As humans, we inevitably create tension patterns in our body from experiences we’ve had and the way we’ve lived. Those tension patterns can show up in all sorts of situations, from the way we talk, all the way down to the way we walk.

Using new and different movement to mess with those tensions and put a “disturbance in the force” is a ridiculously simple method that can free us from these tensions. Those movements also have the added benefit of revealing all the other patterns we’ve created.

We’ll explore this a little more today. Have a listen.

Highlights:

• Any lever in the body will effect something, so let’s pull the practical ones. (11:40)
• It’s impossible to lie and hide what’s on the inside. It’s like whack-a-mole, it’ll just pop out another hole. (13:20)
• On the second day of retreats we have the guys move in various ways to get rid of their physically rigid form, and that will translate to their mentally rigid form. (16:20)
• Start breathing before the movement, keep breathing throughout the movement, and continue breathing after so that the breath becomes an envelope. (19:45)
• Hard work is not a virtue. It may be required from time to time, but it’s not a virtue. It’s taxing on the body, and the body doesn’t want it. (23:30)
• When the movement can be something that is smooth and powerful, there’s more power with less effort, and your body doesn’t suffer the consequences. (:)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

We all know that feeling when you’re watching a movie and you feel the stress and the tension just like the character on the screen. This is your body creating a tension pattern around something that you subconsciously enjoy.

There are many things people do to control these states — like chants or meditations — but not all of these are beneficial. None are better or worse than others, but they aren’t always everything they are cracked up to be, despite the propaganda.

Today we'll explore some things to watch out for. Have a listen.

Highlights:

• Every human life seems to have a different expression of human-ness (2:00)
• Whatever activity you engage with, however good or bad, it is conditioning your mind and your body to function in a certain way. (7:40)
• You didn’t break your brain, you just taught your body an uncontrolled skill (9:40)
• If you are training and then the army invades, and you’re exhausted, then your training didn’t serve you well. (12:05)
• Do you want an employee that sits down for their lunch break and wakes up 13 days later? You're going to be functional in society when you're in these ecstatic meditative states. (15:35)
• Meditation is not designed to cope with life. It's a place where something very, very deep within a person can open up in really profound ways and you can grasp the nature of your own existence. (25:30)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

You know that feeling when you want to ask for something but you don’t want to seem weak or helpless? Or when you feel guilty because somebody else didn’t communicate clearly and you “let them down”?

These are the times when we, as adults, forget that we can actually ask for things. We spend all out time telling our kids this, and yet often don’t do it ourselves. It might surprise you how freeing it is to ask for things — to "use our words" — instead expending all that energy in the constant chess game of manipulating other humans, holding expectations, and then hoping people read your mind and do what you want.

Just ask. Here's more on that. Have a listen.

Highlights:

• Alive and Free go hand in hand. The more life you have flowing through your body, the more alive you will feel and the more free you will feel, regardless of your circumstances. (1:50)
• We set up this expectation that if somebody really loves me then I shouldn’t have to communicate what I want from them. (6:45)
• I’m too lazy to care enough about the other person to communicate effectively with them and then I want to blame them for lack of communication. (14:40)
• You don’t actually love people. You love the idea of them, and when they don’t measure up to your idea you get upset about it. (17:00)
• There is some courage in putting yourself out there and appearing vulnerable (8:50)
• When you are honest, you have the most power in any room. Everybody else is busy trying to manipulate other people into believing them. (20:35)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

People told me from the time I was little that the universe was created either by a big bang or by some outside, greater force. And (because I was little) I never really thought to question that.

But what happens if, instead of just accepting every "fact" just because someone bigger or older says it's a fact, we take a second to pause and actually see if they are useful ways to see the world? That journey — allowing yourself to question everything that has been told to you — can sometimes feel scary, but it opens the door to better solutions than the ones that haven't been working.

It also frees you from being sucked in or duped by another authority, documentary, news reel, or even research study. It gives you the ability to see life with your own two eyes instead of always having to look through the eyes of others.

So let's challenge some "facts" today, shall we? Some BIG ones. And then see how that relates to your freedom from trauma, addiction, depression, pain, and so much more.

Have a listen.

Highlights:

• Nobody has witnessed any of these explanations, they’re just theories attempting to explain what we don’t know. (4:25)
• Nobody is right, the question is whether it’s useful to you in your life. (19:05)
• That’s where the religions that have stuck around have flourished. They’ve been useful enough to people that they have some staying power. (19:15)
• It’s important to question any narrative that you’ve been given. (21:20)
• When I speak from my own experience and don’t exaggerate, people don’t try to argue. (34:25)
• Build your life from your own experiences and then borrow whatever is useful to you from other people instead of believing it because of their authority.(35:30)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

Sometimes we have these emotional rocks — literally, these are crystallized bits of ammonia, lactic acid, and other chemistry just sitting in our system. Leftovers from previous emotional soups run dry and not cleaned from the pot. 

Those "rocks" form because of the way your body instinctively responds at a molecular level to changes in your environment or situation. You might feel this as stress, ecstasy, anger, or even bliss, but what's really happening are that a bunch of neurons and cells are caught in a habitual chain reaction. And if not allowed flow through you and out, if resisted or suppressed in some way, those chain reactions persist.

That's the key. Resisting, interpreting, and giving meaning to all those reactions repeatedly trains your system to create it as a shortcut. 

Today, we get to explore a bit about breaking the rock cycle. Have a listen.

Highlights:

• If you don’t clean out your body you just have a bunch of emotional soups that are left in there. (8:30)
• Your body is basically a walking Petri dish because of all the little bacteria and things in it. (16:25)
• There isn’t a root issue with you, there is just a state that your body is in and your brain's interpretation of that state. (17:30)
• If your body doesn’t change its state, then it's feeding the brain the same information to build with. (18:35)
• The rocks of your body form out of the soup of the emotions that are inside of the system. (21;40)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

A breath of fresh air is more than just the smell of trees, grass, and ozone? 

That one action is one of the fastest ways to mix up the chemistry in your body and create a completely different experience of life. It’s a very simple, direct, and even easy process at times. Because how you feel is directly tied to your internal chemistry.

We had a client with anxiety who needed a change. Someone constantly anxious. Someone getting the creepy feeling like there were people in his house even when he knew that nobody was there. And with a just little bit of breath work he began to feel amazing. We're talking minutes here.

Because with a few adjustments to how you breathe, you can power up your body, think more clearly, calm yourself down, and even eliminate pain. 

Today, we get to explore that a bit more. Have a listen.

Highlights:

• As I learned to breath better I became more aware of my body. (11:04)
• Where you agitate the breath or where you don’t agitate it will create a different effect in the breathing and the body. (17:25)
• This is a guy with lots of anxiety and after some breath work, he feels amazing .(21:20)
• Breathing changed him and helped clear out his OCD in a week. (22:30)
• What we’re doing is not a pitch to help somebody, but rather an invitation to more life. (36:30)
• Maybe take some time today and consider the gift that you have of the breath of life. (38:30)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

What if the real answer to your situation is that there was never a problem? I mean that with things as small as “he took my toy” and as big as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and the like. It’s the radical, all-in-a-moment shift in perception that makes just about every problem vanish as quickly as it appeared. 

Without that, you end up endlessly chasing the next carrot and building an unpaid career in healing that never promises retirement. Nearly two decades training and teaching kung fu taught me about chasing the carrot.

From lengthy sequences of movements to small little death points, there’s always something else that you need to master or some ancient technique that was “long forgotten”. But those are for the black belts. Or the next belt. And if you don’t keep at it, you’ll miss out. Major FOMO.

Same thing happens with the latest new-fangled healing modality or whizbang medical breakthrough. You need this, or you must have that. But do you really?

The answer to that lies in looking at your situation again and seeing through all the competing voices to what’s really going on. Do that, and all the unnecessary carrots vanish like the mirages they are. 

Today, we get to explore that a bit more. Have a listen.

Highlights:

• In order to keep you going, the industry had to keep you aware that there was more. (6:55)
• In order to make you feel like you need something, advertising corporations show you something that makes you think your life is miserable. (11:36)
• If you can’t be happy when you aren’t married then you’re never going to be truly happy when you are married. In fact, that makes it worse (12:12)
• What is the life that is within me asking for? Not, “What does everyone say it should have?” (20:25)
• If you can’t explain it to a six year old then you don’t understand it yourself (34:40)
• The chase ends not when you solve the problem or fix yourself, but when you realize you were never broken in the first place. (35:55)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

Perry came to us as a videographer, not a client. He filmed retreats for us for 4 years until finally asking for some of the physical work we do to help him out.

This is a guy who has run yoga retreats, explored all sorts of personal growth work, experienced a vast array of psychedelics, and deeply gets the link between the mind and the body. Yet still, he said afterward, “I thought I understood what you guys do, but I didn’t realize just how deep it was.”

That’s what happens when you bypass the mind and work both directly AND deeply with the body. Things change fast. Because all our mental and emotional issues are built on the state of the body. 

Change that, you change everything.

Have a listen.

Highlights:

• People are hungry to know how their body works and not have to rely on a book they read or anything else (7:20)
• By the time he got up it was like the facade had fallen and there was a real person sitting in front of me (10:25)
• If you’re talking about a broken person, there’s no such thing. If they were they’d be dead (11:55)
• Once someone puts a label on what I’m doing, they think they understand, and they discount it (14:20)
• It’s the body, not the mind, that experiences the change, and it rises up and discovers it’s not lacking, not weak. (24:25)
• It only seems impossible because you’re looking at it from your history, not from your possibility (26:15)

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

Here’s something that will make you challenge everything you believe you know:

The real reason why there’s so much anxiety, or depression, or pain, or frustration, or stress, or fear, or anger in your life is NOT because something’s broken inside you. Or because something’s “wrong” with you. 

The real reason is because you probably never trained in conflict. So when conflict shows up, you do your best and exhibit the above emotions. 

And you know what? 

By training yourself in conflict, you can figure out how to be free of conflict. You can even find joy in conflict, and banish these nasty emotions without any other work or effort. 

And this creates a freedom to feel joy surge through your body at every moment in the day. 

In this episode, you’ll discover how to unlock this kind of freedom inside of conflict and live the rest of your life in immense joy. 

Listen now. 

Show Highlights Include:

• The oddball “narrate your life” trick for never getting road rage again (1:54) 
• The “Martial Arts for Healing” method for erasing your trauma through roughhousing and play fighting (9:16) 
• Why the root cause of all your suffering is from conflict (and how you can create freedom and joy inside conflict) (10:10) 
• The “pride is punched” secret for unlocking joy even when you’re being physically attacked (12:21) 
• How taking blame for the conflicts you find yourself in liberates you from them (16:19) 
• The “Functional Meditation” technique I reveal at retreats which lets you bring a meditative quality to everyday life (21:08) 

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.

Labels and diagnoses, from ADHD to codependency and every one in between, usually limits your potential. 

For example, I recently discovered that I probably have ADHD. But since I never labeled myself as ADHD or have gotten an official diagnosis that I have ADHD, it’s been a super power for me instead of a way to victimize myself. 

The problem is, most people don’t operate like this. They get labeled an addict, then falsely believe that they’re an addict forever. It strips the power from them instead of empowering them. 

The solution?

Challenge all of your narratives, even the ones you created. Because there’s a chance you’re limiting yourself instead of tapping into your natural super powers. 

In this episode, you’ll discover how to challenge your narratives and unlock the pent-up super powers you already have inside you. 

Listen now. 

Show Highlights Include:

• The counterintuitive way creating habits to get into a “flow state” can leave you more distracted and less productive (0:51) 
• Why the ADHD population is the most underserved community on Earth (and how to use it as an unfair advantage for life) (5:34) 
• How thinking of your ADHD as “otherabled” lets you unlock the super powers it can give you (7:58) 
• Why the mentality of modern education makes you think your strengths are weaknesses (10:09) 
• The insidious way labeling yourself gives you a negative perception of yourself that lasts for decades (11:34) 
• Why taking a problem solver test (like the Kolbe test) gives you a better insight into how you operate through life than a personality test (20:40) 
• How starting your day by creating a “Not To Do” list can boost your productivity and make your happiness soar (25:38) 

Need help unlocking mental, emotional, and physical freedom in your life? Grab my new book, Built for Freedom: Adventures Through Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Addiction, Trauma, Pain, and Our Body’s Innate Ability to Leave Them All Behind on Amazon (or Audible) here: https://www.amazon.com/Built-Freedom-Adventures-Depression-Addiction/dp/B0BS79GMYN  

Or head over to https://thefreedomspecialist.com/  and book a call where we can look at your unique situation and give you the roadmap you’ve been missing.