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Welcome to "The Activate Change Podcast," where transformation is just a conversation away. Join Gabrielli LaChiara, renowned healer and creator of the LaChiara Method, as she guides individuals through powerful healing sessions. Alongside her, Chloë Faith Urban breaks down the frameworks and tools Gabrielli uses to bring deeper understanding to the profound process of healing. The episodes that are healing sessions offer an intimate front-row seat to authentic, raw, and real personal breakthroughs, spiritual healing, and emotional support, allowing you to see yourself in the journeys of others. Experience the power and magic of the LaChiara Method, learn practical tools for self-growth, and unlock your potential to activate change in your own life.
With the LaChiara Method’s deep commitment to collaboration and perpetual learning, some episodes will highlight conversations with other thought leaders, healers, and activists on the path to bringing healing, liberation and true equality to the world.
Whether you're seeking healing, inspiration, or a deeper understanding of yourself, this podcast is your gateway to a more rooted, resilient and radiant YOU.
To experience or learn more about the method go to: https://lachiaramethod.com
Chloe (00:00)
Hi there, I'm Chloe Faith Urban, co-host of this podcast and co-director of the LaChiara Method, a trauma-informed energy medicine method.
Chloë Faith Urban (00:10)
Let's play a little game. Count how many times you've second guessed your yes this week, or replayed a conversation in your head 17 times, or found yourself absorbing everyone else's energy like you're a human sponge. Yeah, I totally get it. I was there for most of my life. The exciting news, you can rewire that. Not with guilt, not by thinking happy thoughts, not by trying harder.
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and start living like your energy, your body and your voice belong, like they matter, like they're enough, because they are. Go to lakiaramethod.com slash radically dash you to join us
and use the coupon code podcast10 to get $10 off at checkout.
Chloë Faith Urban (01:24)
Welcome to this episode of the Activate Change podcast. I'm your host, Chloe Faith Urban, and I am so thrilled to be here today introducing an incredible conversation I had with Berwick Mahdi Davenport, also known as Brother M was inspiring. We laughed, we cried, we showed up together, and I so appreciated his presence.
and his realness. You just don't meet people like Mahdi every day. He really is so genuine and so heartfelt and brought such wisdom to the table in this conversation that I'm so excited for you to experience. We talked about who he was as a little one, the traumas that he faced. it is to show up
for this moment in history. He shared even a piece that I think will be really helpful and inspiring in this moment. talked about how him and his team have really moved from fighting racism to realizing that actually the aim is human solidarity and really embracing the difference in ourselves and thus then
being able to create more of a difference in the world. ⁓ he shared a really moving story about him and his daughter and so much more. I can't wait for you to hear and for you to be in this conversation with us. And before we dive in, I just wanted to tell you a little bit more about Mahdi or Brother M.
He's a human development strategist and facilitator with over 30 years of experience. A pioneer in life coaching, he mentors and trains coaches, guiding thousands of leaders worldwide. As the creator of the ego reduction formula, he bridges social and spiritual consciousness, helping leaders cultivate authenticity for greater impact.
Mahdi is a celebrated author and a devoted father of three. So without further ado, let's dive into this incredible conversation.
Chloë Faith Urban (03:59)
I am so happy to have with me here today, Berwick Mahdi Davenport, also known as ⁓ Thank you so much for being here with me.
Mahdi (04:11)
Thank you for having me, I appreciate the opportunity to have this wonderful discussion I know that we are about to have.
Chloë Faith Urban (04:18)
Yeah. Yes, I'm really excited about it. I really wanted to start by just saying, what makes you you? What's your story? Who were you as a child? Who was little Mahdi? Who are you now? Just whatever it feels like in this moment you want to share about what's shaped you and made you who you are.
Mahdi (04:30)
Wow.
⁓ wow, wow.
Chloë Faith Urban (04:46)
You know, small question.
Mahdi (04:47)
I didn't expect to
have something evoke that much emotion in me so quickly. when you talk about how I was as a child, I've been doing lot of inner child work.
Chloë Faith Urban (04:57)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Mahdi (05:06)
And so like on time, if you'd asked me that question, because for years, I thought my job was to survive my childhood. And I had a very traumatic childhood. And so I survived it. And I thought, wha-pee, know, hooray, I made it. I survived my childhood. But what I didn't realize is I needed to heal from my childhood. There was a lot of unhealed trauma that I hadn't addressed.
Chloë Faith Urban (05:31)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (05:36)
a lot of pain that I had just ignored that was beginning to knock at the door saying to me, if you want to be your full self, you have to reconnect with your inner child. And so to talk about his, I had a nickname, my grandparents, grandmothers, I was raising around my four grandmothers, believe it or not, great aunts. Yeah, and they gave me a nickname, the nickname was Punny.
Chloë Faith Urban (06:00)
Wow.
Mm.
Mahdi (06:06)
And I don't know why, that meant for them, but I get the sense that I was special to them.
Punny was a very loving child, child that loved everyone. You one of those children that, you know, the age of four, meet everybody I would meet, I want to hug and just show light to, right? Yeah. And then, you know, my mom and dad divorced when I was five. Their marriage was very abusive. There was a lot of violence.
My mother was declared unfit mother. We were taken from her. And then on the day we were at the court hearing for our custody, to determine the custody of me, my two brothers, my two younger brothers, the judge said he was going to put us in the custody of our father. And our father literally got up and walked out of the courtroom.
Chloë Faith Urban (07:04)
Mmm. Wow.
Mahdi (07:05)
And that was
like, traumatic for me. So scary because what happens now, where are we going now? My grandmother, she stood to her feet and said that we were going to stay with her. And she told the judge she didn't want us to go to any foster care. She wanted us to take care of us herself. So I'm thankful for my grandmother. But I had a childhood where
When I turned five, I also turned 15. Because I had took on the responsibility of taking care of my two younger brothers. But that was my job, so there was a lot of childhood stuff I missed. A lot of part of my earlier life was a blur. I remember going to high school reunion, I think it was the 25th high school reunion. And people coming up to me talking about
you know, experiences we've had together. And I couldn't remember who they were. Because so much of my high school days was me just trying to survive day to day, get by the pain that I was experiencing. So I wasn't present. My body was there, but I wasn't present to the beauty of the people that were around me, you know. So that's a little bit about my childhood. But Pony was a very loving, full of life and joy. And he's coming back to life.
Chloë Faith Urban (08:33)
Mmm, I love that.
Mahdi (08:33)
You know, because he, yeah, because I'm
giving him space to come back to life. Yeah. Thank you for asking that question too.
Chloë Faith Urban (08:40)
Wow.
Thank you so much for sharing all that you shared. could feel tears welling in my eyes just imagining what that was like in that courtroom when your dad stood up and then having your grandmother stand up and say, wait a minute, no, I'm here. And just, I can't even imagine. So I so appreciate you sharing that.
Mahdi (09:04)
Thank you for
asking that question because I don't think I've ever been asked that question because normally when you're being interviewed, people don't normally do that unless they themselves are doing some type of work that's similar to that, right? So it's in their wheelhouse. And there's a lot of people now who are beginning to do inner child work because they realize they've left a piece of themselves behind.
Chloë Faith Urban (09:23)
Yep.
Yeah. Well, it's just so interesting because as you were sharing, was reflecting and, you know, I feel like I've been doing a lot of inner child work for a lot of years and had some pretty traumatic things around when I was four too. but recently it's come back around because it's like, oh, there's another level and another layer and talk about that experience of, know, when something, when you're just surviving, you forget what is actually happening and there's a lot of dissociation. so just hearing you,
Mahdi (09:57)
Yeah.
Chloë Faith Urban (10:02)
felt like, yeah, I know, I know that feeling of, don't know your feeling, but I do know that feeling of, of reconnecting and doing that next level and layer of work. And it's something I've been doing in the last month or so here. And honestly, it takes me to my next question. And there's so many, you know, I have, have some questions that we might hit on some different topics, but, really it feels like without speaking about where we are in this moment in
Mahdi (10:05)
Yeah.
Chloë Faith Urban (10:31)
history, we would be remiss not to talk about it. It feels like it's a kind of an elephant in the room in a lot of conversations right now. And I'm curious, like, many of us feel like we're at a tipping point that we may never come back from. We're at a tipping point where who knows if humans will continue to survive this, where we are and where we're going.
I'm just curious over this last month, obviously there's been a lot going on politically, globally, and also here in the United States, but I'm curious how that's shifting your work, how you're holding it personally, but also how you're showing up in your work, in your life, in your work with other people. What's been stirring in you recently around it all?
Mahdi (11:25)
That's another good question. You hit no home runs, right? Now, I would say to you that it hasn't shifted my work. It has just reaffirmed my work.
And what I mean by that is this, is that we had a vision of human solidarity, of bringing people together who have achieved self-solidarity. They're tight with themselves. And now entering into community, they can be tight with other people because they are solid with themselves. And our vision was to have, you know, to create this around the world. So this stuff happening politically,
It's just fuel for the fire, fuel for the argument of why human solidarity is so important, right? Because we can't do this alone. And I always think about the past. I look back at the past and I see what we've survived. We've survived some horrific things. In my life, as an individual, I've survived some horrific things.
And when I meet with other people, people that I work with and coach and people that I do workshops with, people have survived some horrific things. Right. So I know that we're going to survive this because we've survived harsher things than this. So, you know, in terms, I don't think it's a tipping point of the end of life. think it's a tipping point of us making a decision to never go back. To never go back to being.
against ourselves, to never go back to being our own enemy, to never go back to throwing ourselves under the bus, to getting to that point to where we are completely embracing who we are and falling in love with ourselves. And regardless of how dangerous it looks, we're going to keep going forward. We're not going back. We owe it to ourselves to shift this. I always remind leaders, have you ever heard of the 100 Monkey Theory?
Chloë Faith Urban (13:33)
Actually, no.
Mahdi (13:34)
The Hundred Monkeys theory is based on an experiment they were doing on the coast of Japan. With monkeys, there were two different islands. The islands were not connected, they were separate from each other. They noticed that the monkeys that are on that island would not eat the food if they threw it in the sand. They would leave the food alone. And for a while they did that until one of the younger monkeys came and took the
picked up a sweet potato and walked to the water and washed it. Not too long after, the older monkeys started washing the sweet potatoes. That was no big deal because they expected that to happen. What was astonishing is when they went to the adjacent island that was not connected to that island, and they threw the sweet potatoes in the sand, the monkeys immediately picked it up and washed it. And they wondered, how is this happening, right?
Chloë Faith Urban (14:28)
Hmm.
Mahdi (14:33)
And so with other studies, what they found is that we are connected mentally on a mental grid. When a certain percentage of the population gets it, we all get it.
So, and what has been surmised is that 2 % of the population is all that's needed for everybody to get it. Right now, we're at the precipice of that 2 % getting it, which is why it seems like such a dark moment because we're at that tipping point where the 2 % get it and everybody comes online. That's why you see so much distraction, so much distraction.
Chloë Faith Urban (15:09)
Mmm.
Mahdi (15:14)
is to get us to take our eyes off of how close we are to the finish line. We are so close to the finish line and we got to keep in mind, we're not after everybody. We're after 2 % to tip the whole thing over. That's all we need.
That's what my focus has been. It's not been, you know, shaken or anything. It's been like, see the reality that we are close. we are so close. You know?
Chloë Faith Urban (15:43)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. Yeah, and I guess I wonder too with that when you talk about 2 % of the population getting it, what does getting it mean to you?
Mahdi (15:54)
Getting it means entering into a space of self solidarity with themselves. Being 100 % on your own side. That's the most radical thing you could do to end racism, the most radical thing you could do to end sexism, the most radical thing you could do to end classes and caste system is to become 100 % on your own side and then enter into relationships with people who are 100 % on their own side. That will take care of itself. Because it's when we are against ourselves and when we are not
our best friend, when we make choices that are not good for us that we end up having to pay for later on. So getting to a place where we're strong and solid with ourselves is what, is really what transform everything. I want people to enjoy their life, to enjoy themselves first. Because think about how miserable life is if you can't enjoy yourself. And I know I live most of my, you're with yourself 24 hours a day.
Chloë Faith Urban (16:46)
Right? You're with yourself all the time.
Mahdi (16:52)
I know I lived most of my life not enjoying myself. I didn't get me.
I was so busy focusing on everybody else, I didn't get me. And I don't want anybody that I come into contact with to miss out on getting them.
And to be so excited about who you are and about this wonderful thing that you came to introduce to the world that no one else can introduce but you. And to finally see that and be like, man, I'm so excited about who I am, who I get to be at this point in time in my life, at this point in time in the history of the world, who I get to be.
Chloë Faith Urban (17:34)
Yeah, there's two things that are stirring for me here. And one, just want to follow up on what you're saying. And to me, what I'm hearing is feeling solid in yourself. And I know you talk about like ego and healing ego. And to me, what you're saying isn't like, let me just be really full of myself and self-centered and all of that. It's a totally different thing to be solid in yourself, to be loving yourself. And can you speak to that differentiation for people?
Mahdi (18:02)
Yeah, I I've worked with so many people who when you talk about self solidarity, it's so foreign to them, right? It's a journey of healing that you go through to restore your respect for yourself. The average person believes in the top of their conscious mind that they respect themselves. But when you look at the behavior and the things we how we talk to ourselves inside of our head, you quickly discover
you don't respect yourself, right? And a lot of people will lie about it. would, you know, they're, you know, perform in front of other people. But if you ask a person like, I've asked, you know, thousands of people this question, you know, would you be okay with us being able to listen in on your conversations you have with yourself about yourself? Everybody immediately, you know, start laughing or they like, no, I wouldn't. Because, because people, we talk about ourselves so poorly.
Chloë Faith Urban (18:54)
Absolutely not.
Mahdi (19:01)
And that is the, that's the truth about our relationship with ourselves. And then there's nothing in our life that we're going to be able to enjoy until the relationship with ourselves is in a healthy place. And so what I tell people is listen, healing cannot happen unless you reveal. It must be revealing to have healing. You got to reveal who you are. You got to reveal your scars. You got to reveal your pain and take yourself to a process of restoring yourself. What some people call recovery.
recovering what you lost along the journey of your trauma, because we all have experienced it. I would say nine out of 10 people have experienced trauma in their lives and have left parts of themselves behind. The antidote to that is connection.
It's not necessarily sobriety, not necessarily getting with other people, but it is definitely reconnecting with parts of yourself that you've been disconnected with, like your inner child, reconnecting with parts of yourself, your emotions, your emotional intelligence. But the average person's emotional intelligence is extremely low. Because when you're going through trauma, you disconnect from your emotions, you disassociate.
I hope that answers your question in terms of what this journey is like, you because self-solidarity is a big thing. Every movement has been flawed because the movements have been destroyed from the inside out. Because what people do is that before you've established self-solidarity, you will agree with people about stuff you don't agree with. You would say yes when you want to say no.
Chloë Faith Urban (20:19)
No, it does. Absolutely.
Yeah.
Mahdi (20:46)
You will not be honest about what you really want. You will say you don't want anything when you're not really in touch with what you want. Then you organize with people who are all doing that is bound to bust up because nobody's being honest.
Chloë Faith Urban (21:02)
Totally, totally. makes, it makes so much sense. you know, something I really love about you is just the ways in which you'll, you'll, you'll take sort of a concept and flip it on its head a little bit. Like solidarity, I immediately think like coming, coming together across differences to join together, right. And like connect. And, and then for you, you're going right to the individual and saying, actually it's about being solid in yourself, which then can create a
Mahdi (21:03)
Yeah, nobody's being honored.
You
Chloë Faith Urban (21:31)
a bridge or, or, but I, I'm curious for you because, you know, I know you've done 30 plus years in anti-racism work and working with organizations and you've trained thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And, and I'm curious, you know, I know you've kind of made this leap from doing it, racism work and anti-racism work as a like, let's fight racism too.
moving into it being work around solidarity. And what I'm hearing you say is that solidarity is a personal journey. And I'm curious how that then links up with solidarity as a collective journey and how that actually is going to help also change or move the needle, as one might say.
Mahdi (22:18)
beautiful question. The first thing I would bring up is how much diversity exists in one person.
Chloë Faith Urban (22:26)
A lot.
Mahdi (22:27)
A
lot of diversity exists in one person. We are each different human beings come here to express something completely different, right? Now, how can I respect, honor and appreciate the difference I see in others, the diversity I see in others, if I have not yet learned to appreciate the diversity I see in me? See, what we realize in doing this work is that when we were...
in the communities that we were in, the way we treated each other was the truth. I'm going say it again. The way we treated one another was the truth, not what we were saying in front of people and audiences doing workshops. That was not the truth. That was theory. How we treated each other was poor. How we talked behind each other's backs, how we didn't support each other when we were going through things, that was the truth.
That was the true state of our condition. So now we say to ourselves, damn, we got some work to do. Because a lot of the people who mentored us wasn't doing that work.
They were teaching that work, but they weren't doing the work. So we said, we gotta dive into this water and do this work. Somebody gotta put their toe in the water and do this work. This is the real work, the work, inner transformation that allows you to be an example to others, not by talk, but by the action you take, by the compassion you have, by the times when you are triggered and you work through your triggers to connect with people.
that you listen to people that you don't agree with, right? Because we used to be like, if you didn't agree with us, we didn't want to have any conversation with you at all. So here is diversity that we are denying because there were parts of ourselves that were in disagreement with what we were doing. There were parts of ourselves that wanted us to be whole and we weren't whole. But we didn't know how to be whole at the time because we were so focused on changing other people.
We were, I mean, entirely focused on changing other people. When we started realizing the way we were treating each other was the evidence that we needed to transform ourselves. We need to develop a better relationship with our own diversity, learn to manage our own diversity, learn to manage all the things about ourselves that makes us different from everybody else, to really get to know it. Because the average person you meet does not know why they're different.
Does not know what makes them different. Does not even know why different exists, which is why different is treated as an enemy. We're at war against different. This whole time that you're talking about that we're on the edge of is a war being waged against different. And guess who's in the forefront of that war? It's not somebody outside of us, it's us. We've been at war against our own difference. You don't need to have an outside army when we're the ones holding ourselves back.
Chloë Faith Urban (25:27)
Mm-hmm.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it feels like it's touching upon, you know, it's like our own difference and we can't really make a difference if we're resisting our difference. It's like, okay, well, wait a minute.
Mahdi (25:37)
You know?
You can't
make a difference without a difference. You gotta start first with a difference. So when you walk through the door, like you say, you meet with a group. It's a group of people that have been working with each other for a while. Your difference is coming to make a difference. But if they don't embrace that difference, it was like you should have never went because you're not taking advantage of what the universe has brought through you to change the condition that exists among us, right?
So we do that with each other. We don't accept each other's difference. We treat difference as the enemy. We attack it. We find fault with it. Rather than understanding that different is coming to teach us a different lesson than we've had before, also coming to introduce us to solutions that we haven't had before. There wouldn't be any solutions if they weren't different, if different didn't exist. Isn't that amazing?
Chloë Faith Urban (26:46)
Right. It's amazing.
And yet as you're saying, it's one of the things that I think internally, that's like one of the hardest things to tackle in our own selves. And we think that somehow if I don't belong here or I show up over here and I'm not perfect or I do that or this thing that somehow we're just, I mean, there's such an internal trashing or a self-hate that goes on in there that would say,
Like I don't get to be different. In fact, that's what's wrong with me, not what's right about me. And what I hear you saying here is like, ⁓ what if your difference is actually what's right about you, not what's wrong with you.
Mahdi (27:17)
Hmm.
I
love that. That's beautiful the way you put that. What if your difference is what's right about you? It's everything about you. It is like the present. It represents the present, the gift that you really are. It's your edge. It's the thing that allows you to see what no one else can see. And everybody is waiting for you to have the strength to say what you see for the longest. I mean, in my coaching practice, I work with people who are brilliant, who have denied their own brilliance.
because they won't accept that they're different. Now here's the thing is, here's the crazy thing about this. Even when you try to fit in, even when you try to be the same as everybody else, you're still being different. You cannot escape it. You can't escape it.
Chloë Faith Urban (27:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Yep. As, as my teacher and you know, co-director of our method here, Gabrielle, she always talks about, know, I've never ever, ever seen even twins, even identical twins do not come in with the same energy. There is a uniqueness. There's that, that soul energy or that essence of that person that is unique unto themselves. And there's, there's nothing.
Mahdi (28:32)
Yes.
Chloë Faith Urban (28:37)
She's like, I've never seen two humans the same. And I think that to me, that's what you're speaking about. And what's so inspiring is to be like, wait a minute, what if that is actually part of moving this needle and really like landing into ourselves is the biggest and most challenging, but first step of it all.
Mahdi (29:02)
We have done the work backwards. We started external because of survival, because to survive we had to do the work externally, to get these forces off our back. But in the reality, if we could go back and do it again and if there was not a survival threat, we would start internally and then move out externally. So seeing that we've done all this fighting and the needle hasn't moved in the way we wanted it to move from fighting.
Chloë Faith Urban (29:21)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (29:30)
We said to ourselves, well, we're gonna switch. We're gonna make the new fighting creating. We're gonna start creating the world we wanna experience in ourselves and then go live it. We're not gonna wait for racism to be over. We're not gonna wait for sexism to be over. We're not gonna wait for any the isms to be over. We're gonna start creating the world we wanna live in right now in our own lives. And we're gonna become the energy the world needs to have in it now.
Chloë Faith Urban (29:58)
Mm. So.
Mahdi (29:59)
That was decision
that we made as a collective group. know, that doesn't mean we are perfect. Doesn't mean we don't have problems, but we are committed to being in solidarity with ourselves. So our motto is creating is the new fighting. And the reason why is because we saw that for generations people have fought and at the end of the fighting, they have nothing to show for it, but a story about the fight.
Chloë Faith Urban (30:14)
Mm.
It's like, what's that gonna get you?
Mahdi (30:29)
Exactly,
which is why we are in the same place asking for the same stuff, fighting for the same things, because the whole time we were fighting, we weren't creating anything.
So that also means we weren't solution focused because we weren't creating. So when you start becoming solution focused, you start creating the solution, not finding that we don't find solutions, we create solutions. We're not gonna find those solutions nowhere. They gotta be created from within us. And then think about it. How are you going to create a solution of a world of peace and love and joy if you haven't created it in yourself first? You wouldn't even know where to start.
You know?
Chloë Faith Urban (31:10)
Yeah. And it makes me wonder to, and just to speak to people who can go to perfectionism here and might say, my gosh, well, if I can't create peace and love and connection with in my own self, then I can't go make a difference in the world. And I don't, I don't think that's what you're saying that somehow like it has to be perfect and you have to love yourself in every single moment for you to be able to. And I know you talk about mistakes and how important those are, but I'm, curious to talk to that.
person who might go, oh my gosh, I can't say love someone else until I love myself fully. I can't go make a difference if I haven't really 100 % accepted myself in the difference in me. But that's just, it's a constantly evolving process. It's not something to perfect. And I'm curious if you could speak to that person that might be having those feelings.
Mahdi (32:01)
Wow,
that's another good question. Another, you know, cause that's like in between the groove, right? Now, how I would respond to that is saying this, what if I would say to you that life is perfect now?
Chloë Faith Urban (32:08)
Yeah.
Mahdi (32:15)
Right? And people who are perfectionists are really just trying to control stuff.
So we can get that perfectionism is an attempt to control life, to control themselves and control other people. And we could push that aside because that's a result of us not accepting the reality of who we are and not accepting the reality of other people too. So everybody's different, right? So being perfect is not about getting everything right as it relates to a process of doing things, because we're here to learn. That's why we're here, right?
And learning comes with making mistakes. It comes with not being perfect. That's what learning comes with. All right. I was talking to one of my daughters who was, you know, she was senior in high school at the time and she took a class on, I forgot what the subject was, but she had never taken that subject before. And she did not make a good grade on the test and she was so pissed off at herself. I can't believe I didn't, I didn't pass that test. So I asked her, I said, we asked you something. Was this your first time taking this subject? She says, yeah, I'd never taken it before.
what is my arrogance of you to believe that you have never, you have never experienced this before, but you're to get it 100 % right the first time you experience it. See, perfectionism is that delusion, the idea, but it's really our fear that we have that if we mess up, we're going to be the mess up.
Chloë Faith Urban (33:36)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (33:45)
That's really where perfectionism comes from because what we've learned to do, use as a weapon is shame. We've shamed people so much that we are so afraid of getting it wrong because we think we are the thing that's wrong. So we go to the opposite end of the spectrum and we pick up perfectionism as a way to escape and to guard ourselves against being the mistake. But that's faulty programming of this world.
Chloë Faith Urban (33:52)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (34:14)
You are not your mistakes. Your mistakes have come to enhance your life. They are the things that will teach you what you need to know about your difference so that you can maximize the full potential of it. But the world is perfect as it is. And the reason why I say that is because it's doing what the world is designed to do. The world is designed to give us back what we give to it.
Chloë Faith Urban (34:36)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (34:37)
It's gonna always do that. It's not gonna do anything different. It's not gonna give you, it's not gonna make decisions for you, it's not gonna judge you, it's gonna give you whatever you give to it.
Chloë Faith Urban (34:47)
Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.
There's so much in there. I'm like, well, okay, how do we go from here? I did, and what I'm hearing in that too was I'm being reminded of something I heard you speaking about once with your daughter. I don't know if it's the same daughter or a different daughter where you were sitting in the car and you asked her, like, do you think I'm a good father? And where that led. And it feels like,
Mahdi (34:57)
Hahaha
Yes.
Chloë Faith Urban (35:24)
from hearing you talk about that, that that was like a real tipping point in your life and or how you related to others and what I'm, you know, it starts with us. And then once we've really cultivated that connection, how, how, how do we show up and how did that moment change for you? How you show up with other people.
Mahdi (35:46)
thank you for the invitation to talk about that because again, I was saying earlier that we were teaching it in front of people, we weren't living it with each other. And my daughter, my oldest daughter made that self evident when I out of ego asked her if I was a good father, because I was looking for a compliment from her. I just got through
giving a speech to a group of men about fatherhood. And I had been bragging about how good of a father I thought I was, because I have three daughters. And I would talk about how well, how much time I spent with my daughters, this, that, and the other, just bragging on myself. So I was feeling myself when I picked up from school as I normally would. And I said to me, I'm going to ask my ex, Najia. Her name is Najia. I'm a good father or not. And like I said, I expected her to say, of course you're a good father, daddy. Thank you for being in my life.
could not be where I am without you. And she says, I'm glad you asked me that question, Dad, because I've been thinking about it for a while. I'm like, what? Why have you been thinking about it for a while? And I was like, nevermind, nevermind, nevermind. Because she's a thinker, so I was like, nevermind, just tell me, am I a good father? She says, well, Dad, to be honest with you, you are a lousy father.
Chloë Faith Urban (36:56)
Uh oh! Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Mahdi (37:12)
Now, before she told me, I promised her that I wouldn't get upset no matter what she said. I wanted to hear the truth and she didn't have to worry about no backlash. And when she said I was a lousy father, my voice raised. I hit the brakes in the car. I was like, what? All that I do for you, I can't believe you would say I'm a lousy father. And I went on for like a good three minutes. Had to apologize to her for doing exactly what I said I wasn't gonna do.
But I was triggered. She triggered me, Exactly. Exactly. So I had to apologize to her. I was like, then ego came in. So here's ego now. Ego is trying to figure out how I can prove her wrong. So here's the question I asked her. Can you tell me how you know I'm a lousy father? What is that based on?
Chloë Faith Urban (37:43)
Yeah, you never quite know what you're gonna do in that moment when you're triggered, Watch out!
Mahdi (38:10)
She said, sure, could tell you off the top of my head. Cause she said she had been thinking about it. And she said, you don't listen to anything. And immediately I reacted and said, that's not true. And she says, you're not listening now. And I said, okay, so if I don't listen to anything, how do you know I don't listen? Because I listen. I know I listen. I was like being animate about it. She says,
I know you don't listen because I come to you every day and I test you. She said, I tell you things that are important to me and then I come back and ask you about them later and you don't know nothing about them. You don't even remember that we had the conversation, which tells me you didn't retain anything that I was sharing with you. And she says, you've been doing this all of my life.
Now want to tell you something, everything, you know, that's when slow motion start happening, everything is slowing down. And I'm like, wow.
So I go from defending myself to realizing the impact I'm having on my daughter. And then she goes on to say, she says, there are three conclusions I've come to as a result of you not listening to me. Number one, you tell people all the time how much you love me. I don't think that's true. I don't think you love me. I think you're doing what you're supposed to do because you're a father and you don't want nobody to see you in ugly light. So you do what you do because of that reason.
So number two, you tell people we are close. We are real close with each other and we're not. We're not close at all. Stop saying we're close because we're not. And the third thing she says, you tell people all the time that we are tight and we are like, not just close, but you know me real well and we get along real well. She says stop telling that lie because that's not true.
And I was like, wow, now here I was traveling around the world, being a proponent for women's rights outside the house, outside of my immediate family, pretending to listen to women. And I wasn't practicing listening to the women in my life.
You get what I'm saying? So I made a promise to her because I felt like there was something going on, where there's a possibility of us losing our relationship, me losing her to the world. So I promised her that I would go on a talking diet. And I created it on the spot. I felt inspired to come up with that, but I stuck to it. And the talking diet was I would talk 20 %
Chloë Faith Urban (40:26)
Yeah.
love that.
Mahdi (40:51)
and listen 80 % and I would try to get as close to that as possible in every situation I was in. So even doing workshops, I would do my 20 % and just listen to people.
it transformed my life. Because what I realized was I wasn't present to the diversity around me. Not only the diversity, the brilliance in the diversity around me because I was such a know-it-all that I was so in a hurry for people to listen to me, but I wasn't in a hurry to listen to them. But life slowed down for me and I started picking up on a lot of nuances that I was missing because I wasn't listening.
Chloë Faith Urban (41:10)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (41:28)
And that really brought my work to another level because it made me understand why self-solidarity was so important.
Chloë Faith Urban (41:38)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mahdi (41:41)
There's a lot of us
out there teaching a whole lot of stuff and it sounds good, but you go into their personal life and you see it's just talk.
Chloë Faith Urban (41:49)
Yep.
Yep. Not necessarily walk in the talk. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just found that so powerful. mean, personally, in and of my own life, my father passed away a couple of years ago and I was by his side and taking care of him. you know, I never had, we didn't have the relationship where I could have said that he would have gone real defensive and they're
Mahdi (41:53)
Exactly. It's just talk, you know?
Hmm.
Chloë Faith Urban (42:17)
really I didn't feel space to have that kind of conversation. But to me, I would have said almost the exact same thing to him. He was so all about, I love my kids, they're the best, they're this and that. I'm like, when was the last time you asked me about my life or even really know anything about me? And what I just found it to be so moving to hear you share that and to be someone who, yes, you went into triggered mode and defensive mode, but then you really did self-reflect and step into the humility.
Mahdi (42:25)
Hmm.
Chloë Faith Urban (42:46)
and say, whoa, wait, this relationship is important to me and what is it to walk my talk and what is it to listen and how powerful that is and then how that rippled out. I found that to be true. Like listening, people are hungry to be heard and hungry to be held and have your presence and for you to care about what they say. And to me, that's part of what is lacking in so many organizing spaces and social justice.
organizations and things that people are just kind of talking over each other and as you said, fighting and trashing each other. And to me that that piece around listening and holding and like, what if we could, what if we could be listening 80 % of the time and talking 20 and how would that really shift so many of these dynamics?
Mahdi (43:40)
think it would shift a lot. I think the reality is we are terrified.
We're not terrified of each other. We're terrified of ourselves.
And you hear it from people when they say, can't be my authentic self. What they are saying to you is I've been socialized to be afraid of my true, my own truth.
Right? We used to be in situations where like we riding in a taxicab with some of my colleagues and they would curse each other out like dogs and get out of the car and go in front of the audience and do a workshop and act like everything was just fine.
And I was like, this is madness. I'm not here to participate in madness. And I'm not judging them. I'm saying the condition that we were in was such that we were trying to avoid going deal with ourselves. We would rather go deal with everybody else than deal with ourselves, than go home. And that conversation with my daughter, Najia, made me have to deal with myself. It wasn't easy to look at myself in the mirror and say,
I have not been listening to my daughters. What impact have I been having on them not listening to their voice? How much of a fraud have I been pretending to listen to everybody else? Because I would look in your eyes. I would shake my head like I was really establishing eye contact because I was taught to do that. But meanwhile, while you're talking, I'm saying to myself, when is she going to shut up? my God. Because when you're annoyed all, you want to hear yourself talk.
Chloë Faith Urban (45:23)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (45:24)
I used to work with some of my colleagues that they would do the whole workshop themselves and have like other colleagues sit and not say anything at all. They would literally have done the whole workshop by themselves and not realize that you had these other talents and diverse colleagues in the room with you who have gifts just as much as you do. But they were so much into hearing themselves talk, they weren't interested in hearing anybody else.
Chloë Faith Urban (45:37)
Wow.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I was hearing you speak about a little bit earlier that that piece around like, you know, the energy that we emit, like the energy that we show up with, the energy that we emit into the world, if we're in our difference and we're solid in that, that's a very, very different energy to emit than if we're in war and in turmoil inside or
Mahdi (45:55)
You know? Yeah.
Chloë Faith Urban (46:23)
hating ourselves or wanting to, you know, somehow prove ourselves by talking, talking, talking, or see, look at me and how amazing and if it's coming from that place of ego, ⁓ it's really different. And it feels to me like, you know, what I'm hearing in this too, is to, to, to show up and to be a leader in this world or to step into collective power or liberation that it really is about.
Mahdi (46:36)
It is.
Chloë Faith Urban (46:51)
stepping into that in ourselves and being that vibration or stepping into and emitting. And to me, that's the story of the monkeys. know, it's like they had to learn this one piece and then it rippled out through the ethos, through the energetic sphere, through the grids, through the matrix, whatever you want to call it. They didn't talk. Exactly. Yeah.
Mahdi (46:56)
Yes.
Yes, yes, not talk it, not talk it, not talk it, they had to live it. That's
where the vibrational essence is coming, comes from. Cleo, one of the most powerful things I ever did in my life was admit to a group of people, audience that I was working with, that I didn't know.
Chloë Faith Urban (47:34)
Right?
Mahdi (47:37)
Because I was trained to, you you don't say you don't know. You know, like you gotta know everything. You gotta know everything or you gotta pretend like you know everything. People would say, did you read such and such book? And I would say, yeah, I read that book. I had no clue what the book was.
Chloë Faith Urban (47:54)
Sure, I totally know who you're talking about or...
Mahdi (47:56)
Yeah, yeah, know
that author. Yeah, don't even know who the author is. Because that's the kind of training that we had received because people were not doing the work.
Chloë Faith Urban (48:05)
Yeah.
Mahdi (48:09)
They were working on other people because it's different when you call yourself working on other people. I had this thing going in my mind where I wanted to go into other people's lives, but I didn't want them to come into mine.
Chloë Faith Urban (48:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Mahdi (48:28)
It's like hoarding,
right? Like hoarders. They don't want you to come in their house so you can see the reality of what they've been hoarding. When I say spiritual hoarding, it's like what you are attached to, the way you define yourself, the way what you believe you deserve in your life. Because for a lot of years, I didn't believe I deserved to be happy. I didn't believe I deserved to be loved. And that was my operating system.
Chloë Faith Urban (48:41)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (48:56)
What's his name? Dr. Ernest Holmes made a quote in his book, in his book, The Science of the Mind, that says, you may not always get what you want in life, but you will always get what you believe you deserve.
Chloë Faith Urban (49:12)
Hmm. Right.
Mahdi (49:15)
And I was getting exactly what I believed I deserved.
Chloë Faith Urban (49:18)
Yep. Yeah. Yep. I know that one way too well.
Mahdi (49:20)
Right? Yeah.
Chloë Faith Urban (49:26)
one toxic relationship after another and all these different things and challenging relationships and I, yeah, it really did take that inner work to say, a minute, no, like I don't, this is not who I wanna be, this is not how I wanna be, these are not the relationships, these are not the people, but it took the inner work to transform that.
Mahdi (49:52)
Yeah, I mean, and owning it. You know, that's why I said earlier, perfectionism is just a distraction. It's really a fear of us being linked to the idea that we're to be ashamed. We've been shame based for not getting things right. You know, all of us have a moment in our life where we were associated with we the mistake. Something is wrong with us. Right. And when we get past that.
when we could own that there's nothing wrong with us, it's just that we believe there's something wrong with us. And people gotta really get that. There's nothing wrong with us. We just believe that there's something wrong with us. But belief is so powerful. Belief is like medicine or disease. Belief is the disease or it's the medicine. If you believe the right thing about your life, it's medicine. If you believe toxic things about your life, it's the disease. It's the reason why placebos, the whole idea of placebos, why they work.
It's not the placebo that works, it's the belief in the medicine that works, right? So belief is both the disease or it's the medicine.
Chloë Faith Urban (50:57)
Mm-hmm, mm, it's powerful. gosh, there's so many things I want to get to, but I want to just follow up on that one piece. So if belief is the medicine, well, how does one start to transform? How do you work with people to transform their beliefs from, yeah.
Mahdi (51:19)
Well,
the first thing is to identify one belief that is toxic about yourself. And it's usually easy to find because we go to, I usually ask people like, you know, what they believe they don't deserve.
Chloë Faith Urban (51:26)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (51:36)
And I get real fast when they tell you what they believe they don't deserve. I don't deserve to be loved. Bam. There we go. So now we're going to we're going to get we're going to get acquainted with where this belief came from. What is costing you? Because that's what you have to do. You have to sober the mind because believing that you are not lovable, believing that you're not good enough means that your mind is intoxicated with lies. Things are not true. So you got to take them the mind through a sobering process.
Chloë Faith Urban (51:42)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mahdi (52:06)
to get their mind to get sober. So the fastest way to get the mind to get sober is to get the mind to identify what believing this is costing you.
And we literally go through a list of identifying what is causing that person. Like through the years, what have you missed out on as a result of believing this about yourself? What have you disqualified yourself from as a result of believing this? How many times have you gotten the opposite result, but still it turned out to be the same result because of what you believe, right? Get them to do that. And then we start exploring what...
belief what we'd like to replace this with, what we really like it to be, you know? What's the possibility you really like to be experiencing? And then we start creating the practice, right? But first, before we create the practice, get them to see how different their life could be if this was the belief, if this was the underlining program operating in their operating system, running their lives, how different things would be. And when they get a chance to see that, the mind is getting stronger.
would go from being drunk to sober to now having some strength to move on, right? And we do this for 90 days. And we do it for 90 days because, you know, if you ever went to NA or AA or ACA, they would tell you that you got to do it in 90 days. You go to a treatment or go to a meeting 90 days to be around people who once believed that they could not be sober for 90 days or one day for two days. And you meet people who are
30 days sober, you meet people who were 60 days sober, some 90 days, some 10 years sober, some 20 years sober. So you get a chance to be in a room with people who have done what you say you can't Right? So it gives you the fuel you need to continue to move toward making it a new habit in your life because our life runs off of our habits, our patterns, habits, and tendencies. But you have to change one core habit to change all of them.
Chloë Faith Urban (54:11)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (54:13)
And it's usually a belief that you've developed from childhood out of survival to try to survive your trauma that you experienced.
Chloë Faith Urban (54:23)
Right, right, right. So powerful and it kind of brings us into all, I'm curious if this has something to do with your program coming up, your coach program coming up. So I wanna hear about that and then I have one last question to finish us off.
Mahdi (54:43)
Beautiful. Well, I have two things coming up. I have a new book coming out. It's called the war against different All right, which is what we're experiencing right now and it's designed to Raise the awareness in us of how powerful and how important our differences Then I have a coaching program is called different in 90 days To take you through a 90-day process of transforming the way you see your difference so that you can embrace your different
Chloë Faith Urban (54:50)
Mmm.
Mahdi (55:12)
and really begin to enjoy yourself. Because what life is really supposed to be, you're supposed to, are here to enjoy yourself. And what happens is the narrative that we've developed about ourselves prevents us from enjoying ourselves. know, enjoying an idea of joining in with ourselves on all levels and really being so appreciative of who you are. I really want that for people because...
Chloë Faith Urban (55:20)
Yeah.
Mahdi (55:37)
I thought I had it, I didn't have it. And when I got it, I was like, ⁓ man, I really want this for people. I really want people to enjoy who they are. What greater gift can you give to someone than the gift of them enjoying who they are?
Chloë Faith Urban (55:53)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, we're with ourselves all the time. If we could be having fun and enjoying ourselves, life would be very, very different. For sure. Amazing. And this last little minute, I just wanted to open it up. And if there's anything else you want to share or that we didn't talk about that feels important to you to share in this moment, to the listeners, whatever it is that you want to add.
Mahdi (56:06)
Yes it would.
Well, I would encourage people to check out our website at the human solidarity project dot org and to check out what we are doing and the idea of the idea about it. at this point in time in our history, what we see unfolding in the world, we need solidarity more than we ever before. But solidarity would not take hold if we don't have it with ourselves. All right. So when we achieve it ourselves and we could then have it collectively.
Chloë Faith Urban (56:32)
Mm-hmm.
Mahdi (56:55)
And that's what we're working to create out in the world. I'm so happy to be able to be a part of that vision at this point in time in the history of the world, to be someone in the world, to be a being in the world that's working to bring beings together.
Chloë Faith Urban (57:08)
Mm.
Good, we need more. We need more of us, right? Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. What an inspiring conversation. I feel like I've gotten a lot out of it and really looking forward to re-listening and taking it in. And it's just been so, so good to connect. I really just, over our conversation, I'm very moved by your humility.
Mahdi (57:11)
Yes, yes, we do.
Thank you for having me on this show.
Likewise.
Chloë Faith Urban (57:39)
And to me that willingness to be in the humble dance and to tell the stories of like, whoa, you my daughter said this or this happened, or I got it all wrong over here. To me, it gives us all permission to be more of ourselves. And for me, I just felt my whole nervous system relaxing over our conversation. And it felt like an invitation to be more myself. And I hope that that's what our listeners get to, but thank you so, so much, Mahdi for
Mahdi (58:00)
You know
Can I say this
very quick? I don't call that humble. I call it just being yourself.
Chloë Faith Urban (58:09)
being here. Yes, please.
mmm,
love it.
Mahdi (58:16)
Because what you're doing is being honest about the reality of yourself and being unashamed of the reality that is yourself and sharing with people as it is, not as you think it should be, but as it is.
Chloë Faith Urban (58:29)
Yeah, yeah, makes so much sense. I love that, that reframe, another one of your amazing reframes. I feel like we could go on and on forever, but thank you, thank you, thank you. I so appreciate you and your work. And yes, everyone go, go check it out. I'll make sure to have links in the show notes for them to find you.
Mahdi (58:35)
you
You're welcome, you're welcome. Likewise.
Beautiful. Thank you so much for this opportunity,
Chloë Faith Urban (58:54)
thank you so much.
Chloë Faith Urban (59:00)
my goodness, what did you think? want to know. You, by the way, can always find us on the website and there's a contact form there, but I'm actually serious. I would love to know how that conversation landed, what it stirred in you, what it inspired. I just loved every second and I feel like I could have gone on forever and ever for, barely got to half of what I wanted to talk to brother about.
the monkeys, I guess as he said it, I had heard about that. But to hear him say that really felt like, right, we're not trying to get half of the world to really shift the needle. We're only trying to get 2%. And that 2 % were close, as he said. And that was really hopeful to me. I am sitting here wondering.
where we're headed as a species, if we'll survive. I'm not sure we will. for me, really in the curiosity of like, okay, and then what? How does that shift? How does that change or does it? What we're doing and how we're showing up as ourselves in our difference and being and emanating that energy that he was talking about of authenticity, of our uniqueness.
and how much that actually shifts and showing up with kindness and respect to ourselves first and then showing up in the world and emanating that out to me is profound and important. And so I just really appreciated, appreciated, appreciated deep, deep in my bones, this conversation and
Definitely when I first heard that story about his daughter saying, you know, you're not that great of a father. It really did just hit me so hard because I didn't have the courage to say that to my dad. I don't think I would have had the space to say it to him either, but it was healing for me to feel him and his transformation around that, him and his realness, him and his introspection and how
He was listening to me that healed me and that healed something inside of me when I was hearing that. And it was profound to feel that shifting in me and be like, right. Okay. Wow. That's possible. There are people out there who are that real, that authentic. And what about that last little turn at the end when I said, gosh, I feel your humility. You're so humble. And he said, I don't see it as being humble.
I see it as being real. I see it as me being myself and not hiding and not being in shame. And I was like, yeah, so true. So to me, it's an invitation for us to be as much ourselves as possible. And as we spoke about in that episode, what is it to
really step into our difference and not try to perfect it, not try to somehow mean that I have to completely love and accept myself in order to show up for other people and love and accept other people, but to be in that walk, to be in that dance and to hold that intention. To me, that's huge and is going to shift a lot in your life, but also the world around you
for that energy really does emanate out. It impacts. It shifts, it changes. It's an invitation for others around you to also be themselves, to be in their realness. And that is so important. So inviting you as you get off this podcast, like seeing if there's one thing, one belief, one...
peace here about yourself that you could step into to feel into what is your difference that you're resisting. And maybe just maybe if you could soften some of that resistance and step into more of that difference.
What shifts, what changes, what does it inspire in you?
Until next episode, thank you so much for being with me.
Outro Podcast (1:03:41)
Thank you so much for being a part of the Activate Change community. If you want even more amazing content, head over to lachiaramethod.com. And while you're there, be sure to join our email list so you don't miss a thing. You'll get instant access to our ultimate self-care bundle to clear your energy, boost your vitality, and feed your soul, plus exclusive content, special invites to live events, and personal updates we don't share anywhere else.
We're so grateful to be on this journey with you. See you next time.
Aly Halpert Thank You (1:04:30)
saying a huge thank you to Ali Halpert, the incredible musician and songwriter behind the songs featured in this podcast. To hear more of Ali's music and learn more, alihalpert .com. You can find the link in our show notes.