E146 - Cory Muscara: Former Monk: “Stop Missing Your Life!” Here’s the Key To Lasting Happiness

Cory Muscara shares profound insights on achieving lasting happiness and fulfillment in the present moment. He discusses his transformative journey from awakening to monastic life, emphasizing the importance of breaking free from cycles of internal distress. Muscara challenges common misconceptions about meditation, urging listeners to confront rather than escape emotional pain. Throughout the episode, he offers practical strategies for tuning into inner wisdom and strengthening intuitive knowing. Try Pique Life tea and save 20% for life & get a free frother: https://www.piquelife.com/KnowThyself Andrés Book Recs: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 1:39 Stop Missing Your Life 9:00 Finding Fulfillment in the Present Moment 13:43 Awakening & Becoming a Monk 25:32 Breaking the Cycle of Internal Distress 32:41 Stop Meditating Your Way Out of Emotional Pain 41:40 AD: Pique Life Save 20% for Life 45:46 The FACE Model - 4 Steps to Presence 51:04 Truth About Self Love 57:13 The Desire for Safety Controls Your Life 1:00:36 Practice to Tune Into Your Inner Knowing 1:06:53 Commitment & Romantic Relationships 1:27:42 Strengthening Your Intuitive Knowing 1:31:25 IFS Process for Healing Stuck Parts of Yourself 1:53:43 Finding Stability in Surrender 1:58:00 Conclusion ___________ Episode Resources: https://corymuscara.com https://www.instagram.com/corymuscara/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyself.one Listen to the show: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives. I was 22 when I went to live in the monastery. A few days in, I was like crying in my bed, wanting to leave because I did not yet have the capacity to be with everything that was arising. Most of our negative patterns, relationship woes, insecurities, they are not the result of not having enough will, energy, or patience. They are the result of old, stuck pain. If you're someone struggling with this and you feel like there's something in me that comes up, I would start by, and this is where so many spiritual practitioners get stuck, is do you believe you are fundamentally whole? Or do you feel like you are fundamentally broken?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  If you are fundamentally whole, then your practice is about subtraction. My direct experience has been we are fundamentally whole. And that is why I often say you need to descend if you want to transcend.

• 1:00André Duqum?

  Cory Muscara, thanks for being here, dude. Thanks, Andre. Yeah. One of my greatest joys in this podcast is getting to see these different individuals online who are sharing similar, inspiring content around meditation, mindfulness, spirituality, and getting to connect in person and feel like, oh, we're gonna be great friends off the bat. Yeah, likewise. Yeah, it's really cool to dig into your story too and see your life as a former monk becoming a bestselling author, cultivating quite the audience online, and proliferating wisdom in these modern times. Something that really resonates with me also, the name of your book titles, is this idea

• 1:42André Duqum?

  of like how we can stop missing our lives. Think as you start to realize what a gift this life is, you realize to the degree we've been unconscious for so much of it and living life through the perception of our own conditioning. So that phrasing of like, stop missing your life, really resonates with me because I feel like for many different periods of my life, I've been keenly aware of the passing of time and how aware I am and present I am during those periods and the times I really haven't been. And it's painful to realize those times you haven't been because you see what a gift this life is. And so what comes to mind when you hear that phrasing, stop missing your life? And why was that so kind of motivating for you?

• 2:27Speaker 00

  The first thing that comes to mind is how much I don't like the title of my book, actually. So I'm grateful that you, that that speaks to you, and it does for a lot of people. There's something confronting about the title, as you're already acknowledging. People can sense how much of their life is spent unconscious, on autopilot. And it is the reason we went with that title. But the title I wanted to name my book was Permission to be Human, because I felt like that was actually the journey to coming back into your life. And as most authors know, there's a bit of a wrestle between like the creative and the publishing company. And we wanted something that kind of stood out to people.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  But it's a phrase that I would never, I would never say to someone. If I was inviting someone back into their life, I wouldn't say, "Stop missing your life." I might say something more like, "What's it like to be you right now?" Which is the, the line that I opened the book with. Really meeting people, very specifically where they're at at this point in time, which is going to be different for everyone. As you already alluded to, the, the process of being out of touch with your life, like actually missing your life, to coming into awareness is not easy. I mean, for a lot of people, there's a grief process, and a lot of people have good reason to want to stay unconscious.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  It's painful to wake up to the things that have been motivating you to stay unconscious. It's painful to wake up like 10, 20, 30 years later and realize like, wow, much of how I've been living is based on protective patterns that were trying to get me safety, connection, and love. So that phrase, like, "Missing your life", I think there's like two, two chapters to it, at least there were for me. And the first chapter is just recognizing that there's a being who can be aware of their life, not being identified with your thoughts and your emotions. I still remember the first time in college where that came up for me.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  I was, uh, well, I didn't, I didn't get into this work for any noble or spiritual reasons. I was trying to impress a girl. I had a hippie girlfriend at college. She was in a meditation. I wanted her to think I was cool. And that's what like prompted me to start meditating.

• 4:49André Duqum?

  I love it.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, no happy ending on that one. She broke up with me a couple of weeks later, but...

• 4:54André Duqum?

  Not even one happy ending?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  The real happy ending was that the, it was the pain of that breakup that actually like troubled me into trying to figure out how to get out of the torment of my mind and my thoughts and my emotions. And it was, I was seeing that the meditation, which I did not know what I was doing at the time, right? This, I was 20, 21 years old. I would just lie in my dorm room bed, put my hands on my belly, focus on my breath, go inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And I was just trying to be as present as possible. But in a short period of doing that, I was, I quickly became aware that there was this place that could watch the thoughts that was, that were judging me, the emotions that felt overwhelming, the pain that was gripping me. And that was the first

• 5:41Speaker 00

  stage of seeing like, oh, there's, there's a being here that is, is bigger. I didn't, I wouldn't have even used the word being at the time. I was just like, there's something going on here. And nobody ever taught me this before. And the more I zoom out and identify with that place of observation, the less torment I feel with the experience. Right? So that's like mindfulness 101. But the, the next stage of really stepping into your life is, once you connect to that, the resonance of freedom of awareness, that space of like what some people might call true self, what does it mean for that to express itself in all facets of your life? That to me is, is

• 6:25Speaker 00

  the real work. A lot of people can have awakening experiences, but it quickly gets caught in the gunk of their conditioning. And so they like wake up here and then they're, you know, they're their 14 year old self over here. And this is why you can also have great meditation teachers who like, you read their stuff, like Osho or Trungpa Rinpoche. You're just like, this is penetrating. And then you find out there's like abuse or there's alcoholism. It's just like, how does that happen? Happen? This is because like, the awakened state has to express itself through our physical embodiment.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  And I've never met a single human being that doesn't have some complication with this. And so if we view spirituality as the recognition that there is a place within us that is not bound to the same laws of impermanence and unsatisfactoriness as our mind-body experience, then we can view embodied spirituality as creating enough trust between that space and the facets of our personality structure, such that awakening can express itself in all moments of our life. That's a lifelong journey. I don't know anyone who does that perfectly.

• 7:45André Duqum?

  Absolutely. It's a messy windy road and the synthesizing and integration of both paths isn't really talked about as much as I think I would like to. And I think it's getting more and more light, you know? But I think we're really familiar with the spiritual insight of waking up beyond the illusion of your thoughts and your emotions and those meditative practices that can really support in waking up beyond the identification with those processes internally. And then, of course, the Western psychotherapeutic approach of parts work and healing your traumatic wounds and daddy issues and like, you know, really familiar with that, too. And I love to see the coming together of how they both support one another and are incomplete in and of themselves.

• 8:29André Duqum?

  And so we can continue to dive into that. I think a theme throughout this conversation is I want to pull from some quotes of yours, either from your post online or book, or, and we can expand on it because I think, you know, they're articulated really well. One aspect of internally feeling like we're like not present for our life is this continual Sort of orientation that our ideal life is somewhere in the future that is AKA not now. And so this quote, I think, hits on that really well. The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives. And so if you want to kind of share about your journey awakening to that realization,

• 9:14André Duqum?

  because it's such a pervasive and persistent one, I think, throughout all culture.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. The belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence than the one we're in right now is why we miss our lives. That has been a piece of writing that has both resonated with a lot of people and has also been hard to understand for a lot of people or activating for a lot of people. Because some people hear it and they hear it as the belief that a future moment is going to be better is the reason we miss our lives, which is not what this is saying. The recognition that a future moment is going to be better is wisdom. It's the recognition of impermanence, that whatever suffering is here will shift and give way to something else.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  But the belief that there is a future moment more worth our presence that we can finally show up to and like really let ourselves sink into, that is the trap we get into. Where we develop this push-pull relationship to our experience, where we're grasping at the things that we want, pushing away the things that we don't want. And it's an inherently non-spiritual relationship to our experience, to our life, because it is layered with the presupposition that there is only gold in something that feels good

• 10:43Speaker 00

  or something that matches the blueprint of our personality structure. And

• 10:50Speaker 00

  My experience with like the greatest transformations that I've ever had, I mean, almost all of them have been during the most painful experiences, the experiences where I'm most confused, where I'm most tormented, and where I don't want to be in that moment. And I use, and I have, like, use my distraction and suppression strategies to avoid that thing and try to buoy myself above it. That never works. I, I, I always have to come back to whatever that thing is that was asking for attention. And when I do, when I allow myself to soften into it, when I like almost make it a devotion of just like, I trust that there is a reason you are here,

• 11:35Speaker 00

  and I am going to soften the protective layers that don't want to touch this as long as I feel ready, right? There's, there's wisdom sometimes to protection and saying, not right now. But knowing that we come back to it, it's like, I'm, I'm here to feel this. When that gives way, life moves through again. And then you are on like the pulse of your life, the natural flow of your life. Waiting for some future moment that, that fits the blueprint of what you want is, um, is a very surefire way to, like, to really disconnect from the aliveness of your life.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  And it's a mistrust in why things are showing up, the way they're showing up, and what opportunity there is for you when you actually let yourself touch it.

• 12:27André Duqum?

  It's pretty amazing to feel the radical transformation in our present moment when we can, yes, acknowledge that there is maybe a certain arrangement of conditionings or a certain amount of money or relationship or health that someday in the future we want to attain to, and we can have those. But to recognize that part of having that and part of actualizing that into form and the manifest is not having it. And that's the journey that we're currently on. And so like not being on our path or feeling lost. Is our path is is part of the whole journey. And so, yeah, finding that acceptance in the moment that maybe we want something to change,

• 13:11André Duqum?

  but in the moment realizing that it is our current life right now and allowing us to land in this moment fully is is so much of our work. And it's so tough to do that when we're so heavily identified with our own thoughts because we believe them to be true. And so I know you started to wake up to this realization as well yourself and then you decided to go spend six months as a monk. And so talk to me about awakening to that realization and that transition and what then led you to make such a radical choice.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  I was 22 when I went to live in the monastery. I was 21 when I had the realization in college that I did not want to go in finance like I thought I wanted to. I had an internship lined up on Wall Street. We met with this multi billionaire hedge fund manager. Everyone said, this is the guy you want to be. This is where you want to get. This is what success looks like. He gave a two hour talk and it sucked my soul right out of my body. And I remember thinking, I don't know exactly what I want to do with my life, but I do not want to end up like this guy.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  And to be fair to him, I have no idea what was going on in his life. He could have had a colonoscopy before he came in the room for all I know. I'm not saying all people in finance are miserable because I know tons of people who are in that world that are fulfilled in different ways. But that was the first time that I really had an inner reckoning and challenged some longstanding ideas of where I thought happiness was going to come from and started asking myself the question, well, if that's not what I want, then then what is it that I want? If that's not the path I want, what is it that I want? And I just started exploring like things that I thought I wanted. I want a family. Well, why do I want a family? It'll give me meaning. Why do I want meaning? Well, that'll make me happier. I want money. Well, why do you want money? Then I go on more vacations, have free time. Well, will that do?

• 15:03Speaker 00

  That will make me happier. Want to be married? What will that do? Give me love. What will that do? That will make me happier. So everything was like when I really looked at it, I spent months, not a long time, but at the time it was a lot, just like, what are all these things I'm pursuing? What do they reduce to? And it was just this this desire to feel a certain way. And it just was so clear to me at the time, like if that's at the heart of everything, figure out what that is. Because all these paths, like, how many people do you know who are married and miserable? How many people do you know who are, make so much money, but they're completely enslaved to the process and they feel dead inside? Or have kids and like they resent their children?

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Just like you just going on those paths is not going to guarantee this thing that you, your mind is subconsciously pushing you to. And I didn't really know what that thing was, or how to get there, or how to reverse engineer. I did just know, though, at the time, I was meditating and it was anchoring me into a place within myself where the peace that was arising seemed less contingent upon the external variables. I'd be walking around campus and, you know, after a couple of weeks of doing this, and I just noticed myself smiling more. Or things would happen that would typically cause stress and I, they would just like brush off like water on Teflon. And so that, that spoke to me.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  That made me curious. And I am like as type A of a personality as you can get. My mind goes, alright, you're doing it 15 minutes a day, it's going really well, what would happen if you did 15 hours a day? Like, where can you go to do something like that all day long? I had known of like Eat, Pray, Love and that sort of thing. So I thought I was gonna go, there's still like jokes, because I was in a fraternity at the time, like fraternity members and sorority people, there was just like a whole rumor going around like, do you know Corey's gonna go like sit on a mountaintop and find himself? Because it was so contrary to like how people knew me at the time. But I felt it deep in me and I just kept following that intention. And anyway, I went on a, I went on a seven day silent retreat that Insight Meditation

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Society in Massachusetts when I was, right after I graduated college. And I told them like, hey, I wanna go deeper into this stuff and I want it to be hard. Like, I really wanna be stripped down. It's like a very young man kind of orientation. And they were like, alright, cool. Well, a good place to go is Burma, because the teachings are like as close to the heart of Buddhism as you can get. And if you really want it to be difficult. And intense, you should study under this guy named Saya Upandita, who I didn't know anything about at the time, but was just notorious for being unrelenting in his push of people toward enlightenment.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  So I said, that's the one I want. Three months later, I was on a plane and showed up wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, really with just like, I had a romantic idea of what it meant to do that work. More, it was a romantic idea of what it meant to come out on the other side. How cool would it be to do six months of this? Not really thinking through what it meant to, like, what was gonna be unearthed. But just, just knowing if I could force myself into this, I would come out the other side with the idea was like a happiness that was not contingent upon external variables. And then everything in my life would just be gravy that I could build, build on it.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  That was, that was the, the motivating force at the time. A few days in, I was like crying in my bed, wanting to leave because it was so physically painful. And I did not yet have the capacity to be with everything that was arising. And just to paint the context, that, that place, Panditarama in Burma, the schedule there, you have to do a minimum of 14 hours of meditation each day, which is typically an hour of sitting meditation and an hour of walking meditation that you're alternating back to back. You wake up at 3:00 AM, go to bed around 10:00 PM, two small meals at 5:30 AM and 10:30 AM. No reading, no writing, no listening to music,

• 19:25Speaker 00

  no contact with the outside world, no speaking, and no days off. You were doing that every single day that you were there. And the mattresses you sleep on are so thin, you could squeeze them between your finger and feel the bone on the other side. So this is, is not comfort. But the food was good and they support you doing the practice. They don't want you working. They don't want you doing like in other, other monasteries, you know, you have different jobs supporting. They just want all of your time devoted to practice. And we're doing Vipassana, like straight up Vipassana meditation, which is just cultivating an awareness of the flow of experience as it's moving through you, watching thoughts

• 20:09Speaker 00

  come and go, watching emotions come and go, watching the pain arise. It's one thing to read about doing that, as you know, and it's another thing to actually be like in the midst of all of your physical pain and emotional pain and, and your thoughts. And the first thing that I encountered while I was there was very extreme physical pain from all of the sitting, right? Like I'm, I'm sitting, I can't even sit cross-legged still. It was even worse back then. They didn't have cushions for people like me where I can like kneel down and prop myself up. So I was trying to sit cross-legged. There's no air conditioning. The fans go out 30 times a day because electricity is going out. So you're sweating, there's mosquitoes, you're not sleeping, you're getting a handful of hours of sleep a night.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  And all day long, I'm just like sitting there like this crumpled up piece of wire. My body was so tight and I'm trying to be aware and all I'm doing is just cursing out every aspect of this place, the teacher, myself. And by day seven, I was ready to leave. I was like, there's just no way that I'm going to be able to do this for six months. Like I'll, I'll go to Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery. That guy looked like calm and nice and everything I read about him seems really sweet. Could walk around, let you smell the flowers. This guy won't even let you look at the puppies running around the monastery. It's just like, it just felt so antithetical to everything I was looking for.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  So day seven, I'm going to leave. Something happens when you know that you're going to come out of a difficult experience. My experience was like, it just lets you relax into the experience a little bit more. So I was going to go to the main office, try to get a plane ticket out. Still doing the meditation in the morning, I said, let's just, let's just like really go as deep as we can in these last couple of hours. And it, in doing that, it just softened the part of me that was so angry and frustrated at myself and everything around me, just enough that I could see with a little more clarity what was going on. And what I noticed was like, the thing that was arising first was physical pain in my back.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  There was like a sheet of pain that would come up every time I would sit down to meditate. But that wasn't the only part of the experience. The pain would come up and then immediately there would be the thoughts of, what's wrong with my body? Nobody else looks like they're struggling as much as me. How long am I going to be able to do this? There's no way I can do this for six months. So all of those thoughts would arise. And then if I paid careful enough attention, I'd watch how those thoughts would trigger emotions of anger, sadness, grief, confusion. And then the most interesting thing, as my concentration got a little deeper, I could see that those emotions were actually making the intensity of the physical pain worse.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And I saw this insidious mental loop that was just being fueled by the mind. There was an experience of primary pain that I could not control, the physical pain in my body. But there was all of this secondary pain that I was layering on top of it, that was being turned up or down with the dial of my mind. Just seeing that was liberating. Because now I felt like I had some agency with the experience. And that was the first time that I really started to play around with like, okay, so if the thoughts are triggering the emotions, like, how do you reduce the charge of a thought? I can't even necessarily stop the thought from arising, but I can watch the thought with compassion rather than fueling it.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  And that's where in that tradition, you have that, the mental labeling of experience. Like, all day long, all you're doing is just labeling. As soon as you wake up, eyelids lifting, it's like, you need to pee, need to pee, you're going to the bathroom, peeing. So you're just like tracking every sensation and every experience. So when you're noticing a thought, instead of letting it go into what they call papancha, which is one thought going into another into another, you just try to like meet it for exactly what it is, just the mental phenomenon that it is, thinking. So you just label it, thinking. I hate this, thinking. What's wrong with your body? Thinking. And the more I would do that, the less those thoughts would trigger the emotions, the less the emotions would trigger the pain, and the more I was actually able to just

• 24:30Speaker 00

  settle into and soften into the pain. That first insight of primary pain versus secondary pain and seeing that there was an ability to not fuel and cake on the layer of secondary pain is what gave me enough space and confidence to keep going with that retreat. And then that retreat became one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. But I wanted to get out, and I was planning to get out, and it was an act of grace that I didn't.

• 25:03André Duqum?

  I'm looking forward to hearing what ensued afterwards. But that insight you just shared about primary and secondary pain, about the reality of having a human body that experiences things, but then the recycling and multiplication of that that our mind does, perhaps, is a really liberating perspective, because then we can stop being prisoners to our experience and we can actually be liberators of it. And one framing that I love around this, too, was experience, awareness, and story. And so I would love if you could share a couple more examples of that and how it could be practiced and practical for anybody who's listening right now, that is, living life

• 25:45André Duqum?

  that has an experience, the awareness of that experience, and the stories that we unconsciously or consciously continue to label on top of that, and how it's important to differentiate the three.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is pointing to that when you pay attention, you're going to see like three main categories of experience. There's the direct experience, which is like, what's happening? I'm sitting here, I'm seeing you, it's quite quiet in here, so I'm just hearing maybe small sounds. That's the direct experience. There's the awareness, this is just like the knowing that is happening, that's behind that. And the interesting thing about awareness is that it's untouched by the experience. My awareness of sadness is not sad, my awareness of fear is not fearful, my awareness of pain is not in pain.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  So there's this aspect of experience that is just able to be there and hold what is present. But there's a layer in between, and this is the story that is really what moderates the relationship between awareness and experience, and what conditions whether we're suffering or whether there's ease. And so in terms of experience in people's life, right? You can imagine someone losing a job. So in this case, just like, okay, job is lost, direct experience. I'm aware that I lost my job. Story, I'm not worthy, or I'm a bad husband,

• 27:24Speaker 00

  or I'm a bad provider for my family, right? And so that story is going to be the thing that conditions the emotions and the suffering that comes next. We can't impact the experience that's arising. We can't do anything, nor do we want to do anything, with the awareness that's arising. But we can intercept the story and start to play with the story and see how the story that we tell about an experience opens up a different emotional expression. And so in that case, right, like you have a job loss, and I'm not going to dismiss like the meaning and how that can shift someone's life. But there could also be another story around this that potentially this is making way for something

• 28:07Speaker 00

  that wants to come through that I've been fighting against. Or potentially, this is giving me an opportunity to follow a creative pursuit that I haven't had a good reason to do because there's been, you know, this has been so good. Or maybe this is giving me some time to really reevaluate what is going on in my life and do I need to make any serious shifts? So the story is what conditions the emotional response. And seeing that we can impact that story is another way, especially in the early stages of our spirituality. And I would actually even put that more in the camp of just like,

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Personal growth of like when you're playing with the story is just seeing like, oh, I can shift the thoughts in my mind and therefore shift how I feel in my body. And I think that's where a lot of people start on their personal growth path. And mindfulness itself, the, the ability to anchor in the awareness begins to show you the distinction between like, oh, I am seeing Andre and then there's thoughts about Andre. They're all good thoughts.

• 29:15André Duqum?

  All great thoughts, right?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  That's the story and that whole condition. Like, you know, even if I think like, what does Andre think about what I'm saying right now? And then I could get in my head of just like, oh, am I saying good things? Or people who are listening, are they going to like me? If I have another, if I even just let that go though, right? So then there's a whole thing of like, what happens when we let go of the story? Then I can really just drop into a channel with you. And we might both have our stories, but we kind of like let that exist as radio noise in the background and drop into like a shared frequency that is creating this moment. And the word frequency doesn't have to be like mystical. It's kind of just like, think of it as like connection. Just like, oh, the curiosity of what's actually

• 29:59Speaker 00

  arising and what happens when I meet what's arising without story, but just curiosity. What awakens within me and what is shared from that place? So yes, there's a layer of being able to work with that story. And then there's another layer of seeing that and seeing that we can let go of the story. And that's when like, we invite even just like another layer of surrender.

• 30:53Speaker 02

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• 31:21André Duqum?

  Yeah, that complementary aspect and dynamic between replacing disempowering stories with empowering ones, and then also waking up to an awareness that encompasses and will always be the background field in which any story arises, really support each other. And again, it can be easy to get sucked into one camp or the other. I think it's great to replace old narratives that are old conditioning passed down through culture, family, genes, whatever, with new ones. I am worthy is much better than I'm not worthy in terms of your internal experience and the fruits that it's going to bear in your external reality. But even more empowering perhaps is to wake up to your worth that is inherent to your

• 32:06André Duqum?

  being beyond any story of it comparing to something externally, whether it being I am not worthy or I am worthy. And part of getting to that point is I feel so much of creating distance from us in any story, whether it's nice or not nice, depending on what we think it is. And that requires practice to create distance between us and any narrative or story that are, that's happening neurologically. Like, the reality is we're so close to our own bullshit. If we don't brush our teeth, as the saying goes, for a couple of weeks, we won't really notice it because the change is so gradual and it's so close to us, we become accustomed to it, but other people can tell, right?

• 32:48André Duqum?

  And so that's, I think, where it becomes really easy when you're at Thanksgiving dinner and you see all the neuroses in your family members, or you're in school and you can see things and patterns that play out in other people way more easily than you. Can yourself. Of course, you have them too, right? As much as we don't like to admit it.

• 33:09André Duqum?

  But it's in creating distance between us and and those stories and those patterns that we begin to see them. And and so.

• 33:17Speaker 00

  And can I?

• 33:18André Duqum?

  Yeah, I just wanted you to jump in here too, because you you talked about the the the jump from awareness to story. And obviously, we're practicing cultivating the the awareness between the two.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, so I think what's really cool here and it and an interesting edge when you're working with story is. So my experience, right, I have done probably 10,000 hours plus of Vipassana training. Just aware, aware, aware. And it's a beautiful practice. I still do it. It it it helps soften edges of conditioning in a profound way. It helps remind me that there's a place that is separate from the fear and the control and the thought. Something else, though, that it did to me is. We all have different survival strategies. Some of us have like a fight.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Some of us have a flea, some of us have a fawn, some of us have a freeze. I have more of a freeze survival strategy, which means that when when things get stressful, kind of get quiet, a little bit more withdrawn, want to isolate. Well, what does it look like when someone gets quiet, a little bit more withdrawn, wants to isolate? Looks a lot like meditation. I would say a lot of meditators that you see on retreats are people who have a disposition or have certain survival strategies that they can.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  So it's an intense way to put it, but they can like mask as morality or spirituality, not intentionally. It happens subconsciously. At least I'll just own it. This was my experience. This was a way for me to relate to my experience in a way that was safe based on my particular strategies. So what I often found with my meditation training is that I got so good at just watching experience and being the observer. That it created some distance between.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  The emotion between the sensation and between the thought, like, and my personality structure. A lot of distance where I could just kind of like sit back. But if I really looked at it, yeah, there was some freedom there, but it was also kind of the similar, similar freedom as like a low-grade freeze response. I describe it as like, it let me sit on my perch of awareness, like, oh, that's your pain down there. Oh, that's your emotion. Oh, it's just an emotion. Just watch it. Just come and go. It's impermanent. Everything will come and go. Powerful, there was wisdom, but it was wisdom hijacked by aspects of my personality structure that were afraid to make true contact with experience. So, how does this relate to story?

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's power to creating separation from story, seeing story as something that you can manipulate, seeing that you are not story. There is also power to getting intimate with story and seeing story as like the tip of a thread of something that is wound up and deep in your system, where you actually like let yourself get into the story of, I'm not worthy. It's like, instead of like shifting that to, I am worthy and trying to stay on the perch of, I am worthy, which has value to an extent. What if you let yourself just feel like the I am unworthiness? And not just feel it, like let yourself get into it, like, I'm not worthy, like, God, I suck. I'm a terrible.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  Once you give that permission to go, it's gonna, it's, it's gonna take you into your body. It's gonna show you and bring you into the places where that core conditioning and wounding lives. And much of how we live our lives, especially when we're meditating, and this is where like so many spiritual practitioners get stuck in their embodiment practice, is their practice like keeps them, whether it's just sitting still in meditation or it's maintaining an idea of how I'm supposed to practice and not getting too messy or just staying in awareness. It keeps them from having enough permission to get into the messiness

• 37:27Speaker 00

  and the rawness of the experience that is holding together these patterns of conditioning that's not letting the awakened state come through in the first place. And that is a key. Thing that people, that I also had to recognize for myself that comes to, how do you orient to what is spiritual growth? Do you believe you are fundamentally whole? And that the joy and the compassion and the love? And the freedom that you're looking for is innate to you? Or do you feel like you are fundamentally broken? If you are fundamentally whole, then your practice is about subtraction. You are releasing the protective layers of conditioning

• 38:10Speaker 00

  that have learned it's not safe to be yourself, to not trust that space. If you believe you are fundamentally broken, then your practice is going to be about adding things and thoughts and ideas that build an idealized view. My direct experience has been, we are fundamentally whole. My direct experience of the greatest transformation that I have is when I let go of the patterns telling me who I need to be, including the pattern saying, you need to have a positive thought. It's when I let myself kind of now meet the negative thought, take that into the wound underneath, let the wound be decoupled from shame,

• 38:52Speaker 00

  meet the awakened state, which is there to hold you. If you soften into it, if you surrender, it will be there to hold you. Let that now take the burden of holding your experience. That's where the wound begins to heal. And as soon as that ball that is held together by all of these protective layers of who you need to be in order to be good or right or spiritual, like those beliefs get to fall away, the core pain gets to be touched and released, and now that particular line goes away. And it's another area in your personality structure that is free for wisdom and awakening to emerge.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  And that is why I often say you need to descend if you want to transcend. You have to let yourself go down. The self-energy, true self-energy, has a gravitational pull to it. But we keep ourselves from going through the layers that it wants to bring us back through because of our ideas of how we're supposed to practice, how we're supposed to behave, how we're supposed to think. And it prevents us from letting ourselves be in the messiness of our experience. I'll just give one more example of this, like when people try to force forgiveness. And just like someone hurt you, you feel angry, but you don't want to feel angry anymore. God told you you're supposed to forgive, or Jesus told you to forgive, or your mom told you you're supposed to be forgive. So you try to forgive.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Very noble pursuit. The perspective I take is that forgiveness is innate to the heart space. If you surrender over the burden of not knowing what to do with this person to the heart space, that's how forgiveness takes care of itself. Your true nature is forgiveness. You can't do forgiveness, especially the parts of you. You can perform it, but it doesn't, it's not from the deepest place. So a lot of people try to perform forgiveness. I'm not mad, or it's okay. And then like you interact in this half-baked way where you're like kind of okay with the other person, and you also still resent them. And then these projections come up. And then the dynamic just exists on this plane of you're not in truth. You're not actually in connection.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  You're playing out parts and patterns and protections. What that person first needs to do is give them space to be angry and to feel hurt. And then take that down. And what does it touch from seventh grade where you were betrayed? Like an old wound that's stuck in the system that this activates. It's like, oh, wow, so this gives me an opportunity to touch this. And you take that down. And that, that could be a long journey. We're not talking like minutes or hours. Sometimes this is like weeks or months. But it is the unwinding of the personality structure. And so when you Meet what is given. You stay in the sequence of what is being presented to you.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  And this goes back to the quote we talked about before, the reason we miss our lives, because we have some idea that there is a future moment more worth our presence right now. If you bow to what is given, what is given to you in this moment and trust that there is wisdom here, even though your mind can't understand it, you are meeting the most alive thing in your experience. And when you do that, it will give way to the next most alive thing and the next most alive thing. And then you'll hit a stuck point. And then that's like the spiritual waiting room where it's just like, oh, I don't know where to go here, but I can't abandon myself anymore. You let yourself cook in it until something else gives way. And you go down and down and down and transcendence is just the reconnection back to our natural state.

• 42:30André Duqum?

  Mic drop.

• 42:33André Duqum?

  That was flames, fire flames.

• 42:40André Duqum?

  Hey fam, sometimes I get asked what kind of tea my guests and I are drinking on the show, or what I just like to drink in general. And I just wanted to give you guys a quick share, because not all tea is created equally. Many companies are not organic, leak microplastics into your tea, or are just low quality sourced ingredients in general. One tea brand that I have been drinking almost every day is from Peak Life. They have this Pu'er tea, which sounds very fancy and bougie. And it is, it's not like normal tea. It's fermented, which means that it's loaded with living probiotics and prebiotics that support your gut health. It's like a reset button for your microbiome that supports with digestion,

• 43:25André Duqum?

  energy, metabolism, and your skin. Peak's Pu'er green tea and black tea, which are right here. It's wild harvested from 250 year old trees. The purity is of next level. They are triple toxin screen, meaning there's no junk, no pesticides, no additives. It's just the good stuff, the stuff that you want. It dissolves instantly in hot or cold water. There's no tea bags or steeping. So the form factor, I love. It's very convenient. And now, because you're an awesome human and you listen to this podcast, Peak is hooking you up with 20% off for life. Yes, for life. And they'll give you a free rechargeable frother and glass beaker when you grab their Pu'er bundle, which is the black and green tea.

• 44:09André Duqum?

  This is an exclusive offer just for everybody who listens to this show. Peak hooks it up with a 90 day money back guarantee. So that means it's a risk free. You can go to peaklife.com slash know thyself to grab yours now. That's peaklife.com slash know thyself. Link in bio as always. I hope you enjoy. Man, there's so many touch points there that we can dive further into. That last note about transcendence being, again, not something that we're in the continual acquisition of, but is the realization, which is why it's called self-realization, as the letting go and the undoing of those parts of us that aren't actually us, but yet we subtly or sometimes grossly believe to be ourselves,

• 44:52André Duqum?

  then realizes and makes space for that experience of our true nature and true self. A great book on the synthesizing of what you're talking to that people want to check out is Already Free by Bruce Tiff.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I have that on my bookshelf. I'm like a few chapters in.

• 45:07André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  He's great.

• 45:08André Duqum?

  Yeah, it's a great, great framework for seeing how, I mean, you could do years and decades of shadow work and make great progress in terms of your ability to be with your inner child and take full custody of it. And, you know, do those parts, works and all of it. And still live so much heavily identified in your mind and story and trying to improve it. And that can be a never endless, you know, never ending journey. On the flip side, you can go deep into the contemplative practices and waking up beyond the story and still be an asshole. Like you can, you can, you can have a lot of those character things that are not resolved because no matter how much you become aware and separate yourself from a story,

• 45:53André Duqum?

  you still have a personality structure in there that you'll go back to, especially if you have a family and you live in society. And, and so they're both needed. And like you spoke to earlier, We've seen so many examples of both, of the spiritual teacher who dies of alcoholism, of the enlightened guru that sexually abuses, right? What is that? Why does that happen? It's because there is all this other characterological stuff that's not addressed and can't be addressed from just the waking up perspective. And we know, obviously, and you can experience a lot of individuals who continue to do shadow work and continue to do the inner excavation, which is amazing, it's noble, and it's a

• 46:35André Duqum?

  never-ending path unless you start to wake up beyond the illusion of any story, right? And so, this, I think, ties nicely in also with your face model. And so, if you'd like to share kind of your process of how you orient yourself towards this, because what's really been useful, and not just sharing your story, because that's amazing as well, but all these practical examples you've given of how whoever's listening to this right now can engage in their next challenging moment that happens in their life, or when they go home and something happens, pleasant or unpleasant, they have more tools,

• 47:17André Duqum?

  like an internal capacity and capability to be with anything. Like, that's a truly powerful individual. And I think some frameworks like that would support it, so.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, so the face model is from my book, and I came up with that in like 2018, 2019. So it represents a certain chapter of my teachings, where I was doing it more in the mindfulness space, but it has relevance for how we meet a moment with presence. And so it's just four, it's an acronym for four simple, four different things. One is just like focus, which is our general, are we attuned to this moment?

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Allowing is A. Is there an ability to meet this moment with an attitude of this moment? It's like this or an attitude of good luck, bad luck? Who knows? Curiosity is kind of like the glue in with the moment. It like pulls us in of like, oh, what's what's here for me? What's being presented here? What can I learn from this moment? Or just like, what's it like to be in interaction with this moment? And then E embodiment, just make sure we're not caught in our head, that we're actually like attuned to what's happening in our body and the wisdom of our body. And so many people, especially in early stages of mindfulness, do it in kind of a like a heady way.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Cause we often think of like awareness happening in the head

• 48:51Speaker 00

  and disconnect from like that. There's huge wisdom and communication happening all throughout the body. And I like to almost think of the body as like this mega sensor. As I'm going through space, I'm just like picking up the wisdom that's coming in. It's just like, oh, what is this making me feel? And what's that communicating? And what can I learn from that? So I outline that as a, as a moment of presence where we can have these four things. If you wanted to break them down of just check with yourself of like, am I, am I focused in this moment? Am I attuned to what's here? Am I meeting it with an attitude of allowing? Is there curiosity that I'm bringing maybe to the person I'm talking to? And am I in my body as I'm doing that?

• 49:35Speaker 00

  If you do that, like in your next conversation with someone, you check those four, four domains, those four pillars, you'll probably see that something's a little off. Like, yeah, I'm focused on them, but I have some judgment. I'm focused on them, but my curiosity is like kind of going elsewhere. I'm not actually leaning into what they're sharing. And so like bringing those all online can just like drop us in in this way that we're talking about.

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• 51:03André Duqum?

  I think as like, in terms of the earlier like, part of that journey of being able to focus and allow what's happening, we have to be aware of what's happening. Like, we can't just be in the unconscious reactivity that's the habitual nature of our, of our mind and what we've been in the past. And of course, as it doesn't capture the whole picture, but meditative practices like Vipassana can allow you to widen the gap between the stimulus and the response and cultivate the capacity for equanimity in the, in the face of any sensation and experience that is so invaluable to have that.

• 51:44André Duqum?

  Arguably, one of the most like transformational things for our consciousness is our ability to simply sit quietly and not need something special to happen in the next moment and to be able to just essentially be with what is, period, end of story. Not meaning that we don't take action or we don't change, you know, what's happening. But, but that ability is really powerful. And just to kind of close out the, and put a ribbon on, on your story of, of meditating for 14 hours a day for six months, there are these like latent faculties that we just don't get to experience because we're scrolling on TikTok all day. Like, because we, we haven't been immersed or, or shown the kind of user manual of the

• 52:29André Duqum?

  human body and mind and what's possible when your mind is so concentrated and how blissful it can be to just to simply be sitting down. Like, when you taste that, I think your perception of life radically changes. You stop being under the illusion that your ultimate happiness and key to fulfillment is somewhere external because you've experienced it. You've tasted that full satiation internally. That wasn't attached to anything happening outside of yourself. And that's one of the most liberating things I feel like we can experience as a human being. And so what was it like? Share like maybe a peak moment. I know you had lots of difficulties throughout the time, but I know when you're focusing that

• 53:09André Duqum?

  much on a contemplative practice like that, you discover faculties and capabilities as a human being that you just were not privy to. And I think it's an important reflection. So what was that like?

• 53:22Speaker 00

  The first thing I'll share is

• 53:30Speaker 00

  the best thing I got from that experience. And people typically think like when you spend six months meditating 14 hours a day, like you're going to have some trippy transcendent ego death type experiences. And I had plenty of those and I'll go into some of the cool ones. But the most valuable thing from that time is that I became my own best friend. There was just an inner coziness that developed really as like a means of survival to get through it. Because when you are spending that much time with your mind, with your pain, like if

• 54:12Speaker 00

  the thoughts that are moving through are like, what's wrong with you? Do this better. You're not a good meditator. And those are like benign ones compared to what can come up in the mind. I mean, you're just not going to make it. It's going to be brutal. You're going to have to like disconnect from your body to get through it. So compassion and love and that inner friendship arose organically out of meeting the intensity of my experience and having to find a different way to work with it. And over time, judgment was replaced with understanding and hatred was replaced with compassion.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Intention was replaced with ease and it was just a deep reverence for what it takes to keep showing up for the mess of the human experience that.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  Made me able to talk to myself in a way that I wasn't able to do before, where I could just be in my experience and go like, "Hey, Cor, how you doing? Like, this is a mess, right? And this is really hard. And like, if you need a break, like, it's okay to take a break. And we don't have to listen to what they're saying, what the teacher's like, "I'm with you." I wasn't able to do that before. I had a harsh inner critic. And I don't have that inner critic anymore. I still have thoughts that come in that like, judge a situation and keep me accountable. But I don't beat myself up like that, ever. I don't really know how to do it.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  That was the most liberating thing from that experience. And that was just a slow, gradual softening back into myself.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  There were other experiences, of course, that, you know, really deep penetrating experiences of impermanence, where you just kind of spend all day long watching your body vibrate and thoughts moving so fast, so fast. Your attention and concentration gets so refined that my teacher would have me shift from noting a thought. So every time a thought would arise, he would just go thinking. And then he would have you label like the content of the thought, like, "Oh, anxiety, fear." So that was another level of specificity. But then, as concentration got even deeper, he would have you label the intention to think.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  So even before a thought arose, you would feel the energy in the mind-body system coming up to want to pop up a thought. So you get that level of refinement, of attunement to your experience. And so, all day long, you're just watching pain arise and disintegrate, emotions arise and disintegrate. And you're seeing what happens to experience when it has the space to just be, without me having a layer caked on of judgment, and why is this here and what's wrong with me? When that layer comes in, like, harking back to the secondary pain we talked about, that's what keeps emotions stuck. It's what keeps anger perpetuated.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  But when that's not there, I mean, these things just move through very quickly. So penetrating experiences of impermanence and penetrating experiences of non-self, where...

• 57:36Speaker 00

  There was just, there was no, the illusion of Corey was evaporated. And, and in that space was just like a heart of compassion that was truly beautiful and really changed my perspective on myself and was very hard to integrate in the real world where you need to have like yourname.com or you're building a brand or a personality and you need to make money. And so the coming back was, that's where the work started.

• 58:08André Duqum?

  I think it's a, one more thing, important thing to come back to was the awareness of how even meditation itself can become a behavioral compensation and coping mechanism to not have to go into the story. And that perspective that you can be with anything, that you can be your own best friend is like, you described it as like an inner coziness. I love that. It's just like a sort of warmth that there's less friction between these noises in your head. You know, it's like, we can be with this, we can work with this. Because I think when people say like, love yourself or be your own best friend, it can kind of

• 58:51André Duqum?

  sometimes seem like this fragmented thing. There's like you and then there's, there's a voice in your head and you're trying to like, talk with that, instead of just recognizing as that's like all part of one thing.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:03André Duqum?

  And, and just making space for that to feel safe. And so I'm just curious, because you've been doing this work also with so many different people on both sides of it, like how much of our efforts, both through meditation, through our behavioral compensation of so many different things are really our subtle desire to just feel safe?

• 59:21Speaker 00

  I think it's all, that's been my experience. Like it just, we can cast a wide net of what safety means. Like the resonance of happiness has safety, resonance of love has safety, but yeah, it's all safety. The-

• 59:39Speaker 00

  The glue that holds the outdated beliefs and wounds together that organize our life, they are held together by fear. The actions, the beliefs and the thoughts that typically run through your mind that are telling you who you need to be in order to get safety, love and connection, like that's all held together by fear. The opposite resonance of fear is safety and love. And this is why, as people start to do this work and they develop

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  a more regulated nervous system, they develop capacity to actually be with more spacious aspects of themselves that have inherent safety. These layers of their personality structure that are gripping slowly start to soften and unwind. I mean, I think it's so evident any time that you have some sort of awakening or just you feel really good in your body, really good in your mind, really safe, really connected, really loved. The corresponding thought is just, oh, this is what it's all about. And you often see like, oh, all these other things that I've been caring about,

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  they're just trying to get me to this. And many of them are distorted. But you gotta do something in the world. So like, let some of those things be an expression of this place. But most of the time, they are distorted ways of trying to get to this place. And, you know, these practices are ways to just get back there, see that it's your true nature and then let that true nature illuminate life itself.

• 1:01:29André Duqum?

  That ability to give reassurance to yourself. It's such a switch to where I think culturally it's kind of conditioned to be in the pursuit. I mean, it's literally written in the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness. It's the extraction of joy from something outside, right? And instead of the sharing of joy from like the inner wellspring that you have, it's a different orientation and different things come out of both of those experiences separately. And I think as you start to deepen in these practices and awarenesses, you start to see how your sensitivity raises and your ability to listen to more subtle whispers in yourself about things that are happening within your own psyche,

• 1:02:11André Duqum?

  about intuitive impulses to move in certain directions, career-wise, a certain level of resonance and ability to see if somebody in a relationship dynamic is meant for you or not, like all of these things you start to attune to more. And that is an incredible place to live life from, instead of just the wants and desires from ego. And so what's the difference of texture from desires that arise from stillness versus desires that arise from ego?

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  My experience of stillness is there's a spacious, non-arguing quality. The choices that come through don't actually have the resonance of being a choice. They don't have the resonance of being a decision. They're just like a receiving. From the personality structure, the ego structure, they take a lot of other different forms, but they tend to be noisy, they tend to be pushy.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  If you turn your attention away from them, they tend to grip a little bit more. They really try to convince you. And so that that inner knowing, it's not as loud, but it's steady. And it's it's something that when you let yourself get quieter and you let yourself get more safe, you you default to that space. And this is like the simple prescription I give to people who are trying to discern, like, am I leading my life from ego? Or am I leading my life from soul? If we were to put that word on it. It is take note of the moments in your day when you feel most grounded, most safe, most connected and most happy.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  These are moments where the fear aspects of your personality structure are not going to come online. And notice in those moments, how does your system orient? What does it think is possible? How does it feel about the relationship you're in? How does it feel about your work? What, where does it want to go? What does it feel is possible? Then contrast that with the moments throughout the day where you feel tight, fearful, stressed. Where does your attention go in those moments? How do you feel about the relationship? How do you feel about your work? What is your mind convince you you need to do? Sometimes you need to contrast that many times to see that there's a distinction and

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  many times to actually be sold on the reality of, oh, there's something happening over here for the fear parts of you to start to get on board of like, maybe they don't know everything as it relates to what's going to give you happiness. But that simple practice is a way to start to, at the very least, attune to, there's a place in you that you can orient to from a different resonance. And it will pull your life in a different direction that's not conditioned by fear. And another like relevant piece of this to tie this into Buddhism, like,

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  In many ways, we're talking about dependent origination, which is like a pretty dense Buddhist concept of like why we come into human form.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  But really, like, why do we get, stay stuck on the wheel of samsara, like the wheel of suffering? And it's, it's because we're, we're conditioning one moment into another from a place of graspiness and feeling like my refuge will be if I get there. And so that creates a cause and effect relationship, where we get a moment that now we've just reinforced this pattern of gripping, grasping, or aversion, and we just stay stuck in the tumult of thinking that next moment is going to be what frees me. It's the same thing when we're talking about like, well, why, why even choose to lead from this deeper place?

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  Like, what if it doesn't, what if it doesn't give me everything I want? What if I surrender and I don't get the relationship? Or I don't make as much money? And, and one, that's the fear of the mind. But it's important to remember that what we're surrendering to and why we're surrendering is not so that we have a life that gives us everything we want or our mind wants. And it's not because we're going to have a life that no longer has pain, that just won't exist. It's because we have seen that there is a place within us that, that already has the resonance of freedom and safety. And like, all of our pursuits are trying to get us that resonance in the first place.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  So we anchor there and then we let that be the origin of the next moment.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  And what you then get in the next moment is a world that is an extension of and reinforces you being in that place, rather than an extension of and a reinforcement of you being in patterns of fear, control, and conditioning. If you go into the relationship from a fear-based place, you are playing out dynamics from the level of the personality structure. You can break free from those. You can drop in and you can do conscious work and find your way to the other side. Doesn't mean that the solution is going to be you're supposed to be together. That's why it can be very helpful to do this work beforehand, but most of us, like, that just doesn't happen.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  But don't be upset when like your partner's interacting with your 13-year-old when you made a decision to be in the relationship from the place of your 13-year-old.

• 1:08:05André Duqum?

  It's a really important reminder too, that of course, we can do this work before getting into relationships. And the unique capacity a relationship has, especially romantically, for being a mirror to our inner core vulnerabilities that would not have otherwise had the safe space to be for, you know, held for, is really real. Like, and maybe no other space would, we feel safe enough to really experience and even just witness and see what those kind of core patterns are, except for romantic relationships. Like, they have that unique capacity to kind of reveal those things for us. I'm curious, do you have any, with your own relationship dynamic and coming to these awarenesses and choices, I'm curious about your journey.

• 1:08:50André Duqum?

  Because when it comes to making choices from the place that feel like they're actually not choices, they're almost like the choiceless choice. When it's coming from stillness, when it's coming from joy, it, like, the way you described it experientially, I really, I really liked, because it resonates with me as truth, that there isn't this back and forth and convincing, there's just kind of this deeper knowing and receiving and accepting of what is. And the Buddhists also have a term for the sort of intuitive knowing called direct, non-conceptual, valid cognition. You know, meaning direct, it's, it's right, it's right there, it's immediate in the experience. Non-conceptual, it's not of the mind in terms of formulation of thoughts or the intellect or logic.

• 1:09:36André Duqum?

  Valid, meaning obviously it's true. It's, there's coherence to it. Incognition is, it's like being aware of it, right? So it's like this, this level of intuitive of knowing for things that are meant for us, for directions we want to go, choices we want to make. And many different impulses that can arise from our, from our deeper sense of knowing. Like, we think of the mind as just the intellect, but the mind is a vast sea that's connected to all life. And so that's a different place to live from. And I'm curious how you related to that deciding who you're going to spend your life with and have a baby with. And, you know, your journey with your relationship, because I know there is an arc there.

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  Oh, that's an understatement. It was a roller coaster there. Yeah, my relationship with my now wife, Brianna, was the deepest spiritual experience or integrated spiritual experience of my life, bar none. After I got back from the monastery at like 2023, I, that chapter from like 21 through age 27, before I met Brianna, I really got to kind of like coast off of the, the work that I had did. I had kind of this balanced orientation toward life.

• 1:11:00Speaker 00

  I was single, so I could kind of follow what I was interested in. I wasn't being too confronted. I was building a teaching business. I was enjoying it. I was working with people and I was, I was teaching from that space. And then it wasn't until I met Brianna that I was thrust into a five-year journey of trying to figure out how to discern what is truth and what is conditioning? And what does it mean to make one of the most important decisions of one's life from a place of freedom and truth? So that the relationship is an extension of that.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  So I'll share about our story. I met Brianna at an alumni event at UPenn. We both went to grad school for positive psychology there. And I remember when I first saw her, she stopped me in her tracks. I would watch her walk around the room and there wasn't a performative bone in her body. She just carried this resonance of authenticity that drew me in. And I eventually convinced a friend to introduce us and we started talking. We spent three hours talking about spiritual bypassing. We went deep, quick, and we were hooked. And the next several months, we really just danced in this place of getting to know each other,

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  sharing stories, laughing and falling in love. And one of Brianna's students refers to her as a walking Mary Oliver poem. And that was my experience. She was just opening me up to new dimensions of myself. And as I'm sure you know, with that much access to life, that much commitment to honesty and that much devotion to truth is confronting. And my 27-year-old self was not ready for it. The biggest thing was just how much emotional range and expression she had. When she was in anger, she let herself be in anger.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  When she was in sadness, she let herself be in sadness. When there was something that was misaligned, like she wanted to get in and wrestle with it and understand it and be like, there's something not right here. Why can't I feel you? I can't feel you right now. And it was scary to me. Here I am, monk boy. She'll say, well, why don't we try to pause and respond instead of react? And have you heard about the HALT acronym? Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired? It's like, let's just breathe together. She's in life itself and scared the shit out of me, honestly. I didn't have the capacity to be with it.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  And at the same time, it was so clear that so much of my spiritual practice had become forms of suppression and didn't give me range to meet her. On this level, but when I was in it, I was like, you know, Mary Oliver turned into Edgar Allan Poe. I was just like, what am I supposed to do? But we like, we worked on it. Like, we continued to meet that. We also had a lot of other things like working against us. We were living on opposite coasts. I was the East Coast, she was West Coast. She was seven years older than me. We met when I was 28. She was 35, so we were, and we both wanted family. We were aware of timeline stuff. We just came from different cultures. I grew up on Long Island, like New York, Italian.

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  She grew up in like the wholesome Northwest. So it's just like, there was friction and a lot to be worked out in our personality structure. And yet, there was like a deep magnetic pull that was undeniable. So we kept exploring and playing and trying to figure it out. And after like a year or so, I checked to myself and I was like, you know, what is it? Well, how do you feel about like proposing when you think about getting married? And when I would imagine getting on one knee, the thing that arose was this tightness in my chest. And I was like, whoa, okay. So I guess this is a sign that this isn't right. Like, this is an intuitive knowing. I didn't have that language yet. It was just like,

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  something's, it can't move forward, telling me not to move forward. So then I would think about breaking up. It's like, all right, well, let's think about breaking up and how we want to do it. And as soon as I would think about breaking up, all this fear would flood my system. And the fear would get all swirly with these other emotions and not wanting to hurt her. And then it would convince me that, like, that's not right. And then all of a sudden, I went from like 90% clarity to like, it's time to break up, to 90% clarity to it's time to stay together. And then that would last for a couple of days and then it would settle. And I would just be back in this space of like, oh, we're just kind of doing the relationship, but can't really go all in, can't get out. And this was the,

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  my first internal reckoning of like, I actually don't know how to discern in my own experience. What is truth? Like, what is wisdom? What is the voice that I should follow? And what is the one I shouldn't? And so we would talk about it and we like try to work on it. It is a hard thing to admit, but we were conscious enough to explore it. And we did that for weeks and weeks turned into months and months turned into years. And during that period, we tried to break up multiple times and failed. We tried to imagine being together. We would like pretend to plan out a wedding and who we were going to invite and where we were going to be.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  And I would just like freeze the whole time. We tried to break up and succeeded a handful of times or we'd do it for a month or two, but we'd come back together because it didn't feel right. And then as time went on, like the pressure built up, the pressure to have a decision. And anyone who's endeavored in this path knows that like the main thing that will get in the way of you accessing an inner knowing is feeling stress and pressure. It just creates too much noise. So we knew that and we were just like, all right, so let's, let's do these things where we create these open containers for one month or two months or three months where we take the pressure off entirely to know what to do. And we just focus on loving each other and figuring out, working out the edges. And we would do that and it would work.

• 1:17:34Speaker 00

  And we were deepening in how much we loved each other and learning to live together. There was so much that was opening up, but it was like an asymptote. It was getting closer and closer to the thing, but never quite touching. Cause each time we'd get to the end of one of those containers and I was counting it down. It was like three days left, two days left. I would check, what is it like to think about getting on one knee and proposing? And the same stuck tension in my chest. We did that for five years. Whoa. Five years. I met Brandon when she was 35. We wanted a family. We were pushing up on when she was 40 and we had our stuff. Like you, it's hard to go that long and not have stuff. Like, why can't you guys break up?

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  Like, that's a good question. That's a very good question. We were trying to figure that out, but there was just something pulling us forward. Eventually, September 2022, after five years, a couple of months before 40th birthday, I'm just like, we, we have to end it. This has to be done. We can't keep doing this. And so I mustered up enough courage and surrender to actually really break that process. It was. The hardest thing I've ever done, which it might sound ridiculous, but anyone who's like worked at relationship dynamics at this level, you know, these things, they hit your most vulnerable survival patterns. Like, it feels like you're dying. But we made it through.

• 1:19:04Speaker 00

  And then, once that softened, we knew on the other side, like, okay, yeah, this is right. We do need to be broken up right now. It wasn't a perfect breakup. Like, next five months, you know, I packed up everything, went back to New York. She was in Palo Alto. We would talk periodically, you know, do the things you're not supposed to do, like, I still love you. But we really stayed separate. And it was like moving in that direction. Then, New Year's 2022. I microdose psilocybin in the attic of a friend's house by myself. It's like the saddest visual you can conjure up. And Brianna just comes through, full force.

• 1:19:46Speaker 00

  And I see some stuff in myself, like, around commitment and intimacy, that I'm like, oh, man, like, could that be the thing that's blocking it? So I reach out to her the next day, and I tell her what's up. And she agrees, just like, all right, if we want to give this one more shot, let's do it, and let's do it well. We go to LA. We meet with this therapist for four days, and we put everything out on the table. And just, and we go deep. And it's mostly stuff with me, like, I'm going into childhood patterns. Like, I'm crying on the couch. I'm touching some, like, learned patterns when I was a kid in relationship to boys and other people where I didn't feel safe, and I felt guarded. And it's like, man, something is opening up.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  And after all of that, we get to the end. We're sitting in the car about to go to the airport. And she asks, like, so what are we doing? And I imagine getting on one knee and proposing. And it's still there. And that's when she said, like, we're done. Like, we're really done. We gotta, we gotta move on. And so we did. We went our separate ways.

• 1:20:59Speaker 00

  A week later, I go to Mexico with my very good friend Miles. Single guy now, so we're gonna go kite surf for a month. I love Miles. He is, he has been such a healing friendship for me. There's so much range in our friendship. We go deep in different areas. We laugh. I love him. Three days into being together, he does something that annoys me. I don't even remember what it was.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  I walk out, I go on the rooftop overlooking the Sea of Cortez. And I just noticed this thought, like, oh, maybe Miles isn't gonna be as long-term a friend as I thought he was gonna be.

• 1:21:39Speaker 00

  I had enough awareness that I had some stuff potentially around relationships. And I had enough recognition of how much I adored this human to be able to catch the absurdity of that thought. And I said, wait a second, buddy. If Miles is not a long-term friend, who would be? And I could feel myself trying to squirm away from an answer. It was like a part of me that was like, don't ask that question. And I held its feet to the fire. I said, no, you, we gotta look at this. Like, where did that come from?

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  And as soon as I held it to the fire in that way and penetrated into it, something started to unravel. And I went into this sober psychedelic experience where I got dropped into all of these past relationships. My mind was taking me through friendships, partnerships, family dynamics, where I'm seeing this pattern of something get uncomfortable, a part of me get judgmental and want to pull away and create distance. As I'm doing it, this part of me that's been aching in the relationship and tightening up is throbbing and pulsating. But every relationship dynamic I go through in my mind, it's softening a little bit more.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  This fear coming up, I'm seeing the pattern, it's softening more, taking me all the way down to some of the earliest ones when I was five years old and like a boy threw snow in my face. And I remember it was just the first experience of betrayal and not feeling like I could get out of the situation and learning that it wasn't safe to be with people.

• 1:23:23Speaker 00

  It went on for a half hour. My body made movements it hadn't made before. My chest was pulsating. My mind just cycled through everything over the last 35 years. Then after 30 minutes, something settled. My mind got calm and clear. My body started to soften.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  And then I thought about Brianna. And when she came to mind, there was no tension in my chest. And I said, what's it like to think about proposing to Brianna? And I imagined myself on one knee. And the answer that came through was, of course, of course. First time ever, no tension here at all. No resistance, just clear knowing. The deepest yes in truth I had ever experienced.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  For the next two weeks, I woke up and I checked that. Because I didn't know, maybe I just had a manic episode or something. And I would imagine her in like her worst moments. And I would imagine like the way she triggers me the most. And it was just still a yes. Two weeks later, I got on a plane, San Francisco. Told her I wanted to meet up. I asked if she'd be willing to. Bought a ring and shared the whole story with her. And said like, I'm here, I am 100% here. And if you're ready to move forward, only if you're here too. Like, I'm ready. She said yes. And we got married six months later.

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  And now we have a four-month-old child. All within that stream of truth and love.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  And that journey, I had a teacher say, like, we front-loaded a lot of karma. People sometimes do this at different layers of the relationship and in different ways, in different contexts of their lives. For whatever reason, like, there was a current pulling us together, but we had a lot of conditioning getting in the way. And I specifically had a part of me that in internal family systems, they call this blending, when a protective part of you masquerades as wisdom. And this is when fear is most dangerous. It's not when it's loud, it's when it impersonates your voice of reason.

• 1:25:57Speaker 00

  And it was running this relationship dynamic for years. And I needed to let myself see it, and I needed to see what was behind it, and allow the pain to breathe, for it to release, so that it could unburden itself. And once it did, it no longer had its grip on the relationship. And so, this, that really represents, like, the second chapter of my work. The first chapter was just, like, how do we cultivate awareness, the recognition that there is that place in you that you can dwell, that you can allow experiences to come and go,

• 1:26:40Speaker 00

  that there's impermanence, that you don't have to grip so hard, that you can release. The next layer was, how does that resonance of freedom move through the human form? Right? Because Vipassana and mindfulness, they teach you really well how to be with a thought as its own observable event. It's just a thought coming and going. Don't judge it, whether it's a good thought or a bad thought. It's just an emotion, good, bad, doesn't matter. But when you have to make a decision... Part of that decision-making includes thoughts. It includes emotion. Like intuitive knowing comes through the body and the mind.

• 1:27:23Speaker 00

  And if you're not able to discern like the resonance of a thought that's coming from freedom versus the resonance of a thought that's coming from fear and conditioning, it all just feels like the same soup. But it's not. It's like oil and water. And for me, I really needed to do a lot of descending to sensitize myself to what are parts that are acting out of fear and protection, trying to run their life, that are impersonating my voice of reason? And how do I help them unblend so that the awakened state can just move through? It's been the deepest work of my life.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  And, um, but it's, it's what I understand now to be like embodied, embodied spirituality.

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• 1:29:14André Duqum?

  Powerful, man, powerful. Yeah, getting to see your own journey. Because we've touched on a lot of themes and different aspects, but putting it into practice in your own life. You know, we talked about those intuitive pulses that, you know, when you tune in from a place of stillness, you'll move towards a direction that's going to bring you more true joy and what's meant for you in life. But there are so many moments where it's just not that clear. And despite all your practice and devotion to growing your awareness like over years, like half a decade of still like coming up against this resistance point. So, I mean, it's commendable to honor the part of you that is committed to the full FES.

• 1:29:57André Duqum?

  Like, if there's a part of you that isn't fully there in terms of this is what I want to do to move forward, then it's also not honoring to your partner, you know? So it's important there. But obviously, so frustrating at times because you don't have clear, like, full clarity on what's the internal block for me having clarity on making a decision like this.

• 1:30:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this, it's a really juicy point you bring up. Because like, you could look at the story and see like, well, at the end of the day, you guys got together, like you were going to be together. So couldn't you have done that at any particular point? We didn't know that was like, we broke up with surrender. The narrative I had was that the greatest, this was going to be the greatest like spiritual work that I was going to have to do in this lifetime, which was to let go of someone I loved so much because it wasn't in alignment. And I didn't know why it wasn't in alignment. I just knew when I thought about moving forward, I was stuck. And that was the deepest thing I could access. And I always said to her,

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  "The only thing I am more scared of than losing you is losing myself. And if I override this, I will lose myself because it means I am not honoring the deepest thing I can listen to." Most of us are going to find ourselves in these positions when we're trying to make decisions. We won't have clean access yet to intuitive knowing. Sometimes we do. Usually, what we have access to is a part. It might not be as blended deeply as me, as mine was, but we just have a sense of like, a stuck point. And what I invite people into is like, your work is just to listen as deeply as you can,

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  and to check with yourself and ask yourself, "Am I listening as deeply as I can?" If you are, that is all you can do. And then you are given the information, and then you choose what to do with that moving forward, or how to respond next. And if making a decision against what's coming through, if you can feel like that overrides something, then that you have to pay attention to, because now you are reinforcing a pattern that says, "I don't trust myself." And what's coming up might not be the deepest thing, but that's okay. What you're doing is creating a tether to yourself of self-trust, that I will listen, and I will, I will follow what is given.

• 1:32:31Speaker 00

  And you often need to do that to get into the other places that let that conditioning resolve itself. Because the way those parts begin to release is with more safety and trust in the system. One way to ensure you're not going to have more safety and trust in the system is to override a part that's trying to tell you something. Or to just say, "Yeah, this is what's coming up for me, but I feel bad leaving you, and I'm going to put that experience first." Right? People might see that as a nobility, but nobody is in service when that happens. The truth is always in service to everyone that is involved. That will just perpetuate superficial patterns of people-pleasing and codependence.

• 1:33:13Speaker 00

  So, yeah, what we have right now is the deepest level we can listen to, and we don't know where that's going to take us. But it's not your job to know. Your job is just like, "This is what I'm given, and I'm listening earnestly and sincerely, and I'm on my knees, and I wish it was something different, but it's not, and therefore, I surrender."

• 1:33:35André Duqum?

  And what's come on the other side, I mean, we were just chatting as your, as, as your baby was being born and like, the, you know, the, the fruit has been bared from making that decision, collapsing the energy. And I know this is something that a lot of people struggle with in terms of commitment, in terms of making these big decisions in life and discerning and seeing what's in alignment. That's a, it's an interesting path to navigate, to honor your truth, to not abandon yourself, but then also make this commitment to somebody else that has real effects in the world and their life. And so gets into muddy waters,

• 1:34:17André Duqum?

  you know, in this process. But yeah, so is there, is there one thing you would say to somebody that's struggling in terms of that sort of commitment? And that's maybe whether it's, it could be a relationship to anything in life, but you know, romantic partner seems to be obviously a really popular one, can be difficult at times. You said like cultivate the ability to listen, but also seems like there is an inevitability to these things that will play out almost when they're supposed to. And as much as we want things to happen on our own time, the universe doesn't work like that. And so what do you think about this dichotomy of doing everything we can in this moment to, to make, to, to know what

• 1:34:58André Duqum?

  we need to know to make a decision, but then also like having patience and seeing how things play out?

• 1:35:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think there's a combination there, right? Like, there's going to be some real life urgency in terms of whether it's a decision we need to make about a job or in a relationship. It's more, how do we use that urgency? Like, what are the practices we're putting in place that are allowing us to do something? If the, if what we're doing is just beating ourselves up, right? Well, then that, that urgency is not being used well. So I, after this happened, I really didn't know exactly like what just happened in my system. I just knew it had the resonance of a miracle. It was the only thing in my life that I experienced as a miracle, which is something completely shifted and reorganized how I thought.

• 1:35:48André Duqum?

  Spontaneous?

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It wasn't until about a year later that I really figured out the parts that were at play and figured out more how to reverse engineer that process. Brianna and I went on a nine-day silent loving-kindness retreat at Spirit Rock. And loving-kindness meditation is where you're intentionally anchoring into these heart qualities of love and compassion. And I found by combining that practice with also my understanding

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

  of parts work and somatic experiencing, that I was able to direct the stream of that heart space toward areas where I felt friction or tension and could actually unwind that bundle of conditioning that would keep me stuck in certain states. And what happened with Brianna is, as I said, there was a part that was blended. So what is a part from an internal family perspective, systems perspective? They're like fractals of your consciousness, of your psychology, that will, are interacting with your experience. And

• 1:37:12Speaker 00

  when something painful happens and the system is overwhelmed with stress or fear, those parts take on the burden of figuring out, who do you have to be now? How do you have to behave? How do you have to think? And what emotions do you need to feel to make sure we don't touch this pain that we already have and to make sure we don't have any more of that pain?

• 1:37:37Speaker 00

  Those parts are typically now running most of the patterns in our life. And they are like, if we have something like commitment issues, so to speak. They're usually a result of these parts that have some deep-seated belief and learning about, it's not okay to be open. These can be super deep. I can't tell you how many times in the five years that I was with Brianna that I checked myself. Like, do I have commitment issues? I would talk to my friends. Tell me, like, I want to see, what am I missing? Like, is there something going on here? Talking to my mom, talking to my dad. It's like, what can I, what can I figure out in this?

• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  So sometimes even when there's willingness, they can be hard to see. This is why, so the first step is you, you start with like, what is given? And so, in this case, let's just say there's a commitment, a commitment issue. And you feel yourself, if I were to redo this with Brianna, and I were to imagine myself getting on one knee and proposing and feel that tightness in my chest, instead of just stopping there and going, okay, that's the intuitive knowing that something's off. What I would orient that as is a fearful, is a protective part

• 1:38:58Speaker 00

  that is, that learned at some point that intimacy and commitment and relationship with others is scary. And it's creating a feeling telling me to get away and creating thoughts telling me to get away. And that all of that is held together by fear. Those parts, they stay in place because they are afraid that if they let go, you are going to have to feel this unresolved pain or more pain is going to come through. Most of our negative patterns, relationship woes, insecurities, they are not the result of not having enough will, energy, or patience. They are the result of old stuck pain that lives in the system

• 1:39:41Speaker 00

  and now organizes your behavior so you no longer have to feel it. That stuck pain and that bundle is held together by fear. What is the opposite resonance of fear? What softens fear? Love and safety. So. If you're someone struggling with this and you feel like there's something in me that comes up, I would start by what I typically tell people. I taught a whole course on this last year called Opening the Heart because I wanted to dissect this process. And the model I taught there was an acronym called CARE and soften. So CARE is you connect to the place in you that you feel this stuck point.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  Feel it in your body or just notice the thoughts of like, I don't want to move forward. I'm scared of them or I don't like them. Connect to it. A is you appreciate and acknowledge that that thought process and that block has a positive intention. It is trying to serve you even if you don't understand yet. There's an intelligent design there. There's intelligent design. It's so used to you being angry at it that it will just start to soften just by you saying like, I don't know why yet you're here, but I trust and I know that you're doing something to protect me. So you connect to it, you appreciate it. R is you ask it to reveal what is it that you're protecting?

• 1:41:05Speaker 00

  And the question I like is what do you fear would happen if you were to let go of your role? This starts to give some insight of like, okay, it's scared that if you were to be open, if you were to get into a relationship with Brianna and now you're married, like what happens when it gets bad? You can't get out, especially if you have a kid, right? That's the learning of this part. So then you like, the E is to empathize. You could go, oh yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Like and usually there's logic, you can understand why this part's protecting and it's usually very young. So the first four, CARE, is just to create enough of a connection with the part that the system starts to soften and you start to see that there's more going on rather

• 1:41:50Speaker 00

  than you just not being able to do the thing.

• 1:41:54Speaker 00

  That for many people is the stage you kind of just want to linger at for a while. You just want to develop a relationship with that part and get to know that it actually cares about you. It's trying to serve you and it loves you. And sometimes it won't let you go further than that because they're very sensitive. They're like a hot stove, like, don't you dare, like, pull back real fast. But if there is connection there and you feel inspired to go further, the next is the acronym soften. So S just stands for soften. This is where you invite the part to actually just not completely let go, but just relax a little bit, like, I'm gonna be here with you.

• 1:42:35Speaker 00

  Again, you're relating to this as like a somatic, psychoemotional somatic script in the system. So for me, it was this tension in my chest. So I would just, you can have a visual on it. Maybe you imagine it like a little kid or like an object, or you just feel it as sensation. And as we say, like, okay, what's it like just to soften? Like, what if you didn't need to hold on and protect and be so scared? Like, we're giving you the space to do that. O is you invited to actually open to the pain that it's protecting, open to the burden that it's been holding. That doesn't always happen immediately, but you know when it does start to happen

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  because you go from usually like this density to things starting to vibrate. These calcified walls of protection and belief of, don't touch me, don't go near me. They start to thaw and then the pain that it's been protecting can start to be felt a little bit more. F is to feel in sequence. So this means you are just letting yourself be present to what is being given. Maybe the thing that's coming up is like deep anger toward your mom and you have a thought of like, I don't hate my mom, like, I'm supposed to love my mom. Just you let yourself cycle through whatever these layers are because they're frozen in time.

• 1:44:01Speaker 00

  These parts in the constellation around them, they are just layers of psychoemotional somatic gunk.

• 1:44:10Speaker 00

  And with very good intention, that has memory after memory after memory, that is building behavior.

• 1:44:18André Duqum?

  Lot of evidence.

• 1:44:19Speaker 00

  Lot of evidence. So you're, as you soften that, you're gonna go through stuff that's like, that's from 12 years old. Why do I feel angered toward my mom? Why do I have a voice of saying, "I hate you, mom. I hate you, mom." If you try to bypass that by saying, "I don't hate my mom," you're gonna get in the way of the process. These trauma responses want to complete. The way they complete is like you let yourself embody them. You let yourself get into the position that you were in when you felt that fear. You're just trying to hold your posture and be good. You get in the way of the intelligence of the somatic. So you let yourself go into it. You let yourself feel the emotion. The T is to trust that unfolding.

• 1:45:03Speaker 00

  That process for many people, like you can spend a lot of meditations just hanging out there, like titrating the amount that you let yourself feel. As that starts to open, you get to the E and the N, the final part of soften. And E is to start to embrace the shift. And so this is where you show the part like, hey, do you see how you softened? Like, we went through that process and we're still okay. Like, you're safe right now. We're safe. Our system can be held. We can exist without you gripping. This is a crucial part that gets overlooked because the part's not gonna disappear. When it's free of its burden, it wants to support you.

• 1:45:48Speaker 00

  It loves the shit out of you. It's just doing its best to try to help you. So you show it like, hey, do you see like we're okay and we feel good? Feels good to be here. You can relax. So you like embrace it. And then N is just to nurture the integration. And it's just like, okay, let's come back. Like our feet are on the ground. I'm me. Like, all the parts kind of can exist as one.

• 1:46:15Speaker 00

  So that's the model in a nutshell.

• 1:46:17André Duqum?

  It's a great model.

• 1:46:18Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:46:19André Duqum?

  It feels pretty comprehensive. Yeah.

• 1:46:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:46:23André Duqum?

  To connect, to acknowledge, to reveal.

• 1:46:27Speaker 00

  Good.

• 1:46:27André Duqum?

  To empathize.

• 1:46:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is great.

• 1:46:30André Duqum?

  To soften, to stay open, to feel it, to trust it, to embrace it.

• 1:46:42Speaker 00

  You're phenomenal.

• 1:46:44André Duqum?

  And to nurture it.

• 1:46:46Speaker 00

  There it is. That was great, man.

• 1:46:49André Duqum?

  10 points for me.

• 1:46:50Speaker 00

  I've never seen anyone do that. Even I have to be like, what is this thing I teach again?

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  But that, I've taken thousands of people now through that process. And are there others? Sure. But that is the, if you want a model for how, it's a combination of internal family systems, somatic experiencing, and loving kindness meditation. So there's actually a key point in the softening. When you start with the softening, the way you get that to happen, because a lot of times you're going to ask it to soften, and it's going to be like, fuck you. I'm not doing nothing.

• 1:47:38Speaker 00

  Now, just remember, you're dealing with the resonance of fear. So you're talking to it, it has so many good deflections. Your job is just to show it love. Just like, I know you don't want to do anything, and you don't have to, but I love you. Like, thank you so much for everything that you've been doing. I so appreciate you. And you don't say it sarcastically. You say it like as deep as you can mean it. And do it in your own attuned way. People, some people like talking like, I love you so much, honey. Like, I'm so grateful. It's okay to let go. And other people are like, dude, you've been holding this for a while. Like, I get it. Life sucked. Dad was an alcoholic. Like, we've been through some shit. So talk to yourself in a way that you can receive that love.

• 1:48:23Speaker 00

  But the idea, and it's probably the. Most crucial part of this model is that you just you stay with that love as long as is necessary for that fear to soften. And sometimes that means an entire meditation, like not much will happen, especially if these are dense. But if you keep coming back to it, like we did this over an eight week period. Like it can take weeks for people to start for it for that wall to start to soften. And when it does, then things start to vibrate. The whole process that I had with Brianna, that unblending of the part from the wisdom function starts to happen. So that's one piece.

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  And then the second piece that I want to remind people about this, and I think is also relevant as something where I think Vipassana and some traditional meditation practice lose the wisdom of the somatic practices is that where a lot of these wounds, like these wounds, so many of these wounds live in your body. And so if you imagine, let's say you're in seventh grade and you got a bully behind you, like right in the corner of you. And the whole like you're you're in a class for a full year.

• 1:49:45Speaker 00

  This person's behind you and you feel them, you just have the sense the entire time you're in class that they're looking at you, that throwing spitballs at you. They're gossiping about you, like what's going to happen? One, you're going to feel a ton of fear in your body. You're going to feel a ton of emotion. You're going to feel like I hate this, but you're probably also going to like start gripping on your right side, like curl yourself up like this. Right? And so that's a somatic script that develops in relationship to a stressful experience. Well, there's a good chance now, moving forward, you're going to find your body wanting to lean in these directions. And the thing is that that's not just like a physical thing you do now. That physical thing is loaded with emotion and fear.

• 1:50:30Speaker 00

  If you don't let yourself meet those scripts and that somatic experience from a place of love, it's gonna stay stuck in your body. So a lot of times when people are doing this work and things start to soften, they'll feel that they go from, they wanna, they're in their like good meditation posture, and then something in them wants to slouch. But then the good Zen in them says, nope, good upright posture, they force it up. But if they really pay attention, it's like, oh man, something just wants to curl up like this in a weird way. What's happening is you are creating enough safety in your system for it to feel comfortable,

• 1:51:12Speaker 00

  to want to complete trauma responses that didn't get to complete. So the wisdom of the system is taking you back to these places that are frozen in time. And if you interrupt them or bypass them with your idea of how you should be sitting or how you should be thinking or what you should be feeling, you miss out on allowing yourself to go back in time, but from now, the place of love and presence, so that the pain that's stuck there, that is protected by all of these walls of judgment and yelling at yourself of like, don't look stupid, don't be bad, or be perfect, to keep you from having to experience the pain of that bully. You're gonna have to cycle through those thoughts and those emotions.

• 1:51:57Speaker 00

  And a lot of those thoughts will sound like that. You'll go from being peaceful and loving to then like hating yourself. You're an idiot, you look stupid, your nose is big. And you're gonna be like, I'm not meditating right. I'm not, this isn't transcendent. Descend to transcend. You are letting yourself go into that. Let yourself embody it, but hold it with the backdrop of love. Cause you're cycling, you're not...

• 1:52:23Speaker 00

  You are not doing that. You are creating the space for those voices to get released in the container of awakening and love in a way that they never got to do. And then you will find, if you allow yourself to touch those deep enough, the body will start to expand in other ways and you'll come out of it. And so, this is often a missing piece for people when they're doing the embodiment work of getting their system open enough and healed enough to actually be able to hold self-awakening energy as it comes through without hitting the gunk of fear. And that's been a real game changer for me in my meditation practice.

• 1:53:07Speaker 00

  If you look at me meditating on any given day, like, "I look like this, I look like this, I like..." I really let my body go into these different positions when it needs to. And then it's amazing, like, if you watch time lapse, and some of them are recorded because I'm doing it while I'm teaching students, you'll see my body go from here and then, like, over the course of an hour, slowly, like, millimeter by millimeter, like, curl up and expand and then go on this side and then curl. And you're just, you can see that there is stuck trauma, energy, and emotion that is just being released layer by layer.

• 1:53:51Speaker 00

  I'm going into the position where I protected myself and fear locked it in place, and I'm giving that the ointment of love, and then it's releasing. And then that gets the ointment of love, and then that next layer, next layer, next layer, next layer. Yeah, this work is incredible. I mean, I'm just so humbled by it, over and over.

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• 1:54:50Speaker 02

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• 1:55:18André Duqum?

  Yeah, that's the model.

• 1:55:22André Duqum?

  Thanks for sharing and you showing it.

• 1:55:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24André Duqum?

  There are so many paths to those different access points, whether you work with the raw energy of the system, whether you work with the language and the words of our neurology and how that's kind of built up.

• 1:55:37André Duqum?

  The historical somatic evidence that's built up in that familiar sense within our body, that familiarity, you can work directly with it in the body. And the emotions and that aspect too. And why not leverage all them? Like, they're all access points and all have a component in which they're wound up in, you know? And so I think so much compassion is needed here in this process of realizing that these wounds aren't our fault, but they are now our responsibility for us to be able to move through them. It can be easy to shame, blame, and be in our own victim narrative around these things, which is disempowering to the reality of just taking responsibility for our current and descending to transcend, as you said.

• 1:56:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, well said. Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. And that's, um,

• 1:56:28Speaker 00

  it's not meant to dismiss anything anyone's been through. It is meant to empower you in your own freedom.

• 1:56:37André Duqum?

  One last aspect, I think, that I'd like to explore on the tail of what we just discussed is,

• 1:56:46André Duqum?

  I think in a life that is inherently impermanent and uncertain to how things are going to transpire externally, there is this awakening to the realization that of like that backwards law, you know, of where we try to control things or want things to happen in a certain way. And the more that we try to pursue it, it almost eludes us. Like by holding our breath, we lose it, you know, and by trying to stay afloat, we can sink. And so it's this interesting balance of like you spoke to with it in terms of our internal characterological emotional wounds and trauma and stuff, but then also in terms of like trying to create in the world and build our career and create the

• 1:57:28André Duqum?

  life of our dreams and whatnot. There is this interesting balance of intention of action and then also finding the place that arises from that state of inaction of stillness and seeing that as a bedrock. One quote that you shared in your book, I saw on your Instagram post, actually, said you don't find your ground by looking for stability, you find your ground by relaxing into instability. And so there's this interesting, universal, paradoxical framing that is really interesting to put into action in our life because it's a very unique philosophical exploration, but to actually live it is where liberation comes in.

• 1:58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. This is one of those quotes where if I were to go back, I would add a little bit of context. Maybe I did in the caption, I forget, but you don't find your ground by looking for stability, you find your ground by relaxing into instability. There's a spiritual truth in that. There's also a relative truth that sometimes you need to create enough external stability to allow your system to relax enough to even begin this pursuit.

• 1:58:48Speaker 00

  I think sometimes, like, coming out of poverty, coming out of very difficult circumstances where there's a lot of chaos, having a grounded relationship, even if we're not sure, it's like coming from the deepest place, but it just, like, we feel stability and something feels good about that, is really necessary for other parts of our system to open up. So I want to acknowledge that truth. And there is no example in the universe of someone attaining awakening by perfectly manufacturing their external world. In many ways, it can actually become a prison

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  because it gets so comfortable that you mistake it as awakening. You mistake it as freedom, or you have just less and less of a reason to try to pursue something else. So my invitation to people is really to look at, like, the classic, "Once that happens, then I can start the work." And just watch how compelling that is and how subtle that is. And what is it like to just meet this moment with an orientation, as Bhikkhu Bodhi would say,

• 2:00:08Speaker 00

  "This moment, it's like this. This moment, it's like this." It allows us to soften our grip on how this moment should be, meet it in its perfect imperfection, as spiritually trite as that is, and do the practice of, instead of entangling ourselves with, "How does this need to be better in order for me to find refuge? How can I keep zooming out and remember that the refuge is already here? And that wholeness is not something I have to create, it's something that I remember." I may need to fall apart

• 2:00:52Speaker 00

  in order to see that my life can be built on the resonance of space, trust, and surrender. And that often means letting go of the need for stability, surrendering into instability, and seeing that there can be still a motivating pulse that creates your life.

• 2:01:13André Duqum?

  I certainly want to create from that place. That's where I strive to. And I see your impact, both through social media and the innumerable courses and writings and things that you do, as an extension of your ability to do that internally. You know, there is a, there's something very alluring in the personal development space of being somebody who says the most profound things, or it can quickly be divorced from the authentic sense of realization internally. And so I strive to have this platform and this podcast be a space for people that are speaking from direct experience, where what they're saying is actually connected to the place it's coming from.

• 2:01:55André Duqum?

  And, and so I feel like you, you, you do that very, very well. And it feels real and true and authentic to you. So, thank you for sharing all of the fun nuggets of wisdom and insights and explorations we did today. It was epic.

• 2:02:09Speaker 00

  Thanks, Andre. I really appreciate it and I love what you're doing.

• 2:02:13André Duqum?

  Thanks, man. I'll just leave it for any other last things you want to share, both maybe work you're doing, things in the world, anything else that's on your mind before we head out.

• 2:02:24Speaker 00

  Sure. The first thing I'll say, just in relationship to what you said next, is like, I am so imperfect, right? And so, anyone who's listening, if there's a sense of like, he's got it figured out, it's just like, know that I am fumbling in the dark alongside everyone else. And, you know, ask my family if I'm enlightened or anything like that, right? It's just like, even within the container of that Brianna and I have, where it was coming, it's coming from like, truth. And that container holds us. Like, we are still working out so many edges. And so, like, have space for the mess in yourself.

• 2:03:08Speaker 00

  Like, really watch the spiritual performance, because it's the thing that can get in the way of true awakening. So I stand in solidarity with everyone on that path.

• 2:03:21Speaker 00

  For anyone who wants support, or if they resonate with how I'm talking about this, you can find all my free teachings on Instagram. If you want to go deeper, like more structured support, the 30-day course that I offer is the main flagship program. So that you can find all this on my website, corymuscara.com, or on Instagram. And then what we talked about, like the experience I had with Brianna, that the unblending, that course I did, that's my most immersive course called Opening the Heart. So if that is something that people want to go into, that course will walk you through with daily meditations, that process of unblending protective parts that are sabotaging and running your life. We have

• 2:04:06Speaker 00

  free resources as well. People can just text the word PODCAST to 55444. But anyone out of the country will just create a page for them as well. They can go to corymuscara.com/knowthyself, and that'll have some meditations and stuff for people.

• 2:04:22André Duqum?

  There you go. You're loaded and ready to go with all the offerings. Sweet. Great. Great touch points, dude. Thank you. Appreciate you. Excited to connect and develop our friendship more.

• 2:04:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35André Duqum?

  And everybody for tuning in. Thanks for being our virtual friend today and tuning into this conversation. Sending you much love. Until next time, be well.

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.