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 to the alive and free podcasts today. I want to talk to you about something a little bit different, some exciting things coming up for you guys to be able to participate in and benefit from. And also what that might mean in terms of a bigger picture about things that we're examining on this podcast all the time. I, my focus on trying to pick things to talk about are trying to find things that tend to keep people bogged down in patterns, where they feel stuck, where they feel hopeless, where they feel like slaves to whether it's behaviors or emotions or thought processes or whatever El whatever else is going on. And to give you a different way of seeing it and looking at it and possibly shred some old ideas that have been keeping you in a place where you didn't realize that the opportunities you're looking for are actually right in front of you.
(01:24): And often that comes down to really challenging some basic paradigms. And so what I've been doing over the last number of months is writing a book that is laying out exactly and doing this very thing, challenging all of these main paradigms that have been holding a lot of us, you and I, and other people stuck inside of patterns of depression, of anxiety, of trauma, of chronic pain, of autoimmune diseases of addiction of you name it, all PTSD, all of these different, even OCD, bipolar, all of these different things that have kept us kind of stuck because not because we're not trying to help, but because we've seen it in such a small light, we are only seeing part of the puzzle. And because we only see part of the puzzle when we try to fix it, we're missing some huge chunks of things. And so the book, uh, the working title is built for freedom, and it's what I've been working on for a number of months.
(02:13): But I wanna take you on this journey. See, I've known for a couple years now that I need to write a book in a way that lays out, just like I've been trying to do in this podcast what's happening so that I can get this in the hands of as many people as possible, who, especially the ones that don't necessarily have the time or the means to be able to set down things and come to a, a retreat where for four days I can work with them very, very personally. And, and the team can, sometimes that's just not a possibility for people. And then other people need a bigger glimpse of things before they can make that kind of decision too. And so I've wanted to do this for a long time, but, you know, time constraints and trying to make sure that all the pieces are in place for making sure we're taking care of the, the, our clients.
(02:55): And so we finally, I finally hired a company to help me do this. And they're, they've done a lot of books like this before. And so they're taking care of the publishing and the cover design and all the other stuff. And so I was like, okay, cool. But one of their requirements was we have trained a lot of copywriters to write these books in a very particular way that enables them to be very impactful for the audience, for the people that read them. And so, because we've trained them that way, the only way we'll work with you is if you is, if we write the book and then publish it, because then we know it'll be a quality product. And, you know, in my head, I'm like, I feel like I'm the only one that's really able to write this book because I'm the only one that's walked down this road. I know exactly what's happening, but they were like, no, no, what we're gonna do is this big interview process. So over the course of a, a few months, they interviewed me multiple times, we're talking 12 to 15 times diving into how I see things what's going on, what's happening, the results that people have been getting from the beginning, how things have evolved and so on and so forth. And so as they did that, I got kind of excited about it. I'm like, okay, cool. They're really trying to get into my head to get into the way that I language things, the way that, you know, can precisely convey what is happening in terms of freedom, especially in this body based approach. I don't know another person on the planet that is as precisely looking at the link up between the body and the mind and the emotions as I have been doing for the last number of years.
(04:26): That doesn't mean that there aren't people like that. I am unaware of them. I'm, I'm aware of a lot of people, but the entire counseling and psychology industry, they're moving that direction. And yet it's a very slow thing to move an entire industry of, you know, hundreds of thousands of therapists and, you know, all of their different theories, the people that have been in a long time, the people that haven't to move that industry in a different direction is a large process. And it'll take some time, uh, which is what ACE talked about, right. You know, are you gonna wait for phase five and whatnot? And so there are people moving that direction, and I'm not saying I'm the only one that's looking at this, but in terms of the kind of precision of what's happening, I'm the only one that, that I know of, that's done this.
(05:03): Even the places that I learned things from they've got bits and pieces of this puzzle, but they weren't dealing like I'm, I trained in a martial arts. They're dealing with how you take people down and protect, you know, do bodyguarding and stuff they're not dealing with. How do you handle your own addictive tendencies or your own depressive, mood swings. And so bits and pieces that I've taken from them are different. And then I've had to connect them to bits and pieces that I've taken from body anatomy and functional psychology and all of the other places that I've trained, all the other certifications and things that I've been through. And as a result has come, this really beautifully organic, very entire person looking, you know, holistic, but I hate the word holistic, cuz it has a bunch of baggage to it approach comprehensive approach to the entirety of the human person.
(05:48): As much as we can do to the way that you move to the way that you breathe, to the way that you think to the way that you, you engage with your body in terms of nutrition and so on. Because of that, I was like, I really feel like I gotta do this, but this company insisted. So I relented. And then finally, you know, I'm, I'm waiting on, Tenter hooks for the first copy the first bit. And I start reading this first bit and um, Tucker had read it first as, uh, you know, he was excited to kinda look at it and he was like, ah, it doesn't sound quite like Bob, but maybe other people would pick up on it. I started reading it and guys, I thought I was gonna throw up in my mouth. it sounded horrible. It sounded like a big, long marketing advertisement with exceptionally vague, vague language about what people are going through and very emotionally manipulative terms that were almost calculated to make a person feel bad.
(06:40): And then to make them feel like I am the way the truth and the life. And I was like, hold on. This is not, no, this is not how people need to engage with stuff. You know, as much as I know how annoying it is that people want to get into your emotional states in order to manipulate you into making a buying decision that they wanna get into how you feel about stuff in order for you to be able to like, just look at what's in front of you and make a clear decision without having to get all emotional about it in order to motivate you to take action. And I knew from my own self, like I got tired of it. I got tired of online webinars. I didn't wanna listen to 'em because I don't wanna listen to an hour long spiel about how my life is gonna fall apart.
(07:22): If I didn't have this thing and how this one thing was gonna save me, there are millions of ways, possibly billions of ways to help a person finally set down all of the struggle. I have found a way that works really well because it focuses on the biological piece, but not everybody really resonates with that. And I, you know, that needs to be accepted. I'm not the only answer that there is out there. And so we called the company back and I was like, Hey guys, I hate this. Will you please refund us the money that we've spent you with you for writing the book. I don't wanna pay you for me to have to rewrite your book. And, and then to feel like I'm gonna have to write a different book just in order to actually say the things that I need to say. And so of course they were very good about it. And they were like, yes, absolutely. That's fine. So they're still doing all the publishing stuff, but then I gotta go back to square one and start from the beginning, writing the book. Now, why do I bring this up? Here's the deal.
(08:26): I trusted another authority. I went to them. They said, this is the only way it can happen. And instead of trusting my own gut and really standing by it, I trusted another authority. And then what happened was we lost about six months of time in that process when I could have just been writing the book from the beginning. And we went around in circles for a while and nothing really happened. And then in the end I had to scrap everything that they had written and start from scratch. And yes, it's beautiful. What came out of that, the way that I had to rethink things was very, very profound. But what was keeping me stuck was trusting other people's answers. Instead of the ones that I knew in my gut were the best ones for what was going on. This has happened to me over and over and over and over in my life, whether it was with choosing a career path or education, finding a job, whether it was with finances and the best way to do your finances, whether it was with when is it through the right time to buy a house or what are the best cars to have?
(09:33): So often in my life, I have relied on other people's answers instead of my own, I've felt like, oh, this would be a really good thing for me to grab like a good book that feels like it's calling to me. And I'm like that I'm really interested, but then I'll read a review about it and be like, Ugh, you know? And then the reviews make me doubt my myself. I'm not saying reviews are good or bad, but I have used them as a way to like really cause hesitation inside of myself. And maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it was not a good thing. There's no way for me to assess that it, it happened and that's it. But you and I both grew up with this training. We were trained by the time from the time we were young, because that's the only way we could go about it, that our parents had all the answers that the people who were bigger in life that were older in life that had more authority or position in life are the ones that knew best.
(10:22): And so from the time we were young, we were trained to just defer to other people's assessment of our situation. And that includes in medical health and psychological health, there was a guy I was interacting with on Facebook the other day, an incredible fellow. And I'm not gonna give his name because I'm gonna talk about his situation here. And I, and I don't want that to be, um, in any way shape, uh, or form something that comes back to haunt him. Um, but he's, he's a coach and he's helped. He's been involved in a lot of people's lives. He TA he's taken young men through rights of passage and helping them kind of like really step into being a man he's developed his own way of trying to help people and, you know, has, has created books and written books to try and help people and so many other things.
(11:08): So he's, he's fairly well established and has been down this road for a long time. And then the other day he wrote about something called generational trauma and how he's still dealing with it. And I stepped in and I said, Hey, have you considered this generational trauma is a theory. It's in a human attempt to explain something that's happening, but what's really happening in this moment is just one simple experience of some kind of emotion or some kind of tension or some kind of pain or some kind of something. And all you have to fix is all you have to deal with is that you don't have to sit there and imagine, oh, this is my, you know, my mother's whatever, or my father's this, or this is the family that, or this is you don't have to create that explanation in order to just handle what's right here.
(11:50): Right now, there are simpler more direct ways to do things. And that doesn't mean it's the right way or the wrong way, but there's another way to do it. And his response was to tell me, oh yes, I know I use this system. And that system in my coaching, I'm very familiar with, you know, nervous system unwinding and all these other things. And you know, I do this very frequently. Basically. He took my, my words, which were unsolicited. So he wasn't asking for advice and I offered it freely. So I expected to be shot down, but he took them and then he put them into his own knowledge base and said, oh, I know what you're talking about. And he didn't, he missed the boat entirely. Well then a couple days later I posted something about a similar kind of topic and he chimed in again.
(12:30): And then a couple days later I noticed that he posted more, he's dealing with some serious PTSD, has been dealing with that for a long time, multiple attempts at suicide, um, lots of depression. And he went to a psychiatrist and he showed up there. Finally, just recently, this is after years and years of work, I've known about this guy for a long time. He went to a psychiatrist just recently within the last week or so. And he, the psychiatrist was asking like, do you feel fine? He's like, I feel fine. And then his, she asked his wife and his wife was like, well, I've noticed this behavior and this behavior and this behavior and his takeaway from this is I have no way of knowing whether or not I'm actually doing well. I need to be asking other people. I don't have really solid markers inside myself and I'll never have them.
(13:14): I just need to check in and he's consigned himself in one way, shape or form to a diagnosis of these are his words. You know, I've been dealing with my PTSD, my generational trauma, my, this my, that. He has accepted a diagnosis from an authority figure as the fact when, if you were to really look at it, as we have been doing for years on this podcast, the things that he's claiming he has don't exist at all. They are not real things. They are labels, theories placed upon very real events that divert our attention from the, what can we can really do to fix things. 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.
(14:27): Every diagnosis in the diagnostic, a statistical manner is one that has been created at some point in time. So there was PTSD for a while. Now there's complex PTSD. And every time a diagnosis is created, people start getting diagnosed with that. And then the numbers of people getting diagnosed with it keep growing over time. None of these diagnoses are shrinking. These are, you know, for a, an industry that talks about labeling people and how labeling people is bad. They'll talk about it in their literature. They know it's, they've created a book of labels that they then apply to people. And then people identify with these labels. And the very thing that this this industry is trying to eliminate is perpetuating itself. By the very way that it's set up the diagnosis becomes this hunt for a problem, instead of getting rid of trying to fix anything and moving on into doing something else, right, moving on into creating a life.
(15:22): That's powerful. The very idea that there is a perfect way that you should be an ideal state is the very idea that is robbing you of the life that you have, because the more you are trying to measure up, the more illness will grow in your body. The more emotion will grow in your body. The more relationships will get strained. The more drama you'll have in your life. And isn't it, time that we graduate from suffering folks, isn't it time that we explore another way of being, instead of saying, this is the human condition. So I want you to consider this. Every idea that you have been given has come from somewhere else. And we're gonna explore that in another episode next week. But every idea that you, that you are dealing with right now has come from somewhere else. And the thing that we have to do in the beginning, sometimes I very frequently have to do this.
(16:11): Is have people begin to question the authorities that they've trusted? Not because those are bad people, not because they're mean people or conniving people or anything else like that. But until you are willing to question the answers you've been given, you won't see all the holes in them. You'll put me on a pedestal or someone else on a pedestal. And I don't deserve to be pedestal. I don't wanna be on a pedestal. It's kinda lonely up there. And then if I fall off, I break, stop . And if you put someone on a pedestal, you end up in the pit. We've said this before, so I'll have them. If they've come to me with some very deep religious shame, I will literally have them ask the question. Where did you learn that you are, that this is bad? And they'll tell me, you know, I learned it from the Bible and or I learned it from this person or that person.
(16:57): And I'm not saying that the Bible is wrong. Don't get me wrong, but I'll ask them what evidence do you have? That that person knew what they were talking about. If you were to look at it, if you knew Isaiah, the prophet Isaiah from the old Testament was walking down the street today and he made some prognostication about what's gonna happen to the United States because of this, that or the other. What evidence do you actually have that he's right? Because there are people on the planet right now that are making prognostications of all side of all kinds. There are economists telling you what's gonna happen with the economy. There are political pundits that are telling you what's gonna happen inside of political parties. And who's going, what, where, and there are poles and all kinds of stuff. People are making predictions of all kinds.
(17:38): There are ecologists that are predicting. What's gonna happen with the, with the environment around us. There are weathermen that are predicting the weather and sometimes they're right. And sometimes they're, there are all kinds of people that are making predictions in our life. And many of them, we don't treat with any degree of respect. We don't treat them like they're profits or called from heaven. We're just like, okay, cool. Some of them, there may be people that you love to listen to. And you're like, no, no, this person's really on point with stuff. What evidence you have that they're on point. You can only see that in retrospect one and two, even if their predictions are correct, there's a lot of things that they miss. If you really look at a person's life, nobody on the planet really knows anything. We pretend to know stuff, but all that we know are the exp explanations that we have created inside of our own head.
(18:28): If you ask yourself who is Bob Gardner, the guy that you're listening to right now, you don't know anything. Some of you may have interacted with me in person, but you you've interacted with very little and all the rest you have filled in the gaps. That's the way your brain works. There is some, uh, interesting neurological research around the eyes. Uh, I mean the retina on the eye is a place where the largest data compression on the planet seems to be happening according to some people's estimations, 10 to 11 million bits of information are per second, are being pulsed from the retina to the, uh, to the visual cortex. Now you would think, okay, cool. So that what's happening is that what's what I'm seeing is coming into the eyes is going to the visual cortex. And then I'm seeing exactly what's out there, but that's not actually the case only 20% or so of the nerves.
(19:22): And the nerve change that are going to the visual cortex are actually coming from the eyes. The other 80% thread out through the rest of the brain, pulling information from all the rest of the brain to fill in the gaps and project to you. What you think is happening based on the little pinpoints of data that your eyes are picking up. If you hold your eyes still for any period of time fixating on one point, you'll notice that the edges of your vision start to get fuzzy and then blur out and stuff. And that's because your eyes are used to flitting around and taking little bitty snapshots of what's there. And then sending those snapshots to the brain, which is exceptionally skilled at creating this three dimensional image of what it is that you think you see. But that is being, those are calculations made in the brain.
(20:09): The fact that there's a boundary between you and the outside world, the distance and length of your arms and where they are in space. That's a calculation in the brain. How long things take. That's a calculation in the brain, who am I in relation to the outside world? That's a calculation in the brain. All of these things are calculations. So if we were to take on a computer, the stream of information coming from just the eyes, you would think that we would see what another person is seeing. But the reality is we wouldn't be able to make sense of it at all. It would be like looking at a computer screen right up close, and you would just see a bunch of little points of light. And that's all you would see cuz all your nerve endings are doing are sending to the brain the way that they fire, like how intense the firing is and the location that, that thing is fired in all over the body.
(20:53): They're sending two pieces of information and all the rest of it is your brain's calculation about what that means. Oh, that nerve picks up photos or photons, right? That's a, that's a light sensitive, uh, nerve. And so I'm gonna translate that in terms of vision, oh, this is a sound sensitive nerve or one that moves in space based on sound vibrations and stuff. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick that up and I'm gonna translate that in terms of sound, oh, this one is also one that moves, but this one feels a little more dense and it feels like it's going through the body, the nerves and this space down in my chest, don't aren't sound sensitive. So I'm gonna pick that up and I'm gonna translate that in terms of touch, oh my gosh, the nerves in the nose, those things are wiggling around in space or whatever, but they're somehow sensitive to things.
(21:39): That's the smell. So I'm gonna translate that in terms of smell or taste or what have you, but that's all calculated in the brain. Imagine getting rid of all that. Imagine you not knowing that this is sound and that sight and that smell. And you're just given a bunch of information. All these nerves, all these different nerves fired, make sense of it. That's what we would have in a computer. If we didn't have the massive amount of, you know, data crunching happening in the background that is making guesses about what's out there in reality. And guess what all of those guesses you make are pulling from your own internal database about what you think you know about reality. So if you've interacted with a guy by the name of Bob Gardner, all you know about that guy is a few bits of sense data and a whole lot of guesses guesses made from your own life.
(22:26): History guesses made where you are comparing that sense data to things that I have never lived through. And you're assuming that that is me. Every authority that you listen to is doing the same thing. They are making sense of what is there based on their own past history. That's it. When you hear them talk, what you are hearing, hearing them say is what you are making out of their words. You're not even hearing them. You're hearing what you are making out of their words. So when somebody is reading the Bible and they're telling you what the Bible means, they're telling you what they've made out of the words that the Bible presented to them. When they say the Bible says the Bible is a book, it doesn't talk. They're looking at some words that were translated by somebody which is already one set of filters in a, in a lot of different filters through that, right?
(23:24): Distance and time, distance and space, distance, and cultural understanding. So many different things. And then they are making sense of those words based on how those words made sense to them. From the time they were a kid coming up and based on the people that they've listened to and the authorities that they Revere. And then they've, they're telling you, this is what it means. And in the end, what you are getting is a bunch of thoughts about thoughts that have nothing to do with your life. And unless you are willing to ask the question, what evidence do I have that this person actually knows what they're talking about, including of the stuff that I'm sharing with you, then you are always gonna be dependent on somebody else giving you the answers for your life. As I was with the book, I wasn't willing to ask them the question until I was until I was like, this sucks.
(24:10): And that's usually what happens to us. Our life shows us something that kind of sucks and we have to step up and be like, okay, I'm not willing to tolerate this anymore. I need to start asking some questions. Like, there's gotta be a different way around this, but what if we could speed up that process instead of waiting until things suck, starting now to ask ourselves questions about our own authority. Even what if I'm wrong? Where did I get this idea? How do I know that that idea is actually correct? So that bit by bit, instead of engaging with everybody's historical thoughts about all the things happening in your life, the only thing you're actually dealing with is what's in front of you. And I'll tell you this much, that frees up a whole lot of energy. Your brain already uses like 25% of the energy in your body.
(24:53): Your liver sometimes uses more than that, but it's often on based on how much food you're eating. So over half, the energy of your body is used up in your liver and your brain. And if you allow your brain to not have to crunch so much junk, because all you're dealing with is what's in front of you, the amount of energy you'll have in the day to go do the things that you really love will skyrocket only because you are no longer looking for someone else to tell you what to do or someone else to validate that you did it right? Or some other opinion or some other authority or some other place to measure up. When that goes away, the amount of energy you have just goes through the roof and the amount of joy that's possible with that goes through the roof. It starts by being willing to question your parents, willing to question your teachers, willing to question your mentors.
(25:42): Not because it's bad, not because you're trying to be a skeptic or you're trying to be a, a dork about things and hard to deal with. No, but because the only way that you'll be able to stand on your own two feet is when you are really starting to see things for yourself. And even when you start to do that, you want to question your own authority about things. Do you really know what it is that you think, you know, keep looking, do the opposite of what Playto did. Playto said, no, I decide on what's there. And then anything that doesn't fit that I throw out. Yes. He said that 400 years before Jesus is born here. Here's some Greek philosopher. Who's like the heralded. One of all mankind telling you that what he operates on is confirmation bias, but he's just being honest. Every human does this.
(26:26): Every human does this. All research is just in many ways, a reflection of the current bias of the time. Can you question your own bias? Therein is a level of freedom, not just from the emotional stuff, but freedom from the obligations and the duties and sense of responsibility and peer pressure that so frequently float through our lives. Oh no, the neighborhood's doing this. Oh no. The neighbor thinks this. Oh no. Should I mow Mylar yard this way? Oh no. I'm I feel pressured to do that. Like all of these pressures on the outside are preventing you from experiencing what it's like to be human. And if you wanna be alive and free, well, a place to start is start questioning the answers that people have handed you.
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 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.
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