the, with those building blocks on build those fundamentals and work on aligning your O your overall wellbeing with how your muscles are and how your body reacts to things that how your nerves respond to stimulus and so on and so forth. All the things that we teach people. And so she says, I want you to stop doing that. She tells me, quit it. Your body needs to do it on its own, or you're gonna end up spending your life constantly fighting your own muscles to try and keep yourself upright.
(12:27): And can you imagine the strain that's gonna put on your internal organs and on your joints, and can you imagine how much they're gonna wear down? Just because there's constant strain pulling in two directions on it, neither of which needs to be happening. I was a little shocked by this taken aback by this, because I really do want things to become second nature, but I had forgotten about the idea of digestion. If I'm feeding my body food, for instance, or some kind of fuel I'm, I can't be taking it in all the time because my body needs to digest the food that's in there. So I have to give my body time to digest and then space for my stomach to be empty so that I can benefit from the thing that I put in. If I'm constantly snoring food down my gut, that's a lot of energy that's being used in digestion.
(13:17): That's not available elsewhere, including for healing and the building of energy and the building of muscle mass. And so many other things, just because I'm constantly putting food inside me, even if it's good food and healthy food. And so, as I learned to not crave food that much and just eat at particular times of day, all of a sudden I have more energy and happier and so many other things, because the, that energy isn't being used just in digestion, but I didn't realize that was the same thing with body posture, that the muscles need a break that I need to train the nerves and stimulate them to pull the bone, to, to have the muscles, pull the bones back into a particular position, but then I need to relax and let the nerves figure that out so that they start to do it on their own.
(14:01): Instead of being micromanaged by a helicopter parent called me . So she's like, what I want you to focus on is just relaxing your belly while you're doing this while you're doing the exercises, only use the muscles that we're asking you to use. And then what I want you to do is forget about it for the rest of the day. You do your exercises once a day or twice a day or whatever, and then the rest of the time, just let your body figure it out. I tell you that was one of the most difficult things I had done in a long time, because it forced me to confront how much I want to have control over everything, how much I've diluted myself into believing that control is the answer and the solution to happiness and wellbeing. Yes. I still operate under really faulty assumptions and huge delusions that I have forgotten, or didn't even think to challenge.
(14:54): Most people want control. And if we're talking about a process of going toward freedom, most of the people we're working with don't have control. So the first step is to gain control. And then after you've gained some control it's to start to train that control into the system so that you can let go of control, and then your body's taking care of you. And that's when you develop a certain confidence in your freedom, because you don't have to do it. It just happens on its own. And you start to see things happening and you go, wow. I, I behave differently in that situation than I've done in a, than I've ever done. That's new. And you start to see that your body is working for you and your mind is working for you and your emotions are working for you instead of against you. They can't work for you.
(15:34): If you're busy, trying to force them to work in a certain way, you actually have to let go of the illusion. The control is the ultimate answer to joy and happiness and freedom. It is a step along the way. If you don't have any, you need to work on control for sure. But once you've got control control, grabbing it more control is not the answer to happiness. So as I was dealing with this and looking at this situation and trying to do these exercise and let go, I noticed how many times I just wanted to control. And then I started having emotional responses to what was going on in my body and feeling the futility of like, oh, it's never getting better and things never work out. And why can't it work out faster? And all the questions that come up when I want change to happen.
(16:17): Those are things that I had suppressed. They had been inside of my system for a long time. And the minute I allowed my muscles to relax, they started bubbling to the surface. What a beautiful opportunity to explore the experience of allowing my body to finally start clearing things out they're bubbling up so that I can see them for what they are not have to fix them and finally be free of them. And as that's happened over time, over the last couple of months, just a different level of calm and peace and equanimity and joy, and has shown up in my life that, that I didn't even think was possible when I was as happy as I was before I thought, no, this is it. I'm good. And then all of a sudden, it's not just because I stopped trying so hard. I quit always having to be in control.
(17:07): I didn't quit working toward creating a good life, but I quit pretending that my conscious actions are the only things that do that. I needed those conscious actions. I needed to take the actions necessary to train my nervous system to be different. But I also needed to recognize that I'm not that important. I'm not that big. I'm not that significant. My conscious thought processes and actions are not all that amazing in the grand scheme of things, there are much bigger things happening on the planet than what's happening in my little conscious thought process. And if you are willing to let go of control just a little bit, just start to simply trust in a way, even though I don't think trust is a good word, but to do actions, train them and then allow your body and your nervous system to start to assimilate those.
(18:00): You'll find freedom becomes a joyful experience, a wonderful explanation, uh, exploration and exciting adventure. Instead of, uh, something you need to check off on your checklist so that you can be okay, so that your wife can be okay, or your husband can be okay, or your kids can be okay. And so that your life can get better. And so you can be successful. What if, instead of all that turmoil and all that toil, you just started enjoying yourself. The only reason you're trying to be successful and fix those things anyway, is so that you can be happy. So what if you started being happy now? What if you stopped waiting for everything to be okay in your life before you decided, you know what, I'm gonna enjoy this process. I mean, you're, you're living anyway. You're going to work anyway. You might as well enjoy it.
(18:44): You're looking at your behavior anyway, you might as well be a fun process. And then that's something that I've tried to embody in the programs I created to the point where I wrote them almost like video games, you know, instead of like, okay, module one, it's like level one and then you, you go to level two and I call them adventures, you know, the choose your own emotion, adventure, and the 20 day breath switch adventure. because I, I, I really wanted it to be a game like it's fun. And when it's fun, humans learn best humans learn best when there's an element of play and an element of challenge. So like you're pushing limitations, but in a playful way. And when that's there changes start to happen really, really fast. As you can ask anybody, who's been to our retreats, just how much laughter happened there, how much fun happened there while also going through some pretty intense experiences, just because I've seen the research on it.
(19:36): I've watched it happen in my own life. Playfulness and joviality are really incredible assets in the journey toward creating a life, a different life that you want, and you don't have to fight the old life. You can give up the fight. You can, instead of wasting your energy, fighting something, you can take all that energy and just go create something new. And it seems impossible at the beginning. I know that at least from my own experience, I know that, but it isn't impossible. If you're willing to do it, we can show you how to do it. Just, you know, go to the freedom specialist.com, schedule a call. We can talk through what the best way to do that is, but don't for a second, believe that you have to keep fighting that life has to be a trial, that it has to be hard or difficult.
(20:18): Don't for a second, believe that you have to turn this into this massive battle and win and overcome. That's just an ego thing. Now you can prove something about yourself. No, no. How about you quit? And for the first time in your life, give yourself permission to quit, to be a failure at misery to, to be a, a dropout in the school of hard knocks, right. To be a total absolute loser in the game of winning, uh, and, uh, trying to make things to overcome everything. What happens if you lose all those games and you're just left with a lo a life of joy and happiness, you'll still be able to do everything you need to do. You're gonna have to do that anyway, but you'll have so much more energy for it and all the stress and all the worry and all the pain and suffering.
(21:06): You don't have to carry those things. Why start with a handicap? I mean, unless you're trying to prove something, starting with a handicap is just a hilarious attempt to do something bigger, right? You don't have to do that. There's so much to explore in life, making it more difficult for yourself is only preventing you from that kind of exploration. And my invitation to you is an invitation to quit, to set it down, to give up and then go live joyfully. And if there's any way that me and my team can help you with that, I would love to help because it will do so much for you and your family and your kids and your friends and every, and your life experience. Like it's a gift to the world. The greatest gift you could ever give the world is a happy you is yourself living it full tilt, and I'm happy to help if we can.
(22:00): And that's it for today's alive and free podcast. If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your 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 a great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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