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The Smoke Trail, hosted by Smoke Wallin, is a journey into awakening consciousness, weaving authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests to unlock high performance and perfect health. Each episode delves into spirituality, leadership, and transformation, offering tools to transcend trauma and find your bliss along the way. It’s a reflective space for achieving peak potential and inner peace in a distraction-filled world.
Welcome to the Smoke Trail hosted by Smoke Wallin. Join Smoke on a unique journey of awakening consciousness, sharing authentic stories and deep discussions with inspiring guests. Explore spirituality, leadership and transformation, tools to elevate your path.
Smoke:Welcome to the Smoke Trail. It's the podcast. We're very fortunate to have a dear, dear friend of mine, Danny Brooks.
Dani:Thank you for having me.
Smoke:We'll talk a little bit about what Dani does and a little bit about what matters to you as we go through this. First, I always like to set the intention, and my intention is simple. As I have gone down this trail of the smoke trail, which is just my personal journey of spirituality and waking up, I believe and I have uncovered some truths that matter a lot to me that have made my life much better. I am extremely happy and pleased and have an overabundance of love and joy that I want to share. Is there anything off limits for you?
Dani:No, nothing's off limits.
Smoke:Nothing's off limits. Brave. Brave. Brave. Brave.
Smoke:That, we might hear a little pup because we have Bodhi, our new Aussie Labradoodle, who's a little blessing that showed up in her house and she's running around here, so if you hear something, you might see her on camera. Funny. Okay. Do you have any other intentions you want to add to what I have said?
Dani:Just to be of the highest service to those watching the podcast, to share as much as we can that's going to be helpful.
Smoke:Yeah. Awesome, thank you. Yeah. Well, thanks for being here.
Dani:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Smoke:I'm going to start with how we met because that puts me in a vulnerable position, but I think it's a worthwhile discussion. I had been going through facing a lot of my own shadows and had done a bunch of work. I did some plant medicine work with some great, amazing resources who will be on this at some point. In that work, I had uncovered a bunch of memories that I didn't have that came back that were very traumatic from childhood and built from there. I didn't really know how to deal with them, so a good friend, a mutual friend of ours, said, You need to talk to Dani.
Smoke:She can help you. I'm like, Okay. I don't know Danny, but we did a Zoom.
Dani:And
Smoke:started to tell you, Well, tell me your story. And then along the way, we did a number of working sessions where Danny gave Smoke homework. It was terrible homework. Smoke did the homework because he's very dedicated to this process. And then we got back together and then Danny gave Smoke more terrible homework.
Smoke:I think that's pretty accurate.
Dani:It's pretty good.
Smoke:Yeah. Did I really say yes? I'm gonna do this. Yeah, did say that, and I don't really wanna do this, and I did it, and then we got back together, and it really helped me a lot. So that's how we met.
Smoke:So Dani, tell us a little bit about why were you the person, someone that our mutual friend connected me with? Why were you in the position to do that? How'd you get to doing that?
Dani:My journey, I remember when I was 24 I read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. And I said to myself, Oh, that's me, I'm going to do that. And I would get a hold of every self help book that I possibly could, which back then was a lot of self help books, but not like what we have today. And so I began to work with my own negative thought processes, the negative thoughts of I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, who am I? I began to work with my belief systems and I began to explore emotions and I was a big emotional eater.
Dani:I would feed, soothe and avoid myself and my emotions with food, alcohol, cigarettes. Would definitely disappear, try to obliterate myself so that I didn't have to deal with things. And I just started, I just decided that I'm going to figure this puzzle out. And back then I was a nutritional therapist and so I was telling people to eat their vegetables during the day and then at night I was binging on bacon cheese, burgers, and french fries.
Smoke:Not exactly coherent.
Dani:No, no, no. So I went into counseling for about five years, and that really helped. And so that gave me the tools to work with my own negative thought patterns, limiting belief structures, the trauma that I had from the past, and then my work as a practitioner just began to improve and improve and word-of-mouth spread and I began to work more and more with people in the plant medicine community, and then I was invited, I created a coaching program before where I was teaching other nutrition practitioners how to help their clients with emotional eating and the platform that I had created at that time was a platform using food as a platform for self realization because when I would work with someone and I would work with the negative thought powers that were driving them to food, the limiting belief structures and teaching them how to handle their emotions instead of feeding or soothing them and working beyond the ego people would come home to themselves and so I was asked to create an integration guide using a program coaching program instead of using food as a platform for self realization using plant medicines as a platform for self realization And I loved it because I had dabbled in plant medicines myself over the years.
Dani:And what I found was that, oh my gosh, where it would take me two years to get someone to a place of self love using food, it would take sometimes three months, sometimes one session to help a client integrate the truth of who we are and what we are. And so then word-of-mouth just spread. So that's kind of how you found me.
Smoke:That's, well, that's awesome. What are the modalities of healing? What are the modalities of clearing their own internal negative self talk and emotions and shadows, and how do we get past that? Because in anyone's journey of whatever you want to call it, spiritual journey is what I refer to it as, You have to clean up, grow up and wake up. Clean up is really, that's all that, all the trauma, all the negative stuff, anything that's been internalized that's in your subconscious that needs to be worked out because it's very hard to wake up becoming more aware, becoming knowledgeable of what this reality is and spirituality and higher purpose without those things popping up.
Smoke:They come up and get in your way, right?
Dani:Right.
Smoke:One of the modalities of that, the food thing that's fascinating me, does that even work? I don't understand how it would work, but it's cool. What would take you two years with that, sometimes it would take as little as three months in a plant medicine situation. When you say that, it's not three months on plant medicine, it's probably someone does a journey and then it's the integration work for the next ninety days after that and coming to terms of what came up from that. Does that mean something?
Dani:Well, thank you for bringing that out, It's teaching people how to use plant medicines efficiently, where the intention that's set and really getting clear on what they're going in for and how to work with that medicine. And then they have the experience and then they integrate and individuals have a new set point and sometimes integration can be instantaneous. You know, people will let go of something and they'll be like, my gosh, that is gone. That's gone. I'm done.
Dani:And then sometimes revelations can take, a month, two months, a year just to integrate to the really big ones.
Smoke:I called it, in my case, emotional energy hairballs that were stuck inside, right? That I didn't even know existed but they were getting in my way and I didn't know it. And then once I became aware of them, oh, it wasn't instantaneous they're gone, just the awareness alone. Oh, I had that going on? Wow, that helped a lot, Just by funny how.
Dani:Oh, yeah. For sure. I call them hairballs too. Remember I remember hacking one up because my throat chakra was blocked and I wanted to express my love, but I couldn't because I was scared that I was gonna get rejected. And I remember the first time I tried expressing it, it was literally like I was back into my hairball but once I hacked it up, it wasn't the prettiest thing in the world but it really opened my ability to be able to speak.
Smoke:I think that was a concept that, for me, successful, it's a lot of my peers in the world of business and entrepreneurs and those kinds of things, just because that's who I know and that's probably who will see this first, or it's younger people who are aspiring to be that. It's people in the mainstream, in the thick of this world, the physical world, the material world. Some of these ideas, these terms we're using, were very new to me. It's really energy. Everything's energy, we're energy bodies, every thought, every emotion, every experience is energy.
Smoke:When we don't process it, when we have something that happens, whether we're a small child, adult, doesn't matter, at any stage along the way, something happens, it's how we react to it. If we can witness it, can see what's happening, can observe it and not be so identified with the circumstances that it's happening, whatever that is, then you'll have the emotion come up and then it will dissipate very quickly. It'll dissipate in its own time, but the point is it will dissipate and will go through. When we resist, when we react badly to circumstances, no, we're trying to say, no, that's not, I don't accept that, what happens is you still have that emotion, but it gets stuck. That energy gets stuck somewhere, and that's what we're talking about, these emotional energy hairballs.
Dani:Yeah, yeah. The best way that I can describe it is I remember when I was first taught how to process my emotions and I was directed to allow the emotion to flow through me and out of me without attaching a story to it.
Smoke:Yeah. Which, by way, nobody teaches anyone how to process a
Dani:function, so it's like, No. When I was five years old, I wasn't taught, right? And so, I remember the first time I was in my car, something had happened and I so mad and I was like, oh, and so I pulled over my car and I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna feel this emotion and I could feel the anger welling up inside me and it was like, and then for a moment I thought I was gonna die, I really did, I thought that the anger was gonna engulf me and I would disappear, I created all kinds of stories about it but then when I let it go it was literally like, starting screaming in my car and I let it out and I let it out and then when I let it out, it was, oh, and then it was and it was gone.
Dani:And and then all of a sudden, I just felt so much better and I realized, oh my god, I actually lived. I'm actually alive. And that's very different between what normally would happen. Normally, I would feel the anger rising and be like, oh, oh, that person did this and that person did that and this happened and then that happened and and when I would do that then that's what holds that emotional energy in place. Yeah.
Dani:We stuff it down, we give it momentum, we hold on to it as opposed to just letting it come and letting it go and the key difference between the two is one, we're letting the emotion come and go, we're not attaching any story to it. It's a pure emotion, anger arising, anger leaving, no story.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:But when I attach a story to it, then that's when I'm holding it in place and it can create that energy blockage in the body.
Smoke:Yeah, and that's powerful. The story thing is, that's the key, right? When we tell ourselves a story and look, there is a story that you can tell about any situation. The question is, is that story even right? Is it accurate?
Smoke:When I was a small child and I was suffering from abuse, the story I told myself might have been very correct and accurate. It doesn't matter. It kept that stuff inside and It's only in becoming aware of it and then processing it that it's been released. One thing that's really interesting to me, and I wonder if you have a thought on this, is looking in these different modalities, whether it be plant medicine, whether it be EMDR and other energy healing therapy is a part of some of this stuff, but there's a whole bunch of different ways to get at this locked up energy that happened around some trauma. Sometimes it's really useful, and in my case, was very important for me, maybe it didn't have to happen, but this is the way it went for me, is I needed to understand what the heck happened.
Smoke:Because my memories were blocked, as I unlocked them, I had to find out. I really spent a lot of time uncovering stuff and going to the darkest, darkest places and using plant medicine and other ways to get to these memories so that I knew what happened later in life, that I could go back with this lens and say, What happened? What was buried there? The way I unlocked it was forgiveness and releasing them, But you don't always have to know the specifics. What I've learned is that sometimes it's literally just a chunk of energy that's stuck in a certain part of your body that if you can get to it and surface it, you don't have to know, Oh, that was when I called Joey guy, Joey Ricanani, Hoboken and they were visiting and I was back there.
Smoke:It was kind of a tough town. It wasn't like the Hoboken now, it was all fancy, but I called this kid that. I shouldn't have, but I did, I was like nine. He took my head and smashed my head into fire hydrant and it broke my tooth. I still have a chip in my front tooth.
Smoke:That thing was probably stuck inside. I remember that story. I always think of that story over the years. I still remember it, but I didn't necessarily need to remember that story. I just needed to kind of resurface that energy and clear There's like a whole range of this stuff.
Dani:Oh, there's so many different ways. It used to be resolving trauma. It used to be crawling on our hands and knees over broken glass where we had to go digging around in it, pulling it to the surface, playing with it, overly focusing on it, which typically can give it a little bit more momentum and make it more real.
Smoke:Yeah, I definitely do. Today
Dani:we know, now we know how to process negative thought patterns, limiting belief structures and emotional imprints from our youth. And we do have ways of processing them. Sometimes it's a matter of, like for instance, in your case, facing certain things, the journaling exercises that I had you do, where to be able to go through exactly what happened as an objective observer, so that you're detached from what happened, so that you can see it through different perspectives.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:So, oftentimes seeing something from a different perspective can help us resolve trauma right then and there. I've seen so many people, experience trauma literally though, like, wait a minute, this thing that happened to me, that wasn't even mine. That was my parents who received it from their parents. Was a rage thing. And so I think the the biggest dissolver of the emotional imprints that we have from our youth, from the past, is the ability for us to shine our awareness onto it with curiosity.
Dani:Curiosity is the antidote to judgment. And when we can look at them openly and objectively, it's literally, it's like nothing can withstand the power of pure consciousness. No negative thought pattern, no living belief structure, no emotional imprint, and no ego activity. When we elevate our level of consciousness to the point where we can literally look at something and be fully present with it, it will dissolve. It will just disappear dissipate for many, many cases.
Dani:Of course, we'll want to pick it back up. Wait a minute. Did I really let that go? Right. And then we'll go poking around and reactivate.
Smoke:It's like I've got a cold record with a groove.
Dani:Yeah. And
Smoke:that groove is hard to get out because it'll come back and like, oh, back in that, have that thought pattern that kind of resurfaces again. So it takes a while to kind of get smooth those grooves out. That was one of the bad homework assignments.
Dani:I know.
Smoke:None of these specific stories actually matter. What matters is that we experience them and what we do with that and how we overcome it and the things that we learn from it. The challenges that we face are challenges that we set up. We were part of setting this project up called This Life and we had a hand in it, most likely. Probably the people that would be listening to this all had a hand in whatever trauma that they incurred because they had certain things that they wanted to learn and process in this particular life.
Smoke:Now I have that perspective, but at the time, I was dealing with these unbelievably traumatic memories and I was happy, still had them. What do I do with them? The unpleasant homework assignment was to write a letter to each person that was involved in the various traumas and write down everything that I can remember that was done or that I feel like they did to me, to anyone else, and call them any name under the sun and in the book that I wanted to and just let it all out and go as hard and mean and whatever it is, whatever's feeling, just get it in that first letter. Then when I'm done with that, to tear that up, in my case, I ended up burning them ceremoniously out in my patio and then write an oath and do it again. The assignment was do this repeatedly until you get to a letter of understanding or forgiveness.
Smoke:I was like, That sounds awful to me. That's just not what I want to do. I did it, and it worked. It was amazing. I mean, single person, whatever situation, I got to this point where I started asking, What happened to you?
Smoke:What happened to them? What would cause someone, an adult, to do something like this to a child or an adult to cover something up? Whatever the situation, it doesn't matter. Something must have happened to them. There must have been abuse that had, this must go back generations.
Smoke:But I didn't come to that until I had done this process.
Dani:I did that process with myself in a couple of ways. I did it with my mom, and it was after she passed away, and it was recommended that I do that. And I had the same experience. Rage. First rage.
Dani:Rage anger. God, I hate you. Why did you do this? And then the second letter was sadness and sorrow with rage. And then eventually I began to understand her perspective and I had a greater understanding of the situation.
Dani:And then I did it with myself through mirror work, and mirror work is a fantastic way for us to get clear and seeing with ourselves doing that process. Instead of writing about it though, we sit in front of a mirror. And the first time I sat in front of a mirror, I could not look myself in the eyes. I was like, no. And then when I finally did look myself in the eyes, anger and rage came up.
Dani:Why didn't you do all the things that you said that you were gonna do? And why are you not good enough? And you keep going, why? Why? Why?
Dani:Why? And it was all of the ways that I had thrashed myself over the years because I had this belief that I wasn't good enough. And that was the first session.
Smoke:Yeah, that's powerful.
Dani:You know, and then I realized the second session I remember sitting down and the anger still came, it wasn't nearly as bad. But then I began to cry of how I had treated myself. And I still had a hard time looking myself in the mirror, but I was able to kind of stick with it. And it takes courage and guts to do that. And to go through the whole arc of the experience until one day I was able to look myself in the mirror and literally say, you're okay, you're okay.
Smoke:Louise Hay used to do, and I've watched interviews of her amazing lady and one of her techniques was mirror work, right? She would tell people and she would do, she said, Sit in front of the mirror, or stand in front of the mirror, go through your affirmations while you're staring at yourself. Self loving, positive self imagery affirmations while you're looking at yourself in the And it's harder than you think.
Dani:I couldn't do it.
Smoke:I could do it pretty well. Nah.
Dani:I can't.
Smoke:Yeah, me too.
Dani:I can't get rid of the shit. See that many times.
Smoke:I'm not a clear mistake. Yeah, that's amazing. Your first book here, The Extraordinary Ordinary You, some of these techniques, like what we talked about, some of them are in this. It's the way I describe it to people is there's a lot of people talking about spirituality, a lot of people talking about their own experience. There are a lot of psychology books that get pretty academic, frankly.
Smoke:I found your book with your techniques to be much more practical. Normal people dealing with things, how do you deal with this? How do you clear stuff? How do you get beyond these things? Was that your intent?
Dani:Well, yes.
Smoke:That's what happened.
Dani:Yeah, that's what happened. It is the compilation of everything that I have done to free myself from my negative thought pattern, limiting belief structures, and the emotional imprints that I received from my youth. About four years ago, I also saw that the ego could be transcended. And, of course, went after with a hacksaw, I was like, Anthony. I fought for about six months, and then I realized, okay, that's not gonna work.
Dani:But everybody, you know, told me the ego can, you know, you just gotta make peace with it. But my ego was not a friendly character. Yeah. And I knew that I just did not want to live and that I knew that I didn't have to live with that for the rest of my life and so I began to explore how to work with the ego and that's in the book as well. It's literally everything that I have done that has been effective for me put into practical terms to help other people let go of the things that the constructs that don't serve them and then acclimate and get used to who they are beyond those constructs.
Smoke:And I think that's why it's so powerful, I think useful for people because you went to some research lab or university and thought about this stuff and then wrote these, it's a textbook or something. What it is, it's like you lived these things.
Dani:Experiential.
Smoke:You had a bunch of coaches and other people helping you, and these are the ones that, the techniques and the things that you found to be useful, so you're speaking at it from direct experience.
Dani:Yes.
Smoke:Which I think always makes a big difference.
Dani:Yes.
Smoke:The theory is useful. Think it's, for me in my journey, you know, I had a very active and continue to have a very active interest in understanding things and understanding it at a depth that maybe some people don't care, don't need to, but for me it was important to understand a lot of this stuff. That was part of my process, is I wanted to understand it. I had huge gaps in my knowledge base. I had super knowledge of how do you do a deal, how do you put a structure together, how do put a company together, how do you start a business, how do you motivate people, how do you lead, how do you speak?
Smoke:Mean, I had all, so I really developed along those lines. Then I had other lines, didn't grow up very religious, which turns out to be in some ways quite beneficial, so I didn't have a huge paradigm thing to come through, but I also had gaps in knowledge. Anitra's had, she grew up in Catholic school from little to up until high school, I guess, and she says she escaped the Catholic church. You did too, right? Yes.
Smoke:You were inundated with this stuff, which can be greater, but a lot of the stuff that you guys learned just because you had to memorize stuff, you had to read things, I didn't do. So I had to think big gas in spiritual stuff and decided to read the Bhagavad Gita and read the Pranashads and the writings of the Buddha and read a bunch of psychology stuff and read Ken Wilbur and go deep on-
Dani:Oh, Ken Wilbur, wow, good for you.
Smoke:Well, that's since we last saw. I've actually gone deep. I can talk vibrancy, lines and waves and I have a pretty good understanding of what Ken brings to the table. I synthesized a lot of stuff, basically, and I think it's useful for me. Everybody doesn't need to go there, but for me it was filling in a lot of these gaps, But I think at the end of the day, that's less important than experientially dealing with your own issues and you're not going to wake up, you're not going to become highly conscious by reading a bunch of books about it.
Smoke:They're either at the point of where, You know what, I'm really successful and yet there's something missing. And so, What's missing? And they're kind of like, Okay, I'll watch this smoke trail thing to see why he smokes so happy and he's not drinking anymore. Why is he so happy?
Dani:He's so much younger, what's going on?
Smoke:Yeah, he's bento and button now. In reverse. Or they're already somewhat on the path, so who knows? Or they're really far advanced on the path, they just want to hear other perspectives. The practices that go with this, we talk about clean up, grow up and wake up.
Smoke:Clean up is what we've been talking about a bit, which is uncovering shadows, clearing out these emotional energy hairballs, understanding, putting consciousness to the darkness or the things that have held us back that we didn't, you know, that we had to work through.
Dani:And I think it's really important to really point out that what we call the shadow or what we call the darkness, we tend to, humans tend to put so much focus and attention on them. But then when we actually go in to meet them, they're they're really quite small. Mhmm. You know, remember when I first went in and started looking at, okay, shadow, what is shadow? And I had this image of this big monster that was inside of me that I had repressed.
Dani:And then when I actually went in there, it was like this little, little monster. And when I opened up the door, it was really kind of scared of me. And I began to peel away the layers of what it really was and it it literally it it's not that bad. We it's working with shadow and working with our, what we would call, our dark aspects. It doesn't need to be painful or uncomfortable.
Smoke:The idea of it is way worse than doing it.
Dani:Yes, for sure.
Smoke:That I know. I definitely know because I was a person before this that I think I had great relationships with lots of people, but if you came to me and started telling me your shadow stuff, trauma, I would listen as long as I had to, and no longer, and I could look for the first way out as soon as I possibly could to get to, Let's make some margaritas and then talk about something fun. That would be my solution. Now, what happens is everybody I talk to calls me and says, I have this thing, tell me about
Dani:it.
Smoke:And it's just I can hold space for any of this stuff and so I get it all the time. What is that?
Dani:It's when you figure something out, you have much to teach and people will find you. And once you work through your own stuff and so I love the, what is it, the let go, the
Smoke:Clean up, grow up and wake up.
Dani:Okay, so I see people moving through four cycles and there's other definitely things in between but the let go is the one that I talk about.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:And it's, this is the letting go of the negative thought patterns, limiting belief structures, working through the nasty bits that what we could call the shadow or the darkness, just patterns and imprints that we receive from our childhood and from our past and all that gunk. Right?
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:There's a letting go phase that people go through. Sometimes when people let go and let go and let go, they'll experience an identity crisis of, oh my god, well, if I'm not all of that, then what am I? And it can be so scary that they'll grab ahold of what they've let go of and they'll reinstall the program, we could say, because they don't know what to do. And when people hit this identity crisis, I'm always in the background going, yes, yes. When you don't know who you are, you're closer to knowing who you are than you've ever been before.
Smoke:The ego mind has these aversions and attractions. At whatever level of consciousness and development we are, they have these aversions and attractions. It might be, I got divorced and there was this nasty, horrible situation, she did this and it was really horrible. If you're still talking about that ten years later, you're probably energized, your ego mind is probably energized by the, you're getting the juice of the negativity of running into that story in your mind. You're stuck on that thing because you're getting something out of it.
Dani:Yeah, there's a victim. There's a, I get to be a victim,
Smoke:Mhmm.
Dani:And that's reactivating something that happened in the past over and over and over again to bringing it into the present moment. Yeah. And and people do things for certain reasons because that can create some significance for that person. Hey, look at me.
Smoke:Yeah, I'm this, you become, Oh, I'm the person that that guy left me or that this happened to. Or the other way, which I did a lot, I got a lot of energy off of having a great party and we'd be making margaritas and just having fun and me escaping some of that, but also it was just, it was fun. Yeah. It was enjoyable.
Dani:That's another part of the phases that I look for when I help people go through the awakening phases, so there's the letting go, sometimes there's the identity crisis, and then there's the affirmation to the truth of who we are and what we are. It's like, holy shit, that's what I am. And then at that point, when people start to realize, woah, the ego can grab ahold of it and it can run with spiritual significance and that's where we have to be really careful and grab people by the ankle and pull them back down and say yes, you are extraordinary and you're ordinary too and the ego can grab ahold of both negative significance and positive significance as well.
Smoke:At some point, when I let go of the last step,
Dani:like, yeah. Yes.
Smoke:The more I learn, the more I go through this process, the more I know how little I know.
Dani:Oh my god. Significance has been one of my greatest teachers. Mhmm. You know, it's like anytime I catch myself caught up in significance, I'm literally always, okay. Where's my smackdown gonna come?
Dani:I've died to significance. I can't tell you how many times. Yeah.
Smoke:Yeah. And not that you're insignificant. It's that you just I'll speak for the first person, which is the things that I've gone through I think can be helpful to others. I actually think that there's a reason we are going through this discussion. I know what I went through and I know that there are other people that have to go through or are going through similar things, so it can be extremely helpful to have this kind of conversation and have people share this stuff because I get it fed to me this way.
Smoke:Everyone understands and learns things different ways, but the more I learn, the closer I get to divinity, to spirit, to somebody, one of my other guests called it, I love this, cosmic heart, God, whatever is the thing that you're called to call what this is, love, the field of love, the closer I get to it, the more mysterious it is. Mhmm. So I know less and less about why, but I know more and more about how. It's kinda how I look at it.
Dani:It's the paradox of knowing the unknowable. Mhmm. Mhmm. It's like, oh, there's no way. Like, anyone that can, you know, describe that doesn't really know it.
Smoke:Yeah. So I I got us off track. You were starting on your four things. Oh, yeah. And the first thing was this letting go.
Dani:So, the letting go phase, the identity crisis, and it's not linear. Sometimes people will go through, they'll experience who they are, especially in plant medicine experiences, they'll experience who they are beyond the physical form and then they'll come back into physical form and they'll be like, holy moly, now I've got to integrate that and so that's the integration of the truth of who we are. Sometimes people will experience that first and then let go, sometimes people will go straight for identity crisis, sometimes people will go for spiritual significance, that's something that is very common within spiritual communities, it's that thing that we have to really watch out for, but it's not a linear process, and there's all kinds of things in between there that people go through as we just degunk ourselves. And I agree with you back to what you were saying about sharing our stories. Those are our most valuable assets, believe, is when I share with my clients.
Dani:Yeah, there's a significance thing that still peaks at me and I'm still working through that. It's really valuable for them to know and it can open up them to a conversation of really you too, you know, you do that too. And it's also really important for us to share how we move through it. And the unworthiness piece, you know, I had one of my clients asked me yesterday, she says, we were talking about ego when I was helping her giving her tips on how to work with the ego. And she says, so where are you with the ego?
Dani:And I was really tempted to say, oh, I still have ego. But then I had to really stop and go, well, a minute, Danny, you got to be clear and honest here and you got to show her the way. And so I told her that, you know, but 80% of the time, my ego is in the background. It's very subtle. Don't care.
Dani:It's, oh, when you're altered. Good.
Smoke:This is the first time we brought this up. It's like, I brought this to you guys in case this came in.
Dani:It wasn't the background. Okay.
Smoke:This is a little Smokey to bear with my, a a little scarf that I got in Nepal when I was visiting Buddha's birthplace. This represents to me I leave it on my shelf in my office, but I took it out for our conversation. This represents to me what sometimes I call perky, which is that ego self, is my friend. It's actually protected me. It's caused me to have great success.
Smoke:The skills and the ability and the capability of doing the things that I have been able to do, I still have. I haven't lost any of that. I can do it, but I can do it without being attached to it. Now I just make fun of it or in a friendly way, Oh, that's perky or that's smoky. Popping up if I have a reaction to something and I'm like, Uh-oh, that's that.
Smoke:You can't function in the world without, you have to have a need to protect you. It's part
Dani:of living in this realm. I'm going to disagree.
Smoke:Please. We're having a clean eye.
Dani:You know, in my journey, I saw that the ego could be transcended, and I saw that that was part of what I'm here to do. And I went after it with a hacksaw for about six months, and it didn't work. Nothing happened. It just got bigger. And then everybody told me you just got to make peace with it.
Dani:And so I said, all right, well, I'll try that. And I began to negotiate with it. I'd be like, all right, so today we're not gonna go and we're not gonna obliterate ourselves with that bottle of wine and that pack of cigarettes and those three movies in a row so that you can just disappear off the face of the earth because you don't wanna deal with shit. We're not gonna do that today. And, of course, the ego, oh, no.
Dani:Yeah. We're gonna do that. And autopilot would happen and the next thing I know, I'm sitting in front of three movies and drinking a bottle of wine. Mhmm. Right?
Dani:So, negotiation didn't work because it was like I was engaging with it.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:So then I thought, well, maybe I'll try love. And I thought, well, maybe I'll just love the ego, but I'm not gonna give it a whole lot of attention. Mhmm. So whenever I could feel the ego coming in through a trigger or an emotional reaction or response, I would literally just go, oh, love you, but no, and I would swipe left on it. And it would come in and I'd go, thank you for trying to keep me safe because that's really what it does.
Dani:But no, we're not going to do that anymore. That's an old pattern working its way out. So I became kind of like Tony Stark in that movie Iron Man he'd go like this with all the computer screens. And what happened is my ego went from being angry and vicious and self destructive to being apologetic. I was like, oh, I'm sorry.
Dani:I thought we were doing the right thing. And then after I kept swiping left and not giving it a whole lot of attention, then it actually began to be playful. It was kind of like my inner child started coming out a little And then the more I just stopped giving it attention, it was like a melding began to happen.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:It was like the ego when when I say transcended, I don't mean that it dies. The ego doesn't die. It literally transforms. When we take this, I I think of it now as almost an energy that when the ego comes in, it feels almost like an energy that's outside of me now that's wanting to reattach and reengage. And now it's easier than ever to literally go, oh, I see it, but no.
Dani:I don't think you know. And so 80% of the time, I can really enjoy my life and being in peace and quiet and play and enjoy. And then certain times the ego will come in and will pop in. They'll want to grab most of most of the time now it wants to grab all the significance. So I'm kind of constantly buying that one away.
Dani:We can live without the ego. So in my experience, I'm feeling the ego dissolve. I'm feeling it go away. I'm feeling that I now am the sovereign being in this. I am the aware presence that resides within this physical body.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:The ego is something that is fading away. I do believe humans can exist without ego. I do, I do, I do. With all my heart.
Smoke:Well, maybe it's definitional more than is disagreement. I think of ego mind, right? The mentations that happen, various levels of consciousness, those thoughts aren't even our own. If you're in depression, you have depressed thoughts. We could list what are the depressed thoughts and they'd be the same for almost everybody in depression.
Smoke:You, let's say, move up to a higher energy level and you're in anger, anger at everything, Your thoughts of anger, the subject of the anger might be this person or that person or that thing, but the thoughts are the same and the same as everybody's angry. So as we move up these levels of consciousness, a lot of those thoughts are just the field, field of where you exist. Once we get to a level of unconditional love and love, in terms of our, call it, zero. Your center of gravity as we move up the levels of consciousness is at a certain level and that center of gravity is going to be the thus, generally, of that field. As we get higher and higher, we have more agency.
Smoke:So, I think what you're talking about is, as we get to a certain level, we have, in essence, complete agency, which means we're not reacting to anything. We are choosing how we want to engage in any situation. We're witnessing, we're observing, we're not necessarily reacting. Yeah. And that's where the ego, the mind, becomes one with our higher self.
Dani:Yeah. We can think of it as mind heart coherence in a lot of ways. Most of humanity is walking around and they're being driven by their mind. Know, all of the energy, the chaos, the compulsions, the addictions, the negative thought patterns, the belief structures, you know, it's all up and through the headspace. Yeah.
Dani:And when we can cultivate awareness while we're really anchoring into our body, into our heart space, we can bring the mind and the heart into coherence, and then all of a sudden the mind begins to balance out. Right? So, yeah, I I look at that. I call that the point before creation. When we increase our level of consciousness to the point where we rise above the plane of mental thoughts.
Dani:I don't above is just kind of like a metaphor for it, but, you know, we have this physical form and then we have what a lot of people will call the emotional body and then the mental body, right? And then the spiritual life.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:When we cultivate awareness and we literally can get to the point where we are above the mental plane of thought where we can really reside in this beautiful place of no thought. And that is really, that's when we're in the ultimate I choose. I'm no longer at the whim of my emotional reactivity or my habits or my patterns of the past. Now I'm fully in a place of I choose.
Smoke:Yeah. Because once we're there, what does that mean? There's nothing outside of me that is I'm not saying I don't have preferences, I don't have I'd rather see this happen than that. Yes, of course. I'm human.
Smoke:I want my kids to do well. Want my grandbaby. I want her to be successful. I had preferences. The happiness and bliss that I sit at in my center of gravity doesn't come from without, it's from within.
Smoke:Once we get to that point, once I got to that point, things that used to matter a lot don't matter. They really just don't.
Dani:Sure. I still, when I get around people that have, the really neurotic, like, the ones that, like, talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk, I will hold space and I do the same thing. I'm like, this is a gift for me to practice, to being fully present. That's part of the self mastery process is how can I be so centered, so grounded that I can't get knocked off?
Smoke:There was there's been many times when I'm on a call with a group. It's a it's usually a business call. I need to be there, but it's not something like I have to talk and just kind of part of the meeting so that, you know, other people are good. My I have this almost compulsion to look at my phone and go online and look at Twitter or check my email or check my messages and see what else is happening or quickly be off the call. What I have been consciously doing is I became aware of that.
Smoke:I'm here for this, so the energy of this meeting needs to be I need to be present. So I'm like, Nope, I turned my phone over. I'm engaging and I'm listening to people and I'm trying to figure out why I'm here, what I'm supposed to learn from what's going on. And I'm not saying I don't ever do it because I do, but I'm now much more aware of it. It's decreased greatly.
Dani:Awareness is everything. It's the number one tool that I talk about in my book. It's the number one tool that I work with my clients with, teaching them how to cultivate awareness and quiet the mind. It's the number one exercise, activity, thing that we can do that will help us to be more present, more grounded, more peaceful beings.
Smoke:We got a little bit off, but I'm gonna make sure we finished your thoughts. I said, Clean up, grow up and wake up. You said, Well, I have four. You started talking about the ego and mind, then I went No, I think. You cover everything, okay?
Dani:Yeah, mine was letting go, identity crisis, acclimation to the truth of who we are, and then just being super aware of the significance and ego activity that can attach to that which we are because it is so amazing. Yeah,
Smoke:so that's what's incredible. One of my questions on our survey that you refused to answer after you spent more time than Some people are more compliant. They were optional, so I'm not doing this. But one of them was about free will and to me that's an interesting topic because people either think there's no free will or think, Oh, I have free will. But you really don't have free will if you don't have conscious awareness.
Smoke:And to the degree you have awareness and you can notice all aspects of a situation or in your own reaction, then that's where free will can come in because you've got choices and You're not just reacting. If we're not aware of these things, there's no free will. You in the field at the level of consciousness you are, thinking the thoughts that are being fed to you, and you're reacting and you aren't making a choice.
Dani:When I work with entrepreneurs, this comes up a lot because entrepreneurs tend to be very linear and they tend to be very, if I do this, this, this and this, I will get this result or if I know this result and I can reverse engineer it and then I can get there and that's possible and that's effective and that can help people get there but it's very limited because there's only one pathway and there's only one outcome. When we can, and oftentimes this path involves unconsciously getting up, grinding, going to work, doing the doing, doing, doing, doing, putting out fires, doing this, doing this, and it can become unconscious. And oftentimes they can be very reactionary. They can be very angry. They cannot be present for their family at home or their partners.
Dani:And it's just a pattern that I see. When I can explain to them that if they can let go of the linearity and allow themselves to go multi dimensional, which means yes, set your North Star and set a path but hold on to that path loosely and be so present that whenever something comes to you, whether it's an inspired action, like when we're present, I'm I'm taking inspired action. I'm not reacting. If I'm unconscious, then I don't have my sovereignty. If I'm unconscious, I get up, I go to work, I do the thing, I come home, I go to bed, I get up, I go to work, and it's, there's no, it's like I'm a robot.
Dani:Okay? Now, when I become more conscious and I become present and I really work to cultivate awareness of my day and I'm present with my day, what happens is all of a sudden, boom, wait a minute, here's Sally, who knows Bob, who's the perfect business partner and that's going to do all the work for you and it's going be greater than you ever imagined before. When you're fully present, you have the sovereignty to choose. Oh, I'm going to choose that. I'm not reacting on choosing.
Dani:We're more present for our partners, for our families, for our friends, for ourselves. We come home to the truth of, oh, I can actually be there for myself. And so, sovereignty is, it's very, very important and I think it's something that we're learning today.
Smoke:A successful entrepreneur probably thinks they have a lot of agency, my friend group. They have incredible resources. They can go places, maybe they have a jet, maybe they have multiple houses, they've lots of things. They can do these things and yet they get into this unconscious action where their agency is really not there.
Dani:They're not happy. They're not enjoying their creations. They're not being present
Smoke:with that. Yeah, and if I go and if I make 100,000,000 I'll be happy because that's my next goal. You get to make $100,000,000 it's like, Oh, it needs to be $200,000,000 I need be a billionaire to be happy. Well, no, actually. There's very little things you actually can spend that money on for yourself anyway.
Smoke:Going private, would put it at a level that does have a certain hurdle rate of creating some happiness. It's about flexibility and being able to go places, that being attached to it, but it's a
Dani:really nice stat. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. If you're gonna go for that, go for that. But at the same time, evolve. Evolve like a company that does not evolve dies.
Dani:If we look at it's a statement is true for anything in the universe technology, if it doesn't evolve, it dies. Right? And so, yes, evolve your company, evolve the way you relate to your people, to your employees, to your partners, to your families, to yourself. If I mean, that's going to create more growth, more expansion, and that debt is going to mean a whole lot more to you because you're going be able to enjoy it. You're not going to be so tired that I'm to go take my jet out but I'm so exhausted because I just put in an eighty hour week in robot mode.
Smoke:Yep.
Dani:Right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's hard. And I think for entrepreneurs, it takes a lot of trust to slow down and to be present because there's this belief of, well, if I slow down and I become more present or if I meditate, I'll never get off the couch and I'll never do anything.
Dani:And the opposite is actually true. What happens is when you become more present, and you become more centered and grounded, the actions that you take are of a much higher quality. Actions that we take, you know, based on ego, they can be effective, but they're to much lower quality than the actions that we take when we're taking inspired action.
Smoke:The physical material world that we all, when we're young, think we live in, and we think that all the way to the end, we're only seeing one aspect of it. We talked a little bit about the energy stuff, but everything is energy, everything is vibration. This physical existence is we are these infinite beings who are, in this experience, are cut down by our senses to believe that this is all reality. This doesn't have to make sense for the other part to make sense, which is most of what we see in the physical world is the cause of it is not anything that we can put our finger on. There can be contributing factors like, I work hard, I do this, I could go move these rocks and put them over there, that would be a lot of work, would take me all day, but I could do it.
Smoke:And that's me forcing in the physical realm doing something. And then there's what you're talking about is action through higher action and inspired action, which isn't about me physically moving those rocks. It's about me figuring out what is it that I want to do and being inspired in the action I do it. I may work a lot less hard than that, but my outcome is going be much bigger. This is where the humility comes in.
Smoke:I don't actually know how it works, I just know it works, which is less is more, And the more centered you can be in heart or mind coherence and in this place of absolute peace and I guess coherence
Dani:Sovereignty.
Smoke:Sovereignty, then everything you do, every word, thought, action has much more power and it manifests that way. Everything just kind of unfolds. I was talking to someone about this, was getting stuck in their mentation, very smart in their mind about this whole idea, because this is nonlinear, I don't even know how to build an airplane. I don't actually know how to fly with one, although maybe I could figure it out. Sat in the final seat, you know, coherent steer, but no, I don't know how to fly.
Dani:Did you get the wings?
Smoke:I did, and I did, but I also did. It's a golfer. But I don't need to know how to build the plane or how to fly it to go fly tomorrow for my meeting. Have to have a naturally perfectly happy getting in a plane and knowing that it works. And what we're talking about, you don't need to know exactly how this works.
Smoke:You need to know if we do these things, the results are very satisfying and powerful, much more powerful than if we force it.
Dani:Yes. And we end up where we never would expect to be. If you had asked me when I was 24 years old what I was going to do when I grew up, it would not be guiding people into and out of plant medicine experiences and acting as a business coach or a spiritual guide or mediations or open relationship negotiations or I mean, I do the things that I do. It amazes me sometimes. Sometimes people will call me up and they'll be like Danny, would you do this?
Dani:Well, never done that before. They're like, everybody can do it. You can do it. Okay. And, and, and it's fun because now I don't have that resistance to, gee, can I do it?
Dani:I don't know, who am I to do this thing I developed an ego coming in with the self doubt and the mind thrashing me about, Who do you think you are? It's like, I'll go wherever I'm called to go. That's what makes it really fun.
Smoke:That brings up for me imposter syndrome, which a lot of really successful people have. They get to the really high level. They have so much self doubt and yet they've been put in this position of leadership and they may be confident in like, Oh, I know how to do, I know math, I know finance, they do know lots of things and yet they have this huge gnawing self doubt. And that only happens, that is the gap between your true self and your ego mind. To the degree you have separation and lack of coherence, that gap is where that self doubt is.
Smoke:When you close that gap, self doubt goes away. It doesn't mean that you have all the answers. It means that you're comfortable not having all the answers. It's a totally different frame.
Dani:Yeah, and impostor syndrome can go two ways. Impostor syndrome can be, you know, what if we use your example as the the entrepreneur who is putting on the face that my business is really successful and doing really great, but behind scenes, he's barely making payroll or she's barely making payments. Right? Me too. And, so that can be where yes, we are being inauthentic.
Dani:Right? We are being an impostor. And then there's also the impostor syndrome where I like to correlate it to or put it together from the perspective of, okay, we are defined amazing human beings, and we are so capable, but we shrink away from that. And we pretend that we're not. Right.
Dani:There are the entrepreneurs that are doing amazing things and but yet they still make themselves small, and they're being an impostor in that way because they're not living up to or really owning and centering into the the truth of who they are and how they're expressing and creating this world.
Smoke:Alright. Well, let's talk about something I think that is maybe useful to people, which is, alright. I get it. Smoke and Danny, thanks for this. You know, it's helping me see some things, but what do I do?
Smoke:How do I get started? I I see this and I don't even know what I don't know, but I know that I need to move forward. What would someone do?
Dani:Thing that helped me the most, a saying that went like this, It's okay to remain unmoving until right action arises. Most of us think that there's something that we have to do. Yep. And it was only when I allowed myself to be quiet and to just be that all of a sudden, the inspiration came forth. And oftentimes the inspiration is, oh, I think I'm going to do the dishes.
Dani:Okay, I'm inspired to do the dishes. Yeah. Okay, I think I'm going go for a walk. I'm inspired to do to go for a walk. But then at some point that I was inspired to, oh, I know what I can do.
Dani:I can create a course. Oh, that would be great. It would be fun to do that. And then the next step unfolds, and then the next step, and then the next step. So we don't have to have this big, huge plan.
Dani:We don't.
Smoke:When you actually sit in quiet, things come up, These are thoughts and feelings and energies and you think you screwed up. Over time, things become de energized and you just recognize them. Now, when I have energy, I'll call it energy as opposed to, Oh, that's anxiety. If I have a little bit of something comes up, I'm like, Oh, that's just some energy that's coming up. I don't want to put a name on it, just clear it, whatever.
Smoke:It's not important to name it. Where it used to be, Oh, I'm anxious, I can't, I'm not really restless, I'm anxious. And all that was happening was I was letting my thoughts about tomorrow get in the way of today. And that all kind of dissipated, it took a while. It got de energized.
Smoke:Yeah.
Dani:And I think that that's the process of let's tie that in with what we were talking about before. When I received that message to remain unmoving until right action arises, I had just sold my company that I had owned for twenty five years. I had just broken up with a relationship. I had sold everything that I had owned. I didn't know where I was gonna live.
Dani:I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what I was gonna do. I had no idea. And my mind was racing and anxious and trying to, well, well, what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen?
Dani:It was remaining unmoving until right action arise, gave me the permission to actually be. Now I couldn't do meditation. I couldn't quiet my mind. But I could cultivate awareness. I could just become so aware of what was going on in my world and then be able to detach myself from it and just witness it.
Dani:And so that's what I did. Being able to witness my thoughts without getting hooked by them. Now, it doesn't mean that I didn't, of course, you know, for every time I didn't get hooked, I would get hooked five times. But I remember really setting the intention of going, no, I am I'm gonna get to the point where there's not one day that goes by where I'm not so aware of my thoughts. And I would sit on the couch and I would literally go, okay, mind, what do you got?
Dani:Right? And just because that's all I could do was cultivate awareness. Yes. Coming to this place of a quiet mind kind of ties all the things that we've been talking about together. It enables me to be sovereign.
Dani:It enables me to choose my creations. It enables me to choose how I want to feel on a regular basis instead of being knocked around. I mean, now I can meditate. I can sit with a silent mind and I can be in that state of peace. But in the beginning I couldn't do it.
Dani:I had to really anchor myself in my body. Yeah. Because it was the only way I could quiet my mind was by being aware of my feet and my toes and releasing my belly and tuning into my heartbeat. Yeah. Then I could pull the energy from my headspace into my body.
Smoke:I think there's a whole bunch of ways to get there and I can get there the right way now. It's so great. Yeah, it's good. But then, cultivating that while you're interacting and while you're doing stuff, you actually, there's never a non meditative state. That's the next level.
Smoke:Two things, one, you want to get ahold of you.
Dani:DanielleBrooks.com. You can sign up for a discovery session with me or you can email me even directly at danidaniellebrooks dot com.
Smoke:I started this with setting the intention that I had, but maybe you'd like to close it out with an intentional meditation or thought process, or how do you want to do it? Sure. We'll tee it up for you.
Dani:Awesome. Oh, so we'll end on peace.
Smoke:Yes.
Dani:I love it.
Smoke:Yes. That's why I took care of the
Dani:admin stuff. Oh, I love it. Okay.
Smoke:You know, like, how to get old.
Dani:Let's just do an awareness exercise. And this is something that I use all the time with my clients to help them quiet their minds. For all of the the viewers who are watching right now, center yourself in your chair, put both feet on the floor, And become aware, keep your eyes open. Don't close your eyes and go inward like you're going to disappear. Keep your eyes slightly open and maybe angle down at about a 45 degree angle.
Dani:And become aware of the sounds in the room. Maybe there's a whirling of a fan in the background. Maybe there's some background noise. Don't judge it. Just come aware of it.
Dani:Become aware of the stillness. And now keeping that super awareness, like you're almost waiting to hear the sound of a pin drop. Become aware of your body and verse located in the room. Become aware of your feet, your legs. Feel gravity as your body is being supported by the chair and by gravity.
Dani:Feel gravity. Release your belly. See if you can become aware of your heartbeat. Become aware, maybe something that you love, a loved one, puppy dogs, ice cream, sunny day. Open your heart.
Dani:Go on. You can do it. There you go. Feel love. And now become aware of the aware presence that is you residing in that physical body.
Dani:If the mind gets really active, just redirect it back to your feet, back to your legs, back to your heartbeat, back to the aware presence that is you. And watch how all of the energy around you will begin to balance, harmonize, and reorient itself. Feel how now your mind is actually coming into coherence with your heart just by paying attention to your heart. Open a little more. Relax a little bit more.
Dani:Soften just a little bit more. And may you have a blessed rest of your day. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.
Smoke:Alright. Thanks, everybody.