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' - Mining the hearts and minds of unorthodox teachers'
The Junkyard Love Podcast is for people who know they’re meant for more - but don’t want to take someone else's route.
These are longform, soul-level conversations with thinkers, artists, mystics, scientists, teachers, philosophers, leaders, comedians, authors, musicians, educators, misfits, millionaires, meditators, psychologists, and much more - and they've burned down their old beliefs to build something truer. This is a show for the life-long learner. Each episode offers real-life insight - and it could be the exact part that our soul-vehicles need to hear, in that precise moment. The Junkyard Love Podcast - for a better life.
Okay, so, the title of your book is called am I Bipolar or Waking Up? Speaker 1 Hang on, hang on. That's the. Speaker 2 First book. The first book. Okay. Speaker 1 Or second, because I'm waking up. Second book is bipolar Awakenings. Okay, okay. So maybe we talk about both books. We've got some time. Yeah, but yeah, the second book, Bipolar Awakenings, will have more implications for your listeners. Speaker 2 Okay. Okay. Speaker 1 So we can start with my bipolar waking up. It's a good place to start. Speaker 2 I mean, I think it's probably all going to weave into each other. Where I would like to start is I would like to bring in. So say somebody is tuning in and they don't really know much about bipolar. They don't they, you know, maybe we've heard this term and maybe they've heard of someone who's been bipolar. Maybe the most they know about bipolar is someone who's like, well, I don't know. Speaker 2 They seem really happy. And and suddenly they're really ticked off, you know, the very, thin, explanation of bipolar. So can you tell me? I guess let's just start with what what is bipolar for someone who's who's just learning this. Speaker 1 Okay. So bipolar disorder is like all mental disorders in the big book of Mental Disorders, the DSM Diagnostic Statistical Manual. It's a label given to a set of symptoms. Okay. So there's no actual disease there that they can find biologically. Okay. There's just a set of symptoms. And what most people think of as bipolar disorder, they would label bipolar two which goes hypomania and depression. Speaker 1 So what's hypomania. Hypomania tends to be symptoms like not sleeping very well nonstop or intense incessant speech. A lot of business ideas sometimes hyper sexuality, sometimes some hyper aggressiveness. And it just kind of feels like for the outsider, it just feels like you're just dealing with it. Extremely difficult person. Okay. And that's the mania side of things. Speaker 1 Spending lots of money, bad investments, these kind of things too. Then it flips to the depression. Okay, so you've got this high lots of energy spending less money to do all these activities, driving everybody crazy. And then there's the depression side where everybody calms down. But you're miserable, right? So that's bipolar two. Bipolar one is when that hypomania goes into psychosis and you have a complete break with reality, and you enter a space where you kind of feel like you're dreaming, right. Speaker 1 And back in the 80s, that usually is labeled anybody back in the 80s who got acute psychosis, it would have been labeled schizophrenia. But somehow along the way, the labels got shifted around. And most people going into acute psychosis today get the label of bipolar one. So bipolar one with psychosis, bipolar two, just the hypomania. And then both have the depression on the other side okay. Speaker 2 And so so that's the the definition as broadly as the culture. Speaker 1 No clinical thing. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay. And then what I mean you seem to have discovered different definitions or you know, you seem to have expanded more on it. So I guess what would be kind of your definitions. Speaker 1 Yeah. So well, there's it's not so much, that I disagree with that definition. Like if somebody has those symptoms, I'm like, okay, this guy's in that bipolar space for sure. For sure. But, what are the roots is the big difference. And according to psychiatry, the roots are biological. And like all the DSM diagnoses, they they tend to say that it's either genetic and then they point to too much or too little dopamine or serotonin. Speaker 1 But the science shows that and this comes from, Robert Whittaker. He's, a writer for The Boston Globe who was taken on this mission. He has a website, Mad in america.com. And what the science shows is that the range of serotonin and dopamine are the same for people with mental disorders as they are for normal people. So there well, there is biological shifts happening. Speaker 1 There is no inherent genetic basis for a mental disorder. You know, and then actual mental illnesses that take place usually involve memory loss, things like Alzheimer's, dementia, these kind of things. You have problems in remembering things. Okay. Mental disorders don't take you or mental illness doesn't take you in the non ordinary states of consciousness per se. Speaker 1 All right. Like what you go into in psychosis okay. So, my perception in talking to people and I have to go back to my own experience for this. But what I believe and how I practice things is that, mental disorders, particularly bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, because there's a lot of gray area between those two and depression have roots in trauma, and that the trauma is somehow lodged in our inherent bioenergetics system. Speaker 1 Now in the East, they could call the system the chakra system, or maybe the Kundalini system, subtle body. Kundalini is like your life force energy in China. They might call it G or qigong. You might have heard qigong that the G and qigong. So you've got this life force coming through you. And then there's these blockages rooted in trauma. Speaker 1 And when those blockages become too much, then that can cause a non ordinary state experience. You know, like going into psychosis, you know, but the roots of depression are the same and that kind of thing. And then when you go into these non ordinary state experiences there's only about 13 very spiritual delusions that pop up and that's it. Speaker 1 There's like 13 of them. And then there's if, if a lot of fear comes over you, there's also paranoia that can creep in too. And hallucinations are part of this as well, sometimes with more severe situations. But for the most part, we're talking about 13 delusions that are obviously very spiritual. Okay. Speaker 2 So you said obviously very spiritual. One thing I found, for my personal experience, was it took me a while to even let words like spiritual into my vocabulary. I didn't consider myself so much spiritual. And so, like any any of that stuff, I kind of just had a, it's not really for me. And it took me a while to kind of actually start comprehending those, I'm completely different place now. Speaker 2 This is many years ago, but, could you. I'm just thinking of someone who's listening. Maybe they've experienced some sort of bipolar things and they have someone in their life. Maybe they're in that same boat that I was in years ago. Could you maybe expand more on the word spiritual? What might that mean to. Speaker 1 Okay, okay. Well, yeah. And according to Ken Wilber, there are 12 different, definitions for spiritual or spirituality. So when one person speaks about spiritual or spiritual things, it can be interpreted completely differently than somebody else, you know? So there's a lot of confusion around that topic. But, just to get very practical and tangible when I'm talking about spiritual delusions, and I and I made a video about this on YouTube, my most popular video from years ago was called Why You Think Your Jesus. Speaker 1 People go into bipolar disorder and they think that they are in psychosis. They think they are either the reincarnation of Jesus giving birth to Jesus through a messiah. They're Buddha. There's some sort of figure here to save the world, you know? And so that's like one of the strongest delusions that that happen. You know, it's like so it's like of the sort of otherworldly domain you, you might say. Speaker 1 And what I see in that case is people getting in touch with the divine within themselves, you know, now, conversely, also spiritual. And often these days people don't think of it as spiritual. You can also have a demonic side to this whole thing. It tends to be projected most of the time, like it's because it's more fear oriented. Speaker 1 But you can think, often like the devil or demons are after you. It can manifest as aliens that are kind of evil aliens kind of following me around or performing a surgery on me or something like that. And, or you can even think that you're the devil, and some people think that they'll tell me that they thought they were the Jesus one minute and the devil the next. Speaker 1 And because what's going on is the energies are kind of flipping inside of you. You're getting in touch with one, and then it turns and gets in touch with the others. Because in this state, your ego has breaking down, broken down, and your psyche is just running free rein without control. You know, you've really got no control in that situation. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, it makes me think of, are you familiar with Ram Dass, the spiritual teacher? Sure, sure. Yeah. He has this story where he tells, essentially he had a brother, and his brother was, actually in, like, a psychiatric ward, and he would visit his brother and he would talk about, his brother was was in that same position. Speaker 2 He was he thought he was Jesus. Like, he would just at all times. And it's funny rundown to talk about, you know, here I am is this person I've been in, in Nepal, in India, and I'm where I got a beard and I had these mala beads and I'm wearing, like, robes essentially, you know, I look more like Jesus and my brother does, and he sanely goes to visit his brother and, him and his brother getting some sort of quarrel and. Speaker 1 The. Speaker 2 Like. The final marker that Ram Dass puts on the conversation is, he tells his brother, like, the problem is that you think you're Jesus. And I know that we're all Jesus. And it's kind of this, like, it's not necessarily about just the self. Like, there is some truth and what you're feeling. There is kind of this, with spirituality, you have to allow paradox. Speaker 2 So it's not just this, like you might, you may feel that you are having these, you know, godlike, experiences and downloads or whatever, but it's not that you are the one special person out of a billion people gets these. It's kind of like a human experience. So anyway, around us mentions that, and I think that's, I always thought that was a really good, teaching on that one. Speaker 1 Right. And, and it's a good indicator also of how severe severe is a difficult word, but how severe the disorder is by how attached and how concrete the interpretation is of what the person is going through. So if you get somebody back on medications for example, and then they're like, I thought that I was some sort of a Jesus figure, you know, speaking of it, sort of abstract or vague ways, right? Speaker 1 Versus you don't understand. I'm here to save the world, you know, and, and that kind of person who is just there. I am the only Messiah that Jesus is, and you need to respect me and bow down to me. Wow. That's a very difficult person to heal, you know, or to help heal. But the first one who was like, I'm pretty sure I thought it was Jesus for a while, but now I kind of get it. Speaker 1 And, you know, they're taking a couple of medications and that that that person, you can help if they've got insight into their situation. Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. If you'll give me, I would love to back up a little bit. So I heard, an inkling earlier I was listening to you on a podcast, and, you were talking about your one of your first experiences into, kind of the spiritual element in what kind of started you down this path. Speaker 2 You were at a landmark forum in, and you had, kind of a profound experience. Could you break that down to me? And could you also just bring in anybody who's new? What's landmark? What were you doing there? What were you trying to accomplish, any of that? Speaker 1 Sure. And just to tell any of your listeners this story I tell in my first book, and it's available as a free PDF on my website. Okay. Am I being sold or are waking up? Is that is the PDF? Speaker 2 I'll have the link down below as well. Speaker 1 Okay, great. So what happened to me is I was dealing with about seven years of on again off again depression, but I it was for me it was always around my career, you know just struggling with my career. But finally, someone convinced me to go take this course, the landmark form landmark education. And at the time, I didn't know anything about it, but it was, rooted in something from the 70s called East training. Speaker 1 And it's just a very confrontational weekend where they really kind of getting your face about, who you are, what you're about, and how you're sabotaging your life and, and, and really messing with you psychologically. But because it was 150 people in the room together energetically, it's really strong thing to like, I was going to the bathroom and pardon my French farting like I have never passed gas like this in my entire life. Speaker 1 Every break we had, I had to go into the bathroom and process internally what the hell was going on farting for everyone. It was really uncomfortable and I've never had an experience like that since. Okay. So funny. Yeah. But, and they controlled things like they told you, you know, you had to promise you will not go to the bathroom while we're in session. Speaker 1 Like, you won't just get up and walk out the door. You needed to wait for breaks. And if you couldn't agree to that, you had to leave the course like they wanted. Everybody on the same page, you know? So it they created almost like a cult like environment where you just you need to buy in or you're out the door, you know, second day of that course, though, they asked us to do a meditation on our fear, and I didn't think I felt any fear. Speaker 1 I was 30 years old at the time, didn't think I felt any fear, and then in the middle of this meditation, I saw a depth gauge from my scuba diving equipment from, Vancouver two months earlier. And I had I had had a scuba diving accident. I lost my weight belt about 90ft below sea level. Okay. And there was a moment there where I'm looking at my depth gauge, and I'm just wondering if I'm going to die before I hit the surface. Speaker 1 You know, because I lost my weight belt. I'm shooting up to the surface from 90ft below. I'm just watching this thing and I'm exhaling, wondering if I'm going to make it to the top. You know? And I couldn't allow myself to feel any sense of panic or fear in that moment, because if you did and you hold held your breath, that could create an air embolism and you could die. Speaker 1 So I was just very relaxed. I just stayed relaxed until I hit the surface, you know? But then on that fear meditation, I just had this huge punch in my chest and just started bawling. And then all the fear came up and I could feel everything, and I was shaking. And they were encouraging us to go into deeper fear imagery. Speaker 1 And I imagined myself sort of being kidnaped and this kind of thing. Once that was over, I, my, my senses had completely shifted and I felt like I could there was a sense of oneness, connection to everything lighter. I felt like I knew things about life that I didn't know before. Like before, I always felt like I was missing something. Speaker 1 All of a sudden it was okay. And then my senses sharpened so I could see detail in curtains I couldn't see before, smelling things I couldn't smell before. It was just everything was more vivid, you know? And then I got really emotional. And this state carried on for about five days, and it takes about 80 pages of my book. Speaker 1 And then on the fifth day, I was still on the course, and I came to this conclusion that I must have died in that scuba diving accident, because I felt so completely different that this is what heaven feels. Yeah, I was like, I was in the course thinking, this is what it feels like when you die. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, that's what happened. Speaker 1 I'm dead. Wow. And I just thought everybody in the room were actors that were just there to, play a role, to help me move along in my life and to move along to the next level. And I eventually went into this other room, this other ballroom, because it was all taking place in the ballroom for this final night. Speaker 1 And I just thought I was going there to meet God. And part of it was taking off all my clothes. You know? And, also, I peed on the carpet there. It was all like a test. I had to let go of everything. So I let go my bladder, too. And, eventually the police showed up and I wouldn't put my clothes back on because I thought this was part of the test. Speaker 1 And they grabbed me and put me in an ambulance and took me to the hospital. And I still thought I was going to Nirvana or Heaven or something. I was trying to get to that other dimension. I was sure it was dead. But then a couple of days after being in the hospital, I started to realize nothing was changing and that and my delusion actually started to break down just by the fact that I was still in the hospital and people weren't particularly nice to me. Speaker 1 And I thought, well, this is, I don't know what's going on. You know, my family was very supportive while I was in the hospital. They were devastated, but they were very supportive. When I got home, I still had this feeling like I'm having a spiritual experience. I don't know what a mental disorder is. I don't know what bipolar disorder is or schizophrenia, but I had a spiritual experience. Speaker 1 And, and part of it is the spiritual delusion, the common one, feeling like you're dead or dying or being reborn. You know, that's one being feeling like you're being tested by God is another very common one, you know? And then another common one for people is feeling like they're on a special mission here to save the world. Speaker 1 But I didn't have that one because I was dead, right. Like I was moving on. So all this happened in 1996. You know, I want to make that clear to people in it. After I had a few months to integrate and I had a family friend who was very understanding and, and would listen was a great listener. Speaker 1 She was from India, so she had more of an open mind than some of the others. And, once I had that time, I went back to work in advertising, which is what I used to do, and my life got a lot better. My salary tripled, you know, in three years. People said they really appreciated me on their business. Speaker 1 They felt like I really cared. These kind of things, you know, even while I was at that point, I wanted to get out of the business, you know, I was I needed to find some sort of spiritual mission, you know, and after after being in advertising for a year, I. Meadow, I met a Brazilian woman on a trip to Peru. Speaker 1 I was I had a dream, I was being called to Peru, and, I just kind of went on a tour. There's a lot of details there, but I met her on a tour, and, eventually we got married and we moved to Brazil. Okay. And so then. Then I became an English teacher here. And am I like that much better? Speaker 1 My years as an English teacher were probably the best years of my life. And that that took me sort of between 2000 when I got married to 2007, you know, and but up, up. That whole time I wasn't really involved in this work. I, I thought that spiritual emergency and mental disorder were two completely different things in that period. Speaker 1 Right? Speaker 2 Right. Okay. So going into this, what was your two questions? What was your background and experience in kind of like a like psychosis, bipolar like did were you familiar with even that language. And then also did you have how about the language of spirituality. Were you spiritual before? Did you grow up with any sort of like Christian background, anything like that or. Speaker 1 Well, I, I was raised Catholic and, and I had a strong interest in spirituality. I studied religion in university. I was actually trying to find the right one for its didn't end too well, and I ended up being kind of atheistic or agnostic, and that I broken a few years earlier, you know, with, with a trip to Vancouver where I started to have, like, synchronicities popping and things like this. Speaker 1 And it sort of opened me up to a faith in something bigger than myself. And this happened two years before I was in the hospital. So, one thing I forgot to mention was that a year after my hospitalization, I discovered the work of a guy named, Czech psychiatrist named Stan Groff, Stanislav Groff, and he had written a book, The Stormy Search for the self, which talked about spiritual, a kind of thing that looks like psychosis but is actually spiritual in nature. Speaker 1 And if you let it just play out, it can be very healing. And he called that a spiritual emergency. And I had all the details on a spiritual emergency and, and basically, to keep it really simple, he broke it down to if you're able to internalize what you're going through, it can be a breakthrough. But if you externalize it, it's a breakdown, you know, and but he separate it into two very different categories. Speaker 1 But for me, coming out of that, I was like, oh, I had a spiritual emergency. I did not have a mental illness. And these are two very separate things, you know, and I, I didn't even have any interest in bipolar disorder. I didn't know anything about mental disorders. I didn't think about them. You know, once I was back to work, it was like, okay, let me go live my life and find my true calling. Speaker 1 Speaker 2 So, so did you feel, did you. I mean, this is a hard word, but normal. Did you feel normal afterwards? Like. Like what was your homeostasis after this episode? Like, do you feel like a completely different person still kind of. Or. Speaker 1 I felt I didn't feel normal, I felt natural, I felt a lot more natural. And I was also a little weird. I think I would be prone to sort of breaking social conventions more often than not. Maybe I was always like that a little bit, but then afterwards I was kind of a little bit, a little bit more. Speaker 1 So I just wasn't playing by the typical rules, you might say. But I kind of lost interest in society to a certain degree. For the years I was in Toronto, after my hospitalization, on Saturday nights, for example, I just stay home with my parents. I had no interest in going out and socializing that much. I felt like I had the secret, you know? Speaker 1 Because I couldn't really share it with anybody at work that I was just six months before joining this ad agency. I was in the psychiatric hospital. Speaker 2 You couldn't relate to yourself? Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. You know, and but then I got interested in shamanism, kind of a new age shamanism. And there was a few events around Toronto. That's where I'm originally from. And I would go to a few events here and there. And then I got, you know, into this trip to Peru and, and that was just a fascinating, fascinating thing to do. Speaker 1 And my wife and I, like, I met my wife in Peru, Leisa, and we got married and we took a in 2000, we took a big trip through her country of Brazil, backpacked all over the place and went and visited shamans and, pages. They would call them all over the Amazon and places like that. Just seeing in Salvador, Bahia and seeing, you know, the the descendants of slaves in Salvador, channeling spirits, you know, channeling African gods and stuff like that. Speaker 1 So we I was really getting an incredible exposure to the variety of, of experience you get in Brazil, both from religious and spiritual perspectives. You know, because it runs the whole gamut down there. And, and a lot of non ordinary state experience stuff happens with drugs and without drugs. Right. Yeah. So it was a fascinating place to be when you were interested in spirituality like I was at the time. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 And so, so it sounds like. And you hadn't written your first book by this point, right. Speaker 1 No no no, no. Speaker 2 So so it sounds like. Speaker 1 2011 2000, 2001. Yeah. Speaker 2 And when did your book, when did your first book come out. Speaker 1 2011. Speaker 2 Okay. So it sounds like you were getting a lot of info in new, you know, stories, and you're probably learning a lot about this whole thing and about yourself, right? Speaker 1 Yeah. And actually, I had written about my hospitalization and given it to a psychologist in the Toronto area just a few years after it had happened to me, but I never published it. I just kind of kept it in the back burner. But then once I got into this work about helping people, then I published it as am I Bipolar or Waking up in 2011? Speaker 2 And so. So how do you make that move into like, oh, I want to start helping people. I feel that I have enough knowledge about what happened to not only me, but now I can help other people. How did you take them? Speaker 1 I was other than learning my own, learning about my own experience through the work of Stan Groff and Ken Wilber as well. I wasn't I was just maybe looking for a calling, but I didn't know how to help people. I was involved in shamanism in Brazil. Sometimes I'd work as like a dog soldier, you know, which would be like giving people water or something like that. Speaker 1 That's what they called it, right? But, in 2007, my wife's younger niece, Anna. And that's important to point out because it wasn't genetic. It was her niece. It wasn't mine. She went into an experience. We just got a call out of nowhere, and she went into experience, and her parents were telling us what happened, and I was like, well, that sounds like what happened to me. Speaker 1 And we went to support her through it. And it was very close to what I had been through. And I thought, oh, well, this is a spiritual emergency. And I talked to the parents and tried to explain to the parents what happened to me. I'd never told the family what had happened to me, you know, not that side of the family. Speaker 1 They're very conservative. But I thought, I need to get the fear out of that place because the fear is what can really do damage. So I really focused on that. And my wife would support, her niece, but and we had good results. The psychiatrist and psychologist both said they had never seen someone recover so quickly. Then. Speaker 1 Then she did, but they still gave her the meds. And I was like, well, why are they giving you the meds? And and then I, they said, oh, it's going to be a few months of meds. And I was like a few months. And then, then I got online and learned it's going to be a lifetime of medication. Speaker 1 And that's where I just went. What the hell are we talking about here? You know, it was just totally new news to me, you know? And then I started to go deeper and I started ordering books on Amazon and discovered that actually, there were pioneering psychologists in the 70s that went past the work of Stan Groth, that said that, like, they didn't deal with the concept of spiritual emergency like he did. Speaker 1 They were saying that psychosis itself, acute psychosis is an intended reorganization of the psyche. That's what's really going on. And this and so if you could support that reorganization without meds and just a lot of patients, they can come through. And there were places like, a clinic called Sutaria House where they would just practice being with people as opposed to doing something to them. Speaker 1 And they were reporting an 85% recovery rate with people in their first break. Okay. And that was very important. So yeah, they were sending people home just after a week stay of, you know, taking care of them and being very supportive. And that was like a huge eye opener. You know, that was a huge eye opener. And that got me really like, oh, well, I think I can do this. Speaker 1 You know, I think I can do this. Speaker 2 Yes, yes. So, so you found in that situation you were able to bring, you know, knowledge and wisdom and, a perspective to, to your niece that nobody else in that environment seemed to be bringing. Like, like did it seem that the doctors that were, you know, they're there to help her, but if they're not trained in it or they don't know any of this stuff, or they think it's all kind of woowoo, spiritual, weird stuff that has nothing to do with this, you know, biology or, you know, the chemical imbalance, that whole that whole thing, that whole story that keeps getting repeated. Speaker 2 Wow. Yeah, yeah. How incredible. So how were people receptive to you when you were bringing this stuff stuff up? Were people letting you, like, explain these things, or did you feel you had to, you know, your mouth closed in doctor's offices or what? Speaker 1 It was a bit of a battle. And, what happened was after doing four months of research into these pioneering psychologists, I was going to go back to the family and say, look, she, let's take her off the medications. If she goes back into psychosis, will support or through it like I'm learning about. You can do this with this Satara house method of being versus doing. Speaker 1 And just as I was ready to go back to the family, her sister came back from Europe and went into psychosis. My like, yeah, it's unbelievable. Four months apart, two sisters with no psychiatric history went into non-owner states. It's unbelievable. Yeah. And she knew what happened to her younger sister. So I call them Ana. They're fake names. But Ana, the younger sister, Eliana, the older sister, Ileana, came to us first and we supported her. Speaker 1 We didn't even tell her parents we had her. And we supported her, right through her first psychosis. Took her back to the family. She was still ungrounded, but she wasn't kind of crazy. Okay. And then she had a second episode that we couldn't help her with, and she was medicated, but then she. She only agreed to go out, stay on the meds for two weeks. Speaker 1 When she went off the meds, she went into psychosis again, and we had agreed with the family that we would support her for that third time. And we did. And it didn't take long. And then she was able to go back to university. Medication free, completely grounded, finish the year with honors, you know, went off to an amazing job and worked in 11 different countries. Speaker 1 And eventually her master's degree, now seven years in the future, it would start to come up again. Okay. So it start to come up again. But we got her through, we got her through university, and she had those seven years medication free. And because we got her grounded and we knew we got her grounded right away in the beginning, then it was like, well, this is my life mission. Speaker 1 This is what I have to do here. And this thing, this thing that I thought was a 1 in 20,000 kind of experience, like what I had all of a sudden I was realizing it was more like 1 in 20, because bipolar disorder apparently affects 5% of people. So I was like, wow, this is a one and 20. Speaker 1 This isn't a 1 in 20,000. And that got me going. Oh, put it that way. You know, and that's really the whole story of the first book, you know. Spoiler alert. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Wow. No, no, it sounds fascinating. And, definitely, again, you have the PDF. I, we linked it below. Yeah. So even just hearing about your 80 pages worth in the landmark form, I'm curious to, to read more about that. So, Wow, that's so incredible. I mean, what what a you know, I think we could bridge this into, like, the talk of synchronicities and coincidences in general. Speaker 2 Where do you. Because it sounds like the in this there's, you know, those are synchronistic things. Those are coincidences to me. Oh, yeah. Strange way. Like, how do you where do you. This is an impossible question. I know, but where do where do you kind of draw the edge? Where's the sanity when it comes to synchronicity and coincidences? Speaker 2 Because, you know, when I was in the. Speaker 1 And it's. Speaker 2 Impossible question. Right. But, I still these days, I feel very sane and grounded in my spirituality in these sorts of experiences. But I still have times where, you know, there's a couple weeks, couple months where I have these synchronistic, coincidental instances, but compared them to my synchronistic, coincidental instances back, you know, when I was a bit more ungrounded, they were very, if I try to explain them to someone in a logical manner, I just kind of sounded off the wall like it really would not make any sense. Speaker 2 Whereas now I think I could be able to explain those things and they feel personal to me, and I could articulate them to someone elsewhere. You know, it's like, hey, this is part of my spiritual experience. But anyway, yeah. So I guess where do we draw the edge of of sanity and synchronistic coincidences? Speaker 1 It's tricky. It's tricky. You know, I told the family, I said one of the things I had to struggle with when I came back from the hospital was, you know, is this real or am I dreaming? And they said, when did you figure it out? And I said, I never did. I just got used to it. Speaker 1 And what I meant was, it's like we think we're in some sort of a firm or fixed reality here with logical reasoning and stuff like that. But then every once in a while we have kind of dreamlike material kick in, which is which is what you're talking about. So synchronicity, I mean, when that happens, there are times when it's actually impossible. Speaker 1 What just happened? You know, I tell a story in my second book where I had a dream, and it's a long story, but part of it is I had a dream in like, I think it was about 2016 August 2016 about seeing myself falling at a distance. I was watching myself falling into a jungle canopy, and I was wondering if I had. Speaker 1 Actually, when I woke up, I wondered if I had entered into a new parallel universe of some kind, like had my reality really shifted. In a way, the eight months in the future. So March of 2017, I go with a client, we're in Mexico and we go see King Kong Skull Island together. It was like a little break from our retreat work, and the opening scene is the silhouette of a man falling into a jungle canopy with the sun behind him. Speaker 1 Wow. So I had seen the entrance to that movie eight months earlier, and I was telling the client's mother the story of that dream just before we went into the movie theater. Whoa. Yeah. And she popped up and said, song your dream? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know what to do with this. Yeah. What do I do with this? Speaker 1 This is just this is too much, you know? So, I think life has a dreamlike quality like that. And also our dreams have a kind of a reality quality. Like they impact us more than we think we do. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, you mentioned shamans, you know, back in the day of shamans, and it was a very important, I'm sure if we if they projected into the future and they learned that we kind of just ignore those eight hours where we go to a different plane of reality every night. It's not really a thing in our culture. Speaker 2 It's like I had this crazy dream. It was crazy. Anyway, what are you having for breakfast this morning? You know, it's, it's. I think back in the day, I think there was, you know, sets of humans that used the dream world maybe just as much as the regular world. Speaker 1 The the difference for them, though, what I've learned, because I've studied a lot of this stuff, is they really looked at the dream world as another reality, like this one, you know? So, for example, if you if you dream that your best friend is having sex with your girlfriend, it happened and you're going to go talk to your friend about it, like, you know, it's serious. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, but but the level of importance is kind of equal. You know, the interpretations are different. But the for me, my dream world is very important. And it's part of the therapeutic work I do, you know. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I'm trying to think of so say the listener right now, this is probably all super interesting to someone who's in this boat, but say that maybe they've been diagnosed with bipolar, and they, they feel okay. Maybe they're, they're medicated or maybe, maybe they're not even diagnosed. Maybe they're experiencing some things right now that, might be up that alley or somebody says they have bipolar or their, their sister has bipolar, and so they think it's genetic, etc., etc.. Speaker 2 And they're listening to this stuff and they're like, what the what does this have to do with spirituality? I guess like. Speaker 1 Well, I think in the bigger picture, yeah. Spiritual experiences like the one I had or even things like psychedelic experiences, for example, people often report having spiritual experiences while on taking LSD and things like that, or peak experience that can happen even during sports. Or different kinds of rituals. They, they give you a taste of this other dimension. Speaker 1 But what you're doing with it is, is kind of the important thing. And, and I think that, the spiritual dimension is just leading us towards an authenticity. You know, like I said earlier, it's not about being normal. It's being natural, you know? And so, when people are healing, which is the focus of, you know, my work now, it's about becoming more open, spontaneous, and peaceful, you know, and present those kind of things. Speaker 1 It's not about being this Tony Robbins kind of super. God, you know, I was so productive last week, I. I slayed the world. It's like, congratulations, Mr. Ego boost. I mean, you know, it's not about that. It's about. It's about being really authentic and honest with yourself. And and I think to a certain extent, healing is about kind of cleaning out the lies, cleaning out the bullshit we tell ourselves, not just about other people or the lies we tell others, but the lies we tell ourselves, parts of us that are just not being honest with ourselves. Speaker 1 Speaker 2 I want to, I want to expand into that more so because that that resonates with my experience. I had a lot of things I was being dishonest with others about and things I was being dishonest with myself more importantly about. And I found that. Yeah, that was, after a while, you start when you're dishonest, you have these layers that you begin to create almost accidentally, of, like, these lies that you have to keep up with. Speaker 2 Again, whether it's socially or just inwardly, and then you kind of lose yourself in between. Is that is that something that you would say is fairly common with, with people who have these experiences? Is there some sort of external or internal lie that maybe even they're not even aware of? Maybe there's some childhood thing that happened that they're not really fully able to be truthful with in the moment? Speaker 2 Is this common? Speaker 1 Right. Well, like the root of the disorder is trauma, okay. That's a big deal. And trauma in itself is kind of a lie because it's taking a part of an experience that was so painful that we deny the emotion itself like a, you know, we just don't don't accept that that happened. And the best example, I think, is when you see someone who is at the funeral of a loved one and they don't cry, and then they'll even ask themselves later, they'll say, I don't understand why I didn't cry. Speaker 1 You know, I loved him. You know, when people go to therapy, why didn't I cry at my father's funeral? You know? And the reason is they're just so devastated that their psyche has just checked it out and said, no, we're not going there. And then and then it becomes locked into this energetic system and can be a trauma that leads to a deeper disorder. Speaker 1 And so how does our. Speaker 2 He, have you heard of a read the book The Body Keeps the score. You've heard of that one? Speaker 1 I, I haven't read it. I should treat it. Really? Speaker 2 It's always brought up, right? Yeah. It's always worth. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's always brought up. I just feel like I it's like I know. Speaker 2 Yeah. You're going to be nodding your head during the entire book. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 Well, I yeah, it's a huge book though. Very influential. Yeah. Speaker 2 I mean, I think I would just the book seems to be my doorway to the conversation about kind of, I think of, like our fascia, our myofascial system. I think it's kind of like a lot of our spiritual like postures with, with the world. Speaker 1 Okay. Speaker 2 I, I kind of wonder, so, like, how is it how do you see trauma being stored or is it stored in our physical body? Is it held? Speaker 1 Yeah. I see it in I see it semantically, like it's in our bioenergetics system. You could call it a chakra system or kundalini system. And incidentally, a year after my hospitalization, I went for Rolfing, which breaks up the fascia tissue, you know, and when you do that, sometimes that does release emotions. And I did have some of that happen in particular. Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah. It's a very have you heard of Rolfing? It's a very intense. It's a very intense massage where the focus is on, kind of breaking up the fascia tissue, which in the fascia tissue is like, what connects your bones together, I think. And once that's broken up, you just feel a lot more fluid and expansive. Speaker 1 But it's been known that people will cry on the massage table from having this Rolfing technique done to them, you know? So for me, the trauma is carried throughout the body, particularly along the chocolate line. But it can be in other, other parts. And so the key to healing is to, work on that. The therapy should be somatic, it should be working with the body. Speaker 1 And so in my second book, I talk about the private retreats that I set up. Took me a long time to figure it out, but by 2013, I started doing private retreats for people. And in those retreats, I was using a technique from Stan Grof, derivation of the technique of Hall of Tropic Breathwork. And with the Tropic Breathwork, you're over breathing in a very safe space in your in a mat and yoga pants, and there's some powerful music playing and you were you're with a trained facilitator. Speaker 1 Certified facilitator. You do this over breathing. And then when you do that, the unconscious comes up and part of it is very physical. So there's a thing that happens called the tani, where your whole body can lock up your face, your neck and some people get so locked up they can barely even talk. And they can go into panic. Speaker 1 So it's good to remind people that this can happen beforehand, and they can be locked up there for like 30 minutes, and then the whole thing just relaxes and they feel more relaxed than they've ever had for their entire life. So this is just like a wave of mini traumas through the whole body that just being released. You know, that tension. Speaker 1 Tension. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. And so, so so you've you've experienced through my fast release and then so in, in your, in your retreats that you set up, I know you've talked a lot about a lot about breathwork and you, you have developed your own. You kind of switch that into you have your own bipolar breathing. Can you tell me about that? Speaker 1 Yeah. That's right. Well, breathwork is a formatted thing because there's a million ways to do breathwork. You know, you can do breathing. That's just like relaxation meditation. You can do things that are supposed to active, activate your kundalini processes, you know, pranayama and things like that. But with breathwork, you've got, a safe space trained facilitator, like I said, powerful music. Speaker 1 It's a three hour session, generally in a group. Okay, it can be private, but it's also in a group. And that's the format. And that was contraindicated for people with deeper disorders because they were afraid that it might open up too much. And the group setting or the limited time frame would be a wouldn't be a safe enough container for someone who's dealing with more difficult issues like you might have if you've got bipolar schizophrenia. Speaker 1 So I said to myself, well, I'm not doing anything right now. How about if I start my own retreat? And that way I give people unlimited time frame and unlimited attention, just private attention. And and I insist that they bring a volunteer, a volunteer supporter, so that I'm I'm not on my own. I can get breaks while they can still be supervised. Speaker 1 The family knows somebody is with them, so they know I'm not just some weirdo from the internet. Somebody from the family is sort of involved. Yeah. And then with the Bipolar Breathwork, I just made a few adjustments, which is they can start and stop whenever they want, you know? So if they just decide after 20 minutes, that's it. Speaker 1 I say, okay, that's it. And we stop and then we come back to it when they want. That's the first thing. And then there's the undivided attention. And I can also customize the music depending on where they're at. So they were the three of the big adjustments I made early on, you know, and the results were incredible. Speaker 2 Yeah. So what are the kind of experiences people that you saw people having? Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, to, to point out, like the somatic aspect to this whole thing, you know, which is, the kundalini and the blocked energy. My first client had been hospitalized, I think, about ten times and, every year for about a month, for six years. And when I went to work with her, she had a pain in her coccyx that was so bad she couldn't sit down for more than ten minutes, and she couldn't lay on her back in bed. Speaker 1 All right. And in the fifth breathwork session we did. She didn't move a muscle. Very quiet. I thought nothing was happening. And then she came back and she told me hot energy came shooting out of her coccyx, up the spine, into the shoulder blades, down through the hands and the pain that she had been to. Six medical doctors for, and they had no answer for her. Speaker 1 The pain was gone, you know, after five sessions we knew right away and synchronistic. We knew it was part of the disorder. I had suspected it. She had told me about the coccyx pain even before I went there. And, when that cleared up, well, that cleared up. I thought she had been healed. Okay. Why not? I'm a genius. Speaker 1 This is done. Here's my bill. I'm Jesus now. Yeah. I'm Jesus, and I'm Jesus. But she did have an episode a couple of months later, and I got on the phone with her. I said, I'm coming back to Romania. I live in Brazil and come back to Romania, and you don't need to pay for anything. And we did a second retreat the second year, 2014, and then she was meds free for five years. Speaker 1 She was. That's for five years after that. So again, it was like she come in 2016, I met her again. I was in Romania three years in a row. Synchronistic. And she came back, she visited me and she said, Sean, I've been off my meds for you. That hasn't happened since I was 20 years old, you know, like for 15 years, you know, and she was able to remain off her meds for five years, you know? Speaker 1 Yeah. So, you know that she was my first client, and then after that, my next two clients in Germany and Finland had incredible success. And they're both completely out of the psychiatric system. They had no medications, no relapses for over a decade now. Yeah, that that's incredible. Speaker 2 Okay, so bring me bring in someone who I think you you and I. It's not that shocking. To hear, you know, there's this physical pain in someone's body. It's it's at this area where we know it's like, okay, this is like, maybe stuck energy in your root chakra. That'd be language that you and I would probably know, but someone else would be like, wait, okay, so you're saying this lady went in to six different doctors? Speaker 2 She had pain that couldn't get solved. It was not on an x ray anywhere. And she breathed in. It helped, you know. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And then try to tell a psychiatrist that, you know, the roots of her mental illness are spiritual and in her ass. Yeah, yeah. It's like, okay, I give up. I can't do that. Right? Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. But clearly you've had success with it. So. So how do you, how do you break this down to people. How do you how do you explain this in a way that, that people can wrap their heads around? Speaker 1 I made a lot of YouTube videos, show a lot of YouTube videos, and I and I, and I made, well, and the books help. But what I learn on YouTube is that even though I'm talking about information that is pretty complex, you can take the ideas as long as you break them down into small pieces and give people things that they can relate to. Speaker 1 Like one of my most popular videos that people still watch was like, what about the spiritual delusions? And I called it, I think I called it, is it bipolar disorder or spiritual enlightenment? And then I talk about the delusions that look like enlightenment. And I think I say, so whether you're a Buddhist monk going through this, in a cave in in Tibet or you're a teenager in Chicago who just took some LSD, your experience look pretty much the same. Speaker 1 You know, there's not and funny enough, intensive meditation that going on a ten day retreat is a very common trigger for acute psychosis that gets people labeled bipolar, and then they're medicated for life, you know, so it's not just all these kids are taking drugs and and now they've ruined their lives and they're on these meds. It's very common drug use. Speaker 1 But on the other end, intensive medication meditation can bring the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 Well, you had, didn't you have a ten day Vipassana experience? Didn't you have a spiritual experience on it? Speaker 1 Yeah, I had my chair. I had 1 in 2. The 2009. And energetically it felt stronger than what put me in the psychiatric hospital over. And it left, like, again, explosion at the heart chakra, all my organs shaking, vibrating, crying, but more tears of joy. But I was so shook up. And this is during the meditation that I was afraid to walk back to my room because there was a hillside trail, and I thought that if I fainted, I might fall down the hill and never be seen again, you know, this kind of thing. Speaker 1 So and I was basically in bed every morning for the next five days, and it was stronger in a Kundalini sense than what put me in the hospital. But I by that point, I knew what I was doing. I had been around the work. I had been my mission for three years. So when this Kundalini process unfolded, then it was I was a bit more ready for the whole thing, you know, and then and then the heart of the Kundalini stuff continued. Speaker 1 For the next six months, I'd be in bed with my wife and then, you know, goodnight. Oh, like, oh, what's that? Just hot pins in my toes. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Just a Korea, honey. Don't worry. Yeah. Is that what they are? Korea's. Oh, the Korea's the prayer. Right. Speaker 2 Well so Korea my understanding is Korea is the involuntary movement. It is the, like the sudden, like the, you know, you're trying to you're in meditation and you can't really help but, you know, anybody who's going through a Kundalini experience, especially for doing a lot of yoga, too, you can't really help but like, do all that kind of stuff. Speaker 2 That's my understanding of Korea. I could be a little bit wrong on that, but. Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah, yeah. No. And and I still work with Kundalini processes to this day, go through a lot of jerking. But, but for the first six months, it was quite uncomfortable. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay. Well, so where do you where would you say that? You sit with it now, after, you know, after this many years of of it as your personal experience where, you know, like, like when someone comes in and then they would like to know kind of your, your background of not only your experience with Kundalini and your spirituality and everything. Speaker 2 What is kind of your explanation to them? Like, hey, I had this experience happen. Here's how I see it now. Because because to me, you come across as very grounded with this sort of thing. And so I kind of wonder, how you observe yourself or how you see others seeing you when you explain it? Speaker 1 Well, I don't talk about it that much for regular people. I am not the kind of person like I look for the open door, or I look for people who seem to be looking for this kind of help. And then if they come to me like. Like I say, you guy like you, you know, you're very open, you're very receptive and you're curious. Speaker 1 You want to know, right? But I don't stand on the street corner trying to tell everybody about what happened to me. And when people say, oh, how do I convince my family to understand that what I went through spiritual, I tell them, I say, don't just, look for someone who's open, or if someone comes to you and you put a few feelers out there and they're opening curious. Speaker 1 Sure. Talk about it. But if not, just just keep it to yourself because people get threatened by this kind of thing. And and if it's you feel like they're not listening in the beginning, they're not you're not going to change their mind. You're not going to change their mind. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. I agree, I where I've come at with my experience with it is yeah, I'm in that same boat, like, I don't, I don't go advertising it. Sometimes it's like I why I'll go many months without even talking about it with friends or whatever. It's like it's crazy. It's like very profound. You know, to me, very important experience happened to me that changed the course of my life. Speaker 2 But it's like, I mean, really thought about it much, whatever. But, I'll note that, it will come up in cool conversations where it feels natural, it feels safe. It feels that I can be useful to the person that I'm talking to. I actually had one time on a plane. I'm mostly an introvert in public on planes. Speaker 2 You know, I'm kind of just like to, you know, have my hood up, have headphones on, just kind of keep to myself. I don't typically dive into a bunch of deep conversations on planes, but, I had one pay a year and a half, two years ago where, I started talking to this, to this girl next to me. Speaker 2 She was super, super cool, super fly. And over the course of the time was like a five hour flight. I ended up learning that her sister had been going through, basically psychosis. And she was like, going through all these things. And I allowed this girl to tell me quite a bit before I even was like. Speaker 1 Whoa, here's. Speaker 2 Kind of my thoughts if you're willing to hear, you know, and I kind of trying to explain without, you know, this girl I'd never heard, you know, these terms Kundalini or, you know, she doesn't use terms like chakra. I think she had like more of a Christian background. So, you know, some of those terms in itself are sometimes people can think they're demonic for some reason. Speaker 2 But but anyway, so I ended up a great connection. I gave her a lot of these resources. I was like, hey, check out this channel, check out this person. This could be all totally, you know, just my perception, you know? But maybe send your sister these, see what she thinks, maybe have a conversation with her. Maybe you could talk to your mother about these things. Speaker 2 You know, just to open up the conversation with your sister. And she seemed to be very, very grateful. And I was like, you know, that was cool that I was able to this stuff that I'm obsessed with, this stuff that I like learning about, that happened to me. I'm able to kind of casually open up and potentially maybe I helped out that person sister in some way. Speaker 2 I've giving her some resources. So yeah, like I wasn't going about looking for like, who wants to hear about my Kundalini awakening on this plane? You know, but, but it just happened. Speaker 1 So and I will add, though, that, over the last 18 years of doing this work, you know, starting in 2007, I was 20, 24 and I was making videos and writing books and I'm doing retreats. There was often a tremendous sense of mission and that I hadn't finished my mission, you know, and sometimes it would just bring me to tears, the frustration of but just not getting where I needed to go, you know? Speaker 1 But then when I finished the second book here and, you know, Bipolar Awakenings The Quest to Heal Bipolar Disorder at the end of the book, I was just like, I've done my part. It's like if the world just wants to just forget about me at this point, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. And, and I there's a sense of relief to a certain degree. Speaker 1 And then I created an online course, and then the relief got deeper. And so now it's like, well, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do, but I like to talk about it. So I've started to do more podcasts and the curiosity is kind of over. I'm not in the research and development part of the work. I'm I feel like I want to be just talking about the work instead of doing it at this point, like being a teacher instead of a therapist, you know? Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I think it's a good spot to be, man, I, I more and more people with the internet especially know YouTube is such a cool thing, especially with, you know, we live in this. It's not necessarily a social media algorithm. It's like a, interest algorithm at this point, you know, so somebody starts watching, you know, they watch this one. Speaker 2 We talk about Kundalini a lot. And, you know, now their algorithm is going to feed on more, more Kundalini type stuff, which I do I do think this could be another interesting part of our conversation, Sean, is do you think that, like philosophizing and reading about this content can cause a Kundalini awakening, do you think content for sure. Speaker 1 Yeah. My videos, well, my videos have caused psychosis for people. Just watching my videos is just like Kundalini awakening. You want to call it a Kundalini awakening? I want to call it psychosis. I my website, like my book, it's called Bipolar Awakenings. So I kind of put in that the paradox that this thing can cut both ways, you know, it can be a blessing. Speaker 1 It could get leave you medicated for life, depending on how you deal with it. Yeah. You know, so any information about this, reading a book, reading a spiritual text is a common what I call a trigger. No. Common triggers are like death in the family. Going to university is a common trigger because you're changing is the most common trigger because you're changing cities. Speaker 1 You're leaving your family behind. You're being exposed to people. You've never been exposed to people from different parts of the country. For example, you're typically not doing as well at universities. You didn't you, as you did in college, like you're probably the top of the class in high school, then you're just one of the dregs when you get to university can be very challenging. Speaker 1 The ego. And you might be doing a lot of drugs too. So you put all that together. It's a recipe for psychosis, you know. Yeah, yeah. Or Bipolar Awakening. It's a recipe for bipolar awakening. We'll put it that way. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Either way, your self will be challenged. Okay. So. So where do you see the self? Where do you see identity? Do you think as a culture, we should be reshaping the way that we interpret and talk about identity in ourselves, in these things? Speaker 1 Wow, that's a deep question. I don't know if we're ready for that depth, not identity. That's that's kind of tricky. But, you see, I think we're starting to veer there a little bit. You hear people talk. Oh, there's one place where it really comes up a lot. There's all of these fake videos on YouTube by, they say they're the words of Carl Jung and they're the words of Alan Watts, you know? Speaker 1 But once you get past the fact that, well, it's not really Carl Jung and it's not really Alan Watson, they're both dead and, you know, like, how are they? What's talking about? Social media. He died in 1973. There was no social media. You know, once you get past that, though, and you and you listen to how they talk about life and living and, this thing that's even I'm just learning about. Speaker 1 It's still a process of individuation, you know, where you're pulling your projections back from the world. You know, you're pulling back codependent relationships where you're looking for other people to fulfill you, you know, which is a typical marriage, you know, that's a, a codependent relationship is a typical marriage. But when you look at that, it's like, okay, it's natural, but maybe it's not optimal. Speaker 1 Maybe there's another way to sort of come at it, you know? And I was divorced last year and we had a very good marriage, I think. But and we're still friends. But there was a part of it where I realized, whoa, hang on. Like, I've sacrificed a lot of myself by being in this marriage. There. There's a real codependency going on here. Speaker 1 And I got to figure that out, you know? Yeah. So and this year has been a lot of deep introspection and often very painful, and a lot of somatic movement and, jerking through the chest, the belly, the hips, the neck, clicking anytime. I would just sort of settle down and focus on my own emotions. It would be like my body would take on a life of its own. Speaker 2 Yeah. It's almost like you got to, like, physically embody who you're now supposed to become or something like you're, you know, like physically changing into to who you are next or, or something, you know. Speaker 1 And the weird and synchronistic part would be like, I put on one of these, like Alan Watts or or, Carl Jung videos on YouTube and listen to them and I noticed that sometimes my body would spontaneously jerk on specific points. Right? Yeah. It'd be like, this is what you're looking for, jerk. You know? And it was like, what is doing that? Speaker 1 What is causing my body to spontaneously convulse on specific words in this video? Yeah. You know, it's it's a divine. And I should bring it up too. And and you see it in the breathwork is the healing agent is actually a divine intelligence. It's a higher power. You can call it God could be aliens. It could be, could be, angels. Speaker 1 But it's definitely a higher intelligence. And working with people on ten day retreats, you see how it unfolds. And it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Speaker 2 So, so how do you when you come across someone with a more atheistic background, who, who, who, like I said before, you know, doesn't necessarily love all these spiritual words, doesn't really have a place in their, you know, psyche or understanding of who they are for kind of, you know, this, this divine being much larger than, you know, my, my, lowercase me self, how do you how do you navigate that with them? Speaker 2 Like, are they able to if you're able to describe like nature or the laws of nature, does that help with them to to kind of penetrate that or. Speaker 1 No, it doesn't help. And this is where the work of Ken Wilber really comes in. And Ken Wilber talks about the evolution of consciousness. Right? Yeah. And one of the things he says is that the first stages of consciousness, like the first six stages, and we have four that are very common. The first two are very infantile, generally are related to illness, and then the next four are pretty common. Speaker 1 And they're all trying to get the other people to see the world the way they think. And the biggest, the strongest example is when a religious person who is constantly trying to convert other people to their religion, you know, but at the same time, the the diversity crowd, the LGBTQ crowd, they do the same thing. I mean, if you don't see the world through their lens, the MAGA crowd, if you don't see the world through their lens, it's like, you know, you're I don't know, you need to be deported. Speaker 2 There's bad other. Yeah. You're evil. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So so they will see different stages of consciousness, will see the other person as evil or stupid, or. Yeah, like a sinner or just something's very wrong with them, you know? But at a certain, like, once you realize the developments going on, your intention is to help people out. And so if somebody is, say, say, for example, you got a, a former drug addict who goes to church every Sunday and that's what's holding his life together. Speaker 1 Beautiful. That's where he's supposed to be. Is he a racist? Sure. He's a racist. Let him be a racist. He's got bigger issues in his racism because he's going to die if he doesn't, if he leaves this church, you know? But then other people are struggling with certain stages. Like what? Maybe. Maybe you're getting more rational and you're wondering, well, is Jesus even real? Speaker 1 You know, if you're having these kind of thoughts or, then you can introduce to them ideas that are a little more atheistic, because that would be an actual step forward, you know, to to get people thinking rationally is a step forward. But then what happens when people are atheistic is eventually they lose meaning in life? Like, what's the point of living? Speaker 1 You know, existential angst is a very common depression for people with atheism or. Yeah, like it's a disease or something. And I was one of those people I just when I was at the early agnostic, which is like where you scientifically believe that it's impossible to prove that God does or doesn't exist. I felt like I was in a lost world, man. Speaker 1 I was just I didn't know what to do with my life in my 20s that followed depression, you know. But then coming out of that atheism, if somebody is really in that existential angst, like if they're proud to be an atheist and are successful in they're doing well in their materialistic good, let them go. Let him do his thing. Speaker 1 But if he's struggling, then you could say, well, what's your intuition telling you? You know, do you want to stay in your job? Do you want to live in the city? Do you want to stay in this relationship? If the answers are no, it's like, well, what then? What is your deeper intuition saying? And once we tap into the intuition, then we're starting to follow like the inner voice of God, you know, like this, this divine intelligence within or or in a bigger picture, even if you want to go way out there, the quantum field, like the quantum intelligence, you know, because I'm a parallel universe guy at this point, you know, so I think Speaker 1 there's a whole bunch of Seans, you know, there's one, Sean, that the drug addict and one Sean's a priest and there's another Sean that's a doctor somewhere. And. And then I don't know what the hell I'm doing here, but it's it's pretty trippy, I can tell you that. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. Another not saying he he has a thing. He elixir piece like I, I'm in this one over here. How did you get into that one over there? Speaker 1 He says that it's always really something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. But, Yeah, I like that, though, you know, trying to find a way in their language that doesn't, you know, close them off, you know, because I find that, like, you know, a lot of people shut down with a lot of these, a lot of these words, you know, a lot of these therapy speak and spiritual language and all of this stuff nowadays is, it's not only a lot, but it's very, like, like I said before, triggering, you know, like just a few sentences can really make someone lock up and then, you know, you're not going to really get any progress with them. Speaker 1 Yeah. And everybody's everybody's on their own journey. And to a certain degree, as much as you want to help somebody and I want to help a lot of people, but that journey does need to be respected. To the point where I'm just kind of I think I'm more than kind of nonchalant about what I'm doing now more than any other time. Speaker 1 And then September, believe me, I wasn't in, but I think I had some sort of a breakthrough of, of, of a sort after an extremely painful September. And then now it's more just like, oh, good, let's go to the beach, you know, and just accept what's coming. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Well, happy November to you, sir. Speaker 1 Thank you. Yeah, it's been a better month, man. Yeah. Paradoxically, drinking a lot of beer lately. Funny enough, it's like, hey, I've been Mr. no drinks, but I'm living in a town where there's just a lot of drunks in this town. Yeah, and, I meet my friends on the weekend, and we have some drinks, and I do it more to be social than anything else, but. Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 You know, you know, I, I thought about, two things lately, both alcohol, the, the liquid courage, as they call it, as well as small talk. You know, I went through periods where I was very against both. And, I thought it was so much cooler than small talk. And then, Yeah. I've really been thinking a lot lately. Speaker 2 These last few months of how great small talk really is to just. We're we're just we're kind of looking for a connection. It's not so easy to just dive layers deep with a stranger right away. You don't always want that. It's okay to like how do I find a way to just smile with another individual? And sometimes it's laughing about the silly traffic or the weather, you know? Speaker 2 And in, in that same realm, as much as, like, alcohol, you know, it's a spirit and, you know, it has all these negative things. We deal with any sort of like depression or bipolar. Maybe alcohol isn't always your friend, but, it's also, you know, half a beer in, and I'm remembering how much I love this friend that I'm getting to have a conversation with and just talking about whatever without it needing to be all spiritual and deep. Speaker 2 We're, you know, laughing about fart jokes or whatever it is you're connecting, right? You know, those simple things that at some point in your path, you push away, they come back around. Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think that's a little bit synchronistic in my own process because you're saying this because I'm a person who does not like small talk. Like, really? But now I'm living in a city by myself. I've got a few close friends. Well, I've got a few friends here and I'm learning that superficial conversation is just the way it's going to be, and you might as well enjoy it, you know? Speaker 1 Yeah. And so I am more active about the small talk. How's the weather? You know, this kind of thing. What are you doing this weekend? Well, you kind of fine man that. Speaker 2 This this is kind of, like, a little bit corny, right? But you kind of find that you could still find a way to love. Love someone without, like, your favorite language, you know, like, I can go to a if I'm on a road trip and I'm in Louisiana and I stop at a gas station and I can tell maybe the person is having a rough day or whatever, maybe I don't even analyze their life at all. Speaker 2 And I just have a quick little two minute conversation, and it's kind of silly about whatever they were talking about. It has nothing. They didn't learn about my deep knowledge of philosophy, or they didn't learn about my, whatever thing that I think is going to bring me joy or happiness. But I walked away and I'm chipper as I'm walking out of that store and they're smiling. Speaker 2 Whatever. You know, that's I don't know, that's that's connection. Speaker 1 You know, it's it. To tell you the truth, I think the best thing like, because I live alone and sometimes I can get a little lonely. Sometimes I think the best thing I can do for my own loneliness when it comes up, is just get it. An Uber broken Uber for like 20 minutes. You know, I have great conversations with Uber drivers. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, they got nothing to do. They're driving around all day and I've had some really fun, funny conversations with Uber drivers both here in Brazil and in Canada. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 I had a guy thank me the other day, actually, for talking to him because he was a little bit, a little bit of a language barrier, and I could tell he probably gets a little frustrated trying to. But, you know, we were talking it was a little clunky, but at the end he was like, thank you very much for for taking the time to talk to me. Speaker 2 I'm like, dude, of course. Like, I can't believe you just had to thank me for talking to you, you know? Speaker 1 But, I remember I had an absolute nightmare of, retreat in India. In South India. I can't go into the details. It's in the book. But they threw me out. They got spooked by what I was doing. Basically, I went and they put me in this taxi for a four hour taxi ride back to the airport. And at one point, I just go rush. Speaker 1 Yes, sir. Do I seem like a bad person to you? He goes, no, sir. You are a cool guy, sir. Yeah, man. It was like Raj was my therapist in that moment, you know? Yeah. Sorry for the Indian accent. I had to do it. Speaker 2 No, I love it. I'm so glad you did. I'm a huge fan of, comedy. I'm actually going to a comedy show tonight, so I'm a bum. Oh, great. And anywhere I could insert comedy into the conversation, I'm in, man. So thank you for it. Speaker 1 Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Okay. Well, I want to I would love to talk a little bit more about Kundalini itself, if you don't mind. So. Speaker 1 For it. Speaker 2 I'm always, like I said, since the beginning, I'm always kind of trying to bring along the person who's new. Maybe they're in the car ride or they're, you know, they're with their significant other who likes my podcast, and they don't really know. I like to like, bring people aboard so they can feel like they're part of the conversation. Speaker 2 You know, you know as well as I do that Kundalini is, it instantly feels very far fetched. It's like, if this is an energetic snake coming out of my butt, what are you talking about? You know, but, bring it back to kind of like, this divine energy that is, you know, within all humans. And it could be, you know, activated release, like, like, I think the best way to describe it, it seems cheap to those people when I say it, I feel. Speaker 2 But, I would say, like, you know, Jesus had an awakened Kundalini. You know, I would say the Buddha had an awakened Kundalini. I don't know these for a fact, but I think it's just a good way of explaining it. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 They were, you know, again, not the US having Kundalini awakening. It's means that we're like now enlightened as just regular people or something. But, I don't know, how do you demystify the word Kundalini, Mr. Blackwell? Speaker 1 I do I do demystify it. Well, I like to start by saying that there was in like about the 1930s, there was a guy named Gopi Krishna in India, and he had dedicated his life to God and meditating every day. And then all of a sudden it started with him. And one of his symptoms was, he just had this insatiable thirst. Speaker 1 And no matter how much he drank, his mouth was always hot. He was always burning. That was one of his symptoms of his kundalini process. Okay. My first client, Livia, she was dealing with the same thing. She called me a few months after one of our retreats, chant. I'm just drinking water all the time. I can't get rid of this burning mouth. Speaker 1 You know Gopi Krishna, at the time, he knew he was in some sort of a kundalini process and he knew that it looked very similar to madness. He contacted every guru. He could get in touch with every mystic guru in India that he was aware of, and there were a lot he couldn't find a single one that had had a Kundalini experience. Speaker 1 Wow. Okay, so we're talking about Indian mystics in 1935. These experiences are very common now for completely untrained people, okay. Regular teenagers having Kundalini experiences, they don't know what's going on, but sometimes they just follow their intuition and spontaneously start to move with this stuff to sort of unlock it, you know, and other people become afraid of it, you know? Speaker 1 So what to make of it? I think that we are in a bigger kind of a global awakening of some kind. Groff was big on the astrology of the whole thing, and I think that. And this gets woowoo. Okay, this does get woowoo, but I think that there's a just a need for authenticity that's happening now in our world that earlier generations never thought to go to, even with their most intimate partners. Speaker 1 You know, like you and I are having, I think, an incredible conversation, you know, which I have not had with, oh, I could probably count on, you know, my finger, my fingers, how many times I've had a conversation where I felt someone is so just with me and real, you know, it's for the most part, that authentic connection. Speaker 1 I think you're better off trying to find that with your cat and with, you know, a family member or something like that. So there's something there's a demand for authenticity. And one of the things that's coming up, I'm sort of meandering around the question, but please. Speaker 2 Do you Grant. Yeah. Speaker 1 Where where we met on Pod Match. There's all kinds of pod match profiles of of a bunch of different podcasts. And the one word that keeps coming up in everybody's podcast profile right now is the word roar. Everybody's saying, oh, this is the place for roar, conversation. Roar, roar, roar. Unfiltered, unfiltered, raw, unfiltered, raw filter. And almost to the point where it's kind of a joke, but people, I think maybe it's because of the AI coming in are getting brittle against inauthenticity. Speaker 1 They want real life experience, they want real connection. And to have that, you do need to get more honest with yourself, you know? And therapy can help. But I don't know. I think there's a lot online that that can help these days as well. And it's a, it's an introspective movement. And once you start to get introspective, the Kundalini is just going to pop, you know, eventually it's going to it's going to show up in different ways and you're going to realize it eventually. Speaker 1 I think, yeah. Speaker 2 You know, wouldn't that be wild if all the podcasters just start having Kundalini awakenings? Speaker 1 Well, it's the end. It's a different kind of conversation you have as a podcaster too, because you guys are having and I've done some podcasts too, but it's like, okay, here we are, 60 minutes, just me and you uninterrupted, you know? Yeah. Speaker 2 How often you do that? Speaker 1 Not too often. Yeah. Not too often. Yeah. Yeah. About things you're genuinely interested in you know. So it's a, it's a very different kind of thing. I, I feel more connected to you, for example, than I would, my, neighbor that I see every day, that I see physically every day. Yeah. You know, I've never had a conversation like this with him. Speaker 1 You know, we talk about the women at the beach, we talk about the drunks, we talk about some gossip about the neighbors. And. And that's our thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2 We're like, what's around us right here, you know? Yeah. You know, you don't get too ethereal or too meta or too birds eye systems thinking. Speaker 1 You know, and we I have fun with this guy. He's a great guy. Yeah. Of course. But it's not. It's not like this. This is a whole other. This is a kind of a conversation that I think can inspire people. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think so, too. I mean, you know that. That's why I like to do them. You know, obviously I love them too. But, you know, I like to think that there's I keep referencing, like, the listener, you know, when I first started, that made me starting this podcast years back was kind of at, not like the height of it kept kind of on like the decline of my kind of awakening. Speaker 2 And, I was I had been listening. I was I started basically, I want to solve all my childhood trauma. I wanted to fix everything that was broken about me, you know? And so I just went to town with excavators and shovels and everything about my psyche. And my insides, and I really just tore it up. And I was really, you know, pretty loosey goosey for a little while. Speaker 2 And, I was listening to podcasts, and I was just learning so much. And I listen to audiobooks and I'm taking notes, and I'm just unraveling, learning so much. And it was so fun and so great and so awesome was just I felt like a new person every day. I'm just shedding layers, right. And, I would hear things on a podcast like, so, you know, a couple dorky comedians talking about whatever. Speaker 2 In two hours and 13 minutes in this, one guest would say this one sentence that would just like, I have to pause it and I have to, like, sit down. And it just changed me. And it I'm just I've never heard anybody talk like that, especially like a man in this instance or whatever. And so I would notice how just casually listening to podcasts would profoundly change me, you know. Speaker 2 And so that led that was a lot of the reason why I started doing the podcast and things too. So I, you know, I'm sure I'm not the only person in that boat, you know? And so isn't that cool to think that we're all changing one another by sharing our, our personal conversations and other people can listen in on? Speaker 1 Yeah, I've never thought about that before, but certainly people listening to authentic, raw conversation is going to have implications for a real life, you know, because people will start to be more authentic in their daily lives with their friends and things like that. They're going to want to open up. They're going to want to reveal themselves more. And it's self-revelation. Speaker 1 And as you peel back those layers, then all of a sudden you get the tweaks and the burning and the the heart palpitations and the leg twitches and all that kind of goofy stuff, the pins and the toes and yeah, yeah, those kundalini symptoms. Speaker 2 All the fun, exciting stuff. Okay, well, I want to be respectful of your time, Sean, we are, getting towards the end here. So say someone is interested in this. They love all that you've said. You know, they're going to go check out your websites and everything. What's what's not only new on the horizon for you. Speaker 2 Bipolar awakenings is your most recent book there. Firstly, would you this is probably a hard question to ask an author. Would you recommend your first one or your second book if you had to choose one as like their first intro to your work? Speaker 1 Oh good question. If you don't know me, then, the first one, it's an easy read. It's a two day read, right? Nice. Yeah. The second book, after every chapter, you need to sit down. Yeah. You just need to be like, did this really happen? Oh my God. And you just need to go and digest and take a break and and it's and it's annoyingly deep and detailed. Speaker 1 And I love it. It's for my money is better than the Bible, but that's just my own unbiased opinion. Speaker 2 You know, sign me up. Sounds good. That's awesome. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Well, cool. Okay, so so they'll check out your newest book or maybe dive into your older, older teachings. Speaker 1 Well, both are free PDFs on my website, Bipolar awakenings.com, and they're. Speaker 2 Both free PDFs. That's amazing. That's cool. Speaker 1 They offer that. Yeah. And I and I've got some online therapeutic approaches that I use to we haven't had time to get into it. But you know that's something we have. But I also do a free 30 minute consultation for people. Speaker 2 Can I I don't want to I don't want to rush past it. We do have a few minutes. Can you tell me a little bit more about your online online courses? What do you offer? What can they get into? Speaker 1 Well, on my retreats, I learned that I was picking up the unconscious materials of my client. Like their pain. Oh, that's. Speaker 2 I actually had notes about this. I did want to ask about this, so. Yes. Speaker 1 Okay. Well, I and so, to make a real long story short, with the help of, one of my clients who became a supporter, Monica Kettler, I always have to give her credit, too. We realized that we were picking up unconscious material from the clients and that having us breathe on behalf of the client, actually going into the client's pain really strengthened the retreat process. Speaker 1 Yeah. Because, for example, I've got tons of experience in breathwork and it's not my pain. So if I'm breathing on your behalf, I can go into things that you're not ready for, you know, that became standard part of our retreat process. First my client would breathe and then I would breathe after that. Then I learned, guess what? Speaker 1 This works at a distance. I can do distance work like this. And that's a long story I get into in the book. But, so I have a thing called distance surrogate breathwork that I can do on people's behalf. And basically it's a two hour session where I'm listening to breathwork music and twitching and working, you know, working out whatever I feel is going on. Speaker 1 And then the client will have some sort of synchronistic material so that they know that I'm working on them. Most of the time it's dreams that come afterwards where they know it's their material, you know, they just know that this is about their life. Like last week, I had a dream about having to apologize for my criminally oriented brother. Speaker 1 And this guy had a had a brother who had been to jail, you know, I that kind of thing. It could also be visual things that pop up during the session, although that's less common these days, and sometimes physical sensations and and sometimes simultaneous physical sensations. So I was in a session with a guy from New York, and at about the 20 minute mark, my arms just snapped right out of their sides. Speaker 1 And when I finished the session, I got a text from him and my arms just snapped right out of my sides. Whoa. Yeah, like crazy stuff happens where it's like, you know, you're connected, you know? So. And if you don't, I'm open to return people's feet. So that's something that I do for people. And I also have a training program where I'm if people have a supporter, I'm open to teach the right people how to do breathwork in their own home. Speaker 1 If they've got someone who's willing to learn the training with them. So far, I've had no takers, but that's there too. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess we'll see. Speaker 1 Yeah, I keep trying to make the work cheaper and more accessible, but keeping it safe as well, you know. Speaker 2 Sure. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I, I'm sorry I keep having more questions. Come. How do you. Monica. Speaker 2 How did you how do you. I don't want to say protect yourself, because that sounds like, How do you not only stay sane and protect yourself? I guess, but, how do you, like, once you notice? Okay, this is not only this. This is not my energy to work with. Now, let me transmute it. But how do you even get to the point where you can decipher your intuitive, like, the things you're working on versus other people's energy? Speaker 1 How do you, Well, the first thing is that that while it's with me, it feels like it's my own, you know? And so I just treat it like it's my own and go through it as if it's my own material. But then once I look at the content and I look at how I see, feel later, it's pretty clear that it's the client's material. Speaker 1 Because when it's your material and you work through it like this is your own unconscious material surfacing, when that happens, it leaves a lasting impression with you, and sometimes you need to sleep on things. You need to think about it. For example, if you had some anger come up, you might feel angry after the session, for example. That kind of thing. Speaker 1 But when it's somebody else's material, it just passes through. You like energy, even if it's angry or shameful or a birth related, and you just look at it, you go, it's like you're watching the whole thing happening. It's moving through you, and you don't have any ego in the game. That's another part of it. It's being done by the quantum field. Speaker 1 This, the inner healer, is actually a healing field that is sending that energy to you to process. Right? So you're just acting like a servant or something. You're just or you're just cleaning whatever's coming your way. That's it. So, if you think on the Big guru and I'm going to heal you, that's not going to happen because there's too much ego in the picture. Speaker 1 You need to genuinely want to do this for people and, want their best, best needs at heart, you know, and you just filter it through like it's your own stuff. Speaker 2 Yeah, I love that a little bit easy actually. Speaker 1 Yeah, I. Speaker 2 Was I love that I, I was able to ask that because I had a lot of struggles. I think, you know, probably a lot of people who go through this stuff or would consider themselves somewhat of empathic, you know, in some ways that sensitive at the very least. And I went through a lot of struggles of absorbing other people's energy, and it was very confusing to me for a while. Speaker 2 It took me a while to kind of like feel when I'm grounded in my own body and feel when, you know, I'd be at times where I could have, like just walking by someone, I would suddenly be like distressed and whatever. And instead of launching off into my solving intellectual mind of like, why is my life this like this and what am I doing and blah blah, just kind of allow it. Speaker 2 And then within a few seconds it's like passes through and I go, oh, I don't even have to solve that. That wasn't mine to solve. I just just passed through. Which is so strange. Right? But, I think it's a useful thing to learn how to do. Speaker 1 Sure. And. Yeah. And things have happened to me on the street, like just by accident, walking by somebody. And then all of a sudden, I have a feeling for a situation and all the whoa, whoa, like, yeah, I've kind of got to be open and compassionate, but it's generally quite spontaneous. You know, it's not like I'm walking around, you know, in white robes or anything like that. Speaker 2 It's just give me your back. Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. You know, congratulations. You've got bipolar disorder, you know. Yeah. Now it's it's just happens. I just deal with it. And, and that's it, you know, it's it's and it's common. I, there have been supporters who've come on my retreats. They just really care about the person. You know, we had a we had a girl on one retreat, 23 years old, no experience with my kind of psychology. Speaker 1 And then she was falling asleep during her boyfriend session at 10:00 in the morning. Normally, when I'm absorbing energy from a client, I'm getting really drowsy. Really? It's like it's a magnet that sucks you in, right? It was happening to her. So I said to her, do you want to breathe? Afterwards the session was over. She says, yeah. Speaker 1 She starts to go into her boyfriend's birth process. Next thing you know, she's like, I have to simulate a uterus for her. And she's got her head going through my arms and then like, I'm hanging on to her and she's struggling out of my grip and I've got to hang on down through the hips and the legs and the feet like she's being born. Speaker 1 And then I said to her, I said, did you have any sense that that was something related to your life? And she was like, no, that was fine. What? She just what a trip. Yeah, yeah. And it was her boyfriend's birth material. Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, talking about codependency. Speaker 1 Yeah. She had no training at all. None. You know, so I was like, wow, she can do the surrogate work. Then anybody can do it for anybody if they've got the empathy. And she did. She had. Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah I mean wow how incredible is that? I mean I think like you already stated, I think a lot of us have discovered since, especially since 2020, how we are able to do those sorts of things virtually to, you know, we're able to not only through video zoom calls, but like you said, if if you and the other person are both aware that the hey, this is what we're going through at the same moment together, it really does. Speaker 2 I mean, wow, what a we have so much to learn about the the capacity and capability of of the, the human mind and how it integrates with physical reality. Right? Speaker 1 Yeah. I had a call once with a girl where I was explaining how the psychic material comes, and I said, suppose, for example, I'm working with you and I see a red violin, and then I that might be something related to your life. And then actually I said, actually did do you play violin? And she's like, yeah, I play violin. Speaker 1 I grew up playing the violin. This is my favorite instrument. I was like, oh, okay, that makes sense. Okay. You know, these kinds of things. Yeah. So yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, they're like little, little crumbs from, from the, from our greater selves or crumbs from the universe or something. Yeah. Synchronicities. I don't know. I love that humans are always discovering more about ourselves as we, you know, heal ourselves. We're really learning and remembering who we really are. You know, it's as we're as we're learning more, we're almost unlearning and remembering who who we already. Speaker 1 Are that way seems that way. Yeah, yeah. Still mysterious, still frustrating. You know, I still don't know how I'm going to pay my bills this month, but you and me both. Rather. It's been quite a ride though, so. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're all just walking each other home. Speaker 1 I hope so, we're going somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 All right, Mr. Sean Blackwell. Well, I would love to just give you one more opportunity. If there's anything that is at the edge of your mind or something that we didn't mention that you kind of wanted to bring up, any, you know, bows to tie anything like that. I just wanted to give you that opportunity or anything that you would like to leave the guests with. Speaker 1 Oh, man. I think it's been a terrific conversation. I think we've pretty much said all that needs to be said on this. Obviously, you and I could go back and forth for another 10 or 20 or 200 hours. Speaker 2 Easily 100%. Speaker 1 Yeah. But, yeah, if anyone's interested in my work, you can access everything at Bipolar awakenings.com. Both books are free PDFs there. There's a link to my YouTube channel. You know, the whole bit. Okay. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Listeners, you'll check out those links below if you want to check out some more. Sean, you have everything you need, down below. And, and if you, if you write more or you work on some more projects in the past and you'd like to have another conversation, I would love to have you any time, Sean. Speaker 2 So please just reach out anytime, buddy. Speaker 1 Wow. That's great. And if I'm in Austin, I'll definitely look you up. Yeah, that would be excellent. Excellent. Speaker 2 All right, man. Well, hey, I'm wishing you the best. Thank you again so much for your time. I hope you have a good rest of your day, listeners. You know the drill. What I always say at the end of every episode, drink some water, stretch. Love yourself, slow down. And, subscribe. We'll see you next episode. Speaker 2 I'm gonna end this recording here. Speaker 1 So.