Practice being present for your birthday when people are showing up with good cheer for you. And that's why I think when we let the barista know it's my birthday today and she smiles or he smiles and says, happy birthday, that's just one person and it lasts 10 seconds and you can keep moving on. There's not a lot of pressure there, right? It's just a moment. It's not like it's a birthday party filled with 20 of your friends and it's lasting for four hours and there's a lot of energy you're dealing with, right? There can be fragments of joy.

The work that I do with myself, with my clients is trying to find out what is that balance of uncovering, recovering, discovering your true self and for yourself and how can you also belong.

And what I find is that the more you can do that, it seems counterintuitive, but, you know, because I think that's as we grow up, right? As we grow up and get older, that's that whole process of individuation is the more I can be myself, the more I actually belong. And not just to myself, but the more I feel like I belong within my society, my family, my whatever.

Donald Winnicott, who's one of the great British psychoanalysts said, true mental health can be exhibited by one's willingness to share their experience with another and to take in the experience of another. And that is authentic connection with another.

And that is how we want to be spending our 86,400 seconds a day, you know, like doing the real stuff, at least we can't do it all the time. Of course we're going to associate. I'm going to play my wordle in the morning. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm to say happy birthday to people on Facebook, but that's literally, I pretty much use Facebook only for happy birthdays and posting my stuff and sometimes hitting a like on a thing or two, but it's under five minutes a day. I've really decided to go on a diet. I don't want to get lost there.

Because I know they want me there. And I don't necessarily want to be used by them. I will use them. But one of my dictates also is create more, consume less.

This is all a play within us. Let's say you want the love of your life, somebody who makes your heart beat, and there's a lot of people who say, you shouldn't want that. You shouldn't want a specific person, or you shouldn't want a specific job. I believe you're allowed to choose what you want. Like, this is your reality, essentially.

It's not just to fool yourself into saying that, I'm in a relationship with so and so. Because your brain is gonna fight against that, right? But it's this idea that, I'm not asking you to believe that you're in a relationship with so and so. I'm not asking you to believe that you have this job. What I'm asking you to believe is can you believe that your belief in this is enough?

It was a complete mindset shift for me on just how I viewed football, the game, coaching, life, mentorship as a whole. It really just opened my eyes up and I've been able to take and carry a lot of that on from coaching and from playing, know, into the business world.

For most of my adult life, I wasn't really sure where I was going with that. I had been brought up in evangelical churches as a child and I had left that behind as a teenager and I didn't really have a lot of direction. And in my late thirties, I began building relationships with some of the indigenous communities and peoples around me. And in their cultures and their ways, I started to see something that was very, very resonant with me. And this is the case, I think, for a lot of white settlers.

In the story of the Buddha's life, when he was sitting, you know, he was searching and searching and practicing and doing all of this learning so many things. And then all of a sudden, it was just like, I got to sit down. And he stopped and he was practically starving to death because he'd been such a renunciate. But anyway, he started to recover and there was a young girl who helped him by feeding him and kind of making him comfortable. And he sat under the tree, this tree where he stopped, and then his process of awakening began. And in the process of that awakening, what did he do but touch the earth?

The guides are integral to the web of life also. They just exist in a slightly different set of realities than I do. And they're very fluent in their realities and I'm slightly more fluent in this reality and we interchange between them and I share with them and they share with me. And that means that we work in the ways that are useful.

I remember laying in bed and having this thought and crying saying, if right now, judgment day was happening and my soul got sucked out my body and I had to go see God, am I going to heaven? Am I actually going? And because I couldn't answer that question with a yes, I was like, something's gotta change. Something has to change. So I quit going to church fully.

I think it's hard in the current environment even to kind of be talking about religion because people always have a kind of like a certain set of assumptions of like what that means about what you believe and then by then how you vote and then how you live your life. And I would say like for me it's always been a little bit more expansive and in that.

And that only happens if I start learning about it. It's guaranteed to not happen if I never start.

So I think it can absolutely be a strong ally in our tool chest when we can allow.

when we can allow ourselves to not be the expert, to not have mastery and still do things. Every person alive that has mastery started as a bumbling fool in whatever thing they have mastery in.

Alcohol's been a confirmed carcinogen since 1988, meaning since I was born, alcohol has been known to be a carcinogen and not like a, you know, it can cause cancer. It's at the same level as radiation, asbestos and tobacco. We all know that tobacco causes cancer and yet somehow with alcohol, it's probably a little bit off. Even with breast cancer, I think three drinks a week raises your risk by 15%. And yet they will put those little pretty pink ribbons on our our wine bottles insane insane to me.

I'm thrilled to be here and I really appreciate this time with you and the opportunity to chat and dive in. So thank you.

Yes. Well, it's such a great question, Reese. I think it's one of the questions that answers easily and lives hard. It's easy for me to say, and I really believe it, that when we set an intention to be more deeply connected, to listen more deeply, to tune our senses so that we are more aware, to open our hearts so that we have heart wisdom that has a different kind of intelligence than our rational logical thinking brain.

Two things about being lost for as long as I was it's not normal to feel as lost as long as I was and I know some people have felt that for even longer in their life but like you don't have to feel like that. Actually like you can feel found like you have found something and it has found you and there are ways to get to it and I would like love to help people figure that out and I hope that that's what I also get to do on top of functional medicine.

I will try not to go off too hard, but I think there are a lot of flaws in the five stages. They were originally developed as the five stages of like grieving your own death. Her research was with kind of death and dying and they weren't meant to be stages of grief or for those of us who are mourning the loss of someone else. And I think it becomes kind of dangerous, honestly, I was trying to decide dangerous is too strong a word, but I don't think it is because what happens is a lot of people think they're doing it wrong. If they're not hitting those five stages in order and they're not making progress, then they think they're grieving wrong. And that's just not true. There's no wrong way to grieve.

There still is good in the world and if I can make a small contribution to that then that makes me happy but it's also, you know just personally, like you said, when you can actually you know make someone's life a little better even if it's small it's the opposite of a vicious cycle yeah what they say kindness is contagious.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think my response to that is, it comes back to that negative self-talk echo chamber. We don't, some of these big decisions are very, very difficult to make by yourself. And so to say there weren't very honest, raw, nervous conversations with my wife, and those two days that I had been back to work would be a lie. We were talking from the instant I got home till the time we went to bed those two days

Uh, as me personally, as a Christian, I just have to accept that we only know in part and he knows ultimately in whole. But my theory is that he is utilizing the quantum field where he is literally created everything. And guys, I'm going to give you a perfect example of why I think this. Steve Jobs in the 1980s had the idea for the iPhone.

I think one of the most important things is to go back to the earth and listen to the land and remember who we are as children of the earth and this incredible gift of life. And it all seems so simple, like we should know these things, but the fact is we're not usually connected to them or it's not even something we talk about on a regular basis whatsoever.