How to Embrace the Emotions You Resist & Find Lasting Freedom | Joe Hudson
Executive coach Joe Hudson joins André Duqum on the Know Thyself podcast for a two hour and sixteen minute conversation arguing that the emotions we refuse to feel quietly run our lives, and that the way out is to welcome them rather than fix them. Hudson lays out his core tools: the three brains of head, heart, and gut, the golden algorithm that explains why the same painful pattern keeps returning, and the reframe that an emotion fully felt turns into its clean form, anger into boundaries, fear into aliveness, sadness into love. Along the way they cover raising kids who never learn they are not okay, the voice in the head, what awakening does and does not solve, the VIEW framework for real connection, and apologies and forgiveness as freedom machines. The conversation closes on AI, where Hudson argues that as machines absorb knowledge work and skill work, wisdom work and emotional clarity are what remain valuable.
Published Jul 29, 20252:16:04 video58 min readAdded Jul 11, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
Joe Hudson, a business executive coach who has worked with founders and researchers at some of the largest AI labs, sits down with André Duqum on the Know Thyself podcast for roughly two hours and sixteen minutes to make one core claim: the emotions you refuse to feel are running your life, and the way out is not to fix them but to welcome them. Hudson argues that the avoidance of emotion silently drives most of our choices, that resistance is a full body act of muscular constriction we would otherwise call stress, and that an emotion fully felt does not destroy you. It changes into its clean form. Anger becomes clarity and boundaries. Fear becomes aliveness. Sadness becomes love.
Around that spine the two of them rebuild Hudson's whole toolkit: subtractive development, the three brains, the golden algorithm that explains why the same painful pattern keeps returning, how to raise kids who never learn they are not okay, how to relate to the voice in your head, what awakening does and does not solve, the VIEW framework for real connection, apologies and forgiveness as freedom machines, and a long closing argument that as artificial intelligence eats knowledge work and skill work, wisdom work is all that is left. What follows rebuilds the conversation in order, keeps the stories and the numbers, and attributes each claim to whoever made it.
Figure 1. Hudson's most general framework. We are a very head oriented society, so the head keeps trying to think its way to change. But knowing you should not eat that while you eat it means the head got it and the heart and gut did not. Real transformation only sticks when all three agree, and because the culture starves the receiving side, the heart and gut work is usually the faster route.
Subtractive development and the place there is to get to
Duqum opens with a framing he has heard Hudson use: subtractive development. So much of what we call growth is really accumulation, more ideas, more material, more strategies. He asks Hudson to speak to development that comes from taking away rather than adding.
Hudson says he has never put it in those terms but he appreciates them. He reaches for a Zen image: if a hand is always open, or always clenched, both are useless. What he sees in our society is endless doing, what do I do, how do I get there, what is the next step, and almost no receiving. There are places where trying is genuinely useful and places where trying gets in the way, and the skill is knowing which is which. He resists the way spiritual traditions turn this into a duality, where the moment subtracting is good, adding becomes bad. It is not about good and bad. It is about flexibility, knowing when and what to use, in order to arrive at the recognition that there is nowhere to get to.
Duqum tries to name what subtractive work assumes: that we are already internally whole, and these practices and retreats return people to an innate state. Is it a returning, he asks, or a rebuilding? Hudson says for years he saw it as a remembering or a getting back to, and now he would say it is neither. That wholeness is always there in everybody, so there is not even a returning, only a recognition. Even calling it a returning, he says, is a little more force than is efficient.
Following the person, not the framework
Asked for the elevator pitch of his deeper retreat and coaching work, Hudson says he has many frameworks because people are in different places, and the important thing is to follow the person across from him. The wisdom is not in the coach. It is in the client. Even after walking the path himself and with thousands of others, he insists there is no way he knows someone's next best step better than they do.
The most general framework he offers is the three brains. We have one brain, but functionally three: the prefrontal cortex, which he calls the intellect or head. The mammalian, emotional part, which he calls the heart. And the nervous system, closer to the reptilian brain, which he calls the gut. If you want durable transformation, you have to address all three. The proof is in everyday failure: I know I should not eat that, but I am eating it, means the head understands and the heart and gut do not. I know I should not treat my friends like that, but I do, means the head got it and the heart and gut did not. When all three land, change is natural and effortless. Because we are a head heavy culture, the receiving work of the heart and nervous system tends to be the more transformative, and faster. He is careful not to rank them. None are bad and all are necessary.
Duqum presses on the western overidentification with the mind, and the difference between regurgitating information and knowing something in the body. What you say you believe versus how you actually act, he notes, and how you act is the truer belief. Where do we go wrong conflating knowledge and wisdom? Hudson answers on two levels. Societally, our education system is built on the idea that getting an idea will change your life, so even most spirituality is mostly talking with maybe one or two practices. Meditation is a great practice, he has done it for a decade and still does, but it is one experiment among infinitely many. If you teach experientially instead of intellectually, the work lands better. In his courses there is some podcast style talking and then hours of running experiments with other people. Rather than explaining that wonder helps you see through fear, he has you do a practice that produces wonder and watch what happens to your fear.
He traces the method to his childhood. With an alcoholic father, authority could not be trusted, so when he dug into spirituality, psychology, and philosophy, he could not simply believe any of it. He started designing experiments to test whether each idea was real for him. That distrust, he says, was the dumb luck that let him make real progress: not what should I believe, but how do I check if this is actually true in my life.
On the personal level, the trap is that if I actually feel the thing I just saw, I might open a Pandora's box, so I set it aside. The mind fools us about emotions by predicting catastrophe: if I let myself get sad I will be sad forever, if I let myself be scared I will be incapable, if I let myself get angry I will destroy what I love. What actually happens is the opposite. Let yourself get sad and you feel better, a good cry feels great. Let yourself feel fear and you become more capable, because you are no longer spending energy not feeling it. And anger, when you are not doing it at someone or trying to control them, does the same thing. We only get angry about what we care about deeply, so moving the anger just clarifies the love underneath.
The courage to feel, and monsters that want hugs
Duqum observes how our resistance to unwanted emotions can perpetuate them for a lifetime. How do we break through the dull background of subtle anxieties and fears? Hudson offers a perspective shift. Saying I do not want to feel scared, I want to heal my anxiety, I want to get through my anxiety, is all rejection of the anxiety, a forceful pushing narrative. What is the receptive narrative instead? If each anxious part is an aspect of you that was not loved, or is looking for love, then the anxiety becomes a call for love. How do I love that anxiety? There might be stages, you might have to get angry first, draw a boundary, do other things, but the orientation flips from getting rid of to loving.
The story he tells is about his daughter at three or four, scared of monsters under her bed for about a week. One day he walked in and asked, do you know what monsters really want? They really want hugs. They are looking for hugs. That was the last day she complained. And that, he says, is basically what he does for a living now. The parts of us we experience as monsters just want attention, because they did not get attended to as children, so they keep throwing a fit until we love them.
Duqum asks whether most suppressed emotions come from the zero to eight age range, the theta dominant developmental window. Absolutely, Hudson says, especially emotionally.
Raising kids who never learn they are not okay
This launches the parenting section, one of the most concrete in the conversation. When he and his wife were raising kids, she led and he resisted, right from decisions about birth. Somewhere around when their oldest was two, he surrendered: you are better at this than I am, I will do whatever you tell me, give it my full effort, and if after three months it does not feel good I will say something. One of the things she brought was Hand in Hand Parenting, a methodology of allowing children their full emotional expression while still drawing gentle boundaries. He calls it one of the most profound spiritual practices of his life and a huge reason his daughters are so amazing: they were told that every aspect of them is okay. Almost no punishment, very little shame, and when either happened, an immediate I am sorry, that is not how I want to treat you.
The mechanism he keeps returning to: when you tell a kid stop being angry, do not be scared, do not get so excited, you are telling them that part of them is not okay. And at zero to eight, that part is all they are, because the sense of self and the intellect are not fully online yet. So the child hears you are not okay, over and over, and grows into an adult who feels they must prove their value, who senses an abyss they will fall into if they go there.
Duqum asks how Hudson allowed that fullness while still functioning in society. Hudson sets the context with his airplane test: if a baby starts crying on a plane, he can stand up, look back, and tell you exactly who among the adults was not allowed to cry as a kid. If a child's tantrum triggers you, it is because you cannot allow that in yourself. So learning to allow it for his kids forced him to allow it for himself, which produced what he calls the great softening of his parenting. He tells the Whole Foods story: his eldest wanted something off the shelf, he calmly held the boundary, and she threw a full tantrum on the floor while he acted as a container, making sure nothing got destroyed. An old hippie lady came over, not judgmental but clearly unhappy with him, and asked if his daughter was okay. His three year old popped out of the meltdown just long enough to say I am just having my emotions, then went right back in. Allowing his daughters to connect with and move through whatever they felt, he found, always returned them to being sweethearts. He finds the exact same thing with adults.
Every trigger is a door
That mirror works on adults too, Duqum notes: what we judge and get triggered by externally reveals where we are not okay with an emotion internally. Hudson agrees completely. Any place you are triggered or judging someone else is a direct experience of an emotion you are not allowing. There is no way to judge someone without clamping down an emotion in your own system, and if you feel that emotion, the judgment dissolves.
He gives a runnable experiment: for one week, every time you judge somebody, stop in the middle and ask, what am I trying not to feel right now, and feel it. Watch what happens to the judgment. He is blunt that hearing it does nothing. Go do it for a week and it means everything.
Duqum asks how much of dissolving a trigger is simply awareness of it. Hudson gently corrects the framing: if you do not limit awareness, then pure awareness is all that is necessary for almost any internal transformation. Conscious attention without a story will eventually take care of it. The moment you add a story, or the attention has a drive, something it is trying to get to, it becomes slower and less effective, though it can still work. Attending to your judgment, you notice the body constricting, notice an emotion, unconstrict the body, feel the emotional state.
The somatic reversal: stop trying to stop feeling
Duqum asks how awareness drives deeper into the somatic experience. Hudson gives his cleanest instruction of the whole talk. Try an experiment right now: try to stop feeling every emotion you are having. Notice that some or all of your muscles had to constrict. Do that for an extended period and we would call it stress, or tension. Full emotional allowing is simply the exact opposite of that. Where stopping is a tightening and a backing away, allowing is a fluidity: less clawing to have an experience, less chasing states, smoother decisions.
Why it matters so much is that avoidance of emotion drives an enormous amount of behavior. How many choices did you make not to feel like a failure, to feel loved, to chase happiness, to avoid discomfort? How many times did you open YouTube to avoid discomfort? Millions of choices, made to dodge an emotion.
He flags a pitfall. People say, okay Joe, I can love all my emotions, so if I love my fear I will get rid of my fear. But if you are trying to get rid of it, you are not loving it, so it will not work. When you actually fully love and accept the thing, it changes and becomes fluid, and you find pleasure and joy in far more. His line: joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she will not come into a house where her children are not welcome. Chasing joy, or using acceptance to get over something, is just another way of resisting.
Emotion
Kinked and resisted (dirty energy)
Fully felt and welcomed (clean energy)
Anger
passive aggression, "nice jewelry," "no, I'm not angry," or lashing out to control someone
clear boundaries with an open heart, like Gandhi or MLK: determination and clarity
Fear
anxiety, or a manic over excitement that never settles
aliveness, exuberance, capability, because energy is not spent avoiding it
Sadness
held back tears, numbness, a low grade heaviness
a deep love, "am I crying because I'm sad or because I'm so in love?"
Any emotion, in general
muscular constriction we call stress; drives avoidant, indecisive choices
fluidity, smoother decisions, less chasing of states, a natural return to joy
Figure 2. Hudson's kinked hose. Every emotion is a conduit, and how you kink it decides what leaks out. Kink anger one way and it is sarcasm, another way and it is an outburst. Unkinked, the same anger is a clean boundary. The emotion does not become a different emotion when welcomed. It stays itself and transforms into its clean expression.
What changes when emotion flows
Asked what visibly changes when someone moves with emotional fluidity, Hudson lists several. Decision making clarifies, because decisions are actually made in the emotional center of the brain. Remove that center and your IQ stays the same but it takes hours to decide where to have lunch or which color pen to use. Much indecision is really stagnant fear, I do not want to feel this way and I do not want to feel that way, so I freeze. If you are not scared of feeling a certain way, choices get clear. He illustrates with the fear of being homeless: imagine you are homeless and happier and more at peace than ever, so much love and joy you cannot even recognize it today. Suddenly homelessness is not so scary, and the decision it was distorting comes free.
Authenticity becomes natural, because most inauthenticity is just not wanting to feel something. Relationships get smoother, because most fights are about not wanting to feel shame, or like a bad person, or out of control, or helpless. If you can accept those feelings, you can accept the other person without needing to change them. You may draw boundaries, you may decide the relationship is not for you, but you are not trying to remodel them. In business, watching a leader lean into an emotion they could not lean into before, a whole solution set opens up that they literally could not see, because seeing it would have meant feeling something.
Duqum names the image of a kink in a hose where flow is throttled, and asks about the difference between clean energy and dirty energy, and what vitality feels like with fewer kinks. Hudson says each emotion kinks differently. Anger felt fully is clarity and determination. Fear felt fully is aliveness and exuberance. Sadness felt fully is a deep love, which is why after a big heartbreak, in the fullness of the grief, there can be a strange bliss. Duqum confirms he has felt exactly that.
This is a real rewiring, Duqum says, of the common model where grief and fear sit at the bottom and the goal is to climb toward love and bliss, an idea he ties to David Hawkins and Power vs. Force. Hudson reframes emotions as a bandwidth where each serves a purpose and can be brought into right relationship. So called negative emotions are also superb signals: frustration says there is a boundary you are not drawing, or a truth you are not speaking. When you appreciate what each emotion is for, resistance drops immensely, and you reach the point where you are not loving the fear to get rid of it, you actually like it, because it is telling you something you need. In sessions he will offer to push a button that removes all a client's anxiety, and they say no, because something in them knows there is a gift in it. Find that gift and the anxiety can be welcomed.
The golden algorithm
Duqum asks about the intelligent design Hudson sees in how emotions work. This is the golden algorithm, and Hudson lays it out in full. First part: the emotions we do not want to feel, we invite in the exact way we are trying not to feel them. Second part: when there is an emotion we do not want to feel, we keep recreating experiences that produce it, so that we can eventually heal. Once we fully welcome and invite that emotional experience, we stop recreating the pattern.
His own example: in his twenties, emotionally abandoned by an alcoholic father and an Al Anon mother, he did not want to feel that abandonment, so he had a run of friends and partners who kept abandoning him. If he could not attract it, he could create it. The two moves he made both guaranteed it: going I am fine, which makes people want to leave, or getting needy, which also makes people want to leave. Self fulfilling prophecies. The way we avoid an emotion invites the experience right back.
But the design is intelligent, because it keeps giving us another chance to feel the emotion, love it, love the part of ourselves that carries it, and see ourselves as whole again. For him it took being abandoned hundreds of times by different people until he could finally say, I can feel this abandonment now. As a child it would have destroyed him, I do not have parents who care for me, what do I do. As an adult he could hug that monster and love the thing that never got loved. And once he did, the charge flipped: I cannot wait to feel abandoned again, come on, let us do this, and the pattern no longer had to repeat.
Figure 3. Why the same painful situation keeps finding you. The avoidance is the invitation, so the loop runs for as long as it takes, sometimes hundreds of repetitions, until the emotion is finally felt and loved. Hudson reframes this not as a defect but as intelligent design: the pattern is the psyche handing you the same lesson until you are ready to become whole.
Responsibility, agency, and the end of the path
Duqum notes the shift from victimhood to responsibility: these recurring external patterns are revealing your internal state. Hudson agrees, and adds a map. At the beginning of the path you think other people are responsible. In the middle you think you are responsible. At the end there is no responsibility. He renders the Tibetan version as mind as wide as the sky, action as fine as barley flour: you can see the truth in every perspective, yet there is only one action you can take. When you hold both, you see the right and wrong of every viewpoint and still do the one thing you are called to do because you cannot do otherwise. That is a kind of responsibility without the burden of having to be a certain way.
He points to how impersonal it all becomes. According to the Mayo Clinic, most humans have around 50,000 thoughts a day, and none of us chose them. If I cannot even control my own thoughts, cannot stop thinking for ten minutes, how could I be responsible for the actions that flow from them? Both stages matter. There is a time when feeling I have agency, I have a choice, is essential, because without it you will not do certain things. And there is a time to let that go, to receive and accept, to relax into non responsibility. Neither is better. It depends on the realization a person needs for their next step. This helps us stop taking our lives so personally, though, as both note, it opens questions of free will and agency that are a topic for another day.
The voice in the head
Duqum turns to the inner voice that runs the show, the mental matrix where the same thoughts loop across a lifetime in different textures. How does Hudson relate to it? This is a large part of his in person work. First, most humans listen to their negative repetitive self talk, but there is a time and place where that repetitive negative self talk actually goes away, sometimes in chunks. It can and does go away.
The voice is always lying, or more precisely, it is never perfectly true, there is a lie in everything it says, and it is horribly ineffective. If 40,000 of your 50,000 daily thoughts are negative self talk, imagine externalizing that as a boss standing over you saying you messed that up, that was not good, why did you do this. You would call it abuse and the employee would be useless. Yet we tell ourselves we need it to be productive, that without the internal abuse we would just sit on the couch and drink beer. It frees up enormous energy not to have it. But, like any part of yourself, if you hate it and try to push it away, it gets stronger.
Hudson says he once collected about fifteen effective tools for working with the voice, and his favorite is not to stop it but to change how you react to it. Most people relate to their self talk like a devotee to a politician: the voice says you are bad, and they nod along, totally captivated. Some believe it and then get passive aggressive with it, you should lose weight, yeah I should, no you cannot make me. Instead, experiment with a thousand other responses. Break into a musical every time it talks. Say I love you. Say shut up. Laugh at it. One day say I see how scared you are, I am right here with you, the next just say no. Play, and watch what you learn about what the voice is up to. It is an incredibly effective way in.
Duqum flags that the inner critic is not only deflationary, it can also be inflationary, you are the best, and both are ego. Hudson agrees. Duqum then shares what has given him the most freedom: seeing how closely he was identified with the voice. He offers the traffic analogy, bumper to bumper misery on the ground, but from the airplane the same traffic looks beautiful, and the only thing that changed was the distance. Does freedom come from distance from our identification with these thoughts, not from their absence?
Hudson says noticing it is not you is definitely helpful, and adds a sharper move: notice that it is talking to itself, not to you. You are not doing a good job actually means it is not doing a good job. It is projecting itself onto you. Think about the five things negative self talk says most, you have not done enough, you are too judgmental, you are not productive enough, and notice that most of it is truer about the voice than about you. Just as your parents or teachers were unconsciously projecting when they installed it.
Following that segment, Duqum reads an ad for BON CHARGE red light therapy, a partner of the show.
Nonduality and spiritual growing pains
Duqum asks about Hudson's experience with nonduality, noting he studied with Adyashanti and spent years meditating. Hudson says he spent about twelve years chasing it and roughly ten mostly meditating. His awakening was the kind sometimes called a fog walker or cloud walker: it happened and he barely noticed, dismissing it at first as just another elevated state, which is not what he was after. It took a while to recognize that the voice in the head had completely changed, the inner editor was gone.
He names two backwaters he was lucky to avoid. One is thinking you are done, which he calls hell on earth, believing evolution has stopped because of your meditation practice. He was spared because the recognition arrived with a thought, and this never ends, the shifting and evolution simply never stop. The other trap is becoming the awakened guy, turning one more developmental step into an identity, the way a sixteen year old might become the guy who can finally do hypothetical thought. He got stuck there for a bit, and what jolted him loose was noticing there was a lot of peace but where was the joy, where was the love. He realized that defining himself that way, retreating to the great peaceful abyss, had become a form of emotional avoidance. An earlier version of this had shown up around four years into meditation, when he realized, this is not meditation, this is just management, I am managing myself. After awakening he saw that the peace itself could be avoidance, and that is when the emotional work really kicked in.
childhoodAn alcoholic father and an Al Anon mother, emotional abandonment, and a deep distrust of authority that later makes him test every idea as an experiment.
his 20sThe golden algorithm in the wild: a run of friends and partners who keep abandoning him, created by the very ways he avoided feeling abandoned.
~10 yearsA decade of meditation and twelve years chasing nonduality. Around year four: the realization that "this is not meditation, this is management."
awakeningA quiet "cloud walker" shift. The inner editor goes silent, but he finds peace without much joy or love, and sees the peace itself has become avoidance.
afterHe learns to "drag the monk back into hell," amplifying every emotional signal he can find, reopening the heart the head had bypassed.
parentingRaising two daughters with Hand in Hand Parenting becomes the great softening, forcing him to allow in himself what he allowed in them.
the workHe meets Case, a gifted teacher who lives with the family while ill; after Case dies, Hudson travels to study Byron Katie and others and distills the VIEW framework.
nowCoaching CEOs and AI researchers. His vulnerable edge: letting the impact of his work be personal, "it was me," not just something moving through him.
Figure 4. The arc Hudson tells across the conversation, from a childhood that taught avoidance, through a head first awakening, to the slower work of reopening the heart. It is the lived version of his own thesis: the head can wake up while the heart stays closed, and closing that gap is the real work.
Duqum asks if it got harder to connect with emotions after awakening. Yes, Hudson says. He had to amplify any emotional signal he could get. He had a short lived teacher whose name escapes him who made a living teaching Tibetan monks their emotional experience, describing his job as, I drag monks back into hell. Hudson now works with people in that same place, people who arrived very deep in the nondual but with the heart not yet open. A big head awakening can coexist with a lot of remaining identification, because the heart cannot identify the way the brain can. You can have access to a vast, spacious, peaceful place and still not have access to the joy and the ungodly amount of love that courses through us.
Duqum relates: ten years of meditation, a lot of peace, and still room to grow his emotional bandwidth. He uses the image of 88 keys on a piano where most of us play only middle C and a few around it. How would Hudson coach him to widen the range, given that seeing the illusory nature of neurosis makes it harder to take any of it seriously? Hudson's first reassurance: your emotional journey will be easier because of the awakening, once you get over the first hump. The quickest way, he jokes, is to have two girls. He quotes a former teacher, Steven Harrison: show me an awakened guy on a road trip with two young kids in the back seat, and I will show you a human. The real instruction is to allow the full intimacy of humanity. Emotional intimacy and relationship, including business, which is just a bundle of relationships, is a great place to find the parts of yourself that are not emotionally invited. He references a coaching question sometimes traced to est: if I am awakened I should be able to live on top of a disco and be happy, but because I am awakened I would not choose to. Occasionally live on top of the disco. Go to a Dodgers game. He tells of a Bhutanese style teacher who would meditate six months in caves then bring students to America for soccer matches where they would get into fights, deliberately courting intimacy with humanity, and recognizing all of it is already in you. Do that three or four times, see the benefit, and it becomes something you can do.
Duqum asks whether Hudson found a bottom to the suppressed emotions. He does not think there is a bottom, it is constant. What he notices is a back and forth between agency and blessing, and ever more subtle forms of it, the dance between waking up and growing up. He cites a Jewish idea of humility as taking your god given place in the world: at one moment humility asks him to expand and become more permeable, not smaller, and at another to disappear in a new way. Are waking up and growing up both necessary, Duqum asks, each incomplete without the other? Hudson says neither is strictly necessary, you can live one without the other, it is just less rewarding. He has dear friends who live in only one and seem fine with it. Duqum notes the paradox that we strive for enlightenment while the I is itself the barrier, and Hudson agrees it was for him for years. He quotes an Irish mystic to the effect of, you can try to crack your ego, burn it with a thousand surrenders, the only problem is it never existed. Because the ego is illusory, almost any angle on it, destroy it or let it go, can reveal some freedom.
Relating to the ego, and owning your power
Duqum asks how Hudson relates to his own ego and helps executives relate to theirs. The first crucial insight: ego is not only I am important, it is just as much I am not important. To taste your ego, have someone give you a big compliment and watch everything in you that resists it. He now defines ego simply as your self definition. You cannot work in the world without some self definition, and it is impossible not to have some, so again it is about flexibility: can I be defined and undefined, can I walk into a meeting with this is completely unacceptable, and also into a meeting with whatever happens here is fine. He invokes the Goenka ten day Vipassana story of a teacher who yells at meditators, walks out, and laughs about how hard he gave it to them. Can you take on those roles when they serve the freedom of others? That flexibility matters even more for a CEO whose decisions ripple widely.
Duqum admits he has trouble receiving gracious compliments, habitually turning away and downplaying, partly from being trained to see praise as inflationary and therefore bad. Hudson flips it: pushing it away builds ego, and taking it as true builds ego. There is a third way that is neither. Someone says you are a complete jerk, and you say yes, I can give you ten ways I was a jerk in traffic today. Someone says you are wise, and you say yes, I can give you ten ways I am wise. That is freedom, where the ego is not ruling you. Receiving it, he says, is a full body sport, becoming permeable and feeling everything it does to you, like a pinball. The more he owns it, the less dangerous or narcissistic he becomes around it.
This connects to power. Working with powerful CEOs, he finds most cannot own their power, deflecting with it is the whole company, other people. But if a CEO can actually feel that when they spit at the top it is a waterfall at the bottom, that the entire organization reflects their consciousness, they become far less dangerous than a leader who will not own it. Power is illusory, only real if people believe in it, all true, and yet feeling and allowing yes, I am powerful makes a leader safer. The megalomaniacs who look like they are owning their power are not, he guarantees, they are precisely not allowing themselves to feel the power they have. Suppression and distortion travel together.
Disowned power, cults, and the two way relationship
Duqum notes that in spiritual communities suppressed areas like sexuality erupt in distorted ways, with leaders caught doing crazy things. Hudson brings up the NXIVM documentaries, one of which, The Vow, he watched. He had a friend who was in NXIVM and wanted to start what she jokingly called conscious culting: she recognized it was a cult, catalogued the benefits, but made them sign a contract and refused to be branded, so she was never actually in it, because being in a cult requires you to hand over your agency. He points to a moment where the leader, Keith Raniere, sits with his harem asking why people all want to listen to him, genuinely not getting it. That, Hudson says, is disowned power and disowned narcissism, and it is what let the whole thing happen.
Crucially, it is a two way relationship, like all relationships. When teaching first started working for him, he noticed people wanting to put him in that position, to hand over responsibility so they would not have to think or stress, and certain people wanting to be his caretaker, to have power by proximity. CEOs live in the same dynamic, everyone around them managing their own I am important because I am close to the CEO. To the untrained eye a crowd putting someone on a pedestal makes them look righteous, but that is often not a sign of integrity. Which is why Duqum cultivates friendships that actively challenge and mirror each other, without turning everyone into each other's therapist. Hudson agrees the most essential thing in his marriage was a mutual commitment to growth: you cannot be each other's psychologist, but two people willing to transform, focusing on their own change rather than the other's, make successful marriages.
Body intelligence and how the coaching actually works
Returning to the three brains, Duqum asks about the pitfall of ignoring body intelligence, especially for high performers. Hudson cites the ratio: around 11,000 bits of information a second in the body versus maybe 12 to 15 in the conscious brain, that is the scale of what gets lost. He works with brilliant AI researchers and finds the most effective ones listen to their bodies. In introductions his groups have people introduce themselves from head, then heart, then gut, so they feel the difference and notice different things come out each time. It is all one system, but making the distinction and acting from those places is powerful. He notes athletes can do something effortlessly in their sport and, asked to bring the same move into a love relationship, light up at how easy it suddenly seems.
How do you build trust with intuition and hunches? Hudson says the real trick is not to build trust with them, but to take them as experiments. Coaching, he is like sonar: deeply interested in the client's wisdom and where they want to go, pinging things and seeing what comes back. He has pattern recognition from thousands of people and his own path, which can look like magic, so what is happening in your gut right now, how did you know that. But he does not believe the hunches, he throws them out to sound the depths. He is very impartial internally, following the person, wanting them to go where they want to go. Duqum has seen this in his one on one work: someone arrives with one problem and it quickly diverts to an area they were not expecting, closer to the real root. Is that conscious? No. After a session Hudson usually does not know how it went, and does debriefs with trusted students just to get a sense of it. His brain runs on its own while most of his attention is in his body, and he can barely remember what happened.
Defensiveness, people pleasing, and emotional hot potato
Duqum asks what our defensiveness reveals. Usually, Hudson says, we are defensive about the things we do not want to accept about ourselves, and because there is an emotion we do not want to feel, so you have two threads to pull and either reveals the other. He gives the counterpart move: if your spouse is defensive and you want to help, first, it is not your job, so do not. But if you do, look at them and say there is nothing in me that wants you to be defensive or thinks you need to be right now, and whatever is underneath gets revealed very quickly. Even if it comes out as anger, what do you mean I am not defensive, that is the part of you that you do not want to feel, and I can welcome it because I can welcome it in myself. Defensiveness shows up as fight, or as freeze and passive aggression, or as let me take care of you, all for the same reason, I am scared there is something bad about me, so I fight, freeze, or fly into you to feel good by making you change.
On people pleasing, Hudson offers an instant reframe. It is a relatively easy pattern to shift once someone sees that helping is actually disempowering the other person. Their self image is I am a helper, but by taking care of someone you tell them they cannot do it themselves, you give them a fish instead of teaching them to fish, you make them small, you make them a victim. When that clicks it is hard to keep doing, once you notice that underneath the helping is fear, and you are managing your reality instead of feeling it. Duqum names the difference between the nice guy who caters to everyone's emotions, which feels inauthentic and blocks intimacy, and someone genuinely kind. Hudson says ultimately all of it is a fear of love. Jealousy is I want you to love me, do not love me, wanting someone while pushing them away. People pleasing is I want your love but I have to take care of you. So much of it is a pushing and pulling of love, because we cannot recognize on a head, heart, and gut level that we deserve love, having been taught at some age that we had to be a particular way to earn it.
Duqum recalls the line that fear, anger, and jealousy are poisons we drink expecting the other person to die. Hudson adds that you can do fear at someone too: I am really scared you will do badly on this podcast, so are you being careful, which is asking you to hold my fear for me. We often ask someone else to hold our emotions when we do not want to, and that kills intimacy.
Apologies and forgiveness as freedom machines
Hudson calls apologies and forgiveness massive freedom machines. Most people apologize with shame and forgive from obligation, and both fail. Apologizing with shame, I am so sorry I talked poorly about you, actually makes the listener scared you will do it again and tends to guarantee the repeat. Apologizing cleanly, I talked poorly about you and that is not how I want to be with you, and I apologize, signals real change. Forgiveness from obligation has no benefit and no forgiveness for your own part. But when forgiveness comes from genuine heartbreak, there is forgiveness both for the other person and for yourself.
He frames grief as a natural stage of transformation. There is a moment of recognizing, I never had to feel abandoned this whole time, I was making that happen, followed by grief and heartbreak. Every time you allow your heart to break, it increases your capacity to love, so grief is not a detour, it is the step that expands you: I did not have to be a liar all these years, did not have to be hard, did not have to be defensive, none of it was necessary. Forgiving from obligation instead of from that heartbreak skips the whole transformative step. Duqum notes how we wear resentment as a badge of honor, and how attachment to the other person receiving our apology robs us of the internal letting go, and also of the heartbreak of not being seen. Hudson describes a live masterclass that day where three people wanted a parent to finally see and apologize, confronted that it will probably never happen, and found enormous grief and healing in that, which dramatically increased their capacity to love those parents. Often we want the apology precisely to avoid our own heartbreak.
Emotional hot potato
Duqum recalls friends who tried everything to get an addicted parent to change, then fully collapsed the energy within themselves, and the parent went into remission the next day. Hudson calls this a rarely discussed phenomenon. In a marriage, if you worry about money, the odds of me worrying drop, and if you stop, I will start. Humans pass emotions like a hot potato, and the most profound one is the shame hot potato, everyone tossing I do not feel good about myself back and forth trying not to hold it. You can watch it in a men's group: take on the always doubting person's it will never work energy and their next share becomes far more positive. In business, remove the one person holding this will not work and someone else immediately takes it on. It points straight at depersonalization and awakening, because you realize you were just holding a thing anyone else would hold, so who are you if you are not even these emotions or thoughts. In some of their in person work they use this deliberately, asking a group to hold the seven emotions someone habitually carries, to show them what is left, a practice that requires deep trust and should not be tried casually.
The VIEW framework
Duqum asks about the VIEW framework. Hudson says the introductory version of the work is the connection course, and VIEW came from studying people who could transform others in conversation. After his awakening he met a man named Case, kind of an ass but also amazing, who could talk with someone for an hour and their whole world would change. Case had cancer and could not get the treatment he wanted in Europe, so he came and lived with the family, and Hudson watched him do this work constantly, in the living room, while their eight year old would call out from the stairs, just stop resisting. When Case died of a heart attack, Hudson set out to learn what that was, traveling to find people who could do it, most notably Byron Katie. Their methods differed wildly, so he asked what they all shared. The answer became VIEW.
Figure 5. VIEW, distilled from what great facilitators share beneath very different methods. Live it and, in Hudson's account, connection, relationships, and even conflict improve, conflict becoming productive instead of destructive. He notes he could raise money better, sell better, marry better, and parent better once he related to people this way, because connection is what we most want.
The people who transformed others were vulnerable in their questions, willing to ask the scary ones and to be seen in their own experience. They were impartial, not trying to get anyone anywhere, okay with wherever the person landed, following more than leading. They had empathy, meaning they were with the person rather than lost in them or their story. And they were full of wonder, not knowing something about you but wondering. Wonder matters because knowing you are an awesome meditator does not let me be with you as a human, whereas wondering what is important to you, how do you want to relate, opens deeper connection. Living in VIEW made conflict productive and every human interaction more rewarding. And it works on yourself: meditating in VIEW, vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, full of wonder, is far more productive than the early meditation of clear my mind, it is not clear, clear it again, you messed up, clear it again.
Real vulnerability and Hudson's current edge
Duqum distinguishes performed vulnerability, which has gotten good PR agents, from truly feeling vulnerable. Hudson notes vulnerability changes over time: I had an alcoholic dad used to be vulnerable and now is not, because vulnerability is offering something up for reflection, and when people reflect back that you do not need to be ashamed, that shame dissolves and you move to the next layer. Can you reach a state with nothing left that feels vulnerable to share? Hudson does not think so. It gets weird, moving outside the bounds of language, and there is a natural insecurity to life, there is no such thing as a secure life, so on that living edge there is always some this is scary but true. The bigger we are asked to become, the more we identify with everything, the more each step still comes with vulnerability.
Asked to share his own current vulnerable edge, Hudson attempts it. His narcissistic tendency was that when he felt he might be hurt, he would put himself slightly above people as protection. Years ago his marriage brought that to a head, and he recognized how much pain that little move had caused himself and others, and all the emotion he was avoiding in it. That recognition brought the humility of it is all moving through me, I am not special, and he became somewhat attached to that, careful not to get a big head. But recently he has recognized that the next step is not to abandon that humility but to integrate it with this is me, this is very personal, this is not just happening through everybody. He describes two forms of fear, one is I am going to die, the other is I am being asked to walk into a bigger room, and the second creates a strange permeability, less of me per square inch, a disappearing that only happens by acknowledging that it is me here. The story that clicked it for him: a lawyer at a hot springs told how he once helped someone at a DMV, interpreted their dream, changed their life, and just started crying in gratitude that he could be there doing it. Hudson realized he does that twenty times a day and is not crying in gratitude. The lawyer had to take it personally, to say I did that, to be touched like that. The way Hudson can instantly feel that about raising his daughters, that was me, it was moving through me but it was also me. His edge now is allowing the impact of his work to actually break his heart, to receive the ten emails a day from people saying you changed my life not only as it is not me, it is what moves through me, but also as something personal enough to break his heart open into a bigger allowing.
Duqum reflects that many creators and leaders feel life asking them to serve at a bigger scale, and that with a growing audience comes all the energy coming back at you. The easiest thing is to armor up and defend, Hudson says, but closing down like that would end this work, because he cannot do it closed. Opening to that much sometimes feels like riding a motorcycle very fast without a helmet, vulnerable. Asked what his wisest self would ask to help embrace heartbreak at scale, Hudson says that is not how his system works now: once he sees something is being asked for, it is just a watching of its unfolding, like trying to pull a butterfly from the cocoon, by the time he can name it, it is done, and he only has to sit back and wait, then occasionally process it by talking to someone.
Unconditional love in business, and boundaries
Duqum notes Hudson describes his frameworks as temporary scaffolding, and that he brings unconditional love into sales and work environments, which sounds counterintuitive. Hudson offers a thought experiment: you are stuck on an island with everything you need and twelve people who happen to be saints and choose to love you unconditionally, for a decade. How do you walk out? That version of yourself is who all of us want to be, and unconditional love is how you get there, and it is what you can create in a company. It does not mean no boundaries, because there is no icon of love who did not draw boundaries: a great mother, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, all drew boundaries. That environment produces productive, effective, lovely human beings, whether a family or a company, and it starts with being able to unconditionally love yourself or finding an environment full of people who do.
What makes a powerful leader
Duqum asks what makes a truly powerful leader, especially those shaping human consciousness at scale, including the AI companies Hudson works with. Hudson first checks the premise. He describes a conversation about a choice an AI lab could make, to say our goal is that interacting with our AI makes you a better person and nothing else. Someone objected that they would lose because someone else will make an addictive AI. Hudson thinks AI may be one of the few technologies where the genuinely life enhancing product could actually be more compelling. But the deeper point is that it is a two way relationship: it is not only the AI or its builders, it is the people choosing which products to use, the clicks. The marketplace is the most efficient democracy we have ever had, and what you buy, they will build, because a leader's job is partly to guess what you will buy. So a great leader actually sees it is a relationship, and also sees they hold power in the dynamic that others do not, and can feel both the connection and the power and own them.
He cites Trillion Dollar Coach, about a coach whose motto was lead with love and who worked with hugely successful companies. Leading with love works, Hudson says, and so can leading with greed, but greed usually has a much shorter lifespan and lacks fulfillment. Everybody wants to leave a positive legacy, nobody thinks they are the bad guy, Hitler thought he was doing God's work, so the confusion is never do I want to do good, it is how, and how scared we are, and which emotions we are avoiding while we do it. His phrase: God is not a sadist. We assume we must suffer for the good of others, but usually the thing best for you is also best for other people, and acting from that alignment is the most fulfilling. He cannot hold obligation or responsibility and love in his heart at the same time: feel love for someone, then try to feel obligated to them, and the love drains out. A leader who feels deep love does better work than one running on obligation or defending against constant attack. He points to Elon Musk, whose early 60 Minutes interview about SpaceX had him crying about astronauts who were not appreciative, and who now reads as all attack. Attack someone twenty four hours a day and of course they harden. What you hate in a leader is what you do not accept in yourself, and taking that responsibility both frees you and helps them become better, even at one in a billion.
Duqum ties it to endurance: moving toward sincere love is what lets us endure the surrounding difficulty, using his own deepening piano practice, where love of it lets him enjoy even the frustration of learning music theory. Hudson tells the story of Sarah, a long time colleague they could not imagine moving away from, who greeted his frustration one day with I love your frustration, because it means something is not working and now we get to find it and get to the other side. It was the first time in a business setting someone loved his frustration back, and you can give that gift to yourself: frustration means creative tension, and that you care deeply about the thing. So how could it not be enjoyable?
Will AI change how we relate to ourselves?
Duqum turns to AI becoming ubiquitous and frightening in its exponential speed, and asks, given Hudson's insight into what is coming, how our relationship to intelligence and emotional clarity will shift. Hudson refuses to predict, no one can predict this, but says with certainty there is a massive opportunity, and how we approach it will determine everything. Divorce, a new child, marriage, job loss, bankruptcy, these are moments of transition, and transitions are where people make the most transformation and also where they deteriorate fastest. When the steel factories left Pittsburgh in the 1970s, some people fell into alcoholism and some transformed their lives. We are about to go through one of the biggest transitions humans have ever seen, equivalent to fire, the industrial revolution, or agriculture, and the quickest one, so the most disruptive to consciousness, moving faster than our consciousness is used to. That is a massive opportunity to transform as a person and a society, or to go somewhere very dark. He quotes Augustine of Hippo: we are the times, if we are good the times are good. The choice is whether we embrace the intensity or avoid it, click on products that make us better or worse, treat ourselves with unconditional love and determination or feel oppressed and lack courage.
Pressed for a guess about how our idea of intelligence shifts, Hudson gives the line that anchors the section: knowledge work is dead, skill work is dead, wisdom work is what is left. Wisdom is the ability to make great decisions, another way to describe emotional clarity. We can ask a model what to do, but we have to make the choice to do it, to sit in discomfort and friction or avoid it, and those are questions a computer will not answer for us, our wisdom will. He gives the example of the brilliant but insufferable lawyer everyone tolerates because he is great and makes money, and notes the computer can now do his work, so the questions become do people want to work with you, do people want to be with you, are your decisions based on fear or on aliveness. It will be our wisdom that puts us ahead soon, is his guess.
Duqum frames it as a revaluation of power away from skills and knowledge toward wisdom and emotional clarity, the sages becoming the valued ones. Hudson notes many businesspeople and lawyers we imagine from movies are actually, in person, quite wise and hearttop, already in those positions. To make it concrete, he offers a striking comparison: in an Amazon rainforest society the shaman, sometimes literally schizophrenic, sits near the top and the person cutting timber sits near the bottom, while in New York City the timber futures trader making millions sits at the top and the schizophrenic person lives on the street. That is how fast status flips when the story shifts. Our story has been that knowledge and skills are scarce and therefore powerful, but now they cost about five cents a minute of electricity in a computer chip.
Analyzing the people building AI
Duqum notes the vulnerability of our position given the scale and speed, comparable perhaps only to fire. Hudson offers a comparison he has been sitting with: awakening. Like awakening, this shift changes everything at disorienting speed. When people in his courses go through a shift, they sometimes cannot function, I went to the grocery store and had no idea what to buy, a kind of Zen sickness. It is the only other place he sees such rapid change, and it is handled with a little love, gentleness, and guidance. Any big disillusionment can go toward deeper integrated awakening or toward the atrophied, watch news all day, hate the world, I am a victim place.
Given that many people making decisions at scale are themselves traumatized, and that models are trained in the consciousness of their creators, Duqum asks what to be mindful of and where there is hope. Hudson sees nothing but good intention plus blind spots, in both the builders and the people voting with their clicks. He admits bias because the people who choose to work with him are sweethearts, a lot of sweetness, and while highly technical people are not usually deeply emotionally aware, some are amazingly so. The only real difference inside an AI lab is a higher level of intelligence and maybe more tendency toward a neurological spectrum, but otherwise it is the same, all a reflection. When we say the consciousness of the creators shapes the creation, it is true, but we are all doing it, we as a society are birthing AI, it is a relationship. We say be careful, we say doom is coming, and that influences them. What he does not see is treating the people building AI the way we treated World War II soldiers, or the way you would support a wife giving birth, present, loving, breathing together, rather than this kid is going to take over everything. Instead they are blamed, while most of us will not look at ourselves and admit we were part of creating this.
Duqum finds it freeing that the cat is out of the bag, an inevitability that becomes an invitation to be the change rather than stand by. Hudson imagines walking into an AI lab where a crowd outside is loving and supporting the builders, and wonders how different the creation might be if they felt the whole world was rooting for them. With any creation there is a spectrum, Duqum notes, helpful models for emotional healing and models perfectly designed for propaganda, all of humanity represented in the LLMs, exciting and frightening. It is us again, the creator creating the thing. Hudson closes the section with hope grounded in the Rat Park experiment: rats isolated in a cage get addicted, but rats in a rich park with play, sex, and company mostly or entirely do not. Mammals prefer health to disease, wholeness to separation, connection to addiction. So if someone builds AI that provides connection, he believes the majority will choose it, and the part that chooses the fentanyl equivalent will atrophy quickly. He quotes the curse, may your children live in eventful times, and says he is genuinely excited.
The closing experiment: receive life
Asked if anything feels alive to add, Hudson ties the end back to the beginning, the accumulating versus the undoing. His parting practice: when you finish the podcast, lie down or sit, and see what it is just to receive life. We can do it right now, I am going to absolutely receive everything available to me. That gift is always there, and all it requires is receiving, which is not a doing, and not exactly an undoing either, just an allowing. Duqum appreciates the simplicity after two hours of frameworks, and Hudson points people to the free newsletter, free coaching, and free workshops as the best way in, then the courses if they fit.
Key takeaways
Resistance to an emotion is literal muscular constriction. Sustain it and you get what we call stress. Full allowing is the exact reverse, and it is available at any moment.
The three brains, head, heart, and gut, must all agree for change to stick. Knowing better while doing worse means only the head got it.
Do not try to fix or transcend an emotion. Welcome it. An emotion fully felt turns into its clean form: anger into clear boundaries, fear into aliveness, sadness into love.
The golden algorithm: the emotion you avoid, you invite in the exact way you dodge it, recreating the pattern until you finally feel and love it. Then the pattern dissolves.
Every trigger and judgment marks an emotion you are not allowing. For one week, when you judge, ask what am I trying not to feel, and feel it.
Raise children who are told every part of them is okay. Telling a kid to stop being angry, scared, or excited teaches them a part of them is not okay, and at zero to eight that part is all they are.
Do not fight the voice in your head. Change how you react to it, notice it is talking to itself and projecting, and play with a thousand responses.
Awakening can open the head while the heart stays closed. Peace without joy is a sign the emotional work is still ahead.
Apologize cleanly, not from shame. Forgive from heartbreak, not obligation. Every allowed heartbreak increases your capacity to love.
As AI absorbs knowledge work and skill work, wisdom work is what remains: the ability to make great decisions, which is emotional clarity.
Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
0:01:30 Subtractive Development: More Results with Less
0:04:08 Working with the 3 Brains that Dictate Our Lives
0:07:08 How to Make Real Progress in Life
0:10:50 Having the Courage to Feel the Feelings
0:13:20 Raising Kids Who Are Comfortable Expressing Themselves
0:19:30 Healing Triggers Somatically
0:24:26 What Emotional Clarity Feels Like
0:29:03 The Golden Algorithm: Intelligent Design in Our Emotions
0:38:38 How the Voice in Your Head Runs Your Life
0:45:49 Ad: Boncharge Redlight Therapy
0:47:27 Nonduality & Spiritual Growing Pains
0:53:09 Best Way to Gain Emotional Awareness
0:59:53 Relating to the Ego in a Healthy Way
1:10:23 Ad: PiqueLife
1:11:24 High Performers Listen to their Intuition
1:13:03 How His Coaching Process Works
1:15:25 What Defensiveness Reveals About Us
1:18:29 People Pleasing: An Instant Reframe
1:22:25 Power of Apologies & Forgiveness
1:29:32 The View Framework
1:33:56 Expressing Real Vulnerability
1:44:07 Qualities of a Powerful Leader
1:56:36 Will AI Change How We Relate to Ourselves?
2:06:15 Analyzing the People & Companies Building AI
2:13:52 Experiment for Implementing This All Into Your Life
2:14:55 Conclusion
Notable quotes
"The avoidance of emotion drives a huge amount of our behavior. How many choices did you make not to feel like a failure? How many choices did you make to chase happiness? How many choices did you make to avoid discomfort?" (0:00:23, Joe Hudson)
"The emotions that we don't want to feel, we invite in the exact way we're trying not to feel them. But that's actually a really intelligent design, because then it keeps on giving us a chance to see ourselves as whole again." (0:29:40, Joe Hudson)
"Do you know what monsters really want? They really want hugs. And that's basically what I do for a living now." (0:11:40, Joe Hudson)
"Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome." (0:22:20, Joe Hudson)
"At the beginning of the path you think other people are responsible. In the middle of the path you think you're responsible. At the end of the path there's no responsibility." (0:32:00, Joe Hudson)
"The constant internal negative self talk is always lying. The more exact way to say it is that it's never perfectly true." (0:40:00, Joe Hudson)
"Show me an awakened guy having a road trip with two young kids in the back seat, and I'll show you a human." (0:50:24, Steven Harrison, quoted by Joe Hudson)
"Somebody comes up to me and they're like, hey Joe, you're a complete jerk. Yes. I can give you ten ways I've been a jerk today. Hey Joe, you're absolutely wise. Yes, I can give you ten ways I'm absolutely wise. That's freedom." (1:07:00, Joe Hudson)
"Every time you allow your heart to break, it increases your capacity to love." (1:27:00, Joe Hudson)
"Knowledge work is dead. Skill work is dead. Wisdom work is what's left." (2:02:00, Joe Hudson)
"We are the times. If we are good, the times are good." (2:00:40, Joe Hudson, paraphrasing Augustine of Hippo)
"All it requires is for us to receive, which is not a doing, and it's not particularly an undoing either. It's just an allowing." (2:14:20, Joe Hudson)
If I ask you right now to do an experiment, try to stop feeling every emotion that you're having. Some muscles, if not all of your muscles had to constrict. And if you did that for an extended period of time, we would call that stress. The avoidance of emotion drives a huge amount of our behavior. How many choices did you make not to feel like a failure? How many choices did you make to chase happiness? How many choices did you make to avoid discomfort? The emotions that we don't want to feel, we invite in the exact way we're trying not to feel them. But that's actually a really intelligent design because then it keeps on giving us a chance to see ourselves as as whole again. We have three brains and if you want transformation in your life, you need to address all three. And so what that means in a practical level is something to the effect of there's a lot of ways to work with the voice in the head. There is a time and a place as you do the work where the repetitive negative selft talk goes away. Yet when we have it we say oh we need that to be productive. Like I would just sit on the couch and drink beer if it wasn't for that internal abuse. But it frees up so much energy not to have it. [Music] Hey everyone, welcome back to Know Thyself. Our guest today is a renowned business executive coach and facilitator of people returning into wholeness within themselves, applying neuroscience and philosophy and incredible practices that I'm looking forward to diving and exploring with the man, the myth, the legend himself, Joe Hudson.
Good to be here.
Thanks for being here.
Yeah, pleasure.
Pleasure to have you. I I want to start with a couple uh frameworks that I've heard you speak to that I think will set the stage for our conversation today.
Cool.
Subtractive development. Um and this idea that so much uh of the illusion of like growing in life is the accumulation of more and more and more ideas, more material things. Um so I would love for you to speak to this this uh positioning, this kind of internal orientation of development and growth actually coming from subtracting. I've never put it in those terms before, but I I appreciate them. What I would say is that there is a you know there's a Zen tradition that says if a hand is always like this or if a hand is always like this both are [expletive] and what I see in our society is there's a lot of this which is what do I do? How do I get there? What's the next step for me to take? But there's not a lot of receiving. And so to me, there's places where trying is really useful and there's places where trying is really not useful. And so it's really learning how to be able to do both. So what I notice is typically if I say like subtracting is a great thing, then people will say, "Oh, so adding is a bad thing." And if you look at like spiritual traditions that they do that all the time where it's like there's a good way and then all of a sudden there has to be a bad way. And for me it's just about the flexibility and knowing when to use and what to use to get to um get to a place of knowing that there's no place to get to.
That's what I'd say.
Yeah. The way you just verbalize that makes me feel like the subtractive kind of mentality around this is if we are internally whole and we can experience itself beyond the identification with our neurosis and thoughts and emotions then we're in in a way in a lot of these endeavors and a lot of the practices and retreats and things that you lead are helping people return back to what is their innate state. Would you agree with that or is it more of a rebuilding?
That's a great one. Yeah, for years that's the way I looked at it was it was a like a remembering or a or a um getting back to and now I would say it's neither uh because it my experience is that it is always there in everybody. So there's not even a returning to there's just a recognition of and I think it like even the returning to is a little bit more force than is efficient. uh what's like the elevator pitch for the the deeper retreat work that you do um and in your one-on-one coaching previously um how would you explain that to somebody of like your framework of of working with people which I know is a big question.
Yeah, I have a lot of frameworks because people are in different places. So to me the really important thing is to follow the person that I'm across from. So that's where the wisdom is. The wisdom isn't here. The wisdom is in them. And even if I have been down the path myself and with hundreds, thousands now of other people, there's no place there's no way that I know their next best step better than they know their best step. So I would describe it differently to different people depending on where they are in the path. But so I have different frameworks that I would describe for people. But the one that is most general is we have three brains basically. I mean we have one brain but we have three brains. And one is the human prefrontal cortex thought. That's one part of our brain. We'll call that the intellect. And then we have the heart which is the mamleian emotional part of the brain. And then we have the nervous system which is far more of like the reptilian brain. I we call that the gut. So we have those three brains. And if you want transformation in your life, you need to address all three to get it consistently. And so what that means in a practical level is something to the effect of we've all been in that position where we've said, "Oh, you know, I know that I shouldn't eat that, but I'm eating that." Which means you've intellectually got it, but your your heart and your nervous system haven't gotten it. Or I know that I shouldn't treat my friends like that, but I'm still treating my friends like that. Which means your head's got it and your heart and your gut doesn't have it. And so if you're going to really have transformation, it needs to be addressed on all in all three areas. And if that happens, then the change is just really natural. And the brain is very much the part of it that is how do I get it? How do I add? How do I understand more? But the heart is far more and the gut and the the gut is and the nervous system is far more more about receiving. And so since our we're very head oriented society generally that oftent times the receiving stuff and the heart and the gut work and the nervous system work is going to be more transformative more quickly. But none of them are bad and they're all necessary. I don't want to make the duality of it
for sure. Yeah. But there there tends to be this over identification with the mind especially uh more western. And I'm curious because a lot of people relate to knowledge based off of the education system that we were raised in often. uh that conflate regurgitating information as knowing something versus the sematic experience of integrating in your body and that actually being knowing.
Yes.
And it's like the difference of what somebody says they believe versus what they act in accordance to their values. That's that's actually more what they actually believe cuz they're living in accordance with that. Right. So, uh where do you think we go wrong in conflating knowledge and wisdom? knowledge that lives in the body that we live as versus the ones that we can you know information we can regurgitate as a society or as a person
both yeah as a society I think it's be our education system is really based on the idea that if you get an idea that your life is going to change so even most spirituality there's maybe one or two practices but there's a lot of talking you know and so it's like meditation great practice love it did it for decade still do it. Wonderful. And that's one experiment you can try. There's infinitely other more experiments you can try. And so a lot of the way that it's been passed down is through talking through intellect. And then hopefully there's a transmission the way the state in which the person is speaking from has an effect as well. But if you teach experientially instead of teach intellectually, I think that as a as a modality works a lot better. So like if you look at any of our courses, there's podcasts in which I'm talking and then there is all the hours and hours of experiential learning where you're running experiments with other people. So instead of saying wonder is this thing that really helps you see through your fear, let's this is a great way to experience wonder. Let's do that and see what happens to your fear. Let's actually do the thing instead of talk about it. And the reason that I I ran into that is because I had massive authority issues as a kid. Like Matt my I had an alcoholic father. So it was like authority shouldn't be trusted. So when I dug into all the things I was interested around spirituality or neuroscience or there wasn't neuroscience back then but psychology and philosophy um I just was like I can't trust that. So I started designing experiments so that I could see if it was real or not real for me.
And and so to me that was the why it was so why I was able to like make the progress that I was able to make was that just dumb luck of I'm going to try that on. How do I how do I see if that's actually true? How do I do that in my life to see if it works? And so that's the way that I teach it to. And so I think on a societal level, I think that's generally where we go wrong. On um on a personal level, I think what happens is, oh, if I actually have to feel the thing that I just saw, then I'm going to open up this massive bundle of stuff that I don't know that's a Pandora's box. We're just going to put that aside. And the way that the brain fools us, the mind fools us about emotions, is we think, if I really let my self get sad, I'm going to be sad forever. If I really let myself be scared, I'm going to be incapable. If I really let myself get angry, then I'm going to destroy the things I love. And what happens is actually not that. You really let yourself get sad, you feel better. I had a good cry. That felt great, right? or um if you really allow yourself to have feel fear, you become much more capable because you're not constantly trying to not feel fear, not feel anxiety. And anger, if you don't do it at somebody, if you're not hurting somebody or trying to control somebody with your anger, the same thing happens. You feel far more you like we don't get angry at anything that we don't care about deeply. And so all you're doing is clarifying your love by moving your anger.
Yeah. It's interesting how our continual resistance to those unwanted emotions perpetuate them for lifetimes in in many cases, you know, and like uh I I love how you speak directly to this um in the sort of golden algorithm. Um, and so, uh, I would like to like just unpack this a bit more because, uh, it makes so much sense when articulated in the way that you're you're saying to it. And yet so many of us find in our lives that there are these subtle anxieties, fears, resistance to an internal dialogue or or emotion. We we let that fear be like a dull pain of unconsciousness permeate throughout life. And so, how do we directly break through that?
There's so many ways. uh but the like a great perspective shift is um im imagine so whether I say I don't want to feel scared I want to heal my anxiety I want to get through my anxiety all that is a rejection of the anxiety so instead of that narrative which is a very forceful pushing narrative like what is the receptive narrative so to speak and and and so so if you think about each of these parts of yourself is just um aspects of yourself that weren't loved or that are looking for love or that's a a much oh that anxiety that's like that's a call for love how do I how do I love that anxiety even there might be stages I might have to get pissed I might have to do a whole bunch of other things I might need to draw a boundary but what's actually required for me to love that anxiety is that completely changes when my daughter was a three or four years old, she uh was scared of um monsters under her bed. And there's like a week or so of her uh being scared. And one day I walked in, I said, "Do you know what monsters really want?" And she's like, "What?" I was like, "They really want hugs. They're like really looking for hugs." And uh that was the last day that she complained about monsters under her bed. M
and that's basically what I do for a living now.
That's so good.
Yeah.
Those those internal what we perceive as monsters
that just need a hug.
They just want attention and to be attended to.
Yeah. They didn't get attended to as kids typically. And so they're just they're like just keep on throwing a fit till we love them. Would you say that the vast majority of the suppressed emotions were consciously or subconsciously experiencing life are derived from that 0 to 8 age range in the theta brain development.
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Especially on the emotional level. Yeah. That's why I'm like such a proponent. So when we were raising our kids, my wife, she uh she she was like, "Let's do this." And I was like, "No." And she's like, "No." And we would have these things about how to raise kids like right from like the early, but like even birth, how we were going to birth. I was like, "No." And she'd be like, and she knew my brain, she was like, "Okay, I'll get the data. I'll I'll show you." And she did. And but I was resistant. And somewhere around when the our oldest was 2 years old, I was just like, "Okay, I'm just doing whatever you say." And so I I said, "I you're better at this than I am. I'm going to do whatever you tell me to do with the kid. I'm gonna do I'm gonna give it my best. And then after three months, if it doesn't feel good, I'm gonna say something, but I'm gonna give that first 3 months. And one of the things she came with was this thing called handin-hand parenting, which was really allowing your children to have their full emotional expression. Still draw gentle boundaries with them, but have that full emotional expression. And um and it's I recommend it highly and it is definitely one of the most profound spiritual practices of my life was raising my children in that methodology. And it's also a a a huge part of why my girls right now are so amazing is because they they were told that every aspect of you is okay. And so there was almost there was almost no punishment, very little shame. And if there was ever of those things, there was a there was just immediate I'm sorry, that's not how I want to treat you. And they came out wonderful because they just never learned. Well, I'm sure we we weren't perfect. I can tell you how lots of ways we weren't perfect, but but they basically didn't learn that some that they weren't okay. Cuz when you're telling a kid, stop getting angry, you're saying you're not okay. Like that part of you is not okay. Don't be scared. That part of you is Don't get so excited. that part of you is not okay and and at zero to eight years old that's all you are. The intellect doesn't even like compute your sense of self isn't even online yet. So you're just being told you're not okay. You're not okay. You're not okay. And so you end up as an adult going I feel like I need to prove my value. I need to I don't feel like I'm okay. There's this thing that I if I whenever I go there it's like an abyss. I'm going to fall. All that stuff comes I think directly from that experience.
How did you navigate allowing that fullness of experience? Uh, but also like having boundaries within society and like uh I guess other people's experience if you're going out or like I'm just curious. I got a couple good stories about that one.
Um the to give some context right now if we're if I'm in an airplane and a kid starts crying, a baby starts crying, I can stand up, look back in the airplane and I can tell you exactly who wasn't allowed to cry as a kid.
And so that so the question is how did I do that? I I had to learn how to have my full emotional experience because if their temper tantrum was triggering me, it was because I couldn't allow that in myself. If their fear was triggering me, it's cuz I couldn't allow that in myself. So, as I learned how to allow it for them, I had to learn how to allow it for myself. So, there was a great the great softening of parenting and I just softened through that that period. And so, that's that's how it worked. But there were some awkward moments, you know, there was a there was a Whole Foods experience with my eldest where she wanted something off the shelf and I was like, "Yeah, we're not going to have that thing on the shelf and she just starts throwing a fit." And I'm making sure she doesn't destroy anything. But I'm like container. We're on the floor of Whole Foods and she's just like going and we lived in a town that is was more hippie then, a little less hippie now. Um, and this old hippie lady, are you okay? and definitely like not happy with me parenting and just like wasn't judgmental and and she my daughter was maybe like 3 years old and she's like I'm just having my emotions and then she went right back into it. It was like this like popped out of it for just a second to let her know and then went back in it. And so so it just was a the great softening of what it was for me. It was just constantly seen if I allow my daughter now both daughters to connect with themselves and to connect with their emotional experience and like move through whatever that is, they just come back to being sweethearts.
And I find the exact same thing with adults.
Yeah. It's it changes how we look at adults too cuz you share that story of like the in the airplane of looking around and seeing who's who has difficulty accepting their own range of emotions. And uh like zooming in on the individual for all of us introspectively seeing what we judge and are are getting triggered by externally is revealing in many ways where we're not okay with various emotions. And so
yeah,
that's uh that's just like a really important highlight too of what you said and and something to dive deeper into um about how we can continue to reveal where we're still stuck.
Yeah, absolutely. every every place that we're triggered to me is there's a couple there's a there's so many ways to reveal it that's a great one. Um but yeah, any place that I is if I'm triggered by or judging somebody else, there's a direct experience of an emotion you're not allowing that you're not okay with. So there's no way I can judge you without clamping down an emotion in my own system. And so and if I feel that thing, the judgment goes away. So if you like a great just an experiment to run is every time you judge somebody for a week stop in the middle of and say what am I trying not to feel right now and feel it and notice what happens to your judgment
like that would be don't like I can say it it means nothing
right
go do that for a week and it means everything
how much of the dissolving of that is the continual awareness of when it happens like uh in terms of let's A zero is complete unconscious of triggers 100% is no longer being triggered by these things. Does like how much of a of being aware and the awareness of that trigger uh dissolves it and uh and what else do you think is needed to actually resolve it?
You're limiting awareness there. So if I don't limit awareness, I'll say that's all that's necessary for almost any kind of internal transformation is just your awareness. a a pure awareness.
Yeah. Maybe more more I was referring to as conscious attention versus the totality of awareness. But I hear what you mean. Yeah.
No. Yeah. Conscious like if I'm consciously attending to something without a story, that'll pretty much take care of all of it eventually. Yeah. As soon as I add the story, then everything gets slowed down.
Right. Because if I'm consciously attending to like my judgment, I'm going to notice my body's constricting. I'm going to notice that there's an emotion. If I unconstrict my body, I'm going to feel an emotional state. So, I think that yeah, it's just when the attention has a drive or the attention has uh something that's trying to get to or some story that is involved that it becomes less effective.
It still can be very effective.
Yeah. I guess I'm I'm interested in how the awareness drives deeper into the somatic experience with these avoidance cycles uh as you gain awareness. How does one go deeper? And maybe you have an example of this, but like going deeper into the sematic experience of feeling those feelings and making space for that on an internal level. What does that look like?
So, so best way to think about it is this. If I ask you right now to do an experiment, uh try to stop feeling every emotion that you're having. Like some muscles, if not all of your muscles had to constrict to do that. And if you did that for an extended period of time, we would call that stress. We would call that tension, right? So it's just the opposite of that.
Full allowance and everything that comes with it. So if you've sematically felt what happened to your body or if you're listening to this and you like pause and like try to stop all emotional experience, you'll feel the direction that you go, it'll be like a tightening and a backing away kind of thing. And then if the exact opposite of that experience is emotionally allowing
and so there's a fluidity that comes with it. There's there's like a you're less clawing into trying to have an experience. There's less chasing states. There's smoother decision-m. There's a whole bunch of things that go along with that because the avoidance of emotion, it drives a huge amount of our behavior.
Like if you think about how many emotes did you make not to feel like a failure, how many choices did you make to feel like you to be loved? How many choices did you make to chase happiness? How many choices did you make to avoid discomfort? How many times are you like getting on YouTube to avoid discomfort? Like millions of choices are made as an avoidance of an emotion. It seems like you're also describing a great opportunity and and how to live our life and how we view these triggers because we could live life unconsciously and continually calcifying these triggers further and further or using the experience of when they arise to be uh just another opportunity to experience more freedom
in our life.
Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing is like so so one of the pitfalls that happens here is that people say okay Joe I can love all my emotions and then like if I love my fear then I'll get rid of my fear. It's like yeah but if you're trying to get rid of your fear you're not loving your fear so it's not going to work right so there's this thing that happens where yes if you actually fully love and accept the thing it it changes and it becomes very fluid and and there's you find pleasure and joy in so much stuff. I I have a I have a phrase that's joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won't come into a house where her children aren't welcome. And so there's just so much joy with it. Uh but at the same time, if you're using it to chase joy, if you're using it to get over it, then you're not actually loving the thing.
It's just another way in which you're resisting it.
You mentioned a couple things. uh one like all the things that come as a byproduct naturally of of allowing these like the experience of these
and then the returning to the state of joy as like all everything else is welcome at the dinner table so to speak.
Yeah. Yeah.
What do you see as the most distinct changes uh um and what like happens in our surroundings and how we make decisions when we move with emotional fluidity?
In relationships, in business.
There's just so many. These are the most important ones. I let me just go through the ones that I can think about cuz there's so many of them. So your decision-m gets clarified. Often times if we're stuck in a decision that's actually fear that's stagnant and we're just basically saying I don't want to feel this way and I don't want to feel this way and I can't make sure that I don't feel either of these ways so I'm indecisive or your decision-m clarifies because in the the decisions actually get made in the emotional center of the brain. And if I took the emotional center of your brain out, your IQ would stay the same, but it would take you like hours to decide like where to have lunch or long time to decide what color pen to use. And so, so the clarity of decision-m is a tremendous thing that happens. Um, the authenticity is becomes a natural expression. Meaning most of the time we're not authentic, it's because we don't want to feel something, right? If you if I said to you, hey, take your biggest fear. Let's assume for a second your biggest fear is to be homeless. Like, okay, you're going to be homeless. You're like, I don't want to be homeless. Okay, now imagine you're homeless and you're happier than you've ever been and you're more at peace than you've ever been. And there's there's just like so much love and joy in your life. It's something that you so much you couldn't even recognize it today. All of a sudden, being homeless isn't so scary anymore. And so that's the that's the so it clarifies your decision-m because we make it as emotional decisions. We're just using logic to try to figure out how we're going to feel. But if you're not scared of feeling a certain way, then decision-m becomes really clear. Relationships become far smoother cuz most of the time if I'm in a fight with you in a relationship, it's cuz I don't want to feel shame or I don't want to feel like a bad person or I don't want to feel out of control or I don't want to feel helpless. But if I'm cool with doing those things and I can accept you, I don't need to change you for for who, you know, change you to be something else. I might not want to be with you. Like I might, you know, this isn't my kind of relationship. And I'm I definitely be drawing boundaries, but I'm not I'm not trying to change you. I'm not trying to make you into something different, which is really great for relationships.
Those are some like basic examples. business. It's just an amazing when you see a leader lean into a decision, an emotion that they haven't been able to lean into before. Like a whole solution set opens up to them that they couldn't see before because if they if they saw it, they might have to feel some way. So, they won't do it.
It makes sense that there's probably not a single area of life that this wouldn't affect, right? It's like a
a kink in a hose where the flow is just not it's not allowed its full capacity. And uh you speak to the distinction of dirty energy versus clean energy. And I'm just like what is the energetic state in your mental vitality and physical vibrance? Like what do you feel like comes as a when when when there isn't as many kinks in the hose and in terms of your own experience?
Yeah. So everyone is a little bit like every emotion is a little bit different. So if I take if you take the emotional let's say conduit call it anger, right? And you kick it this way. It's Nice jewelry. If you kink it another way, it's no, I'm not angry. If you kink it another way, it's you son of a bah. Unckinked, it's kind of like Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It's it's it's clear boundaries. It's no, I'm not going to accept this, but I'm not going to close my heart either. It's I'm going to allow all that care. I'm also going to have the full boundary. And so, so that's anger. But it's the same with fear. You kink it one way, it's anxiety. You kink it as another way, it's like over excitement. There's a whole So the way that it gets kinkedked is is different for and therefore has different results. But generally anger when felt fully is clarity and determination and fear when when felt fully is like a aliveness or excitement uh exuberance for life and sadness is like a a a deep love like you know we even feel that sometimes when we're sad we're like am I crying cuz I'm sad or am I crying cuz I'm so in love it's like ah
and so it's like you And that's those are the
it's so ironic and paradoxical how cuz I've experienced this too like after a big heartbreak where there's immense sadness but in the fullness of experiencing it there's actually bliss in a weird way.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the way you're speaking to this feels like it's kind of rewiring how we think about emotions completely because I feel like many of us and me in my past have thought of like emotions as like a like from zero to 100 like grief, fear, sadness, all that stuff's at the bottom and like the goal is to transcend higher, higher, higher into love and bliss and and joy and all of that.
Yeah. Force overpower that book. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
David Hawkins.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but you're speaking to like each sort of emotional experience on a bandwidth um where we can come into right relationship and they all serve a purpose and like the example of Gandhi like the what what have used to be perceived as negative emotions actually in right relationship are used in service to something. Um so that's that's a big rewiring.
Yeah. A and they're also just amazing signals, too. Like, oh, I'm [expletive] frustrated that oh, there's a boundary I'm not drawing. Oh, what's the boundary I need to draw? There's my truth that I'm not saying. What's the truth that I'm not saying? Like, they're they're amazing signals. Each one of what we call negative emotions are just like an amazing signal. And when we don't resist them, they there's one way to look at it, like if we don't resist a certain emotion, it becomes a different emotion. I I find that less effective of a story than if I fully love and allow for an emotion, then the motion transforms, but they're the same emotion. I find that story just is more useful.
Yeah. Feels like in the appreciation of how all these emotions serve a purpose, like the resistance to them would drop immensely.
Immensely. And that's how you actually get to the place where I'm not loving the fear to get rid of the fear. I actually really like this fear. Like, oh, it's telling me something. I need that signal.
Mhm.
You know, you you'll hang out with people like often in sessions when I'm coaching somebody, I'll say, "Okay, if I could push this button, I'll take away all that anxiety. Do you want it gone?" They're like, "No." Okay. What is that? What is that thing that you What is the gift of the anxiety that you're that you see that you know that there's something inherent in you that knows that you want that? What is that thing? And then if you can get in touch with that, then the anxiety can be welcomed. Do you feel like there's an incredible intelligent design in how all of these emotions work? Uh like when somebody has an experience uh just any pick any emotion.
Dour.
Um whatever if we have a certain amount of grief attached to a prior event like uh I think we just spoke to it but in the appreciation of how that there's actually an intelligent design there that protector part or whatever it might be serves a purpose. Um, and I know as you've worked with thousands of people at this point, I'm sure you've through pattern recognition seen how there is like an intelligent design throughout all this.
Yeah, that so this goes back to the golden algorithm. So if I tell that full story, it's something to the effect of um the emotions that we don't want to feel, we invite in the exact way we're trying not to feel them. That's the first part of the story and I'll go into that in a second. Second part of the story is um if there's an emotion we don't want to feel, we keep on recreating experiences to feel that emotion so that we can heal. And once we fully welcome and invite that emotional experience, then we don't recreate the pattern. So all those patterns in your life are created in that avoidance as a way to keep on bringing them up so that you can feel them. So that would that's how I put it together. So So let's do one at a time. I was in my 20s. I was emotionally abandoned by the alcoholic dad and the and the Alanon mom. So I didn't want to feel that abandonment. So I would have girlfriend or friend after girlfriend or friend where they would just keep on abandoning me. I could I would if I didn't attract it, I could create it, you know, and and so what was I doing? I don't want to feel abandoned. Therefore, if I start to feel abandoned, I'm going to either do one of two things. For me, I did one of two things. One is fine, which of course makes you want to abandon me. Or the other one is I'd get needy.
Which of course makes you want to abandon me. And so
self-fulfilling prophecies.
Exactly. So every time we're we're trying not to feel an emotion, the way we avoid it, the way we try not to feel it, we are inviting the experience back into ourselves. And so that's that's the golden algorithm. But but that's actually a really intelligent design because then it keeps on giving us a chance to feel the emotion to love the emotion to love that part of ourselves to become to see ourselves as as whole again. And so great I had to for whatever it took for me it took hundreds of times being abandoned by different people until I could say oh that I I can feel this abandonment. I couldn't as a kid cuz it would have been destroyed me like oh I do not have parents who care for me. What the what the hell? What am I what am I going to do? I couldn't do that as a kid. But I can do it as an adult. And so all of a sudden I can say oh that abandonment that that monster. I can just hug that monster. I can love that thing that never got loved as a kid. I can love it now.
And then when I did, oh, I can't wait to feel abandoned again. You want to spend time with me? abandonment anytime. Come on, let's do this thing. All of a sudden, I didn't have to repeat the pattern. I feel like so many of us have the the thought that like through the lens of victimhood we're at fault for a lot of the things that have happened and you're just you're shifting and what and how you're explaining this into to responsibility like it's not it's not your fault or however all the things happened but whatever patterns are playing out in our external life that we keep seeing that we don't have the reason we don't consciously understand quite why they keep showing up um you're inviting oh It's it is a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. It's like it's revealing something to you in the external world of your internal state and being.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And there's this uh saying that's at the beginning of the path you think other people are responsible. In the middle of the path you think you're responsible, at the end of the path there's there's no responsibility. And the way that the Tibetans talk about the same thing is and this is this is where it gets really challenging to words get challenging here but uh they say mind is wide as the sky and uh flower as fine or action as fine as barley flour. So what what I think they're meaning there is that I can see the brilliance truth in every perspective but there's only one action I can take and when there's when you see the world that way which is there like this is my truth in this moment this is all I can do this is what I'm called to do and I can see the right and wrong of every perspective then there's no responsibility there's a responsibility like I'm going to do the thing that I'm called to do because I can't do otherwise because I know it's going to hurt if I do otherwise. But there's not responsibility like I have to be a certain way. I have to I have to take ownership to get to the place to that all goes away. There's just flow.
It makes me think about how our past conditioning is always coloring our perception through life in ways we're not privy to fully and
never will be.
Yeah. It's such a pain in the ass, but also perfectly designed, right, for our own evolution.
Yeah, it totally is. And it gets fun when you realize that cuz then it's like okay another thing another opportunity for growth. Um and a non-personalness to it
like like I'm not responsible for the whole thing and and that's the interesting thing right so it there's a stage in the path this is also kind of what's cool about the design. There's a stage in the path where it's really important to feel like I'm responsible. I have a choice. I can I I have agency. That's a really important thing to feel and to know because without that agency, there's just certain things you're not going to do. And then there's a time where letting that go where you say, "Oh, I can't even control my own thoughts." Like whatever. Most humans have 50,000 thoughts a day according to the Mayo Clinic. And none of them chose what those thoughts were going to be. They weren't just like, I'm going to that this is all my thoughts today. Like that didn't happen. And so I'm not even I can't even control my thoughts, let alone the actions that move from my thoughts is all a gift. How could I be responsible if I can't even control my own think? I can't even stop thinking for [expletive] 10 minutes. Excuse my language. Um, you know, and so so then you can say, "Oh, there's a gift and and in that gift in in the non-responsibility, there's a relaxation and there's a a receiving and an acceptance." And both of those two stages are really important. So it's not one's better than the other. It's just like where that person is at that moment, what's the realization they need for their next step.
Yeah. Yeah. That shift I think helps us drop us taking our life so personally like when you do sit quietly and you see this continual flow of thoughts that are happening ben unbeknownst to you it's like okay it makes it brings into questions around agency and free will and whatnot which is maybe a topic for another time but I do want to speak to this voice in the head. Yeah,
because it's running the show in so many different ways we're not aware to. Um, and we live in this matrix of mind where largely 95 plus% essentially the same thoughts throughout our life um in different textures but rooted in in the same kind of quality. Uh, so how do you relate to working with and relating to the voice in the head?
Yeah, that's a large part of our work, especially the inperson stuff. Um, so there's lots of things to the first one is that most humans listen to the their negative self their negative repetitive selft talk. I'm I'm going to call voice in the head. There's going to be thoughts that occur. But there is a time and a place in the like as you do the work where the repetitive negative selft talk goes away. And maybe it's in chunks, but but it does it can and and does go away. And and so that constant internal negative self-t talk is always lying. There's a maybe a more exact way to say it. I think the more effective way to say it is it's always lying. But the more effect more exact way to say it is that it's never perfectly true. Meaning there's a lie to everything that it says. And it's also horribly ineffective. Meaning if you if there's 50,000 thoughts and let's say 40,000 of them are repetitive negative self-t talk. Now imagine externalizing that you're doing your life and you have a boss and your boss is just sitting there. You [expletive] that up. That wasn't good. This isn't good. Why did you do this d whatever the editing that's going on? You would be a horrible employee. Yet when when we have it, we say, "Oh, we need that to be productive. We need that to be to like I would just sit on the couch and drink beer if it wasn't for that internal abuse. But it's incredibly it frees up so much energy not to have it. However, just like any other aspect of yourself, if you hate it, resist it, try to push it away. It it it if anything gets more profound, more stronger, it doesn't it doesn't go away. And so there's a lot of ways to work with the voice in the head. One of the most I think at some point I I think I I think I had collected about 15 effective tools for working with the voice in the head but one of my favorite is not to try to stop it but to change the way you react to it. So typically what happens is most people listen to that negative selft talk the way that you would um a devote to a politician would do. politicians like, "Wow, that they're bad and they're bad and this is good." And they're like, "Yeah, that's captivated. Totally gathered. We're gonna Yeah. Uhhuh."
Um, similarly, that's how most people are with the voice in their head. The voice in the head is like, "You're bad." And they're like, "Uh-huh."
It's like a dictator inside of you that won't shut up.
Yeah. That that you totally believe as it turns out. And so that's one way to react to it. Some people react to the negative selft talk first in belief and then in resistance, which is you should lose weight. Yeah, I should lose weight. Okay, I'm going to
Who's saying that by the way?
Yeah, that's another Yeah. And so, but then it's like, hey, like I'm going to become passive aggressive with the voice in my head. I'm going to just No, you can't make me. So, there's those are kind of the experiences that people have with this self-t talk. You could have a totally different experience. Every time it talks to you, you could break out in musicals. You could every time it talks to you, you could say, "I love you." You could go, you could say, "Shut up." You like there's a thousand responses that you could have
undermine it initially.
You could undermine it. You could, you could actually try to support it. You could you could there's a thousand. Start experimenting with those gives a tremendous amount of insight into what the voice in the head is actually up to. So instead of saying, "Okay, I'm going to do all these things to undermine or get rid of it." It's just like just experiment. Just play. Okay, today I'm gonna laugh every time you talk and tomorrow I'm gonna say, "Oh, I see how scared you are. I'm right here with you." And then the next time you just say no, next like play and then see what what you learn about yourself and this negative self-t talk. That's an incredibly effective way to work with with the with the voice in the head.
Yeah. Uh I want to get your perspective on how when relating to this inner critic.
Which by the way could also be a lot of positive inflationary things, right? Which is I've heard you speak to how they're both ego whether it's deflationary or inflationary.
Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
Um and we can and we can dive into that. But there's there's the various different ways we could react differently, respond differently to the voice which might undermine it. playful like changes how we relate to it and the power it has over us.
Uh I think many of us have the experience of this like fractured sense of being in our head. Like there's a voice in our head. There's our dialogue with that voice in our head. And it's it's like in so many ways sapping our own life and our experience of life. And in my personal experience, what's I guess given me the most freedom from that voice is how closely identified I am with it. And I want to get your perspective on this. Um, there's there's the analogy of like being in traffic and it sucks and you're in bumper-to-bumper traffic, but you're going to the airport, you get in the plane, you take off, you look back down at the traffic and all of a sudden it's kind of beautiful,
right?
The only thing that changed was our the distance from it.
And so, uh, when you Yeah. When you examine like
what really creates the most freedom,
um, do you feel that it's actually creating distance from you and your identification with them? Not that they're not there, but like how loud they are in your awareness.
Definitely helpful. It's definitely helpful to notice that it's not you. Yeah, it's it's also really helpful to notice that it's talking to itself.
That it's not talking to you. That's a really useful one. You're not doing a good job means it's not doing a good job.
It's like a phenomenon happening in and of itself. Like
it's projecting onto it. It's projecting. It's projecting itself onto you. So, this one's a mind bender, but like think about the five things that negative selft talk. You haven't done enough. I've done more than you. What are you talking about?
You don't even exist technically.
Exactly. Exactly. Right. Or, you know, you're uh you're too judgmental. Really? You haven't you know, you're not productive enough. like most of the things it says is it's more true about it than it is about you. It gets weird when it's physical, but there's actually a way to look at it that way, but that would take too long. But generally, it's that's the that's another really useful thing is to see that it's it's projecting onto you just like the people who installed it were doing. just you know your parents or your teachers or whoever installed that negative self-t talk unconsciously they were projecting onto Hey everyone a quick share. If you have been listening for a while you know that I'm all about stacking healthy habits. One tool that I've loved over the years is red light therapy. For the past few years I've started my mornings often with meditation and a few days per week with red light. It's helped make a noticeable difference in my energy and sleep. There are over 4,000 peer-reviewed studies showing benefits for cellular healing, boosting collagen, supporting testosterone, and a lot more. If you're curious about trying it, Bond Charge is a solid choice. They're a partner. I love them. Their red light devices have the lowest EMF levels on the market. They have no flicker, combine both near infrared and red light, two different spectrums of the wavelength into one lightweight device. They ship worldwide and have an easy return policy and also an array of other sciencebacked wellness products worth checking out. If you want to give them a try, you can go to bondcharge.com/now thyself and use code know thyself to save 15%. That's b o n c h a r ge.com/nolithself and use code no thyself to save 15%. You can always go to our website as wellpodcast.com to find all of our partner deals. Bond charge products are all HSA and FSA eligible giving you tax-free savings of up to 40%. I hope you enjoy. Back to the episode. What has been your experience with non-duality? I know did you study with a Shanti for some time? I spent I spent 12 years chasing it and probably 10 years mostly meditating.
Wow. Okay.
I saw a tweet that you kind of talked about like you had like 10 steps of your journey with non-duality and
Oh yeah.
Um
yeah, I remember that.
And uh in in terms of
discovering the unchanging ground of our being in that awareness,
how does marinating in that space help us relate to our thoughts? and were the potential pitfalls of overly identifying perhaps with that being absolute truth in a sense. Curious your thoughts on that. Yeah. So I can just tell you my experience of it. Um super super you use useful. So I think they call like my experience of awakening was I think they call it like cloud walker or fog walker or something like that where it happened and I didn't particularly notice it. I've been working for years to get it, but I at some point was like, "Oh, just another elevated state. Whatever. That's not what I'm after. Just another and so I had this experience and I was just another elevated space." And it took me a while to recognize that like the voice in the head had completely changed that the editor was gone. And um and then I identified as that. There's a there's another backwater that happens that I was very lucky not not to to have and not happen to me. And it's just because of the way my journey went, which was a lot of people have that experience and that they think they're done, which is just hell on earth to think you're done. And so I was lucky enough that the moment that the recognition came immediately and part of the reason I think I didn't recognize it immediately the thought came, oh, and this never ends. This shift like this this shifting, this evolution, it just never ends. And so that's one place that I see people get stuck. they they think they they've like gotten there which is like and now evolution has stopped because of your meditation practice. Um, and then so the other one that's equally as funny is now like I I am I'm the awakened guy. I, you know, um, instead of that just being one more step in, you know, I'm the walking guy. I'm the talking guy. I'm the, you know, I can have, uh, hypothe hypo hypothetical thought at 16 years old guy, you know, and now I'm the awakened guy because it's just, it's in our nature. This isn't it's not special. It's not spiritual. It's just like it's just growing up if we if we don't get stunted because of trauma. It's just part of how we as as humans mature. And so, but we then there and I got stuck there for a bit thinking I was the awakened guy. And and a lot of the emotional work came in because what I noticed was yeah, there was a lot of peace, but where the hell was the joy? Where was the love? And that's when I noticed that a lot of my experience in defining myself in that way and going to the great peaceful abyss was to avoid emotional experiences which is h what's what's going on there? And and there was an early stage of that in meditation. I think it was maybe like four years in where I realized oh wait I'm just managing myself. This is this isn't meditation. This is just management. What? What? And so there but then there was this after what people would call awakening then there was this realization that this was also a form of avoidance and it was just emotional avoidance and and so that's when that journey really started to kick in in a big way.
Did you find it actually more difficult to connect with your emotions after that?
Yes, you did.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, absolutely. So I started to do the emotional work before that moment and then when that moment left then I was just like yes that's an emotion you know and I actually had to like
emotion there is
yoding your way through
totally and so there was this uh this this what happened inside of my system was I would for whatever reason had the intelligence uh the inherent intelligence to really like amplify any emotional signal that I could get. And that's what I actually had to do. And I and I had a like a very short-lived teacher at the time whose name escapes me. And he he basically made a living with Tibetan monks, teaching them their emotional experience because that there and he called it he's like, "Oh yeah, I drag monks back into hell." That's how he described it. And uh
that's hilarious.
it's a good Instagram bio.
And so and so there there and and I get to work with some people who are in that same place. There's a couple folks who have been working with us some years came very very in that non-dual place and but the heart wasn't wasn't open and now their heart's just wide open and and the heart can't really identify the way the brain can. So you can have that nice big head awakening and still have quite a bit of identification even though you have access to this really big spacious peaceful place. You don't you're not you don't have access to the joy and to the into the like un ungodly amount of love that that courses through us. I feel like I feel like there's parts of that that just really resonate with me in my journey the past 10 years like exploring meditation experiencing a lot of peace and I still feel like there's there's room for growth in terms of my emotional bandwidth.
Like if we imagine 88 keys on a piano like many of us have like one or two keys in there like middle C and like around. So if you were like coaching me through the lens of your own experience going through that you know 10 years of meditation and non non-duality
um
how what is the what is the best way to like drag the monk back into hell
because again we can have this awakened state of consciousness and awareness of that ungrounding uh unchanging ground of our being and how much peace and beauty there is there um and the impartiality of Uh but then like you're speaking to it kind of makes it harder to pick up on it makes it harder to take any neurosis seriously because you see the elucory nature of it.
That's right. Yeah.
So what Yeah. What would I what would you do?
The first thing I would tell you is your your emotional journey is going to be easier because of it once you get over the first hump.
If you want the quickest way to do it, have two girls. That'll get you. Uh you know there's a teacher that I had for a while. His name was Stephen Harrison. and um just by books and um and he said uh show me an awakened guy having a road trip with two young kids in the back seat and I'll show you a human. Mhm.
So, so, so you know, allowing yourself the intimacy, the like the full intimacy of humanity, I think really is a great way to to like see the parts of yourself that are that are emotionally not invited. You know, find yourself on the plane with somebody with some kid crying. But any that I think emotional intimacy and relationship is like a really great place for it. and delving into all the places that are uncomfortable there. Just the same way you delved in through your meditation practice into all the uncomfortable parts of your consciousness, do the same thing, but just do it in relationship is usually like a is a very effective way to go. And so that would include something like business because business is a whole bunch of relationships. And and often times I what I notice is there's this um I think it was a cart tool but there's this you know endless question I think talked about this but there's this endless question is like right if I'm awakened I should be able to live on top of a disco and be happy but because I'm awakened I'm not going to live on top of a disco like I don't I don't want it like why would I invite that into my life. occasionally live on top of a disco. You know, go into the places where it's uncomfortable in humanity, whether that's like living on top of a disco or going to a Dodgers game or
Yeah. You know, there's a there's a Tibetan teacher I was uh learning about and he would, you know, I think maybe he wasn't he was maybe a Bhutan, but he would, you know, 6 months in caves meditating away and then he'd come to America with his students and they'd all go to like soccer matches where all that like they'd all get in fights and they would like, you know, so like allow yourself that intimacy with your own humanity or with other people's humanity and recognize that all of it is in you. There's just no way you can't have all of that in you.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, that's a useful useful way to do it. And that and then once it starts going,
once you actually, okay, I know there's some emotion in there. I'm going to really amplify it. I'm going to pretend I remember those days. Once you do that like three or four times and you see the benefit, you're just like, "Yeah, I can do that. I'll there." you you felt like you were able to get to the bottom of certain suppressed emotions after that journey where you wanted to dive back in to your emotional experience?
I'm constantly doing I don't know if there's a bottom, but yeah, there's just it's a constant
Uh yeah. Yeah. There's like uh and and it's always like that agency all blessing agency all blessing. There's this back and forth to it, you know? It's, oh, I'm learning this new form of humility, which is that it's not me. It's all moving through me. Oh, I'm learning this new form of humility, which is I'm the I think it's the Jewish tradition, uh, they talk about humility as taking your god-given place in the world. It's like, oh, I'm actually my humility is now asking me to expand and become more permeable, not become smaller, not disappear. Oh, wait, now there's this new form of disappearing. And it's so there's always like a back and forth nature to what I I notice in the emotional world is there's always a more subtle form of back and forth. It's like that dance between waking up and growing up and and both of those. And would you agree that they're they're both a necessity and yet fall short in and of themselves without the other? I
say neither's a necessity. you can do whatever you like and um so uh and you can live one without the other. It's just not as rewarding or fulfilling.
There's definitely like dear friends who really live in one and don't live in the other. And that's that's okay with me. It seems to be okay with them.
I just don't think it's it's it's just not as fulfilling. It's interesting because we might proclaim that I want to strive for enlightenment failing to recognize the eye as the barrier into into that state.
Yeah. Was for me for years.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and the greatest thing about that eye statement is that every way you look at it, it can You know there was this uh Irish mystic wooiwe I think is what I can't remember so many names but he said oh you can try to crack your ego you could try to destroy your ego go ahead and burn it with a thousand surreners the only problem is it never existed that's like wow that's so there's freedom and then there's also freedom in okay let go of your ego there's also like you know there like almost any way you look at it because it's illusionary in its nature almost any way you look at it can show you some aspect of freedom
if you look at it.
I know you work with so many uh like worldleading business execs and
um both in your own journey leading your own team and and hence supporting other with their own how do you relate to your own ego and support others relating to their ego in a healthy way.
Yeah, there's so many good things. So you mentioned this a little bit. So the the the first part about ego to that I find is really important for was really important for me to understand was that I always thought ego was I'm important. But ego is just as much I'm not important. So if you want to really get a full taste of your ego, like have somebody give you a really big compliment and everything that in you that resists that compliment, I I would call that ego because the way I define ego now is just more of your self-defin.
And so and as it turns out, you can't really do work in the world without some self-defin or andor it's impossible to not have some self-defin. But again, it's about the flexibility. Can I be defined and can I not be defined? Can I can I do both? Can I walk into a meeting and uh this is completely unacceptable. We're not dealing with this. This is like uh-uh and can I walk into a meeting and oh whatever is going to happen here is is cool. Do I have that flexibility the way that if you've ever have you ever done a Guanka 10day retreat?
Yeah. So you'll hear the story of his teacher walking in and just yelling at people who are meditating and then walk out and be like, "Ah, did you hear how hard I gave it to him?" And like laughing about it. Can you can you allow yourself to take on those roles when they're necessary for the freedom of others? That that I feel is a really great way and and that's very true as a CEO. It's even more true of a CEO who's running a very like big or important kind of business. meaning important meaning having a a large effect on the world to be able to say oh here I can take on this structure of forceful here I can take on this structure of gentle and supportive and I can do those things when it's necessary for the for the mission that I believe in that notion that there's ego on both sides like I've in in the past and to some degree it still shows up have trouble like receiving gracious compliment ments or you know people come up they see me like from that listen to this podcast and share all these nice things and uh habitually there's been like kind of a turning away from it and like um downplaying it and I I think finding the the way to relate to it instead of like if if I'm receiving it from the heart it's different than receiving it from the head. Yeah. Um, but I've also I feel like part of that was coming from the place of being trained to see anything as potentially inflationary or praise that it's that it's building ego and so it's bad and so you don't don't want it but you're like kind of flipping it on its head. I would say pushing it away builds ego. Taking it as true also builds ego. So there's there's another there's a there's a third way which isn't oh that's true you know it's true I am incredibly wise and intelligent and oh it's true I am wise and intelligent
and oh yeah I can I can actually see my wisdom and intell so I would say it like this somebody comes up to me and they're like hey Joe you're a complete [expletive] Yes. Yeah, I can absolutely see. I can I can give you 10 ways that I've been an [expletive] today in traffic. Yes, true. Hey, Joe, you're absolutely wise. Yes, I can give you 10 ways in which I'm absolutely wise. That that's freedom. That's that's where the ego isn't isn't ruling you. If somebody comes up to you and says some great things about how cool and great and wise and handsome you are, handsome doesn't happen so much, but yeah,
just had to throw that one in there.
Thank you. H
what does it feel like to to to receive that, I suppose? And like um putting that into practice like that that that understanding that you just shared, putting that into practice, what what does graciously receiving that look like without inflationary?
It's a full body sport.
I just like I like how much can I be permeable and feel all everything that does to me? It's like it's like pinging. It's like a a pinball. I become a pinball. It's likeing bing. And I'm better at some of them because I've I've had them more often. Like the handsome one is definitely one that would be more, you know, to me. The wise one is like it's like easier. And and what I notice is that the more I own it, the less there's a chance that I'm going to be dangerous around it.
So, or narcissistic around it. So like one of the things when I'm working with really powerful CEOs, not so powerful CEOs, is can you fully own that power? Most of them can't. Oh, I'm not the most important person. No, other people, it's the whole company. Like that's most of what is said. And if they can actually own the fact that when they spit at the top, it's a waterfall at the bottom. When they see that the entire organization is a reflection of their consciousness, that's how much power they have. Yep. Power is illusionary. Yep. Power is only if people think you have power. Yep. All that stuff is true. But when they can actually feel and allow that in, yes, I am powerful. Then they are far less dangerous as a CEO than somebody who's not owning their power.
Now, there's people who are what we call owning their power, like megalomaniacs. They're also very dangerous, but they're not actually owning it either. I guarantee you they're not allowing themselves to feel the power that they have. It's interesting to see that that relationship between suppression and distortion.
That's a great way to put it.
Great spiritual leaders in those circles in spiritual communities, sexuality, for example, is an area of topic that maybe is more suppressed, not talked about. And it's fascinating that in certain cults and spiritual circles, there's
weird sexual stuff that happens. And you find out the leader is doing like all this crazy stuff. And uh that's like one example of an extreme thing, you know, and there's many different verticals and and ways that could show up. It's fascinating.
Yeah. There's a you know there's those films about the Nixium cult. There's like two or three films about the Nixium cult. And one of them Yeah. I had a friend who was actually in it, which was like a fascinating story in itself. And um she she was I have to say I have to talk about the story for a second. She was uh you'll love this. She I she wanted to create something afterwards and maybe she did for a while called conscious cultting. So she was you know they she was there and they were like hey do you think we're in a cult? She's like yeah we're totally in a cult. What are you talking about? This is like yeah look how cool this is. We're in a cult. Like these are all the benefits of the cult. And I when I was speaking to her, I was like, "Yeah, you weren't in the cult." Because being in a cult requires you to actually give over your and she actually made them write a like a contract with her. Like she's like, "I'll join." And then they asked her at some point, you know, do you want to get um branded? She's like, "No, like she's just amazing woman." But she she was like, "There's all these benefits of culting as she would call it." And so anyway, she it was a really cool lesson. We were talking about um Keith and and I saw the movies and there's this great moment where he's like sitting around with his herm though you don't that part of the movie you don't know it's his herm and he's saying I don't get it. Why is it that people all want to listen to me and and think I'm I'm like that's it. That's the disowned power and that's the disowned narcissism that allowed that whole thing to happen.
That's what when I saw that I was like oh that's And the other thing about that is that it is it is it is a two-way relationship like all relationships meaning I remember when I it like tried to happen in my world at the very beginning when I was starting teaching and it's like oh people want you to be in that position they want to hand over a certain amount of responsibility so they don't have to think about it so they don't have to stress like there's there's a desire to put you in that position and there's even more there's a desire of certain people to be your caretaker slash like I have power because of proximity thing. It's really it's really it's really it's like a it's a dynamic. It's not a
And and CEOs are in the same dynamic. I'm important because I have proximity to the CEO. It's really important for me to keep the CEO happy. I can't do that because of the CEO. CEO said I can't do like all that. It's all in there. And to the untrained eye, a swath of people agreeing and putting somebody on a pedestal makes them look righteous and as if they're living in like in a holy place or to be followed and listened to, but that's in many cases not a great indicator of actually somebody who's living with integrity um or in right relationship. So, it's it's interesting and that's why I to the best of my ability cultivate relationships and friendships where we continually challenge each other and call each other forward and
be mirrors actively for each other.
Um,
best gift
without trying to have all my friends be psychiatrists for each other cuz that can that can go too far on that side too. You know, you got to play.
But, uh, but there's in my deep relationships and friendships, all of that is kind of inherent in our connection which I think is essential.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The most essential thing in marriage as well was that the commitment to growth. Can't be each other's psychologist. That's like horrible. And eventually and slowly you can actually be there for each other in that way a bit. But but but absolutely two people who are willing to grow together and change and transform and focus on their own transformation, not each others, that those are successful marriages. Sometimes I get asked what kind of tea my guests and I are drinking on this show or what I like in general. And I can't recommend Peak Life enough. Their puera tea is wild harvested from ancient tea trees, fermented and loaded with living, gut-healthy probiotics and prebiotics. It's amazing for digestion and energy and your skin. There's no bags, no steeping, just pure tea that dissolves instantly in hot or cold water. Every batch is triple toxin screen, so you know you're getting the cleanest tea possible. Right now, our community is getting 20% off for life and a free rechargeable frother and glass speaker when you grab their puer bundle, which is this tea right here that I've been drinking. And you get a 90-day money back guarantee. So, there's no risk if you want to try it out. peaklife.com/now thyself is where you find it or at our partners page at know thyselfodcast.com. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show.
You spoke to the three forms of intelligence.
What do you think is a pitfall in terms of ignoring our body intelligence, especially for high performers?
11,000 bits of information in your body in a second. Like it's what 12 or 15 in your brain. So that's the that's the ratio of loss.
Yeah. Whether it's a business high performer or a I mean I'm working with brilliant AI researchers and it's amazing how effective the ones are that listen to their body. Do you support people like refining that intuitive capacity? Do you describe the body intelligence as intuition?
I I can.
Yeah. If it's useful. Um sometimes I'll describe it as what does your gut say? What does your you know, one of the things we'll do is in introductions with people is we'll have them introduce themselves from their head, their heart, and their gut. Just so they can actually feel the difference of those intelligences and and what comes out. It always different things come out. And so obviously it's all one system, but it's um but to be able to make that distinction and and act from those places I think is incredibly useful. And often times what like you'll see people who are professional athletes are really good athletes at something. And all you have to do when they're how do I do X, Y, and Z? It's like how did you do that in basketball? Oh, this way. Oh, cool. Can you do that in your love relationship? Oh, you mean it's that easy? Like it's just an amazing hack to have people understand their body in that way. But one of the ways is to describe it as intuition. How how do you build trust with that those hunches and that intuitive capacity? I don't that's the real trick is to not build trust with them. It's to teach take them as experiments. So I'm coaching with somebody and I'm just I'm like sonar, right? So, I'm interested in their wisdom and where they want to go and I'm pinging stuff off. Now, I have pattern recognition and I've seen a lot of people go through a lot of things and I've gone through it myself. So, when you watch me sometimes it looks a little bit like magic when I'm coaching people on YouTube because I can, oh, so what's happening in your gut right now and oh, how'd you know that? You know, that kind of thing. But it's it's um what's actually happening is I am very impartial internally. I'm very impartial. I'm following them. I want them to go where they want to go. And all I'm doing is kind of pinging things and then seeing what comes back to me. And so it's it I don't believe the hunches, but I throw them out because it's it's the way that like it's test, you know, sounding the depths, if you will. I've I've seen you work one-on-one with people and it's a thing that I I recognize in great coaches where somebody comes to you with a problem or a perceived element in their life and then it quickly diverts into an area they were not expecting.
Right. Yeah. But you have through pattern recognition, through listening to your own internal hunches, um ask a question that that directs it into an area that is actually more at the source and root of what the questioner is is really asking and wants to dissolve and move through. Is that a is that more of a conscious process? Do you those questions come to you consciously? Um
no.
Yeah. No, no, no. It's uh when I'm done a coaching session, I I I usually don't know how it went particularly,
you know, I I'll do debriefs with um with people I care about or or students who've been with with me for a long time just to have an idea of how the whole thing just went. So all I'm in this place where my brain is operating on its own and I'm really I'm paying most of my attention is in my body. It's not I don't even I can't it's very hard for me to even remember what happened. When working with individuals I'm assuming if they're coming to you there's obviously a an agreed upon level of wanting to resolve what they're bringing to you. I'm sure there's times where these frightened parts of ourselves they feel defensive over.
Um what do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Because that uniquely reveals our own agreeance and admittance to that thing.
Yes. That's right.
So I'd love for you to share your thoughts on when relating through communication with others. What is our own defensiveness? What however it shows up revealing about what we believe to be true about ourel.
Yeah. I mean usually we're defensive about the things that we don't want to accept about ourselves. And usually we're defensive because there's an emotion we don't want to feel. So you those are you have two things you can explore. Either one will probably will reveal the other eventually. Um so that's I think that answers your question. I feel like there's potentially a a a secondary question in that but I I can't I can't place it.
If we zoom in on an individual and they have a they have a conversation with their spouse
and they say something that they immediately feel defensive over.
Yeah. We spoke to it earlier in terms of the golden algorithm really and like the what we resist persists in many in many different ways. Is there anything else you want to remind people of when they experience defensiveness of what
mostly on the other side I want to if you're with your spouse and they're defensive and you want to help them get to the bottom of it. First of all, it's not your job so don't. But the other thing is um to look at them and say there's nothing in me that wants you to be defensive or thinks you need to be defensive right now. And then whatever that is underneath it will be revealed very very quickly typically. Even if it's anger, what do you mean I'm not defensive? Oh, that's the part of you that you don't want to feel right now. I can I can I can welcome that because I can welcome that in myself. Do you see it as the process of maturity and maturation to experience the the feeling of defensiveness and be like, "Oh, okay. There's cuz normally we it's like defensive and then it's control fight on the external world cuz you're in defensive mode like you don't realize it, right?
For some people I think our patterns are probably more like that. Some people they get defensive and they do this
quiet shut down passive aggression.
Yeah. Yeah. Or or freeze passive aggression or let me take care of you. Let me let you know that's another one that people will do as well. They
That's really important one.
Yeah. So, all all of those they'll do for the for the same reason.
Yeah. I'm scared. I'm scared of looking at a part of myself. I'm scared that there's something here that is bad about me. So, I'm going to either fight or I'm going to freeze or I'm going to fly into you and try to make myself feel good by making you change.
By taking care of you, making you change.
Whatever. Tomato tomato.
Yeah. Yeah,
it's so fascinating how there's innumerable subconscious perceived inadequacies that we have that lead to all these behavioral compensations like people pleasing that you're speaking to and uh how we label them as as noble, you know, um in a in a in a sense in a way to avoid actually dealing with the underlying issue.
Um when when you support people with that peopleleasing
Yeah. Yeah. what what comes up. Uh you typically that's a relatively easy one to work with on people because once they see that what they're actually doing is disempowering them then they're sense of self can't handle it because their sense of self is I'm helping people. I'm a helper. And when they realize oh by helping that person you're telling them that they can't do it. You're taking care of them so that they can't learn to take care of themselves. You're giving them fish instead of teaching them how to fish. You're basically saying, "You're not capable. I've got this." Right? You're making them small. You're making them into a victim. When they see that, when that clicks, it's really hard to maintain the behavior
without without noticing that actually what's happening is you're scared and you're trying to you're trying to manage your reality instead of feel your fear.
Yeah. It comes to mind a couple friends who have deal like dealt with this experience of being nice like the nice guy versus somebody who's genuinely kind and they have that part of them.
There is always this experience of people whether it's in relationship a girl and a guy or um within friend groups where there's the nice guy who's always trying to cater to people's emotions and there's something inherently inauthentic in how we experience that and might not verbalize it.
But also creates a barrier for intimacy.
Yeah. All all of it is ultimately all of it is a fear of love. Then you might have to go through many steps to get there but intimate all of it is like take anything random like um jealousy. Jealousy is I want you to love me don't love me right? I really want you but I'm going to actually kind of abuse you with my jealousy to make sure that I'm I'm keeping you away. Right? People pleasing is the same thing. It's like I I I want your love. I want you to I want us to have this intimacy, but I'm going to have to take care of you. And so so much of this, like there's a way of looking at all of it, which is a pushing and pulling away of love because we can't actually recognize deeply on a head, heart, and gut level that we deserve love
because we we were taught at some age that we had to be a particular way to get love.
Yeah. had said that fear, anger, and jealousy are poisons that we drink and expect the other person to die.
Say it again. Which which
like fear, anger, jealousy, these are like these are poisons we drink and expect the
the other person to die. Yeah.
Yeah. That's the other one I think is really important to speak to is is that we talked about how you can do anger at somebody. You can do fear at somebody, too, right? I'm there's a way of doing fear to make you hold my fear for me. Oh my gosh, I'm really scared that you're going to like do bad on this podcast and so are you being careful with the podcast? It's like I'm asking you to hold that for me or you know I'm scared. It's like actually am I am I projecting like what am I doing there?
There's there's this thing where we where we often are asking someone else to hold our emotions when we don't want to and that also kills the intimacy in the relationship.
Yeah. It seems like whatever grievances we have yet to like forgive or move through, we're maintaining our sense of righteousness by continuing to experience that pain over that. And so when when you think about forgiveness and how many of us have the illusion that it's actually a lot about the other person instead of an internal experience.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah. Uh well, apologies and forgiveness are just like massive freedom machines. They're really cool. So most people unfortunately apologize with shame and um and they forgive from obligation. And so if I apologize with shame, then then it doesn't actually do it's if it does anything and mostly it does this, it guarantees I'll repeat the behavior. I'm really sorry that I I talked poorly about you. When someone does that, I get scared because I'm like, "Oh, you're going to talk poorly about me again." But if somebody's like, "Hey, I talked poorly about you and that's just not how I want to be with you and I apologize for that." I'm like, "Oh, that that person is that that action is going to help change their behavior." Much less likely to happen. And then it's the same thing with an apology. I'm sorry, with forgiveness. If it's like if I'm forgiving you right because I feel any kind of obligation to forgive you, there's no benefit in it for me and there's no forgiveness in myself for my part in it.
And so there's a way in which if it's not obligation, if it's actually a heartbreak, then there's not only forgiveness for you, there's forgiveness in yourself. And and that's really the it's just actually a natural part of the transformation cycle. So there's a moment where you recognize, oh, I never had to this whole time I didn't have to feel abandoned. That was unnecessary. I was making that whole thing happen. That was what? And there's after that moment there's usually grief that needs to there's heartbreak. And you talked about this a little bit and and the way I think about this is that every time you allow your heart to break, it increases your capacity to love. And so naturally in your transformation process, grief is there. Your heartbreak is there because that's going that's going to be the thing that increases your capacity to love to allow love in. And so that apology and that forgiveness, it's like there's a heartbreak in it, particularly in the forgiveness that allows that transformation. The same way that there's the heartbreak and oh I didn't have to be a liar for all these years. I didn't have to be abandoned for all these years. I didn't have to be hard. I didn't have to be defensive. None of it was necessary. That grief that heartbreak is like the next step in the transformational process.
And if you're forgiving out of obl out of obligation instead of from that heartbreak, then you miss that whole step in the transformation process.
So important. I love how you broke that down. And it it feels like so many of us at different points in our life wear resentment and pain as sort of a badge of honor and then when we go to forgive or or ap or give an apology um of course it would be nice if the other person can receive it and let go of that as well. But the expectation and attachment to that actually happening I feel like robs us of the authentic experience of letting go internally and then whatever happens in that dynamic happens. Yeah. And also robs you of the experience of of the heartbreak and helplessness of not being seen.
There's a huge amount of healing. You know, I like today we were I was in doing the master our our master class which is this online thing and
there was three different people who showed up with I want my mom to like see apologize see me know what has happened and there's just no way. And in all three situations, there was a confrontation of like, yeah, that's probably never going to happen. And the grief and the and the healing that came out of just, yeah, that's never going to happen. So that there's another thing that's happening, which is we're wanting that so that we can avoid our own heartbreak. And then when that full heartbreak moves for those people, like their capacity to love their moms is as is so much greater. I've had a couple experiences where I've supported or worked with friends whether it was in my men's group or just other relationships where they had something like that um with one of their parents like their dad for example and they were dealing with addiction and struggle and they were trying everything that that they could do to get them to accept and realize what they were doing
and then they fully collapsed the energy within themsel and the next day they went into remission or something. It's crazy how entangled those energies are.
Yeah, totally. it. Yeah. So, this is actually a really cool phenomenon that I think very very few people talk about. So, yeah. So, if you're in a marriage, say, and let's say we we're married and you're worried about money, the chances of me worrying about money are not so great. You stop worrying about money, I'm going to start worrying about money. Like there's a way in which humans if one person's holding that emotional experience then the other people don't have to hold that emotional experience. And there's like an emotional experience hot potato that typically happens. And the most profound one of these is the shame hot potato which is I don't feel good about myself. You did this thing. And then you're you don't feel good about yourself and you're like yeah I don't want to hold that. You did it. And then like you're just like trying not to everyone's passing the shame back and forth trying not to feel it. And but it happens in all sorts of emotional like uh relationships that we have. And you can like check it out in a business meeting or like a in your men's group. If you have let's say somebody in the men's group who's just always doubting and I don't know, I don't think it's ever going to get better. And you take say I'm just going to take on that energy for this men's group. Yeah. This is never going to work. Oh, I think it's never You'll notice their next share will be like so much more positive than any other share that they've ever had. It happens in business. It How many businesses have I been in where there's this one person who's holding this particular energy like this isn't going to work or we need to have marketing instead of tech investment or whatever it is. And finally there we're getting rid of that person and then somebody else just takes it on. You're like what what just happened? There's a really it's an amazing phenomenon when you really explore that phenomenon. It's amazing because it's it also points to the depersonalization and the awakening because you're like wait who am I then? Like I'm just holding this thing that anybody else will hold if I stop holding it. Like what what's happening? Like who's me if if it's not even the emotions or the thoughts or
That's that's powerful. It's It's so fun working with relationships when they're that when you recognize in the mirror that they are for each other.
Yeah. And in our and in some of our some of our stuff that we do that's in person that's we don't you know we don't advertise or anything. We'll literally use that tool in a group to help with people seeing through them seeing through themselves.
Like we'll ask okay here are the seven emotions that you're typically holding in your patterns. We're going to ask other people to hold them and see what see what's left of you. It's a really cool experience.
Yeah. It takes a lot and a lot of trust. It it's a like don't do don't like just don't try that somewhere. But yeah, it's like you have to really build a long legacy.
What's the view framework that you have in terms of communication, relationships? The way that we introduce people to the work is something we call the connection course and that's where we teach the view framework and where it came from was um so after the awakening I was met this guy his name was case and kind of an ass but also amazing and he could have these conversations with people much like the coaching you would see where he the people would just within an hour their whole world would be different and he had cancer and he couldn't get the treatment he wanted where he lived in Europe and so he came and lived with us and so I we got to experience him all the time doing this work both with others with ourselves and I remember literally you would have we would be doing the work with each other in our living room and the 8-year-old you'd hear like stay up listening and then every once in a while she'd be like just stop resisting it was awesome Um so when he passed and he he uh had cancer but he passed of a heart attack um I was like whatever that was I want to know what about that. So I was able to just travel the world at that time and find people who could do this kind of work and um like most notably Byron Katy could do it pretty well and and um and so I was just like what do they all have in common? what are they all doing that's the same because the methodologies would be really different and that's where the framework came up which was view it's like oh this is a way to deeply connect with ourselves and others and and and so what I noticed about all of them is that they were vulnerable in their questions they were they were they would ask questions that were scary that were oh my gosh am I asking that question that's not an okay question to ask and they were being vulnerable in their own experience of they were allowing the full emotional experience to occur. They were impartial, meaning they weren't trying to get somebody somewhere. They were okay with wherever the person got. They were following more than they were trying to lead. Um there was empathy, meaning um they were with the person, they weren't in the person. They weren't lost in the story, they weren't lost in the emotional experience, but they were with them in it. And they were full of wonder. And I was like, "Oh, okay. Well, what if I like live life like that?" and all of a sudden better connection, better relationships, conflict was something that became productive instead of something that became that was destructive. Um, I found out that I could raise money better, I could sell better, I could be married better, I could raise kids better. And so, so that's what it is. It's just basically how do you be with somebody in a vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, and full of wonder way. So, it's like I'm not knowing something about you as far as wonder goes. I'm wondering right so I could know something about you like you know you're been a big meditator and you're awesome and but that doesn't actually let me be with you as a human you know so oh well what what is what's important to you what how do I how do you want to relate with me that actually allows for a deeper level of connection
and so so that's the whole thing that was where that framework came from and it and it just was a really productive way of being with people and incredibly rewarding, but it turns out that when you connect with people, that's what we actually most want. And so, you know, it makes you better at anything you're doing with humans.
And it's it's far more rewarding, too.
And so, that's where the framework came from and where it is now.
And it there's a lot of asking questions in it, too. But it doesn't require you can be in view with yourself. Like think about meditating for a minute and you're like, "Oh, I'm vulnerable with myself. I'm impartial about where I'm going to go. I am um empathetic with myself and I'm just full of wonder." Like that's a really productive sit as compared to okay, clear my mind. Wait, my mind's not clear. Okay, I'm going to clear my mind again. Wait, oh, you [expletive] up. Okay, clear my mind again. Right. Early meditation, but yeah, less a lot less productive. Yeah, it just seems like the more fruitful orientation towards life in general.
Yeah,
particularly when it comes to vulnerability, I think a lot of us conflate displays of authenticity and vulnerability like they've gotten good PR agents, you know,
and so it's like it
but the but real vulnerability is where we when we actually truly feel vulner vulnerable in the experience of that.
Um how has your
and it changes, right? Like vulnerable for me used to be I had an alcoholic dad. Now it's like that's not vulnerable, you know? So the the experience of vulnerability changes because what the vulnerability is doing is I'm going to be vulnerable about something and then which is me saying, "Oh, I'm offering this up for reflection." And if I do that 10 times and 10 times people come back and they're like, "No, you don't need to be ashamed of it." Cuz most of the stuff we feel vulnerable about, we feel like there's a little bit of shame in then. No, you don't need to be ashamed about that. All of a sudden that shame goes away. And so then it's the next thing I'm vulnerable about. It's the next level of shame that I'm
that I'm going to allow you to see in me.
Through doing this work, do you think it's possible to arrive at the state where there's actually nothing in your experience you feel vulnerable expressing and sharing? Do you think you can arrive there?
I don't think so.
Really?
Yeah. I mean, it gets weird. It definitely gets weird. Um,
it gets weird because it starts becoming outside of the bounds of language a little bit.
But, um, but that doesn't mean that there's not action that you're going to take that's going to feel vulnerable. There's there is a natural insecurity to life. Like there's there's no such thing as a secure life. And so when you're on that line, there's always going to be some feeling of of, oh, this is scary, but it's true. But when it gets outside of the bounds of language, then it's then it gets just weird because you can't really particularly describe it. But generally, I I haven't seen anybody who doesn't have some version of that vulnerability.
In theory, both in theory and in practice, why wouldn't it be feasible that if somebody has the capacity to embrace the fullness of their humanity that there would be, I guess, no experience of vulnerability in sharing that experience with other people. Does that make sense?
I do. Yeah. Um, so think about like the most expansive state you've ever been at in a meditation.
Like do you feel the vulnerability in
I suppose I do in in terms of it's um like in what you mentioned the insecurity of it.
Um like in in a sense there's something inherently dangerous uh living on the edge of life and death and your experience of you know
Yeah. Yeah. that the the the I notice the bigger that we're asked to become, so to speak, the more we're the more we're identifying with everything, the more our sematic experience is one with everything. Every step of that so far that I've ever experienced comes with a a level of vulnerability.
Are you open to sharing what in your own personal life is a is an experience of vulnerability now where you're finding deeper permission to be human, where you struggle to
I can attempt I can attempt. Um, so for me there was a like a a clear time where my narcissistic tendency was that if I felt like I was going to be hurt, I would put myself slightly above. And we had a I don't know I can't remember how many years ago it was but it it our my wife and I our marriage went and brought that to a head and in that moment I recognized how much pain I had caused myself and others in that just simple oh I'm just putting myself slightly above people as a form of protection and all the emotion that I was trying to avoid in that little move. And in that recognition came this understanding of um of oh it's not me. Like the humility of it's all moving through me. I'm not special. and um and and and and became somewhat attached to that like oh this is like it's really important for me not to get a big head or to um but then there's this been recognition recently that what's actually wanting to happen is not to abandon that but to also integrate that with oh this is this is me this is me this is this is very personal like this isn't happening through everybody Because what I'm noticing is that like there's a in a there's a tradition about like there's two forms of fear. One form of fear is I'm going to die and one form of fear is I'm being asked to walk into a bigger room or I'm I'm asked to do something bigger. And every time I do that there's like a a biggerness that creates a it's very hard to describe but it creates like a permeability. It's like as I allow myself to walk into a bigger space, fill a bigger room, like there like there's less of me per square inch, so to speak. So there's a disappearing, but it's a different kind of disappearing, but it's a it doesn't happen without actually being like actually under acknowledging who like that it's me here, that it's not just all moving through me. And the perfect example of this that really helped me click in and understand what was happening was I was sitting across from a guy at a hot springs. Um he was telling me the story about this this one moment where he was helping somebody at a DMV. He was a lawyer and he somebody at a DMV was doing this thing and he said this thing and it changed their life about their dream and interpreted their dream and changed their life and he just started crying and gratitude that he could be there doing that and I was like oh I am not crying in gratitude and I'm doing that 20 times a day. There's moments where it touches me, but it there like and it he he had to take it personally. He had to say, "Oh, I did that to be able to be touched like that." The way that I can say I I like my like if I think about raising my daughters, I can immediately go to that place of like, uh, and that was me. I know that was me. It wasn't [expletive] moving through me. It was moving through me, but it wasn't moving through me. It was me. And I can feel that. And and so my edge right now is the vulnerability of actually like allowing that in the work that I'm doing in the world to actually see, oh wow, I get 10 emails a day from people these day. Well, it was like one a day and now it's like it's multiple on different channels and people, oh, you've changed my life. This has been good. And yes, absolutely. It's not me. It's what's moving through me. But there's another thing. It's like, oh, like to allow that to actually break my heart. That's a vulnerable stance because it like it's asking me to get to a like a bigger allowing it to be bigger the movement to see it in a bigger way. So that would be a place that's definitely on my vulnerable edge.
That's incredible. I I think so many creatives and leaders can relate to that experience too. like when you we feel like life is asking for us and how it's presenting to us is
is serving more in a different way at a bigger scale and in a slightly different context than one-on-one sessions. Um I'm so grateful to have you in at this period of your life. I feel like you're right now at this impetus in your own career where it's like
it's widening in in a deep way um in terms of scale and like social media and and and all these things
and and with that comes like all the energy that comes back at you with it.
Right. I notice that a lot of people as they as that audience grows and there's more and more people's energy that like the easiest thing is to defend. The easiest thing is to like armor up so you don't have to deal with it. But like I can't closing down like that would be how I would like drop all of this work because I can't do this work if I close down like that. But to open up to that much of it is like it feels like I'm um at times it feels like I'm riding a motorcycle really fast without a helmet,
you know,
vulnerable.
Yeah, it's very vulnerable.
What would the most wise version of you ask if it was to formulate a question around like helping you kind of embrace that heartbreak at scale in a sense? Is there something that comes to mind? Yeah, that's not how it works in my system now. It's um once I see that it's being asked for, then it's just a watching of its unfolding.
That's what I find to be most effective and most efficient. You know, it's like trying to pull a butterfly out of the cocoon. It's like, oh, it like by the time I know it and by the time I can say it, it's done.
Yeah. that awareness of it,
that aware it's done. Like I all I have to do is like sit back and wait.
Yeah. Which is the most efficient approach I find too.
It wasn't the most efficient approach earlier, but it it now it is
and then occasionally processing it, you know, talking to somebody about it, stuff like that. It's interesting as different creators, whoever is listening to this podcast in some way, when we're asked this kind of stretch beyond what we thought at one point would be a lot already to continue to scale and like
that there's just more there's more to life. There's more to serve. There's there's more to love and uh bigger challenge, more adventure, all it's it's it's service and it's also like woo, you know, it's like all that. Yeah.
It's a trip. What a ride.
Exactly.
Totally. It totally is. Yeah. you're like, "Oh, wow."
No, that's awesome, man. Thank you for sharing.
Yeah. Yeah. Pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for asking.
Yeah. I've heard you mention that like a lot of the frameworks we've even explored in this conversation are are sort of like temporary scaffolding and I and how you also work with a lot of execs and teams uh bringing in unconditional love into a sales environment or a work environment, which is so counterintuitive to how we think of that.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious for you to talk a a bit of that process like what that actually looks like and uh the importance of it.
Yeah. So, this is a little mental experiment you can run with yourself, which is okay, you're stuck on an island and there's all the food and everything you would need on that island and you're stuck on that island with 12 people. And it just turns out that these 12 people are saints and they can love you unconditionally and they do. They choose to love you unconditionally.
Am I Jesus?
Nope. You're just you. You're just you as you.
Just also 12 other sages around me.
12 other people just unconditionally loving you.
Okay.
And then you're stuck on that island for like a decade. How do you walk out? And you don't have to answer it. You can just imagine yourself walking out of that. Right. That's that is a version of ourselves I think all of us want to be. and and that's how you get to that version of yourself. And that's what you can do in a company.
And it doesn't mean you don't draw boundaries cuz it's you there is no icon of love that didn't draw boundaries. A great mother, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, whatever, Mother Teresa, all of them drew boundaries. That's part of being loving.
So it's not that. It's just like, oh, right. If that kind of way that we can be with each other, it's creates really productive, effective human beings. It's what we want. It's like what draws us. It's what we're trying to find in so much of what we do. So, if you can create an environment like that, it's it's it's really productive, really amazing, really lovely, whether it's a family or or a and it and it's of course starts with you being able to unconditionally love yourself or being lucky and finding an environment where there's a lot of people who do that. I am very interested and fascinated by the stories of love that is fierce and like some of those and like some of those examples that you gave of individuals like Mother Teresa.
Not that she didn't have her own faults.
All of us. Yeah. Uh there's a great documentary about her that came out that I watched and we think of like loving people is like oh they're very peaceful maybe just um not taking as much action in the world per se for the individuals that are called and find themselves in roles of leadership managing and responsible for 10 h 100red thousands of people whether it be in a business enterprise or their family relationships or whatever it Um it's yeah I just find those stories very inspiring and when people embody that sense of love in action in through fierceness and uh and so when you think of like truly powerful leaders that can like on the macro scale shift the paradigm of human consciousness and how that ripples out into impacts of um people in poverty or slavery um or are in charge of teams that will change the way we work with the world which I know with your a lot of the AI companies that's very much so the case. what uh what in your eyes is a is a truly makes up for a truly powerful leader in those qualities that we don't talk about enough?
Yeah. Um so the first thing I want to do is just check the premise for a minute. So, you know, I was talking to somebody about um a choice that AI could make and and so somebody there's all these AI labs and one AI lab might be able to make a choice and say, "Our goal is that interacting with our AI makes you a better person and that we're not doing anything besides that." And we were talking in this group and one of the people in the group said, "Yeah, but they'll lose because somebody's going to make AI that's addictive." We can debate that. I think AI is probably one of the few technologies where you could actually do something that's more compelling, a product that's more compelling because it actually is lifeenhancing because of some things. But but what that is pointing to is that the relationship with that is a two-way relationship. It's not AI and it's not the builders of AI. It's also the people who are choosing what products of AI they use. It is also the clicks. It the biggest democracy the most efficient democracy that we've ever had is the marketplace. And fact that like what you buy they will build. leaders of companies don't they they they part of what their job is is to guess what you will buy like that's like and if they're successful at it then they make money so so it's a relationship and I I think it's really important that people see that whether it's a dictatorship or whether it's a a a guru or whether there's a relationship in it. So, one of the things that makes a really great leader is that they actually see that it's a relationship. And they also see that they have this power in the dynamic that other people don't have. And so, and being able to feel both to be able to feel the connection and to be able to feel the power and like actually own those things, I think makes somebody a really great leader. Um there's a book called The Trillion Dollar Coach, which is um the guy who was I think behind Facebook and Apple, a whole bunch of things. And and um Lead with Love was his thing. And he was successful. I'm successful. The companies he worked with are successful. The companies I work with are successful. It it works. It just works. It Other things work, too. You can lead with greed, and those things can also work. Um, but they usually have a much shorter lifespan and you don't have the fulfillment that you would have So, so that's another thing. I think what I notice is that everybody wants to leave a positive legacy. So, the where humans get confused is how to do that and how they disagree with that. Nobody thinks they're the bad guy. Nobody is like, "Oh, I'm the bad guy here." Maybe there's like a psychopath here like it does, but you know,
Hitler thought he was doing God's work.
Say it again.
Exactly. Yeah. So we And no matter what side of the aisle you're on, clearly there's people who think that's good for the world. And so so the confusion isn't, oh, I want to do good for the world. That's something that is inherent in us. it's how we do it and or how scared we are when we do it or what emotions we're avoiding when we do it that's actually more key. Um and so showing like I not showing but when a CEO sees that the way I say this is God isn't a sadist meaning we think that there's this thing of like I have to suffer so for the good of others but as it turns out usually the thing that's best for you is also the thing that's best for other people and so if you can find the thing that's best for you that is also best for other people. It's usually the most fulfilling thing. And if you find that thing and you act from that alignment, then that becomes very fulfilling, very satisfying for folks. Yeah. Yeah, I could think of so many examples of, you know, uh when we like when we move from obligation in life, whether it's at a a party or a meeting or it's like when we when we're showing up somewhere because we feel like we should and we're [expletive] all over oursel and others,
It uh yeah, it just it it drains the authentic experience of actually being there.
Yeah. Well, the the thing is I can't actually hold in my heart obligation and or responsibility and love.
So like right now think of something that you love deeply in the world. Maybe somebody in your men's group or something like that and and then just feel that in your system and then now take responsibility for them or do obligation like you can just immediately that love just gets drained out. And so that's really the the teaching is that you're actually con those these are other ways you constrict yourself from loving people.
And I would I think a leader of a company who feels that deep sense of love is going to do better work for the world than the one who feels a deep sense of obligation or who are deeply defended because they're being attacked all the time. And that's the other place that I see that people are in relationship with these companies or with these politicians like you know if I was attacking you 24 hours a day how do you think you would start changing and that and you see it you see the Elon Musks of the world like that first six one of his first 60 minutes interviews around SpaceX he starts crying because he thinks of like astronauts who aren't appreciative of him and now it's like all attack.
Yeah. And you see this with like creators and artists and like they get in the public eye and then they get attacked and they just harden and like how did they make that kind of switch? What we as a society attacked them for like decades? What did you expect them to do? Become nicer? Like how does it what you know? So that I think that's again that relationship is really important and and you know what I notice is that we take we look at the the leaders and just like what you hate in the leaders that you hate is the things you hate in yourself. what is triggered for you and the leader is a thing that you don't accept in yourself just like we were talking about before and taking that responsibility leads you to freedom and it also helps them be better people even if you're one in a million or a billion. It also seems like when we move in the direction of our sincere love for something, it's what actually enables our capacity to endure with all the BS that comes along the way. you know, even from something simple like I'm deepening uh piano right now, my learning around piano right now, it's like and if I had that obligatory energy towards it, it would it would be I would be dragging myself to it every day. But because there is that actual love and enjoyment of it, it's like I can endure the the pains of ignorance around different things in music theory
um for the greater pursuit and benefit of of you know of integrating those things one day and learning those things. also enjoy the ignorance.
Like,
yeah, it's frustrating at times, but there's definitely many enjoyable pockets.
Yeah. I mean, on the frustration front, just as an example, um, you know, I have a a a woman named Sarah who's been working with me for a long time and she's like, we love Sarah. One day, one time our family was thinking about, you know, moving, we're like, we can't move Sarah, you know, we we'd lose Sarah. She's like that kind that kind of important to us. And um one day I came in just frustrated. I was like and she was like, "Oh, I love your frustration." I was like, "Huh?" She goes, "Yeah, whenever you're frustrated, it means that there's something not working and then we're going to find out what that is and we're going to get to the other side of it." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, you're right." And like so like she literally was the first person in a business environment who had loved my frustr I' loved other people's frustration but to get that in back I was like
that's awesome.
It was so good. What a gift.
Yeah. And and and and you can you can give that to yourself too cuz there's like oh right there's that means there's some tension here that's creative and it means that something's going to pop out of that and it's really cool.
It also shows you that you care deeply about the thing.
Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,
that's Yeah, it's awesome.
So, how could that not be enjoyable?
Right. Right.
You've been uh like I feel like AI is just becoming so ubiquitous in so many of the tools in our our experience of daily life more and more and
it can be quite frightening at the speed and how exponential it is. Um I'm curious because you have this whole background and people listen to this conversation they kind of get your vibe and like how deep you are and um also insight of what's coming and this avalanche of super super intelligent AGI.
What do you think is going to change in how we relate to what intelligence is and how emotional clarity and intelligence is going to how we're going to relate to that and prioritize it?
I don't know. I can't I don't I'm not good at prediction especially with this. I don't think anybody can predict this whatever this is happen like that's but what I can say with certainty is there's a massive opportunity for us and it's going to determine how we approach it. So you get divorced, you get have a kid, you get married, you lose a job, you go bankrupt. These are major moments of transformation trans excuse me moments of transition. things are gonna trans like like and those are usually the places where people make the most transformation. Like if I'm in a if I'm in a class and somebody's like I just got a divorce. I'm like I know they're going to like it's also where people deteriorate very quickly. Oh, you know the steel factories went away in Pittsburgh in the 70s and a whole bunch of people just went into alcoholism. Some people transformed their lives and had much better lives. But those moments of transition are these like the ripest opportunity for transformation. We are about to go through one of the biggest transitions that I think humans have ever seen like equivalent to fire, equivalent to the industrial revolution if not more or agriculture. And it's going to be the quickest one. So it's going to be the most disruptive to our consciousness. It's moving. It's going to move faster than our consciousness probably is used to moving. And so the sense of self, the sense of what you do, the emotional waves that are going to come with it, that's a massive opportunity for us to transform as a as a as as a person, as as as a society. You know, there aren't really bad times. There's just we us being bad in times. There's a great quote by that by um St. Augustine of of Hippo or something, but basically we are the times. If we are good, we the times are good. And and so we have that opportunity in front of us to transform ourselves andor society in this really profoundly beautiful way. andor we have the capacity to you know go into a very dark place personally andor as a society and it really just depends on how we approach it. Do we approach it with embracing the intensity or do we try to avoid the intensity? Do we click on the products that make us better people or do we click on the products that make us worse people? Do we uh treat ourselves with unconditional love and gentleness and determination or do we feel oppressed and and lack courage in the face of the unknown? And that's really the that's the choice we have and that's the only thing I can say for certainty is that that transition is coming and we have that choice. If you had to if you had to make a guess in terms of how we shift about our thoughts around what intelligence is or really what it means to be human because we're seeing super intelligent be able to do pretty much anything a human can do better by the day, you know, in terms of even creativity and it's like
every week it seems like there's a new AI AI model or video model that's like so realistic and
it's there's not a single industry it's not going to revolutionize. Um where does that place us as humans?
Yeah, knowledge work is dead. Skill work is dead. Wisdom work is what's left. Wisdom is basically the ability to make great decisions. That's a that would be one way to describe wisdom. Emotional clarity would be another way to describe wisdom. we can ask a model what to do, but we have to make the choice to do it. We can sit in the discomfort and the friction or we can not sit and we or we can avoid. All those are questions that a computer will not answer for us and our wisdom will. And so the people who can answer those questions are the people who are going to succeed and because just like today there's a great lawyer. He's a amazing lawyer, but he's just really a hard to work with and nobody wants to work with that person. But we're going to work with him because he's a great lawyer and he makes us a lot. Oh, nope. Computer can do you.
You're gone. It's like, do people want to work with you? Do people want to be with you? Do do you make decisions that are are decisions based on fear? Are you making decisions based on aliveness? These are the things that are going to make a difference. And so it's going to be our wisdom that puts us ahead soon is my guess.
It makes me think about the shift of how we value power and the individuals that we perceive hold power in in the realms of skills and knowledge
versus um all the lawyers and and other individuals in various different other fields. for example, that you in that example you gave um that our our our understanding of of their value in the in the world in the marketplace is going to be shifted and the individuals who have wisdom and emotional clarity like you're speaking to. Um it's like it it feels like oh the the the sages are are going to be the sages and and I know it's kind of a more mystical term but those individuals that have that um deep sense of nosis and ability to be with things and the things that aren't the things that are irreplaceable in a in a sense that a computer can't do
connection. Yeah.
Yeah. I I hope I know that sages have been thinking this for a while too. So, you know, we'll see what happens. But but what I notice also is that um even now today, you know, we have this idea of a of a businessman, business woman that we get from movie screens and lawyers that we get from television shows. But when you actually meet many of them in person, there are some that are scared and narcissistic. But there's actually quite a few that are quite wise and and really thoughtful and really hearttop people. And so they're they're already in those position. Some some of them are already in those positions. And so that's an that's a it's a fascinating thing. And so I I do feel like that's probably the trend is that way. And just to make it maybe more practical for the people who are thinking about it right now, if I went to a society in the Amazon rainforest and one of the p people at the top of that society would be the shaman and potentially let's just assume for a second cuz in a lot of societies this is the truth and they're schizophrenic. So the schizophrenic person is kind of in the top of that society and say that there's somebody who's like cutting down trees doing lumber futures bottom of the society. Now I go to New York City and the top of the society is the lumber's future guys making millions of dollars and the bottom is the schizophrenic sitting on the you know living on the street. That's how quick it goes. That's how much things can change in a one society to another society when our story shifts. And our story right now has been knowledge and skills are scarce, can't be commoditized entirely, and therefore we can pay less for them and therefore there's power in the skills and the and the knowledge. But now it's just 5 cents an hour or 5 cents a you know minute in an electricity of a computer chip.
It seems like what is so vulnerable about the position we find ourselves in humanity is because of the scale and speed at which this is happening.
And uh like you spoke to perhaps none other than the discovery of fire. Um, it can't really be compared to anything else because it because of how fast and how big it's happening.
There is something it can be compared to that I've been thinking about recently, which is awakening.
Like that just shifts everything.
You know, when we're working with people in our courses sometimes, you know, they go through a shift and they're like, I I went to the grocery store. I have no idea what the hell to buy. I don't I don't even know how to shop anymore. What the is happening? like, you know, call up Joe. Like, what?
that's like a very common thing, you know, or zen sickness or whatever. The shift is so quick and
it's the only other place that I see this kind of rapid change. And we're able to handle that with a little love, gentleness, and guidance. So
it seems like like you mentioned with any crisis and that example you gave where there's a big disillusionment it could either go into a deeper integrated awareness and awakening or the schizophrenic route in in a sense.
Yeah. Or Yeah. Just like atrophied watch news all day hate the world place. I am a victim place. Yeah, that seems like the the options.
See what happens. Yeah.
In sight of the great opportunity that we have and realizing that um many individuals who are making decisions at scale are quite traumatized in themselves. Like when you see that the models are being trained with the consciousness in which is training them and how that informs the parameters consciousness of the creators in the creation.
So what do you see
the spectrum of these different companies that you're working with and
uh and what what needs what we need to be mindful of and where maybe there's hope.
So like we said before that there's nothing but good intention I see and and there's blind spots just like all of humanity
both in the people building and the people who are voting with their clicks. So it's like it's yeah both of both of those things are happening. Um generally I just I notice like almost everybody I work with I have bias because um they're choosing to work with me, right? But um
they must be great people.
They're sweethearts is what I noticed. There's a lot of sweetness. And
I mean I wouldn't say like you know most highly tech people are not like deeply emotionally aware. That's not usually, but some of them sure are, and some of them are amazingly so. Um, so there's, you know, there's there's the only thing that I would say is different inside an AI lab and outside an AI lab is the like level of intelligence, but the and maybe also more tendency to be on like a neurological spectrum, but but generally it's like it's the same it's the same inside or out. We're like it's all a reflection. So when I say the consciousness of the creators and the creation it yeah that they're doing it but we're all doing it like this is not a we're we as a society are creating AI. We're birthing AI. It's not just these people over here. It is a relationship. We as a people are going be careful be careful which is influencing them. We as a people are saying, "Oh my god, doom is coming." Which is influencing them. What what I don't see a lot of is treating the people who are building AI the way that we treated our World War II fighters or the way that you would treat um your your future wife while she's giving birth. Be careful. You know, oh my god, this guy's going to destroy my life. This kid is going to take over everything. Ah, I don't know if we should give birth. like you're not doing that. You're you're there supporting, loving. Hey, how do you breathe? Let's be in our body together. I love you, dear. Like I don't see that happening for the people who are building AI and then they can be blamed. But you know, like most of us just won't actually look at ourselves and say, "Oh, we we were part of creating this."
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a bit freeing to see how it's already the cat's out of the bag in a sense where it's an inevitability and it's um it's like it gives us the opportunity of wherever we see an opportunity for growth, are we going to be are we going to stand by and watch or are we going to actively uh be the change you wish to see in the world?
Yeah. Yeah. Or Yeah. Yeah. And so that that that to me is the uh wouldn't it be great to you know you know walk into an AI lab and there's like a whole bunch of people there loving them and demonstration you know that would be like I wonder how think about how different the creation may be if there was if they felt like oh the whole world is like loving and supporting us or like even like you know the 10,000 people in front of our office are loving and supporting us like how much different would the creation be? Seems like with any creation there's a spectrum. There's a variance of different types obviously in different models for example and I
I could imagine how there's going to be and there are incredibly helpful models for healing uh our emotional you know experience. Um there will be used many that are perfectly designed for cultivating propaganda in the world
like uh
all of humanity will be represented in the LLMs. Yep. which is so exciting and incredibly frightening.
Because we know what that looks like. It's a big spectrum.
Yeah. Yeah. And that Yes. And so that that's the Right. This is another expression of how it's it's us again. It's a we are the creator creating this thing and we're
Yeah. I don't Yeah. It'll be its own ecosystem with its own predators and prey and everything like that. What I notice about humanity generally is that we prefer health to disease and we prefer um wholeness to separation and we prefer prefer connection to addiction. So, if you think about that rat experiment, mammals in general, but the rat experiment, you know, where they put the a rat in a cage and they all become addicted and they're all like poke pumping the cocaine or the heroin thing, but then they put the rat into like the rat park where there's other rats and there's play and they can have sex and they like hang out with each other and like very few of them become addicted or none of them in some cases become addicted. We as mammals will choose that. So if somebody can create AI that provides that, I I believe the majority of us will choose it.
And and the ones who don't will it'll be like a fentanyl, meaning that like that part of the society will
atrophy. Yeah.
Very quickly.
Yeah. We'll see what happens. It's definitely an exciting time to be alive.
What is that curse? that Chinese curse, may your children live in eventful times.
But yeah, I'm excited by it. I I I like
I'm grateful individuals like yourself are are supporting and having input with, you know, whispering great things into the leaders that shape the destiny of humanity in many ways.
I'm I'm grateful that they are choosing to be in it with me for sure. Yeah.
What a what an eventful conversation.
Awesome. Yeah. What a pleasure to be with you. Thank you very much.
Yeah, this is so many uh so many great clarifications also and appreciation for nuance throughout that I really uh I really love that you brought into the the dialogue and um I think very incredible frameworks and uh reminders for us all. Is there anything in the hindsight of this whole conversation that you feel like would be good to touch on before we close out that we haven't feels alive for you? So, we talked a little bit about like the accumulating more or the undoing, but I wanted to give to tie us back to the beginning and the end. Um, for the people who are leaving, just do the if you want to experience what I'm talking about, do this little exper experiment, which is um just like when you're done with the podcast, lie down, sit down, and see what it is just to receive life. just like and we can do it in this moment of oh yeah we can just oh I'm just going to absolutely receive everything that's available to me right now and that gift is always there all it requires is for us to receive which is not a doing it isn't it is it's not particularly an undoing either it's just a an allowing and I think that that is such a powerful thing that so many of us miss and it's available to to us all the time.
I have deep appreciation for the simplicity of that as well. I think throughout all the pod, you know, podcast conversations and different ideas and frameworks uh our our notions um accepting our humanity and awakening get pretty complex often times and um yeah, I just appreciate the simplicity of of of that and as a great invitation to close out on.
Yeah. Cool. Thank you, man. Pleasure. And uh for anyone who wants to dive more into Joe's work, we'll link down below where you can stay connected with him. Any other things you want to point people towards, resources?
Uh the best is to get involved in our newsletter. Then you can do the free coaching and the free workshops and get in touch with everything we're doing and then see if the courses are right for
Sweet. Amazing.
Thank you, man. Pleasure to connect with
Thanks.
And everybody, appreciate you for tuning into this episode of the No Thyself podcast. Until next week, I'll see you. Be well. Hey.
