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.
(00:36): And welcome back my friends today. Let's talk about, let's go back in time to when I first was trying to figure all this stuff out. I mean, I had spent 18 years of my life stuck in compulsive behavior patterns that with, with pornography, but I was also depressed and I was somewhat suicidal at times, trying to find my way in the world and figuring things out. And when I first was trying to like resolve that, I dove head first interview because I knew my, my marriage was on the line. My own life was on the line. I couldn't, I just didn't wanna live that way anymore. And the first thing that had happened was first people told me, Hey, this is not like, I've just thought, oh, there's something wrong with me. But the first thing that happened was we went to a Bishop in our, uh, congregation.
(01:22): And he had shared with me some books, uh, around how this was a big problem. And he said, this is a really big problem. I want you to read these books and come back. And so the first seed that was placed into my mind was the seed that this pornography thing is a big problem. A lot of people have it. It's a huge deal. Most of you might agree with that might not. And so I had this seed, oh, okay. Maybe it's not something wrong with me. I'm not alone in this. This is just a big problem. This is like the condition of mankind. There are books called every man's battle that put forth the idea that this is just something, every man deals with. That's not true folks. Even the men who claim that aren't dealing with it all the time. So clearly there's something about their life that makes it come to the surface and makes it go away.
(02:09): And so anybody claiming that this is just every man's battle. This is a fact of life needs to, uh, needs to understand that that is not a permanent fact of life. It goes away all the time. Uh, the number, the amount of time I spent watching pornography is vastly dwarfed. It's completely eclipsed by the amount of time I spent living the rest of my life. So every problem you're dealing with, whether it's depression, anxiety, whatever else it is, how much time do you actually spend there? If, if you spent the time in your day and just over the next week, when, and, and, and tracked it, how many minutes were you not depressed? And when you were depressed, how wa what, what parts of your body are depressed? Are your butt cheeks depressed? Are your kneecaps depressed? Are your ankles depressed? Are your nose hairs getting in on the action?
(02:58): , you'd be surprised how little a feeling it is and how little it's around if you really start paying attention. But instead we want to call it a big problem, because we've learned that if we make something into sounding like it's a big problem that can motivate us into action. That's an old way of thinking. It's a very rudimentary and primal way of thinking. It's very manipulative and it's completely dishonest. What if you could resolve things that are going haywire in your life without turning them into a big problem? What if you didn't have to worry and freak out and stress about those things? But that's not what I was aware of at the time. So I was given this information that said, oh, no, this is a big problem. So now, instead of it being a problem with me though, I still felt that way.
(03:39): It was now also just a problem with being a man. Not exactly helpful, cuz that's not something I'm getting rid of anytime soon. so gee, thanks folks. And then when I entered 12 step programs, now it was addiction. Oh my gosh. And now I had visions of like heroin junkies on the streets and dirty needles. And that made me think, oh no, I'm gonna end up in a brothel and I'm gonna end up hiring prostitutes. These were not thoughts that had entered my mind necessarily before. But the labels that people had placed on me had introduced these thoughts, unintentionally. They were trying to help, but then it got labeled as an addiction. There's no evidence by the way, psychology's supposed to be evidence based. Right? But there isn't actually any evidence that pornography behaves anything like an addiction at all. Now they haven't challenged their other theories about addiction, but they have at least gone that far.
(04:31): And for in the DSM four, the diagnostic student manual, they AC uh, diagnostic and statistical manual. They actually got rid of the word addiction, but they put it back in the DSM five. So they're still going back and forth on that. and we don't actually have to read that book thankfully for a, for a profession that, that understands that labeling things can create huge problems. They've certainly created a large book of labels and said, don't you label yourselves will do it for you. I mean that tongue and cheek, there are a lot of great therapists out there and a lot of them are doing a lot of good and they're busy trying to get people, get rid of the labels that people put on themselves. And often their profession requires that they place another label on them just by the requirements of the profession, which is unfortunate, cuz that's not what those people are after.
(05:19): So I am not, you know, taking pot shots at individual therapists just at the, the way that the industry has shown up. So here I am and I've been, been in a very traumatic space, like in a very suggestible space. So here's the thing in hypnosis, a person becomes suggestible or open to suggestion when they're in intense emotional states or when they're even in confusion. So mentalists and magicians use this all the time. As they're getting you into places where you're just a little bit unsettled, a little bit confused, a little bit, not sure what's going on and it can be as much as you reach out to shake their hand. And just before they, they shake your hand, take their pull, they pull their hand away. So now you're left in this place of like what's happening. And when you're left in the place of a question, they can supply an answer.
(06:04): And so I'm in this place of not knowing what's going on and then someone supplies an answer and I'm suggestible. And then I'm in the place of like feeling like, oh, oh my gosh, this is a bigger problem that I thought it was. And then I go in and I have all of this emotion around sharing that I am this guy that's been stuck in porn and now I'm not sharing it just with a Bishop. I'm sharing it in front of a bunch of random strangers. And in that space, I hear the first step of the 12 step program, which is that I am an addict. You know, my life is unmanageable and I have to introduce myself as an addict. And because I'm in a suggestible state, I actually believe it to be true. And just like with hypnosis, I begin to behave in that role.
(06:50): Now I may have already been behaving in that role to some extent, depending on who you talk to , but the, but the reality is that role really changed my behavior. And until I started questioning the suggestion that was given to me and becoming UN hypnotizable I, my behavior didn't change. I was still operating in the, oh, well I'm an addict. And that means I'm gonna have relapses. And that's just part of the game and all of those things. And so here I was going through that and then as I started questioning them and I came out of it, I was introduced to another thought and it was such a powerful thought that I didn't even think to question it. I was suggestible. And this thought came, this is a thought about your subconscious. Have you ever heard that you, your conscious mind is only like 5% of your brain or two or 3%.
(07:43): And the rest of your brain is like 95% of it's unconscious. And so you really have to get the thoughts in there through repetition and stuff in order to deal with your subconscious mind. And it's your subconscious that you're really fighting. And that's where all these programs are. And you can do all you want with the conscious mind, but you really have to program the subconscious in order to do things like that in order to find some real success. And so I would do these things with affirmations and I would make these affirmations and then I would turn on epic music and I would scream them at the top of my lungs. And my kids love to be in the room because it was so jam packed with energy. There was so much energy there. And I was just like, yeah. And I was on high for like 20, 30 minutes, you know, uh, sometimes an hour or something I'd go in, you know, I'd hit it.
(08:26): And I would do my business goals and I would do all these other things because I was trying to hammer an idea into the subconscious mind so that it could do it for me. Uh, other ideas that come with this though, is that there's an idea that everybody has an ego and an ID and a super ego. And these are terms that Freud was using at the time. Ego just means, I like, I love this. I love that. You know, ego is the Latin word for I. And so you have an I or a person or the person that you think you are. And then the, I, it means it or this or that, you know, and then a super ego would be what's above the ego. Um, and, and whatever other terms that they have. So what they did was they noticed human behavior and Freud and others like every human, they're not bad people, but they were just making ideas.
(09:14): They were coming up with hypotheses about how things work. And they, in those hypotheses, they made up different parts of the human brain that don't exist. They're not there. No one has ever cut up, open a human brain and found an ego. Oh, look, I found this ego here sitting right next to the hippocampus. No wonder this guy had problems. You look at the shape, it add ego. That didn't happen. There's no place in your body that your ego is located, which means it's a creation and you couldn't have created it unless you had the idea about it. And giving, being, given the idea about it is something that you learned over time. In other words, it's a learned behavior. So people are like, oh no. And then my ego rises up or, oh, and then my subconscious or, oh, and then my triggers. And pretty soon they have like, oh, part of me likes this part of me likes that.
(09:58): And they've divided themselves into many parts. We've talked about this in the past, on, on the podcast, around going from being a divided soul and gathering that all up to recognizing that you are one individual, an undividable thing that there's just you, there, isn't an ego there isn't a super ego. There isn't an ID. There are, there's just you having experiences. And that's it. Well, recently I read a book by the, a fellow by the name of Nick chatter called the mind is flat and he went and he gathered and surveyed all of this research around the subconscious mind. Have you ever heard of a subconscious mind, have you heard of it? It's very popular nowadays, you know, decades ago, nobody would really have thought that much about it in, in, in everyday speech, except for maybe psychiatrists and stuff a couple centuries ago that might not have been a thing they might have been talking about your spirit or your soul or something else.
(10:50): So different terminology, trying to point to whatever the heck is going on under there, that that guy doesn't have control over, but really there's just activity in the body. And as your neurons in your cerebral cortex, in your Neo cortex are really working on understanding them. Then you become more and more conscious of that activity. So in the sense of there is activity that you're unaware of, yes, we could call that subconscious that's below your consciousness, but that isn't your subconscious mind. It's not a separate thing. And he used to use this example to try and prove his point. He pulled up Anna Carita. I'm gonna use, uh, Harry Potter. Since enough people are familiar with Harry Potter, Harry Potter, at one point in the series of seven books, I don't wanna put any spoilers in there. So I have to be very careful about, about what is going on, right?
(11:45): Mm-hmm but toward the end of it, he, uh, at least let's, let's talk about the movie toward the end of the movie. He grabs the elder wand, which is the most powerful wand in the world. The, the, one of the deathly halls, the unbeatable wand, and he's won it through a course of a series of actions and high adventure and all the stuff that's happened through the book series. And at the very end of it, he takes the wand, snaps it over his knee and throws it off the bridge so that nobody else can have it. Now, if I asked you, why did he do that? Just take a second. Why, why would he have done that? And immediately your mind is coming up with motivations and answers for why Harry Potter, would've done such a thing, but you forgot Harry Potter doesn't exist. He's not real. The only thing that exists are ink is ink on a page lights on a screen. Daniel Radcliffe is not Harry Potter. Harry Potter is completely make believe he doesn't exist beyond the moments that you are aware of the character in your mind. There isn't a motive behind it. He simply does that in the book. And then afterwards, someone declares a motive, but there isn't a person that has a motive. They're just words it's totally made up, but because your brain is so good at piecing together random bits of information, it's made you believe and string together. This idea that there is a character named Harry Potter, but that is completely fiction.
(13:21): That's not real. And your mind does this, even with the information that you take in from your senses, just like it pulled in words, on a page. And then you created an entire inner life and thought process for Harry Potter that doesn't exist. It also does that with what you see with what you hear with what you taste with, what you smell with, what you feel in your internal senses of the body. And it creates a storyline for your life, a storyline that tells you who you are and what this means about you and what this means for your future and your past. And people have this sense that there is this big future and this big past, uh, that's going on. And that the present moment is really just the moment that the future turns into the past. And so when they look at their life there, if you were look to look at your life on a timeline and to draw it out, you would have this big past and then a possibly huge future.
(14:16): And then this.is the present. But actually the only thing in reality is this moment, the past is something you are making up in this moment. The future is something you make up in this moment. They don't exist. They've never existed. They never have. There is no such thing as the past a past has never existed. Yes, other experiences have happened, but they don't exist right now. So your life is only an ever present now. And that's the only thing you can ever experience is this moment. It's the only thing that exists. And so actually the dot that you would call the present is a huge, massive circle that encompasses and surrounds the past and the present. Those are actions that your mind is making up in order to give you an experience. And in order to navigate this present moment and survive, if you're dealing with like, there's a tiger chasing me, and I need to guess where it's gonna be and which tree to climb and so on and so forth. 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.
(15:40): So we talk about this subconscious mind, like it's a, a little thing, but really there is just little individual bits of information that your senses have picked up, like.to dots on a page. If you look at a page and there's a bunch of dots on it, you might see a dragon, you might see a castle, you might see a unicorn, you might see a hamburger, you might see any number of things. And then you can draw lines between all those dots and say, look, see, it's a hamburger. Someone can even number the dots and tell you how to put the dots together. But actually they're just dots on the page. I had an art, uh, an art, um, class a long time ago in college. I may have told you about this before, where one of our assignments was, he just gave us a page with a bunch of dots on it and he didn't make anything out of it.
(16:27): And so I responded to that and I looked at it like constellations. And then I did this big kind of constellation of a Raven in it. And then I did this drawing out of it. That was part three dimensional. And I did this painting from it and stuff where others had like cut out the dots and made it into a shadow box with a different shape on the inside and something coming out of it. Some people had used those dot patterns just as a thought process and made something completely different. Just spawned by the dots. I had made up all the rules in my own head about what I was supposed to do, and other people didn't make up those rules. And so they were able to just respond to that dot picture, however, the heck they wanted and, uh, within very narrow range of requirements by the teacher.
(17:10): And we had this mass, everything from sculpture to, uh, video to three dimensional, like relief, kind of 2d in layers, things to paintings, to drawings, to, to, uh, collages you name it, all kinds of things, just in response to a series of dots on the page. And that's because, well, that's how our minds had put things together. So what happens is that when children are exceptionally honest, when you say, why did you do that? They say, because only because they've learned that that word means that that's a reason they don't actually know what the word beca, because means when you're asking them why they don't have a why they simply did it and that's it. But they learn by us constantly peppering them with why did you do it? Why did you do it? Why did you do it that we're telling them, no, you have a subconscious, you have some ulterior motive.
(18:00): You have something going on inside you, and you need to know why. And you need to think about why you did this thing. And why don't you go up to your room and think about why you would've done such a thing. So the kid is going up to his room, completely confused. He doesn't have a clue what it is you're after. And so he is trying to come up with, make up as many hair-brained Kaka, Mami theories as possible that might satisfy the parents as to why they did or did not do such a thing. And then we go to school and we were asked the question why, and we learn to make up things that aren't there. So the mind in this book, the mind is flat is really in intensively, intensely capable, prodigious, capable, improvising machine that is creating and destroying hypotheses about life.
(18:45): Every single moment, these explanations that we have about life then form the basis of our experience of it. We think something's happening. And then plus placebo nocebo things we've been talking about for the last couple weeks. And it's those hypotheses that get in the way of seeing things as they really are. They are useful hypo. These hypotheses are useful. They help us interact as human beings. They help us have experiences. When we want to have experience, they they're useful for very many things, especially for survival. So it's not bad. It's just that they've taken over. And we haven't seen beyond them to what's really going on. Most of the time, you don't have to have that. So when the Buddha 2,500 years ago was really trying to figure out what was going on, his deepest sense of enlightenment, and one of his keen insights was a recognition that every explanation that he comes up with about reality is just an explanation about reality.
(19:36): It is literally not true, not real. And it's a separate experience from reality. I can sit here all day long and make up stories, and that would be an experience, but that has nothing to do with life outside of my head or in my body. For that matter. It doesn't have anything to do with the digestion of food or the miracle of breathing. It doesn't have anything to do with any of that. So rather than considering that there is some subconscious mind that you have to control, that you have to reprogram that you have to do all these other things. What if you step back and recognize that all you have is a bunch of neurons and in any given moment, they're taking a behavior and they're doing something and you don't have an issue. You don't have a root issue. A problem. I know in the beginning I used to emphasize root issue because that was the, the common parlance of a couple years ago.
(20:22): Everybody wants to know the root cause and the root issue. And that's useful. It does give leverage, but it's just one method of explaining what's going on. And at a certain point, you get to step back from that and recognize all you have is a bunch of neurons that are behaving in a certain way and used to behaving in a certain way. So maybe their connection is a little bit stronger than another one, but all that has to happen is that we just get them to move a little bit differently. And you might a little bit slow on the uptake. You know, if I was to teach you to do a Cartwheel, some of you can already do it, others can't. And those of you who can't, if I start, you know, trying to get you to do a Cartwheel straight off, you probably fall over or do something funky or weird or whatnot.
(21:01): But if we build it bit by bit, you'll get it. It's just learning a new skill. So rather than thinking that you have some, some subconscious mind that is programmed with all these belief and conditioned through millions of years of human experience, even Jay Kristi, who is, you know, purportedly an enlightened being has great talks online. Like there's a lot of great, incredible things that he's that by his observation alone, he was able to teach. I often get the feeling that he was very frustrated with the people he was teaching, cuz he went from India to England and was trying to teach them and uh, he would get there and he's, he's talking to them about all of these different things and uh, about ego and, and and whatnot. And he's saying that the human mind is conditioned through millions and millions of years of evolution.
(21:46): And that's not simply not true. Your mind is in your body. Your body started with an egg in a sperm. And it learned by interaction with the nerves in your parents system. And by watching your parents, all of the things that they learned from their parents. So yes, there is in a sense, a passing down of things from one generation to the next, but it's not that you have this millions of year old brain that you're gonna have to override millions of years of evolution. You don't, your brain evolved in nine months and has been continu in the womb and then has been continuing to evolve. You only have the years of your life that you're dealing with. And even then each thing that's happening is just a thing happening. So what if I could relieve you of the tyranny and the suggestion that you may have been given?
(22:29): Why in the beginning and UN hypnotize you from the notion that you have a subconscious that is working against you? Yes, there are a lot of processes happening on the planet and in your body. And the more you become consciously aware with it, you work with what you can work with and suddenly your life can become something absolutely incredible because you're no longer fighting a past. None of your past history has anything to do with who you are at this moment, who you are at this moment is a current moment creation. And at any moment you can stop it and do something different. And then if by force of habit, whatever you do it again, you can stop that and do something different. And pretty soon you'll get good at that. And pretty soon there won't be this force of habit, but that's just how you're used to behaving.
(23:14): And that's it. When I first started teaching my son heliman to catch a ball, I threw a ball at him and he would close his eyes and they would flutter and he would look away and he would stick his arms straight out in front of him. And the ball would either land on his arms or miss cuz I wasn't always a great aim and it would fall away and he would just hope he'd catch it. I had to eventually teach him. Okay. No, let's keep your hand facing this way. Okay, cool. Now let's breathe while you're doing it. Okay, cool. Now hold your hands in this position. Okay, cool. Now do this, do that. And pretty soon he catches a ball and now he can catch a ball and it's simple and easy and that's not because we had to overcome some past conditioning. It was just that.
(23:50): Well, his nerves hadn't worked that way before and so let's train them. And what if that's all that's missing for you? Your brain tells your nerves, your neurons haven't fired in a way that produces freedom by default, before and huge, greater and greater levels of, of pure enjoyment of life. They haven't done that before. So all you have to do is train them, become aware of what's happening and then do something different. And you don't have a subconscious to overcome. You don't have a set of root issues. You don't have an inheritance from your parents. I know there's this great talk about epigenetics. That's been going around the, the, the medical and, and psychiatric community. But that's a theory. It's an explanation. Oh wow. This is inherited from the family. This is a family trait. It's not a family trait. It's a learned behavior. Even diseases are learned.
(24:41): Behaviors of cells in the body. There are ways the cells have responded to things. And if diabetes is in the family, well, yeah, but is it in everyone in the family? No. Then why is it that every single? Why is it that the people that don't have it? Oh, well, no, it's recessive. It'll be passed on to the next generation. If you keep believing that guess what? No Sebo, your body will create it. These are all learned behaviors. You've learned that diseases are dangerous. And when you learn that, they're more like the common flu, you stop caring about 'em and it's not a big deal. You've learned that foods are poisonous. You've learned that like certain things are dangerous to the human system. And so you respond to 'em and yes, there are certain things that will end a life. If, if an ax falls on your neck or a guillotine, chances are, you might not get out of that one.
(25:30): But there are stories of really enlightened souls that have come down through history. How mythological, I don't know. I'm open to the idea that they're both false or true um, but I don't know. I don't have a way to prove them one way. And somebody coming and telling me that's not possible. It's just somebody who's never seen it happen. And they have no, no authority to say anything is not possible just because they haven't seen it. So they might believe it's not possible. And if the human system believes, if all of humans believe it's not possible, none of 'em are even gonna try it. We didn't believe running faster than a four minute mile was possible. And now it is, we didn't believe flying was possible. And now it is spacecraft and space flight is POS. Now it is. There's so many things that are possible. Now that, um, a century ago we would've been like, that's not even possible. Why are you think that's just science fiction? It's fantasy. Right? So there are stories of people long ago, who'd have limbs cut off and they'd put 'em back on and the limbs would regrow back on. Did it happen? Did it not happen? I don't know. That's not the point.
(26:32): The point is don't limit yourself. And one really insidious way that we have been limiting ourselves for a long time is the belief in a subconscious, the belief in mental illness that don't, that doesn't go away. The belief in limitations of the human condition, the belief in stress, the belief in betrayal, even the belief in pain, cuz pain too. And all of the research points this way, pain is simply an opinion that your brain has about what's going on in the body. In the tissues of the body. Pain does not come from the body. Pain comes from the mind, always nerves will fire. They might get severed and cut. So information will be sent to the brain, but your body's production of pain is completely an opinion, which is why some people, they, we say they have a high pain tolerance. No, they're not experiencing it as pain.
(27:32): They're not tolerating pain. They're just having sensations. That's it. Pain too, is made up in the mind. It'll take some time for you to challenge all of these assumptions that you've been carrying for a long time. That's okay. And there are ways to do them that are more efficient and, and a lot of fun. But I want to free you from your limitations, the, to free you, to finally be able to go and explore your life without having to believe that there's all this dangerous stuff out there. And that, that, you know, you have to look over your shoulder at every turn and that you always have to work hard. And so that you can experience what it's truly like to be alive and free. And if you'd like help with that, please, our retreats are the best place to do it. You don't have to have a huge problem in your life to do it.
(28:21): It's just such a great place to really set down everything at a biological level, a cellular level, to retrain your nervous system, to open yourself up to possibilities, the likes of which you probably haven't encountered in your life. Even people who have come, who have seen a few of the things we've done have never experienced it the way we've, we've put this thing together. It's been a lifetime of exploration for me, trying to put this together in the simplest way possible so that in four days, your entire neurology, your entire biology gets given a glimpse at an entirely different life and can start putting things down in earnest. 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 great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice.
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