In this episode Victor Pierantoni discusses how incorporating Zen and Stoic principles can lead to personal transformation. Listen in as Victor shares his coaching approach called liberation leadership training, which aims to remove obstacles and negative emotions to tap into innate wisdom. We also explore the role of gratitude, stillness, and meditation in personal growth.
Victor Pierantoni is a coach, lifelong martial artist, philosophy enthusiast and founder of The Zen Stoic. He developed liberation leadership training to help burnt out coaches, leaders and CEOs create meaningful transformation in 90 days.
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Now here’s your host Marcus Aurelius Anderson. Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson. I’m a guest today truly embodies that phrase. Victor Pierre Antoni.
01:00
is the founder of the Zen Stoic philosophy. His vision is to liberate 1 million people from their own emotional matrix over the next decade. He works with impact focused leaders to help them live with unshakable inner peace within themselves and proliferate transformational work in their communities. Victor, the Zen Stoic, this has been a little while coming. Thank you so much for your time and for being a guest today. Thank you for having me, Marcus. It’s an honor to be here, man.
01:29
Yeah, this is awesome. And real quickly, can you send us or can you tell everybody your Instagram handle, your LinkedIn handle, where we can start to follow you and learn more about this philosophy that we’re going to delve deeply into today? Absolutely. Yeah. So the best place to find me and contact me is my Instagram. That’s where most of my content is going to be displayed. So that’s victor.zenstoic. And if you go on LinkedIn, if you just type in my name and or Zen stoic, you’ll find those pages there as well. That’s awesome. And
01:59
I’ve been studying this stuff since I was a little boy and I’ve always seen a lot of overlap between Zen, Stoicism, Taoism, all these things have this, these ideas. Which one did you find first? And then which one led you to the other? us where that crossroads came from. So I actually, I found them both around the same time. think Stoicism came into my life first, but when I actually started learning them, it was simultaneous. Like I would read one book and then the other kind of thing.
02:28
But ultimately the way that they found their way into my life is I used to work for one of the biggest coaching platforms on the world, which was about three years of my life. That was like those in the beginning of my professional coaching career. had my own practice for a little bit, but then I got hired by this company. It’s the Anthony Robbins company. So Robbins research international for those who know. So while I was coaching for this company, I had been essentially doing a lot better than I thought I would. Right. I went in there.
02:57
And, know, was somewhat of a new coach, but I was really obsessed with the material, really obsessed with being able to help somebody change the way that they looked at themselves. And things started going so well that I ended up having like 95 clients on my roster at one point in time. that’s 95 people that I’m talking to three times a month. And that’s a lot of calls. Oh, it’s a lot. So I got a really amazing like volume of experience and it was such a great experience working for that company. Just really transformational for myself and allowing me to.
03:26
help a lot of people. However, at the same time, 95 people that you’re talking to and helping manage their problems and their goals. started realizing that I was breaking promises to myself. I wasn’t motivated anymore because I couldn’t hear myself think anymore. thing is I’m teaching the Tony Robbins stuff all day to these clients. So I needed something that was outside of that. So very fortunately, one of my clients actually recommended Stoicism to me. He was saying,
03:55
He’s like, yeah, I’ve been doing this. been really helping me with my thinking and like really getting my thoughts clear and using my rationality and reasoning. So I was like, all right, cool. It sounds great to me. And then I had also always been intrigued by Zen, right? The equanimity that one finds the value of meditation and stillness. So I started kind of reading them both at the same time. And what I did is I bought the daily Stoic and I would read a page a day and then journal, like kind of like free, write an entire page in my journal. That was whatever my reflection was from there.
04:24
And then I’d sit in stillness in Zazen meditation, and I would just allow all those lessons to sink in. And then I’d go and start my day. So what was interesting is like over time, my coaching became like, started to catch a lot of that flavor and that influence. And what I started noticing is that there were more breakthroughs happening with just these little concepts from Stoicism and from Zen and a lot less of like the traditional goal setting and personal development stuff I was using. And I was just using that.
04:54
And in 2017, I ended up getting ranked number one out of 120 coaches based on the customer feedback. So the surveys that they send out. I was like, okay, there’s something here and I’m not sure what it is yet, but I’m going to dive into this and really start doing it. So I started the Zen Stoic podcast, which was my old podcast. Now it’s the Zen Stoic path, but it has now gone from being a little bit of Zen, a little bit of Stoicism into being its own unique philosophy that’s different from the two.
05:20
And that’s the thing, if you’ve studied either one of these philosophies at all, you’ll start to see similar flavors. You’ll start to see overlap. You also see clear divergence, but some people, so for stoicism, for example, a lot of people love the notion of stoicism because there are these virtues that are sort of set out. There are many examples. There are many things to sort of follow. And Zen has that to an extent, depending on the kind of Zen that we’re talking about, but
05:48
For some people, it may be too ambiguous or some people it’s too broad. And some people need again, like the, daily stoic where it says, listen, here’s your, your lesson, go through, reflect, take that time, have that stillness to actually let it permeate your psyche and then go through. I tried to read meditations when I was 12 because of the name, because my grandfather gives me the name and it’s impossible to live up to, but you try to be worthy of the moniker.
06:19
And went to the bookstore. They didn’t have a copy. had to order it. This is I’m 51 since this is before Amazon. Finally get the book, go home to read it. And I’m disappointed because I don’t understand context. I’m like, who the, why is he telling me about his grandfather? Why does, don’t care who his father is. I don’t know who any of these people are. This is a horrible book. Shut it immediately. Go to the store the next day, ride on my bicycle and say, can I get another book? And they were like, this is the only book that he wrote.
06:49
As I’m leaving, defeated with my tail tucked between my legs, I walked down the philosophy section and I see the Dao Jing faced out and it has Chinese characters, which looks similar to the characters on the martial arts school that I’m just started training in. like, huh. So I pick it up very thin book as we know, and open it up and it says, continue to sharpen your blade and it will go blunt. And I’m like, I’m only 12, but
07:18
that has some punch to it. Like that stopped me in my tracks. I read the rest of it, you know, care about the opinion of other people and you will forever be their prisoner. I’m like, Ooh, now I’m intrigued. And it’s, and it’s a very small book. It’s 83 pages and each chapter is one page. So it gives you this feeling of again, like the daily stoic or the daily laws or any of these things where, so I went through and I would read that when I would wake up in the morning, I would read that passage.
07:47
I would try to be conscious of where the lesson was throughout the day. I would read the same passage again before I go to sleep. And then I would wake up the next day, next passage, next passage and applying it. So without realizing it, I was applying the material. I was looking forward. was allowing it to permeate my subconscious when I woke up, before I went to sleep. And then within three months, I’d already gone through the entire book and then I would do it again. So for that first year, I was able to literally go through and apply that singular focus.
08:16
to that singular lesson every day. And you’re a coach. So you understand what I’m about to say today. Society, everybody wants to learn more. Everybody wants to consume this. They want to go to the next event, the next podcast, the next book, the next program. And those things are fine. I love that people want to learn, but it’s almost like a buffet. It’s like, if all I do is just put all this stuff on my plate and I’m just consuming it. One, I’m not tasting it.
08:46
I’m taste blind to it. Two, I’m not digesting it. And then three, because I’m not doing either of those things, I’m nauseated. I’m sick. So I’m not able to, I’m thinking that more is better, but frankly for most people, I would say that perhaps fasting from any of this new material for a month would be great and say, no bullshit. What do you already know to be incredibly true? What do you keep seeing repeating in your life and why the hell aren’t you applying what knowledge you already have to that?
09:15
right now, I say that the, that wisdom that is acquired and unutilized is the equivalent of ignorance. And people think that they can out learn a deficit that they are not doing the work on for themselves in the moment. So can you speak to that? Oh, absolutely. And I love that you brought that up because there’s, there’s a lot of things in there that I really enjoy from what you talked about, especially the single-minded focus of really using one page a day.
09:42
Right. In the morning and at night, going to sleep, allowing your unconscious to work with that as you sleep, I think is a really cool idea, something that I use in my life. Um, so I, I may adopt that practice from you. The Dao De Ching. think that’s, that’d be it. That’s a good, good one to do it Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. can see the value in that. So I love that. And, one thing that I would say is this idea of in Zen, they talk about how, if you want knowledge, add something every day. If you want wisdom.
10:12
subtract something every day. And to me, one of the things I do in my coaching, so my, my coaching is called liberation coaching and it’s designed to, such a way that within a one or two day session with a client, do, we essentially do a lot of the heavy lifting upfront in that one to two day session. A lot of them describe it as accomplishing a lifetime of therapy or a year’s worth of therapy or decades worth therapy. Like that’s been described all these different ways in a day.
10:40
And the reason being is because it’s all about removing the layers of a person that are not actually them, the falsehoods, the beliefs, the unprocessed negative emotions that they brought on the inner conflicts, the incongruent values. So in subtracting all this stuff, we allow our innate wisdom to come online. So if we’re constantly consuming content, what I learned is I thought I was doing something good when I was in endless consumption of content. What I realized is that I was actually practicing a term that I use.
11:09
called Righteous Procrastination. Nobody’s going to tell me it’s wrong to be consuming like that. It’s you’re hiding, you’re not actually creating, you’re not actually like allowing yourself to be. Until I had one friend who gave me this feedback. I’m not sure if you know this guy, his name is George Bryant. He has an event called the Lighthouse Business Accelerator. So I went to his event and we ended up running into each other afterwards at the airport of all places. And he gave me this feedback that absolutely changed my life. And he said,
11:39
No more certifications, coaching stuff, cut your consumption out and start creating, start honing your craft because you’re hiding in your consumption of all these things in your learning, which is looks good on the outside, but you know your intention internally and you know what you’re doing with that. So I was like, no shit. All right. And then I dove into that. It was really powerful life-changing advice that speaks to this point of.
12:08
not constantly consuming and learning, but starting to subtract things from ourselves. like you said, it’s righteous procrastination almost in many ways. And it’s this idea of understanding that for me having that, that injury at 40 lying in that bed paralyzed, and then realizing all this philosophy that was going on in my mind, sound like a bunch of flowery bullshit. Because in that moment, when you’re in the heat of it,
12:36
It’s like, well, these people know what I’m going through. They haven’t been through this. like, no, they don’t, but they have been through other things. They have faced all kinds of other hardships and they’re, and they’re willing to do it from a place of just naked radical acceptance. But when we’re in the heat of it, it’s often very hard for us to have that ability to detach that ability to remove the emotion. I always say that emotions assassinate the truth. So when we’re in it, we had to be able to say, okay, where is this emotion?
13:05
muddying the water, as they would say in Zen, this understanding of just keeping it very simplistic. And I went through all the stages of acceptance, went through all the anger, all the denial, all the victimhood. And again, thinking about Zen, thinking about stoicism, thinking about, you know, Steven Presil, what he wrote about this idea of resistance, right? It’s an amazing book of Robert Green when he’s saying, you know, when you’re a lost and you don’t know where to go on your path, start back at the beginning.
13:36
All those things are lost on us in that moment. So we have to get everything stripped away. Adversity strips away all the bullshit that you are not all the fake things that we think that we are all the things that we think are important from other people’s perspective. All this shit that we get good at that has no bearing on what we believe or ethos or as you were saying, or incongruent. How many people do we talk to that say that this is what I want? And then you observe their actions in last 30 days. And it’s like, this is what you claim that you want.
14:06
But your actions are telling me that this is what you want because it’s continuing to reaffirm where you are. Oh yeah. And once I got to that place of just accepting the same, listen, I am paralyzed. This is what my life is. And I accepted it radically. That’s when I was able to learn. Okay. What can I do to move forward? For me, it was having real genuine gratitude, not the bullshit gratitude. Wasn’t gaslighted myself into gratitude.
14:34
I wasn’t having gratitude based out of guilt. was learning to be grateful for my injury and genuine gratitude in my opinion is when we can be happy that something happened, even if it doesn’t help us. Correct. So for me being in that place, realizing if I’d have been deployed at the time, because I just been given a team, if I was in Afghanistan in a hot zone for every one man that’s injured, takes two men to pull him to safety. means my team’s compromised and other team has to cover down another unit has to cover down.
15:04
A Chinook has to fly into a hot zone, which is a big target. And even though it didn’t help me directly, I was just grateful. Like, wow, I’m lucky. Yes. Not that it was me, but that nobody else was hurt. And as warriors, we know this. We signed the paper. We know where we’re going. We’ve made peace with that. But for me, that was the cornerstone. That was the real beginning. And once that happened, I was able to eventually be grateful for the bed that I may never get out of or the room I may never leave.
15:34
And within weeks of that, was able to actually get a little bit of movement back in my hands. And it wasn’t a lot, but when you’re in the wilderness, any piece of hope of truth, that’s enough to move you forward. That’s right. I love that you brought that up. This is a concept that I’ve been reflecting upon recently, which is unconditional gratitude. Gratitude, not just for what you prefer in your life.
16:01
but also gratitude for the things that didn’t go your way or the things that you don’t have, which is fascinating the way that it works in just our perception. So I’m going to come back to this. But another thing that you were talking about that I want to really highlight that I think is interesting is that when our philosophy becomes about philosophy, it becomes a hollow, meaningless shell. And one of the whole reasons that I added Zen to the mix
16:29
of stoicism, where I said Zen stoic is because Zen very simply, mean, there’s all kinds of rhetoric around if you try to define Zen, start to dilute its meaning and all that jazz. But ultimately what it comes down to is Zen is being perfectly and simply human wholeheartedly without having to keep an eye on yourself, right? And watching if whether or not you’re performing in your ego approved manner to the world. And then the stoicism allows us to use our minds, our rationalistic thinking and our reasoning.
16:58
to guide that sense of intentionality. So Zen Stoic is all about intentionality. It’s built on a framework called the Four Intentions and Four Delusions, which I’m happy to go into. But ultimately, the reason why I brought it to that is that sometimes a person can look at Stoicism and if they’re just getting into it and they see the virtues of Stoicism, they can go, okay, I can act like that. But internally, is that what they’re actually intending?
17:27
His intention moves faster than thought and emotion. is a way of being. And the one thing that we cannot hide from ourselves is our own intention for why we’re doing what we’re doing. So if our intention is aimed at the human experience, the direct human experience, not the abstractions and all the concepts that we want to think about, right? I know you’re a fan of Bruce Lee. I’ve seen you talk about some of his stuff, but life is better lived than conceptualized. And so our philosophy is.
17:55
serves us best when it’s about our actual experience. And I love how in your experience in that, when you were injured, you focused on what you had, no matter how small that was, focused on what you could control, no matter how small an amount that was, right? You dug into that. And as a result, when we are grateful for what we actually have and we have that focus on what we have, suddenly we start to get more of what we have, right? We start to welcome it in. And so.
18:24
That’s a practice that I love is helping to create that unconditional gratitude. Something that I’ve done recently, anytime I have a context where I either have external or internal challenge. So one of the recent ones for me was the context of money. Last year, I had an external challenge where the actual circumstances were challenging. Cashflow wasn’t what I wanted it to be. This year, cashflow was exactly what I want it to be, but…
18:52
had internal challenge about it. I noticed I had anxious attachment about it. So what I started doing is I started writing down every single day, all the little details of what I was grateful for about money. And I do like five to 10 items a day. It started off with all the things that I preferred and that like were nice and good and positive. And then it turned into being grateful for money that people around me have and what it’s doing for them and how it’s serving them. And then it became.
19:20
Being grateful for all the moments I didn’t have money because of all these lessons I learned. And then being grateful if somebody didn’t sign up for a service of mine, being like, I’m grateful that they took that money and they’re going to use it for something that’s going to be better for them. And it makes room in my roster for a client that is right for this program. And then that unconditional gratitude started to come up. So everything that would happen, good, bad, and different, I would look at it as just perfect order going on.
19:50
And it’s guiding me instead of looking at it and making a story about it. Yeah. The story that we create is key. And as you said, when we pay attention to our intention, it amplifies everything that we see, whether it be positive or negative. There are so many times that we get caught in that place of that almost victim dialogue, and then it becomes self perpetuating. Then we justify the existence. Now we build what we build this moral justification around it. build this.
20:19
false humility around it saying, I don’t need to be successful. I don’t need to be financially successful. I don’t need to be seen because I’m, I’m humble. I’m grateful for what I have. And I believe that that becomes, if we’re not aware of it, not only is it deleterious and it like brutally crushes everything that we do, but we project that onto other people if we’re not aware. And now unintentionally we’re creating conflict, friction, resentment.
20:48
And then again, what does that do that continues to perpetuate those things. So for those of you that are thinking, my narrative is this, or I talked to myself like this, be aware that whatever your internal dialogue is, it will eventually become the external dialogue of those that are closest to you in your circle. That’s right. So it’s brutal and it’s abusive and it’s something that they cannot receive well. And that’s not their fault. That’s on you. And you can still give them the truth from a very honest place, but understand how they’re going to be more receptive to it.
21:18
If we have that ability to, again, this is an idea, this stoic idea of what’s the better option here. Am I trying to be right or am I trying to help this person? Correct. Yeah. I think that’s, that’s really important is being mindful of the intention because the person I’ll pre-frame this with this, this quote from Carl Jung, cause this is something I use all the time and the teachings and the coaching that I’ve done, but
21:45
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate. So whatever that unconscious, whatever we’re hiding, because typically what we’re hiding, we’re shaming in ourselves because it is not approved by the current iteration of our view or definition of ourselves or in other words, our ego, right? It doesn’t fit into the box that we’ve decided our ego to be. And so when we do that, it starts to get projected out into our external reality, right? We start to see.
22:12
ourselves in everything and everyone. And we don’t just see the self that we think we are. We see all of the stuff that we’ve had right in the background. The shadow. Yeah. That’s right. And so we see the shadow and everything and everyone and the external reality becomes like a mirror. It’s one of the reasons that this was a recent discovery. It’s like a little less than a year ago, but I finally started to understand that whole notion of the obstacles away, right? That title of Ryan Holiday’s book, where Marcus Aurelius says,
22:42
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. And I always thought like, Oh, that’s a real philosophically uplifting thing to say. That’s what I thought it was. I thought it was just some motivational quote, you know, that was written 2000 years ago. But then I started to understand that when we set a goal in life, when we decide what’s important to us, what it does is it reorients our entire world, you know, by activating the reticular activating system, the part of our brain that notices what’s important to us and
23:11
tries to see similarities that mirror what we have inside. That also includes, I mean, if we look at the meta reason for setting any goal is we want to set ourselves free a little more each time. And so when I started to look at the obstacles away, essentially what it is, is a lot of it is an unconscious projection to show us where we are not yet free and liberated within ourselves. And it will appear in situations, circumstances, in people, in events.
23:39
Because there’s an infinite number of things to notice in our reality. And what directs our behavior is the unconscious. And so if we’re setting a goal and we’re saying, this is important to me, and we want to become the type of person that would achieve that goal, suddenly life is going to present us with those obstacles, with those adversities. So every single one of them is actually a gift and not a deterrent, but rather reassurance that you’re on the right path. Cause you’re being shown these opportunities to overcome these challenges, or you can allow them to overcome you and then you stay the same.
24:09
So the choice is ours. is. we have to choose the adversity, right? If, if we’re going down a path and there’s no adversity, we shouldn’t be surprised when we face it. We should be surprised when we don’t. That’s the indication that we are on the correct path. And if the path before you seems well lit and perfectly maintained, I don’t know about you, but in my life, that’s never been the path. No, that’s never been the one that I’ve wanted to go. The path that we find is the one that we end up creating our own from our own footsteps.
24:37
And again, we can have a general direction. I want to go over here. There’s no path in front of me. Well, if we don’t want to do the work, then that’s where we’re going to be stuck. But if we say I’m willing and I see all the briar patches and I see all this rough stuff, I’m to go through that to get to this other side or even in the process of going that direction. Sometimes the path appears before us once we’ve gone through that initial underbrush, but until we’re willing to commit, everybody wants to be perfectly prepared.
25:08
You’re never going to be prepared no matter what it is. No, in the military, know, plan survives for his contact or Mike Tyson’s everybody’s got a plan to their punch in the mouth. The truth is you don’t have to have the perfect plan, but you have to be perfectly committed because once you’re committed the plan, you figure it out. But if you’re not committed and you’re just relying simply on the plan, then when you face any sort of adversity, any kind of friction, it can crush you. And then all of a sudden it actually makes us move back steps.
25:38
Almost like with, I’m sure that you’re the same way I am. When people have new year’s resolutions, it kind of breaks my heart because there will be a time eventually in this person’s life where they will give new year’s resolutions one more shot and then we’ll give up. They’ll stop trying to change themselves. They’ll stop trying to get better. They’ll stop trying to improve. They’ll stop trying to cut out the superfluous stuff in their lives. not helping them. The bad habits, the alcohol, smoking, whatever it is. And they just…
26:07
come to this place of acceptance. And I believe we do have to accept ourselves where we are, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not willing to change or not able to change. But until you’re at that place where you can actually accept with you, where you are with the understanding that now that I accept where I am, what I am again, from my injury, it was like, had all this knowledge, but I wasn’t using it. And I could quote people. I, again, I felt pretty, you know, good being able to say, Oh, Mark really say this and
26:35
You know, I said this and, you know, Dogen said this and it’s like, well, that’s fine. Are you living it? Are you putting into play? Donald Robertson was nice enough to have me speak at StilConX in 2021. And my entire speech was about the Bruce Lee idea of knowing it’s not enough, we must apply when it’s not enough, we must do, which goes into Epictetus. Don’t tell me your philosophy, fucking embody it. That’s right. It’s where we have to put this stuff into play. So that’s kind of what we’re trying to do all.
27:04
in all these spheres to bring this ability to make it something that’s applicable and pragmatic instead of this airy Chinese fortune cookie, the little tropical thing that we’ve read so many times. Yeah. It all, it all just becomes a performance for the outside world, right? It falls into that, um, that Cooley quote, which is, I’m not who I think I am. I’m not who you think I am. I’m, I think you think I am, which when we just kind of live,
27:30
by the fortune cookie quote, so to speak, we’re essentially just trying to put on a performance because we think that if I say this thing, this person’s going to be impressed and they’re going to think I’m really cool and wise. Doesn’t quite work like that. Or especially what, because we’re the ones who have to live our own life, right? So if you’re not actually eating your own cooking and then you have a situation that challenges you and you revert back into all of your old habits, then that just creates this, this loop, this rhythm that just keeps you going, keeps reinforcing it.
27:59
Right? So that’s one of the reasons why I love the whole ethos behind your podcast here is it’s actions, not words. mean, yes, we need to be conscious of the, how we use the words, but we must back them up with action. And that action needs to help us to actually reinforce, solidify our words that we speak. Because when a person decides to line up and be totally congruent between their words and actions, then what starts to happen is.
28:28
Their word becomes law in their universe, right? That’s where the mastery comes in. It’s like that congruency that we build within ourselves by following through on the things that we say we’re going to do. Yes. Which is the definition of what discipline, right? Yeah. It’s the ability to, and that’s how we build true self-confidence. That’s how we actually become in touch with what we want, who we are. We had to have that like premeditation on adversity and say, okay, I know I’m to run into something hard, whatever that may be.
28:59
How would I like to show up? How am I likely to show up? And then how may I potentially sabotage myself in the process? And when you unpack that way before you’re there, because in the heat of adversity, it’s often difficult to make the right decision unless it’s something that’s very much ingrained in us. that courageous decision, whether it be a conversation, hiring somebody, letting somebody go, all these things are very much in this realm. So understand.
29:28
We usually know what the correct answer is, but we get caught up in the semantics of the correct decision and the execution. And we, when we know that this person is not a good fit or when we know this relationship is not serving us, we’ve already come to that conclusion many times, months, dare I say years before we actually had the balls, the backbone, or the thing that pushes up, up against the wall and says, you need to fucking change this. Yeah. It’s a, metaphor that I use with this.
29:58
is one of the main themes of what I teach is how to build rapport with the unconscious mind so that when your intuition speaks, you understand how to listen and how to execute on it. Because our intuition speaks to us all the time. It’s usually the first very quiet voiceless voice that speaks through instinct. it’s, you know, some people will call it their gut. Some people will say that, you know, this is my heart, but the intuition is always speaking to us. And if we don’t understand how
30:26
how to actually receive what it’s saying, then it can be that where you’re getting the signal month after month after month, and then it blows up in your face. So the metaphor that I use with that is you can think of your inspiration, which is essentially what’s coming through when the intuition speaks to you, like a fruit. And sometimes you’re just getting a seed, right? You can’t consume that seed, but maybe you water that seed. Maybe it germinates.
30:53
But then that fruit begins to grow more and more and more, and then the fruit is green. It might not be ready to act on in that moment, but you know, you’re aware of it. And then there’s that moment where the internal world and the external world meet, and that’s when the fruit is ripe. That’s when it has the most value to you in your life. In other words, the most nutrients and the least amount of like defense chemicals that plants will have when they’re still growing. That’s when it is to act.
31:21
But a lot of the time we see the ripeness and we’re like, oh, not, not quite. And then we let it rot. And then we have to deal with all the rotting, which is all the non-preferred experiences that we experienced. Because the way that I see it is the soul wants to develop at the rate that the soul wants to develop. And if you want to hinder that with your, your mind and what you think is right, or what falls into your narrative, then you’re going to learn from the consequences of such things. The correct answer is incorrect if we wait too long to execute on it. That’s right.
31:50
So that’s like you said, the fruit that’s this prodded for us. Can you tell me, I don’t know if I would say favorite, cause I know it’s hard to have a favorite. Who is your favorite Zen author and then who is your favorite stoic author? And then are there similarities between the two or is the diametric opposition that makes them your favorites? So my favorite Zen author, I guess he would fall in this category would be Alan Watts.
32:18
I really love the way Alan Watts brought Zen into just living as a human in everyday life, right? Not making it this special performative thing to everybody, but just being a human being, right? Being able to, you know, like the Stokes would say, they’re not the person that’s like in the books, but they’re out there in the market, in the city, and, you know, in communities actually serving and doing something about whatever it is. And they’re enjoying their life. So I would say Alan Watts is my favorite in that category.
32:48
In terms of stoic, it’s a toss up between Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, even though neither Marcus Aurelius, I know for sure wasn’t intended on being a book, which I love that one meme where they talk about time traveling. He’s like, oh, Marcus Aurelius, you wrote that book. He’s like, the what? So I love how like that was just a very sincere expression of his soul.
33:15
And like, this is just a man reflecting and yet it’s changed countless lives throughout history and been used in all sorts of contexts. So I could see why, you know, you got the name Marcus Aurelius, which maybe you know this, but yesterday was actually his birthday as the time of this recording. have, I am aware indeed. Absolutely. Yeah. That’s the thing too. And so you were also talking about Epictetus who Marcus Aurelius quotes in his book as well. Oh So that influence is definitely there. And again,
33:43
to this idea of just trying to do the practice for the intention, the journaling with meditations, much in the same way where Epictetus wasn’t writing anything down. He was just teaching. He was just lecturing. He was pontificating, if you will. And it was his students that were the ones that were trying to everything down, which Epictetus was influenced by Rufus. So there’s all these other areas where we had this commonality, almost like in Zen. And we see even Zen, this practice, Jerry Colonna, one of the most
34:12
incredible coaches out there very much Zen influenced, does Zazen, does two or three settings sometimes in a day if he wants to or needs to. Or even when I interviewed Robert Green, like he’s done Zazen 45 minutes a day, every day, religiously for 14 years. So coming from that place of stillness, coming from that blank slate.
34:35
coming from the breath, coming from that presence, that intention, and now coming into this thing where now that you’re primed, you can write to the best of your capacity, or you can coach to the best of your capacity, or you can reflect to the best of your capacity. This gives you that ability to have that true vision and knowledge of what is important for you in that moment. It lets you let go of a lot of things that maybe are not serving you. And it gives you that.
35:04
dare I say specificity with the aggression of action in a way that’s going to serve you or your team or your company or your wife or your family or whomever. Oh yeah. I value the stillness practice. It’s one of the things that I do to start my day and I do it first thing in the morning because it essentially clears the slate of whatever it is that I got going on mentally.
35:29
And what I noticed is that also shows me what emotions haven’t been fully felt yet, which I learned this actually from, two of my students that were in a training that I hosted last week. Um, but they, they were saying to me that I think is Gabor Maté that they learned this from, but essentially an emotion or a feeling of any sort only lasts about 90 seconds. And then everything after the 90 seconds is story. I think the problem.
35:58
is that most people stop the 90 seconds by trying to get something to distract them by using something to bypass that feeling instead of fully feeling the emotion. And then they just go into the story for years and years and years. So you have all these half-baked emotions that haven’t been felt into their entirety. And then they create story after story. And then the mind is full of all this noise. And so the stillness I’ve noticed has allowed me to calm that noise and like fully feel what is, what is coming online. And sometimes
36:27
Right. In the evening, I always write down questions I want answers to. Sometimes the answers come in that stillness. it’s like, just directs me and guides me what to do. And so it pays off in dividends to give yourself that opportunity to create from stillness, to create your life and your day from that place. does. And what I have found also is when you have a client, you’re, you’re asking them, I would like for you to meditate. And then they’re like, I want to do a guided meditation. It’s like,
36:56
Actually, what I would like for you to do is just take five minutes and let go. I don’t want you to focus on anything. I don’t want you to have any expectation or any intention behind it. I just want you to be there and let it all go. And when they do that, of course, there’s the circus, it goes on. And now you’re thinking of a song from 1999. You’re thinking about a conversation. You’re thinking about what you’re worried about, what you’re going to buy at the store.
37:25
But that in and of itself, that ability to lose focus, come back to your breath and then come back to your presence in and of itself is in many ways what meditation is. But if we aren’t willing and able to have that ability, what happens? You wake up in a very adrenalized state. You’ve got to do things. You’re doing stuff. You’re looking at your phone. The first thing you get up all the stuff we know to be not ideal. And then if you do that until 10 or 11 at night and now your head is the pillow.
37:56
I can’t sleep yet because your head is trying to process all these things. So coming to that place of understanding and allowing those things, what I have always found is the answer that I seek is found in the adversity that I’m avoiding. And so, like you said, the avoidance of this, this 90 seconds of discomfort, but at least to rumination for 90 days, because I don’t have the courage to face this for what it is, or I don’t have the courage to acknowledge that I had a hand in that.
38:26
the Jerry Colonna, when he says, what way have you been complicit in creating the environment that you claim that you don’t want? mean, again, these are the very radical things that are very straightforward. And I love that. If you look at Jerry Colonna, you can see the same thing said by a person like Jocko or Goggins, but it’s the delivery system that gets it. sometimes I found for whatever reason, my, tweets are punchy and I try to give that truth.
38:56
And you punch them in the face with that, or you get their attention. But now that you’ve done that and they’ve stopped for a second and you had the presence, now you can slide in that, that additional element that may not have gotten any other way. That’s right. And now you’ve stopped them because the first season gift for me, in my opinion, because it’s the best teacher, because it’s, painful. It’s difficult. If we’re used to forget everything else you’re doing and say, are you paying attention? Because this is going to keep coming until you do.
39:25
And by the way, when I come back, I’m to have some friends. want to have some built up compounding interest. I love that with that metaphor, it’s the truth. And in my mind, like resistance, Steven Prestold, right? When I was lying in that bed, I knew what I was facing was resistance technically, but it was like so much more adversarial. Like it, it had killed me on the table. So it had to be more than that. But I also realized.
39:53
That the reason why I was facing the adversity that I was facing now is because of the way that I had dealt with resistance leading up to that for the first 40 years of my existence, which resistance and adversity, your brothers, they’re co-conspirators. work against us. And if we can see one, that means the other one’s not far behind. right. So it’s resisting the adversity typically perpetuates it in our lives. And I love that you said it comes back with interest because there’s this whole theme.
40:22
motif, if you will, that I talk about in the teaching. So the liberation coaching is specifically designed to release emotional debt from a person. Now, emotional debt is comprised of all the unprocessed negative emotions all the way down to their root cause, which is usually out of conscious awareness yet still operates through the nervous system and colors our entire world. Unprocessed falsehoods or narratives about ourselves, limiting
40:49
value sets that we have for ourselves, limiting identities that we have for ourselves, as well as incongruent values in our conflicts or any incongruence in the system. And all of this exists at the level of nervous system. But what I’ll usually tell people is the place that we least want to look that will actually set us free is our triggers when we get triggered emotionally. There’s such a gift there because when you react with an eight out of 10 with something that should be, it would be reasonable to be a two out of 10.
41:20
You know, you have some emotional debt because you just got charged an interest payment on that. And it’s going to come back with more and more compounding interests, like you said. So every time we have a trigger, it’s like, those are great opportunities for exploration. You’re like, Whoa, like this is interesting. Like I’m freaking out over, you know, spilled milk kind of thing. If, if we have the ability to just sit with those moments instead of go into story, I’ll be like, well, it’s because of this, this, and this reason and all these justifications.
41:48
We have the ability to just sit with that feeling, explore it and ask ourselves, like, what is this teaching me right now? What is this emotion wanting to communicate with me? Because I think one of the misconceptions that a lot of people have, especially around stoicism, is that it’s all about controlling your emotions. But in the work that I’ve done, you don’t control emotions. You learn to communicate and interact with them. You learn to understand them.
42:14
And we always try to control what we can’t understand because emotions are not this like cut dry thing. They’re very nebulous kind of experience. We think that controlling them is going to be the answer, but the reality is if we can understand them, then the emotion has given us all that it needs to give us. It’s signaled to us the learnings, the lessons and the wisdom. And therefore it no longer has a purpose for being. So it goes away naturally.
42:39
Not because we hit it, not because we bypassed it, but because we’ve learned and understood what that emotion is wanting to signal to us in that moment. And now there’s no opportunity for it to resist back because we’re, we’re giving it nothing. It’s like, yeah, we’re pushing into the emptiness. Exactly. We disperse that energy in a way that now we have a better opportunity. When I was resisting the adversity that I was facing, again, in the martial arts, if I have a bigger, stronger person and they’re already committed, they’re already leaning into me.
43:09
Unless I’m even bigger, even stronger and can redouble my energy past them, it’s not going to help. But I just have to turn them. I just have to get an angle on it just for a second. And once I’ve done that, I can redirect that energy in a way that actually potentially serves me or at least doesn’t do me any additional harm. That’s right. And so staying directly in front of it on the train tracks as you are, it’s hard to just put your hand out and think that you’re going to be strong enough and resilient enough.
43:39
And in some instances, I’ve met people that do build resilience by doing that. But eventually there will be a big enough train on that track where it doesn’t matter how strong you’ve been in the past. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done before. The better option is to step off of it and blend with it. Cause once it’s going by you, you have the opportunity to decide to jump on if you, if you so choose. And that becomes something that we can use as this energy source. I also love this idea where there’s no emotion that we have this.
44:08
That’s not intentional. That’s not superfluous. That’s not going to service. It’s there for a reason. And even an emotion like anger, lots of times right below that anger, if we’re honest and if we were courageous, we can pull below that and see that there’s fear. But within that, it’s still something that we can utilize if we are able to understand how to do so. We hear historically how people were like overcome by fear. The Stoics talk about anger. The Zen talks about anger, but it’s, don’t ever say to just completely block it out.
44:38
They say you have to acknowledge it. You have to see it for what it is. And when I was injured or even when I was doing physical things, when you’re doing a 25 pound rug march in the snow with a hundred pounds on your back, sometimes the only emotion that you have that’s readily available is anger. But it’s the way that I respond to it, the way that I commandeer it that allows me to use it as something that will make me continue to walk, to walk faster. Yes. As opposed to being that person that just allows it to become this
45:07
Defeated mentality to catastrophize as Donald would say with the CBD, but that’s the power of that. had a post recently where you were talking about the victim mindset and how we can often paint ourselves into a corner spiritually and intellectually with that. Could you elaborate on that a little bit? Because I thought it was good. Yeah. So, uh, one of the things that I had.
45:30
I don’t know which post you’re speaking of specifically, but I did do one that talked about if I go into a victim mindset or if I have like the temptation to do so, this is what I say to myself. So there’s it, you could call it like a mantra or affirmation of some sort, but anytime I have a really challenging situation and this started in times where I was going into a martial arts training where it was a tough conditioning class and I was like dying there. Like just like, feeling like just beat down.
46:00
I would just say to myself, I chose to be here, whether I remember why or not. And the fact that I’m here is all the validation I need. And so I just embrace my current reality because I see resistance. If we put resistance very simply into a definition, resistance is like essentially arguing with reality. It’s for whatever reason you think you shouldn’t be there or that this isn’t fair or that you didn’t ask for this on some level. And it’s like, if we can take ownership of that and be at the
46:29
pause of our adversity versus at the effect of it. That’s when we take our power back and put ourselves in the driver’s seat. We own what we feel. We feel it in its entirety. We don’t try to bypass it, but we own that and we own the direction that we’re deciding to go in. If we say to ourselves like, Oh, I didn’t choose to be here. like we act as though some, some outside force has cast something upon us. Then we have no power to change it. have no power to learn from it or transform.
46:59
We just essentially give all of our power away. And the way that I always will share this with students is power cannot be taken from you. It has to be given. And it’s given through blame and very like tempting thing that we do for ourselves to shield ourselves from all like the backlash of the tough situations in life. we either blame circumstances, which are like events, the amount in your bank account, the amount of time that you have, like your schedule, or we blame people.
47:30
Right. This person said this to me when I was in second grade. So now I’m never going to do this thing that I really want to do. Or we, we, we blame falsehoods about ourselves, like stories about ourselves that are just not true. Like, Oh, I’m no good at tech. So I won’t start that business or I’m no good at sales. So I’m like, I’m not going to get into coaching, even though I really want to help people. Like I’ve, I’ve heard it all, but that’s how we give our power away. That’s how we fail to acknowledge that we chose to be exactly where we are in this moment. to being at cause is essentially.
48:00
Taking responsibility for all choices, conscious and unconscious that brought you to this moment right now. And this is the convergence point. This is where we can choose to make a change and choose a different direction, regardless of what’s happened in past. That’s everything is that radical acceptance. When I was in infantry school, I joined the infantry at 38. Oh wow. Yeah. So I’m at Fort Benning. It’s two o’clock in the morning. It’s freezing drizzle out and they’re making us do burpees. And they just say burpees go.
48:29
So there’s, don’t know how long we’re doing it. We don’t know why we’re doing it. Are we being punished? Is this, what is it? And to your point that there were young guys around me and you hear them under their breath, like, custom, and this is stupid. Why the fuck are we doing this? I can do blah, blah, blah. And again, what is, what is that? Disempowering. Once I got there and I realized it was all a mind game. Cause I trained for six months when I signed my contract to get in and try to make my body as resilient as I could for what the military.
48:58
the infantry was going to do for a, to me, so to speak. And then once the first two weeks were up, when they started trying to like redline everybody and kick as many guys out as they could to break us. Once I got through that, I was like, Oh, the rest of this is a mind game. Okay. I got this in my mind. I kept my power, but I gave all of my capacity to the drill sergeants. Yes. So I was like the player in the game and they held the controls. And once I did that and stop resisting it,
49:28
The minute they said burpee, I was the first guy down. I was already done with my first one by the time I, the bail was like, I’m just going. And they call it smoking you because they’re trying to just, you know, burn you down, so to speak. But you get to a point where you become fireproof where, because I embrace this and because physically my body is to the point where I probably could have kept doing burpees, even when they said to shut up and go sleep for two hours. I was like, okay, whatever. Like I just had that radical acceptance because I knew that.
49:58
What was under my control was again, my physical capacity responding as quickly as I possibly could to whatever this demand was. And then letting go of it. Once it was done, I wasn’t pissed off that I had to go do it. I didn’t try to ask for an answer or justification because when you’re in adversity, there is no answer or justification that’s ever going to be enough when you’re suffering. Never. It just doesn’t happen. So when you can understand that now, before you get there, now you’re not going to be stuck there and say,
50:26
I’m a good person, you why is this happening to me? Why is the rest of the world get away with murder and I’m sitting here, you know, living this life of like quiet desperation that, doesn’t have to be like that, but we have to come from that place of radical acceptance. And like you were saying that that unconditional gratitude, I call it 360 gratitude where no matter what happens, if I can be just as grateful for the guy that gives me the finger in traffic as I am for winning the lottery, now I’m bulletproof because no matter what happens.
50:56
can be genuinely grateful. And when people talk about gratitude, like I said, if they’re doing it out of guilt or it feels false, or they feel like they should have gratitude when they don’t, that’s incongruent. That creates that friction inside of them. And now they’re like, I know that I should be grateful, but I don’t feel grateful. Except the fact that you don’t feel grateful. You don’t even have to question it. Just say, accept it. And now from here, from this place of being able to acknowledge it, now you have the
51:24
the opportunities to begin to say, do I want to keep doing this or do I want to impact this? Or like you said, that plants the seed for the fruit, so to speak, as opposed to being in this place of saying, well, I should be grateful. And I’m writing all this stuff down in my, my pretty little journal, but I don’t believe any of it. You’re doing more harm than good if you do that. It’s true. Because I think the, the challenge comes when somebody gets fixated on the content.
51:52
of life rather than the context of life. So if a person is doing the gratitude practice and they’re fixated on the content of writing down what they’re grateful for and they’re like, I’m so grateful. And they’re like pissed, right? Like they’re like following their brow and stuff. the emotions and the energy that you’re bringing to that practice is actually speaking everything. Like again, it’s the actions, not the words. The actions are the context. The words are the content, so to speak. So
52:23
When we realize that we are the context of life, we’re not the content and that the content is always changing. That’s when I feel that we’re able to become more free within ourselves. And one thing that you brought up when you’re saying these questions of people when they’re saying like, why is this happening to me? Or like, I’m a good person. Like this isn’t fair kind of thing. One of the things that I originally, that attracted me to your content, a few years ago when I first started following you on social.
52:52
You talked about the gift of adversity and I would say the biggest adversity that I’ve ever had in my life. That was also the biggest gift of my life. I didn’t know it at the time. We never do by the way. We never did ever like, I always say like the greatest gifts come in the shittiest wrapping paper. And for me, this was, you know, this was quite devastating, but when I was a kid, I was seven years old, my mom passed away from cancer and
53:21
All of my life, had like probably for the next decade or decade and a half, I would ask myself like, why did this happen? Why did this happen? Like, this isn’t fair. And I would just beat myself up, which is part of like the inspiration of doing what I do today is because I was a prisoner of my own mind. I was a prisoner of my own emotions. I had given all my power to my circumstances and to the people around me. And I just felt like helpless. And in other words, imprisoned in my own life, so to speak.
53:51
But then there was a moment where I realized that my mother’s death was actually the greatest gift for me because it allowed me to become who I am. It allowed me to have the inspiration that has helped so many and has helped me experience such a fulfilling life. And the moment that I realized that her death wasn’t about me, her death was about her because it was her life. The moment I detached from that, I was able to honor her life, feel the gratitude
54:21
for the role that she played in mine and able to take and channel all of the pain from that experience into something constructive that could not only fulfill me at the highest level, but also the people that I get to interact with and work with. That’s how it happens. We have to go through it. We have to go all the way through it. We have to process it. We have to accept it. And then oftentimes we still need a gestation period afterward to be able to…
54:50
truly see what it is. So when a person goes through adversity, what is it that makes one person go through adversity like what you did and get stronger and other people that could stay, they stay stuck there where something happened to them at 20 years old, but they just exist until they’re 16 and they die and they never get beyond it. I would say it’s the choice of whether or not to be at the cause of your adversity or at the effect.
55:16
Being at the cause essentially means that you’re taking full responsibility for what you’re experiencing. Now that’s not to be mistaken with fault because something cannot be your fault, but can be your responsibility to deal with. let’s say you throw a house party and somebody comes in and they like knock over a vase and it like shatters on the floor and they’re like, anyway, I got to go. And like, they don’t clean it up. Was that your fault? No. Like they knocked it over.
55:42
Is it your responsibility? Yes, because that has happened in your space, in your house. So you need to clean that up. And it’s like, can moan and groan about how like the world is doing all these things. But if we are putting our mind into being the victim, be other people, blaming other people, right? We’re casting all of our power away. So I think the thing that makes the difference in how somebody handles their adversity is whether or not they decide to take responsibility. And all responsibility is.
56:13
is you’re not agreeing that what happened was fair. All you’re doing is you’re giving yourself the ability to respond to the world around you by giving yourself your power. And so that is what makes the major difference. The more we invest into being at the effect of our situations versus being at the cause, the greater the pain and the longer it’s going to perpetuate. So what I always will say is be 100 % at cause or be 100 % intentional about you.
56:41
in your life and how you’re going to show up. If you’re even 98 or 99 % intentional or 98 or 99 % at cause, you’re not going to get the full value of these experiences or these adversities. And if somebody’s like, oh, well, I’m doing my best to be at cause I’m like 98 % there. It’s like the question I always ask is like, okay, would you be okay if your partner was 98 % faithful? And the answer is always no. So that 2 % is like a night and day difference.
57:11
for people who are experiencing any of these adversities. So choose to be 100 % that cause, remind yourself that whether you remember why or not, you chose to be in this place right here, right now in this moment. So embrace it for what it is, choose to be curious and understand and learn from it, have the discipline to focus on what’s meaningful here and allow yourself to get into that Zen style of action of the inspiration and the action happening simultaneously.
57:41
That’s exactly it. And back to that 2 % component, oftentimes what we think is a hundred percent is not even close to what it could be. Like when we truly go to the hilt, when we’re truly forced to go to the hilt, when we’re truly forced to demand more from ourselves, we’re like, I’m done. That’s like, sorry, guy, you got to keep going. Like, I don’t think I can. It’s like, you got to figure it out. There’s no other choice. Now we step into what that is. Now we start to see. So again, when you see
58:10
great martial artists, Musashi, when you see Zen practitioners, when you see Navy SEALs, anybody that’s like at a very high level of competence within this space, you see that they understand that even this notion of enlightenment, right? That doesn’t mean that they stop now that they’re there. It’s like, I’m enlightened. I’m done with Zazen. All right. They’re not done. They’re never done. There’s always this process of going through just like our workouts are never done. Our diet is never done. Our relationships, we’re always trying to cultivate those things.
58:40
But being in that understanding helps us understand that the destination is obviously important, but intentionally enjoying the journey in the process is everything because once we have that skill set, we can apply that anywhere, whether it be building a business, whether it be building a relationship, taking accountability, ownership of anything that we’re doing, having that conversation. And those are the indications that we should be looking for because frankly, they’re all around us if we’re aware or willing to be aware of them in the moment.
59:10
That’s right. Yeah. And this is reason why I feel like being able to work on unlocking your own innate wisdom in this life is one of the most meaningful tasks that one can do. And you do that through journaling, you know, challenging yourself through adversity, through meditation, through gratitude, all of these things, because you start to shave away what is not you. Like you shed the layers of who you’re not. And there you start to discover who you actually are. So one thing that I
59:37
I like to share with people anytime we discuss enlightenment is like, everyone’s enlightened. Some people remember and some people don’t. And the thing that keeps you from remembering is all the shit that you think you are that you’re actually not. So the chasing and the obsession of the outcome of enlightenment actually becomes a trap in and of itself because you’re object focused on something that you already are. It’s like trying to bite your own teeth, but we only discover what we already are by shedding away the layers of what we’re not.
01:00:07
And Robert Green said that it was this notion that we’re born enlightened. We just, as you say, forget it. And we piled this stuff on. And at a young age, I was putting a lot of this into practice. But as I got older and responsibilities in life came in again, what happens? We throw all these things on or we get consumed with, I don’t want to say a vanity metric, but we’re more concerned with this person thinks or what these people are doing or I’m trying to impress this person. And those things are very hollow and false and fake.
01:00:34
And again, being injured the way that I was like everything being stripped away, helped me see what’s really important. It’s really not. And now as I go forward, living my life on my own terms, I stopped getting good at shit that I don’t care about. stopped perfecting things that don’t matter to me. And I took that time and that bandwidth and that energy to do other things or to give myself more space, to give myself more time, to give myself the capacity to really let the stuff go.
01:01:05
Because when you’re meditating, you don’t have the breakthrough, not very often in that moment, but what it’s done is it’s primed you and it’s given you the space to have the capacity to do that later on in the day, in the conversation, in that emotional upheaval in your body, in that workout, in that discomfort. But if we hadn’t done that work, not necessarily that session in the morning, maybe those years or those moments or those hours of sessions that have accumulated throughout your lifetime to give you the capacity to do that.
01:01:35
So just because you’re, going on this path, don’t worry so much about trying to reach that, that destination of the alignment, so to speak. It’s more about the notion of, I willing to be present in the process of getting there? Because everything that we need is found along that path. That’s right. I love that. It’s so true. It is so true. Oh my goodness. We’ve gone for a little bit here. I still want to unpack. Tell me about you. You mentioned that there were four incongruencies and there were four.
01:02:05
Yeah. So the four intentions and four delusions. So Zen Stoic philosophy, the framework that it’s centered around is all about being intentional in our everyday life. So instead of creating four virtues of Zen Stoic, I created the four intentions and four delusions. And ultimately the difference between these is an intention is you are intending towards the direct experience of your life, like the present right here, right now.
01:02:34
Delusions is your intending toward abstraction of reality or concept in your head. So in other words, when we talked about resistance, that’s actually one of the illusions because you’re arguing with reality based on a concept that you think reality should be loving what it is. So the first, they’re all organized into pair bonds. And the first one is embrace versus resistance. And this has everything to do with your outlook on reality as it is right now. So embrace is essentially.
01:03:03
embodying Frederick Nietzsche’s Amor Fatih, loving your fate, having the unconditional gratitude and receiving all that is right now. Resistance, on the other hand, is arguing with reality, wishing it were different, wishing you were different. And that is a futile pursuit because essentially we’re not allowing ourselves to actually be here and now. So we miss so much of what is already there. So Embrace also goes into
01:03:32
focusing on what you can control focusing on what you already do have that sort of thing. The next pair of bond is understanding versus control. So these are very simple. Essentially, if I were to bring them down to their most like root level, understanding is asking questions. Control is making statements, conclusions, if you will. So Zen for instance, prides itself, if I had to use that word pride in relation to Zen, sounds like an oxymoron button.
01:04:02
If Zen were to pride itself on something, it’s not on its great answers. It’s on its great questions, its ability to open up the mind. So understanding is leading with a sense of curiosity, thinking inductively. Whereas control is leading with a conclusion, leading with a belief that I already know this thing. So I can’t possibly learn any more. We always just try to control that, which we can’t understand. Then you have discipline versus expediency. Discipline.
01:04:32
is the prioritization of what is meaningful to you and the pursuit of that. It is to be a disciple, like Mark Devine’s definition of this, to be a disciple of something bigger than yourself, something that is meaningful to you. Meaning that when I say meaningful, I say it’s useful and beneficial to you now and in the future and useful and beneficial to others around you at the same time. The higher degrees of benefit or value that we can have to ourselves,
01:04:59
the higher degree of discipline and meaning that we’re engaging in. Whereas expediency is the prioritization of gratification over meaning what feels good right now. How can I bypass these uncomfortable feelings and build a bridge from my not so good feeling into my okay or good feeling? That’s essentially expediency. And we can build the bridge of expediency with anything. We can build it with food, TV. can build it with, um, we can actually build it with other emotions. And people do this whole time. They’ll feel anger.
01:05:29
Kind of like what you were saying before. It’s like, okay, or they’ll feel fear rather. It’s like, I’m scared. So what am going to do? I’m to get angry instead to show that I’m in control. Right? So the bridge of expediency can be built with anything. And then the last pair of bond is this is the one that plagued me most of my life. And what has also become the greatest gift, which is sincerity versus performance. And sincerity is simply expressing what is present for you.
01:05:59
whether that is something that you think is going to garner you approval or it’s just your personal truth. So since already we’re expressing our truth, performance, we’re acting like we think the people around us want us to be. Sometimes performance can be a little sneaky because if we don’t have an actual audience, we’ll create one in our head. And that audience might be comprised of, you know, role models, teachers, parents, family that we’ve had in our life. We say,
01:06:28
I’m just, not going to go after this thing because I’m really humble and I have a lot of humility like you were talking about before. So it becomes a performance. It’s not actually a genuine expression of anything. It’s just a virtue signaling a performance to the world or to the self. And so when we operate an intention, all of those intentions are focusing on the direct experience of the present where all the delusions are focusing on outside abstractions and concepts of reality. I love that. And it covers so many of these stoic virtues and virtues.
01:06:59
this idea of once you have that understanding, you can apply it anywhere. It’s a truth universally, know, Guru Nisanto Bruce Luce-Perse says, if I teach you a technique, you learn one technique. If I teach you a concept, I teach you a thousand techniques. So the idea is this understanding, how can I bring this down to the common denominator? The brass tacks is this performance. What am I trying to do here? Because again, even like on social media, it’s very much like being rich while playing monopoly. It’s like, I mean, that’s fine, but
01:07:28
It’s not real currency. It’s not real wealth. It’s just this illusion that distracts us for the moment. That’s right. I would always say regarding social media, if meditation had an opposite, it would be to take a picture of yourself meditating. Agreed. Absolutely agree. Where can we learn more about you? Where can we, do you have, you have a program that you were talking about before you, you have live events. Where can we learn more about you? I want to be respectful of your time, but I could talk to you for hours. Yeah. Likewise, man. Uh, so
01:07:58
Yeah. In terms of the best way to contact me or learn about what I’m doing is just reach out to me at victor.zenstoic on Instagram. One thing that I’m creating and it’s something that I want to give to the world. As I said, you know, that my vision is to liberate a million people from the matrix of their own emotions and their minds. And in order to do that, I realized that I can’t do that with one-on-one coaching. And I may not even be able to do that fully by just throwing events and trainings.
01:08:28
But there is something that I’ve created that is the last visualization practice that anyone will ever need. There’s this guided visualization that I’m creating. actually recording it today after this podcast. So it’s not out yet, but if you DM me at victor.zenstoic and you just type in meditation, right? I’ll send it to you when it’s ready. And it’s essentially a meditation that by the time you’re done with it, you will have a knowing.
01:08:58
Not an intellectual understanding, but a knowing that you have everything you need within you to create the life that you want. And there is a certainty and conviction to that. And the reason why I wanted to share this with people is because even if somebody never swipes their credit card with me to purchase a service, to be coached or trained or anything like that, I know that this practice will change somebody’s life for the better, allow them to create that liberation in their own lives. Outstanding. That’s why we do what we do, right?
01:09:28
That’s right. That’s fantastic. I appreciate you so much. I appreciate your time, your candor, your wisdom, your presence. And I also look forward to being on your show at some point. Oh, I can’t wait, Marcus. It’s going to be awesome. was the prime for that. So yes, absolutely. All right. Thank you so much, brother. Thank you. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
