Each week, Coach Sam and Coach Jesse delve into the pain of the modern man taken from the stories of the men who enter the gates of the crucible, Warrior Week.

In today’s episode, they have a conversation around this principle: Truth is something that evolves – what is true today for you, may not necessarily be true for you tomorrow. It’s constantly changing. Fear between truth and ourselves causes men to lie. ________________________________________________________ Parable #1: The Man in the Mirror

• Coach Sam: We know of a brother who is living a lie in order to get what he wants. He’s pretending inside of his relationship that no longer serves him in order to be able to be close to his kids.
• Coach Jesse: Ultimately, he wants a relationship with his kids and in the process of doing this, he’s lying to them, he’s lying to two women in his life, and most importantly he’s lying to the man in the mirror every fucking day.

QUESTION

What lies are you telling others in order to get what you want?

Parable #2: Three-Ring Circus

• Coach Jesse: Fears are driven from this place of money and this fear of lack or loss. In his case, if he is truthful, he won’t see his kids. If he’s not truthful, he will see his kids.
• Whether it’s money or a relationship, there’s this fear of if I do this, I will lose something. So, we continue down this path and ultimately find ourselves caught in this web of lies with no way out.

QUESTION

• What is the paralyzing fear that causes you to become a fucking clown?

Parable #3: Web of Lies

• Coach Jesse: In this situation, the intention is I want to see my kids. But what happens when an intention comes from a lie is that it turns into manipulation.
• Coach Sam: It’s a fucked up cycle. He’s manipulating the kids to get what he wants. At the end of the day, his kids feel his bullshit, and the love he’s looking for is never going to get cultivated in that environment.

QUESTION

What good intentions of yours has backfired into a game of manipulation?

Parable #4: Shift

• Coach Sam: One of the possibilities is to shift and to leave this fucking pit; to release himself from this web of lies. With this, there may be a price to pay – they may not want to see him for a while. Sometimes the void and the gap is what it takes.
• The fear can cause us to stay in the pit, and empowers us to dig even deeper. There’s power in fear and there’s also a paralyzation within that fear.

QUESTION

What is the price you’re paying for cultivating love in an environment of manipulation?

 

Parable #5: Your Way Out

• Coach Sam: When you are caught in a web, begin by cutting one strand at a time. Sometimes you may require help from the outside: men that will help set you free much faster than you could have done it on your own.
• Coach Jesse: One of the ways out of this web of lies is to have someone mirroring back to you what you’re doing. Once you are aware of being a manipulator you are no longer acting out of ignorance.

QUESTION

What is the message someone is mirroring back to you?

 

Parables from the Pit:

“As we share these stories and parables with you each week, our invitation to you is to give yourself permission to explore that pain inside of you. If you were triggered by anything today, explore that.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“Whatever you fear losing, there’s a feeling attached to that. If you look into that deeper, you’ll find the truth that needs to be told.”

–Coach Jesse Ewell

Coach Sam and Coach Jesse are hours away from leading men in the crucible of Warrior Week 50 as they continue this conversation around pain, and inside of that, the pain of betrayal.

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Parable #1: It Begins in the Mind

• Coach Sam: Of the over 1,000 men who have graduated from Warrior Week, at least 50% of them have come from a betrayal situation – either they have betrayed their wife, or their wife has betrayed them.
• Coach Jesse: Betrayal starts early in the relationship before something actually happens. If I feel that you have betrayed me, I create a story about it and then act that story out in energy.

QUESTION

What stories have you been creating in your mind about your spouse?

Parable #2: Not Created Equal

• Coach Sam: There is a difference in the character of a man who has cheated on his wife and the man who has been cheated on by his wife.
• Coach Jesse: What we’ve experienced in Warrior is when a woman cheats on her husband, they rarely come back together, but typically when the guy cheats, they can work it out.

QUESTION

How has betrayal entered your marriage?

 

Parable #3: Submission

• Coach Jesse: At the end of the day, women don’t want a guy who is going to submit. When he’s in that place, a woman will eventually find someone else who won’t do that.
• Coach Sam: The reality is, modern men have submitted to this weak version of themselves, which means there is no leadership when it comes to them.

QUESTION

How does submission play out in your relationship?

Parable #4: Modern Mike

• Coach Sam: Modern men use their ego to justify their assumptions. “Modern Mike” is the guy who is distant with himself.
• Coach Jesse: As we betray our soul and believe our mind over our heart, we begin to betray ourselves as a modern-day man; we submit because we’re numb to what’s going on around us.

QUESTION

How do you resonate with this conversation about the modern man?

 

Parable #5: Warrior Week 50

• Coach Sam: Warrior Week enables a sense of awareness of your true self, which is the aspect of your heart and mind. Leadership is making a distinction between them and the ability to lead with both.
• Coach Jesse: When you think about it, we are actually taking hundreds, if not thousands of people through Warrior Week when you consider the number of people one man has an influence over.

QUESTION

What has been your experience with Warrior Week?

Parables from the Pit:

“As we become aware of the soul, the mind, and the heart, we start experiencing the difference between leading from our hearts rather than from our minds.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“Betrayal is a sedation mechanism for guilt and shame. When I feel betrayed or betrayal, I immediately go to this place of guilt and shame which starts me cascading into my pit.”

–Coach Jesse Ewell

Welcome to the 32nd episode of Warrior Week, Parables from the Pit. The show has a new format where every week the conversations will be driven by three lead trainers inside the Warrior Movement: Sam Falsafi, Jesse Ewell, and Kevin Voisin, who combined have led and trained thousands of men inside the experience known as the Warrior’s Way. Each week they will have a real and raw conversation about a specific aspect of the pain of the modern man. Today is a powerful conversation about the overall pain of all men, which is feeling alone and lonely.

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Parable #1: Pain that Men Resist

• Coach Jesse: The pain the men are resisting that comes up consistently is the pain from a father. It comes down to the pain we experienced as a child that we carried for many years, almost like a weight on our back that we never let go of, and never learned how to work past it.
• Coach Kevin: The one pain I see across the board is that men are unable to endure the pain of vulnerability. Even if that feeling is having love for their child, they have a hard time expressing it because they’ve been taught that those feelings belong in the realm of women and not real men.

QUESTION  What is the pain that you are resisting the most? Parable #2: Operating Alone

• Coach Sam: The current path of a man inside his pain is this idea of being alone – not socially alone, but operating alone. It ties back to no instructions from dad, and that emotions are not part of the playlist.
• Coach Jesse: Feeling alone is disconnection. When you’re alone, you disconnect from people and from the things in your life, and that is what gives you the feeling of being alone.

QUESTION    What pattern have you noticed about yourself when you begin feeling all alone? Parable #3: False Feeling of Significance

• Coach Kevin: By believing I’m alone, my ego fucks me up and says no one has ever felt this pain before; that no one can understand. We give ourselves this false feeling of significance that somehow in the history of the universe, no one has ever felt this before.
• We had a miscarriage in our marriage, which was a painful loss. When I started opening up and sharing it with people, I was so amazed. It seemed like everyone had a miscarriage story. I wasn’t alone at all.

QUESTION   What is something you have opened up about recently from a place of vulnerability? How did you feel afterward? Parable #4: Backpack Full of Pain

• Coach Sam: In certain areas when I feel that things are not going well, I have a tendency to get a backpack and put all of my pain inside of it and carry it alone. I have these old tendencies that have a major impact on me the minute I start feeling alone.
• Coach Jesse: A pattern we have as men is this feeling of alone that takes us back to the place where we first began feeling it, between the ages of seven and ten. We try to hide to make ourselves feel better about being alone.

QUESTION   What’s coming up for you in this part of the conversation?

 

Parable #5: Share Your Pain

• Coach Jesse: When I feel alone, I close off everyone around me. It’s me not letting anybody in. I feel I’m not vulnerable enough to expose myself, therefore I’m all alone in my own Pit that I created because I wouldn’t let anybody else in.
• Coach Kevin: There is no reality in the idea that you’re alone. My father used to tell me: If God wanted you to do everything by yourself, he would have put you on your own little planet, and you could just do it all. Instead, he put you here with 7 billion other people.

QUESTION   What is one thing you need to share with someone this week?

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Question:

“Where in your life are you feeling the most disconnected? As you feel that pain, what the fuck are you going to do about it? Are you going to give yourself permission to have a conversation?”

Parables from the Pit:

“The source of the pain of being alone is disconnection. We experience this trauma of disconnection many times and each time we do, we find ourselves attached to different things – any type of attachment that takes away the pain.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“The pain of feeling alone comes from the pain of not communicating that you’re experiencing feeling alone. Communication is the gateway to not feeling alone.”

–Coach Jesse Ewell

“Most men are sedating away from any emotion. They don’t want to feel anything. Even the positive emotions scare the fuck out of them because there’s been this conditioning that men don’t feel, and that to open up and be vulnerable is a weakness.”

–Coach Kevin Voisin

 

Welcome to a very special edition of Parables from the Pit as the amazing story of Kahea and his boys is shared with Coach Sam Falsafi. It’s a story of courage, darkness, heartbreak, and turning points, where Kahea and his sons, seemingly against all odds, come out victorious. Kahea also shares his involvement with Operation Underground Railroad as a special operative traveling throughout the world rescuing children and taking out traffickers.

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Parable #1: I Wanted to Be Happy

• Kahea: I married young and was excited to have a family. After the first year, we realized we weren’t even great friends, we were more like roommates. We were different in the way we viewed the world and we just wanted different things. A month after the birth of our youngest son, we ended up having a conversation where we decided to get divorced. She moved out shortly thereafter, leaving me with our baby and our almost three-year-old to raise.
• In my culture and religion, marriage is something you’re supposed to stay in, no matter what. I wanted to be happy, yet this didn’t feel like a life I could continue with. It wasn’t everything that I had thought it would be. We were living in this close-knit village community in Hawaii where I felt like everyone had ended up turning their backs on me, even the people I knew well and had helped out because we had chosen a different path.

QUESTION

What are your beliefs about “sticking it out” in marriage? When do you know it’s time to part ways?

Parable #2: From Millions to Welfare

• Kahea: A year prior to this when I was 26, I had a 12 million dollar real estate investment going through. By the time I was 27, I had bought my first office building in Honolulu and had $18M of assets. It was 2008, the year the market crashed. Everything in my life and all across America started going downhill and within eight months, I had lost everything and found myself standing in a welfare line just to be able to feed my kids.
• Prior to finding myself standing in the welfare line, I had won a business award from one of the biggest banks in Hawaii. They shot a commercial highlighting my success and for some reason, the airing of it had been delayed for eight months. So here I am standing in the welfare line with my baby in my arms, trying to get assistance so I could feed him when out of the corner of my eye, I see this commercial with me talking about big business and success. I tried to hide my face, hoping no one would see me and make the connection with the commercial playing in the corner of the room.

QUESTION How does your life resonate with Kahea’s experiences? Parable #3: Dad, Come Back to the Campout

• Kahea: Financially, we’re crashing. The divorce is going through, my wife has moved out leaving me with a brand new baby and my 2 1/2-year-old who has just been diagnosed with spastic pysista cerebral palsy. I’ve given my wife the last $5K I had in the bank, the house is in foreclosure, 0ne of our dogs has been shot by the neighbor, the other one has been stolen, and I keep dodging the guy trying to repossess the car that I need to take my son to the hospital, which is an hour away, for treatments, surgery, and therapy.
• One particular evening proved to be a turning point for Kahea when they came home from the hospital to find the electricity had been disconnected. It was during their third night of camping in his bedroom, unable to console his crying baby with cold milk, that he found himself crumpled and broken in a corner of their home. “My three year old comes over to me and asks, Dad, are we still doing our campout? Dad, come back to the campout! That moment was my ‘I need to be a fucking diamond’ moment.”

QUESTION

What were the conditions that led up to your ‘I need to be a fucking diamond’ moment? How has your life changed because of it?

Parable #4: We Just Don’t Quit

• One of Kahea’s legs was shorter than the other which caused him a lot of pain through the years. He was prone to injury and found it very difficult to stand up any longer than five or ten minutes at a time. Surgery was suggested and as he researched the different possibilities, he found one that was experimental and was only the fourth person in the U.S. to have it performed.
• Determined not to be wheelchair bound for months or even years, after surgery he began a rigorous five hour per day physical therapy regime which enabled him to eventually train for and enter the Hawaiian Ironman. During his recovery as he crawled up the stairs to his second-floor bedroom, he would say to his boys, “What do you do when you fall and break both your legs?” They would answer back, “You get back up with your arms!” “They’ve learned and witnessed directly from me that no matter what happens, we just don’t quit.”

QUESTION

What have you accomplished that seemed out of reach at one point in time?

 

Parable #5: Divine Mission

• Kahea has built a $75M empire since the days of standing in the welfare line and has continued to find purpose not only in his children who are everything to him but also inside of an organization that is very near and dear to his heart. While listening to Elizabeth Smart share her story of being kidnapped from her home at the young age of 13 and becoming a sex slave for the next eight months before her miraculous rescue, something stirred inside Kahea’s soul and spoke to him.
• Kahea: A couple of years later, all the pieces came together and fell in my lap that enabled me to become a special operative for Operation Underground Railroad where we rescue kids from sex slavery and child trafficking. There are only ten of us who do these ops all over the world. Our main objective? Rescue the kids and take out the traffickers.

QUESTION

For more information about Operation Underground Railroad, go to ourrescue.org

Parables from the Pit:

“I feel that why you are here, and what you are doing, is a reflection of the man you have built for the past decade. You’re on a mission, a Divine mission. ‘Come back to the campout’ was the light that came to you through your son, and now you’re bringing that light to the children.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“This has taught me so many lessons over the years, even now. It’s taught me how two individuals could be in the same location and under the same conditions, physically, and yet be emotionally different only because one chose to see things differently than the other.”

–Kahea

Coach Sam Falsafi welcomes two powerful leaders to the show today, Dr. Ed and Karen Osburn. They share stories of the unexpected twists and turns in their life, and demonstrate how they have chosen to rise and lead through their challenges.

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Parable #1: Intro to Warrior

• Ed: I had started following Garrett on Facebook and got sucked into the matrix of his message for men. I felt he was speaking to me. I had a podcast for chiropractors at the time and reached out to Garrett to bring his message to the men because I felt they really needed it. That interview was transformational and indoctrinated us into the Warrior’s way.
• Karen:  After the episode came out, Ed told me that he just did an interview with a guy in the Christian market. I wasn’t impressed until I listened to it. I remember being riveted by what Garrett was saying. What was this about having it all? There was something I couldn’t explain, a feeling in my heart.

QUESTION

What was your introduction to Warrior?

 

Parable #2: Wanting Power and Confidence

• It was on Ed’s 45th birthday while watching videos about Warrior Week that he mentioned to Karen that maybe he should go. He made a comment on Garrett’s facebook page, Garrett chimed in, and the next thing Ed knew, he was having conversations with both Sam and Garrett. Soon thereafter, Ed found himself knocking at the doors of Warrior Week 20, something Karen wanted for Ed more than Ed wanted for himself. Karen: For me, I always saw Ed as a powerful man but I felt he didn’t see it in himself. I saw this as an experience where he could discover who he was as a man and show up as I wanted him to. I had seen a version of him in the past, that confident and certain Ed, but I didn’t feel he had the confidence at this point in his life.

QUESTION

How are you showing up for your wife?

 

Parable #3: Rise or Die

• Ed almost didn’t make it to Warrior Week. Two years after being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, he had surgery where they removed most of his bowel except for 12 inches. “When I left Warrior Week 20, I had a decision to make: either succumb and just die to the disease, or rise. Even a lot of the guys were feeling that too: he’s either going to rise or die. So, I rose.”
• Ed returned to Warrior Week several times after that, each time coming away having shed the man he used to be and stepping into a new, expanded version of himself. “You have to stay in the game. If you don’t, you start to go back to sleep and become unconscious again. I could feel myself leaking power and felt I needed a kick in the dick. Almost every 12 months, I had to come back and experience the physical aspect and the bonding with the brothers.”

QUESTION

What challenges have you been able to rise above, seemingly against all odds?

Parable #4: Colliding Over Clarity

• Ed: Along with the power that we’re accessing, it has given me the power to collide with Karen. We don’t let things just sit. Moving forward, we would never want it to choose anything that would compromise something inside of our marriage that we have built. The power to collide is a good thing.
• Karen: We are always colliding over clarity. Right now, especially for me, I’m going through a shift. It feels like something new is percolating and building. It feels very unknown. I’m open. I’m surrendering. I believe I just need to fucking own it and trust it.

QUESTION

What is the difference between conflict and collision?

Parable #5: Behind Closed Doors

• Coach Sam: I grew up in a house where my mom and dad didn’t hug and kiss in front of us. Culturally, they were taught that you just don’t do that in front of people, that it’s meant to be kept hidden and private. After I had been operating that way in my marriage, I began questioning that belief. Kissing my wife three times a day became part of my 90-day challenge. I was rejected many times but I stayed consistent because I wanted to break through the belief I had adopted as a kid.
• Karen: A lot of people think they shouldn’t fight in front of their children. They don’t want to show that part of their relationship. I grew up in a family where the fighting took place behind closed doors. I say, show it. Show all of it. The biggest gift for me as a mom with my kids is that I have this little accountable thing with them where they see us fight, and see us make up. They see us get to model marriage for them.

QUESTION

What behaviors have you adopted from your childhood that no longer serve you?

Parables from the Pit:

“At the end of the day, whatever you’ve created is what you’re projecting onto your children. They are seeing this creativity, and therefore see the power, confidence, and certainty to create and recreate.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“I didn’t realize until about 12 hours into the first day of Warrior Week that I was actually there for my marriage. I thought I was there to learn how to hunt better. Once I made that shift – once I came back to build that connection and marriage I wanted – it only took a week for my business to change.

–Ed Osburn

“I don’t want my kids to just follow, I want my kids to think for themselves. Although it’s a challenging way to parent compared to how most of the world rolls, it’s the most fulfilling when I hear my kids say things or call me out with feedback.”

–Karen Osburn

Coach Sam Falsafi welcomes Warrior Week 36 graduate, Navin Thukkaram, to the show today. Navim is a very successful entrepreneur and a man that has completely transformed his life in the past year by simply believing in the concept of becoming this greater version of himself. "It’s what the journey makes you become, it’s not getting to a finish line," says Navim. "The finish line does not exist."

Parable #1: Commitment

• Navim is from Chicago, his parents are from India. He had a traditional upbringing with a strong emphasis on education. He loved playing golf and was really quite good, so he chose a University that had its own golf course - Princeton - and boasts that he got to play golf and do math all through college.
• Navim: I feel like when I was growing up, I was cranking non-stop at school from ages 5 to 18 to try to get into an Ivy League school. It was the contract of 'this is what you do.' I always had targets and outcomes I was working towards - go to college, get a lot of money, get respected. I had worked really hard for a very long time, and although it all actually worked out very well, I was super burned out.

Ask Yourself: What area of your life do you feel needs a deeper and more consistent commitment from you?

  Parable #2: Cooks in the Kitchen

• Navim: I made my first million in my late 20s. At the time I was a partner at a private equity firm. One of my investments went extremely well, it grew from there, and we sold a little bit of it which was well over a million dollars. I’ve been fortunate to have my good family and education and resources to be successful. Obviously, it’ not about the money, it’s about what the money represents.
• That represented unbelievable about of commitment and work over a lifetime, and in some ways, it also represented what my parents had done for me over that very long period of time. All those things had to come together to make that happen. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen that helped make that happen.

 

Ask Yourself: Who are the people who have contributed to your success?

 

Parable #3: The Missing Link

• Coach Sam: In your late 20s, you achieve this and you continue to grind. Obviously, the reward of the money was great and you felt successful. You built a fucking empire. Life is good. And then you go to a Tony Robbins event, and inside of the event, you meet Garrett who tells you to 'talk to Sam.' After you watched some videos, what truly resonated with your heart for you to say: this is something that I want to do?
• Navim: It was one of Garrett’s first videos where he was walking in Vegas talking about the concept of sedation, and the concept of wanting something more. I’m always doing personal development in some way so it wasn’t like I felt I had hit rock bottom. But I felt like I didn’t have near the energy that I had experienced in previous years, and it was a lack of purpose. 

 

Ask Yourself: What message resonated with you and was the catylist for your entry into Warrior?

 

Parable #4: Warrior Week

• Navim: I come into Warrior Week. I’m doing well, but I’m not feeling that energy or purpose. I knew from our conversation and by the way you identified that so effortlessly, that this is the place I needed to be. I was thinking: I don’t know what the fuck these guys are doing, I don’t know why they're wearing all black, I hope this is not some sort of cult, but Garrett is obviously a great guy so I’m going to trust the process.
• The first thing I felt when you had me in the hole that we had dug for ourselves was that I was very confused. I knew I was in the right place, but I didn’t really know why I was there. I had a feeling as to why I was there, but I couldn’t really articulate it very well. But I knew I was not going to get out of that hole until I convinced you that I knew why I was there.

 

Ask Yourself: How has trusting the process impacted your life?

Parable #5: Measurable Results

• Coach Sam: For the first time ever, I feel you are balanced enough to have a relationship. For a year you’ve been knocking at the door of fatherhood and relationship. For 27 years, you’ve been programmed as an assassin, and now you meditate and have these moments where you stop and you go to the void for no reason and no purpose, and then you come back. It’s creating balance in your character and the way you communicate.
• It is a totally different Navim, not that the Navim before was a bad one, but this one is a more dominating, powerful Navim. You’re a badass doing MMA right now, business is booming, the purpose behind your business is clear. You’re meditating, you’re connected to your being. The missing piece of the puzzle is the Balance, but you’re in the most attractive state ever.

Ask Yourself: How has being part of Warrior changed your life?

Parables from the Pit:

"Part of what was missing from Navim was fire. You saw a glance of that fire in Garrett. The heat of that fire warmed you up and attracted you, which brought you into this crazy conversion. Warrior Week burned you to some extent. You and the men of 36 forged this connection - this relationship that most men don't have. It's an invitation for collision, for calling each other out, prompting the highest standard. And that’s what we hold you accountable to."

-- Coach Sam Falsafi

"You have to remember that your business is a reflection of yourself. Just take a look in the mirror. You have to get that fire first - for yourself - if you’re going to set your business on fire and really take it to the next level. The thing is, when you get yourself right, you can make quantum improvements."

--Navin Thukkaram

Coach Sam Falsafi welcomes Natalie Martin to this week’s episode of Parables from the Pit. Natalie has been a big part of the Warrior movement over the past three years. She not only put Garrett’s WarriorBook into written form but has witnessed the growth of hundreds of men inside the Warrior moment, including that of her own husband, Chris, and has been instrumental in helping change the lives of thousands of men through her writing. This is a rare and unique opportunity for us to get a glance inside of a woman’s Pit by exploring Natalie’s.

Parable #1: Losing Yourself In Service

• Natalie was raised in an environment and culture where the women were told they needed to take care of the men in their lives. At the age of 10, after refusing to be at the beck and call of her father, she was labeled a feminist by him, a term that young Natalie wasn’t familiar with. This planted seeds of worthlessness inside of her where she felt that because she wasn’t male, that she was somehow “less than.” She had this constant feeling of needing to do more, yet never felt she was ever able to do enough.
• Natalie: In the Mormon culture, which is my background, women are always looking for ways to be of service to others, of losing themselves in service, and losing themselves in helping everybody else. It’s not really emphasized that you need to take care of yourself. We’re told to make sure we read our scriptures and do our hair for our husband. It’s very traditional; it’s very Donna Reed. I didn’t start out at college to get a degree unless it was an MRS degree. I have truly always just wanted to be a mom.

QUESTION

In your youth, what were you taught about the different roles of men and women, and how is this affecting your marriage?

 

Parable #2: Good Girl Syndrome

• Sam has conversations with thousands of men where the wife’s portfolio mirrors that of Natalie’s. These men’s wives have been taught that femininity is all about taking care of the family. Many of these women are disconnected inside of their relationship, they don’t have sex with their husbands, and they end up living like fucking roommates. Sam asked Natalie about this and was curious as to what happens to a woman’s sexuality when they actually think this way.
• Natalie: Our sex life has always been good, which is on Chris because I had the Good Girl Syndrome. I was taught that sex was for marriage, sex was for procreating, and sex was not something that you’re supposed to enjoy yourself. Fortunately, Chris has always been really good at being patient with me. Sex became the glue that held our marriage together when it was otherwise falling apart.

QUESTION

How does this conversation resonate with you?

 

Parable #3:  The Empty Shell Syndrome

• Natalie: As a police wife, you’re a single parent. As a woman in a culture where it’s always about everybody else, I didn’t know who I was anymore. It was in January of 2012 when I realized I didn’t feel anything for anybody. I didn’t know who I was other than a mom and felt like I was mediocre at that.
• Even though I would go through the motions with the kids, I felt empty. I call it the Empty Shell Syndrome. I felt like I was walking on eggshells around Chris all the time. He would blow up over the stupidest things, then I would blow up over the stupidest things. The only emotions I felt anymore were anger and resentment.

QUESTION

How can you help your wife when she is feeling empty?

 

Parable #4: The Pit of an Unhappy Woman

• Coach Sam: Your Pit continued to become deeper and wider because of the series of “cant’s” coupled with the pressures of life that you were dealing with. You can’t pay your bills, you can’t have your husband at home very often, and on top of that, you have three kids. Inside of that, Chris was forced to lie the minute he walked through your front door. Although unintentional, the one place where Chris would actually experience a peace of mind and be able to disconnect, became a place where he had to fucking lie for the safety of the kids and to not worry you.
• Natalie:  He was always gone. It wouldn’t be until months later that I’d hear about some drug sting he was involved in. At one point, he grew his gotee really long and I eventually found out that he was working narcotics during that time. He would go to a different town and pose as a scumbag, then come home and try to operate as a father to his children. He wasn’t telling me anything and our communication became absolute shit.

QUESTION

What are you hiding from your spouse? What lies have you been telling them?

Parable #5: WarriorBook

• Natalie: WarriorBook is a masterpiece; it’s my baby. I absolutely love everything about that book, even all of the Pits that I had to go through to get it published. The book tackles a Hero’s Journey. What’s beautiful about a Hero’s Journey is that everybody can relate to it. With it, I could see a mirror of the pain that I had in my own struggles. I could see the need to find an answer behind the pain. Otherwise, what’s the point?
• If we’re just experiencing pain for pain’s sake, there’s no point to it. But if there’s pain with a purpose, and we can see some clarity behind it, it becomes more relevant and it becomes a lesson to be learned to then teach to others so that they can have tools to navigate through their own Pit and pain. There are tools to help them realize that there’s a point to it all.

QUESTION

What stories in WarriorBook have influenced and affected you the most?

Parables from the Pit:

“Have a conversation with your wife and tell her that she’s enough, that she can be herself, and that she matters.

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“Literally, no one has read WarriorBook as often as I have, and in so doing, it gave me a grasp of what it takes to understand that we’re all like a book that has multiple chapters in it. Sometimes chapters have to be cut out; sometimes the chapters are expanded upon. Ultimately, it comes down to the power of the story of our own journey.”

–Natalie Martin

Coach Sam Falsafi and Warrior Week graduate Brian Davis have a beautiful conversation about meetings with God, gifts on the mountain, unlocking masks, and discovering light in the darkest of Pits in this special edition of Parables from the Pit.

Parable #1: Knocking on Warrior's Door

• Before entering the crucible of Warrior Week, Brian had come knocking on Warrior's door on two separate occasions. During his first encounter, he ended up having a brief conversation with Coach Sam.
• A year later, the doors of Warrior swung wide open as Coach Sam brought fire and passion in a video that was part of the package of WarriorBook 600 that Brian had just purchased. Although he wondered what he was getting himself into, it was very clear to Brian that he was exactly where he needed to be.

QUESTION: How and when did Warrior show up in your life?

Parable #2: Overflowing Buckets

• It was the birth of Brian's second baby that served as the catalyst for his entrance into Warrior Week. Tensions ran high as correctional casts were placed on the feet of his ten-day-old baby girl. After 48 hours of constant crying, and in the midst of a whirlwind of emotions, Brian snapped at his wife. He immediately felt guilt shame for his actions and was left wondering what kind of a man he was for not being able to hold space for his wife and newborn baby.
• Coach Sam: The kind of man you were showing up as is exactly the kind of man I am, and that most men are. There were just too many buckets of problems that you were carrying. At some point, you're going to spill the fucking buckets because there aren’t enough hands holding them. Now you have another bucket which is supposed to be a bucket of happiness, but instead, it's a bucket of sadness because of the unknown.

QUESTION: What happens when your buckets are overflowing?

 

Parable #3: You're a Locked Dude

• Brian: In my journal from my initial brief interview with Sam, I wrote the words he spoke to me: You’re a locked dude. It was the beginning of the process of unlocking for me. In that place of darkness that first night in the Pit of Warrior Week, I uncovered things I had buried for years. It was in that place that Coach Jesse became a transformer and said to me, Hey man. Why don’t you just be yourself?
• Coach Sam: As you looked at yourself in the mirror in the darkness of the Pit that first night, you saw a man wearing a mask. And on that mask, there was a lock. Unbeknownst to you, most of your life you had been searching for the key that would unlock that mask. As you heard the voice of Coach Jesse, you realized the key to the lock had always been inside of you, and that by just being yourself, the lock was opened and the mask fell to the ground.

QUESTION: What masks are you wearing?

 

Parable #4: Gifts Atop the Mountain

• Brian: The gift I received on the mountain was very clear: My family is a divine gift. God doesn't need us to take care of our families, He takes care of them. God gives us families to increase our capacity to hear Him. How might we treat our families differently if we thought of them as a gift vs a responsibility?
• I would never have been able to go on the journey that I'm on without my daughter providing the challenge and the pain to force movement. I now see that as God talking to me. God speaks to men through their families and through the challenges that they are facing. Walking off the mountain, I knew that my family was all the power source I needed in order to dominate everywhere else in my life.

QUESTION: What changes do your experience when you treat your family as a gift rather than as a responsibility?

 

Parable #5: Meeting With God

• Brian: Before Warrior, I started scheduling meetings with God every Monday morning. I would go to a cafe and in my journal, I would write, "Thank You, God," and proceeded to write down everything I was grateful for. On the next page, I wrote," God, I know you can, but will you...help me with this sale, help ignite my marriage on fire, protect my family, etc. I was very specific. After doing this for six months, I looked back and was astonished by the results.
• I realized how honored I felt when my 2-year-old came to me and asked, "Poppa, will you read me this book?" God gives us these relationships with our children to provide an analogy of what it is like for Him with us. We are honored when our children come to us and talk to us, just as God is honored when we go to him and converse with him.

QUESTION: What messages have you received from God recently?

Parables from the Pit:

"I challenge you to set up a meeting with God tomorrow morning and see what he has to say to you. Whatever he has to say, that’s what you need to hear and believe."

-- Coach Sam Falsafi

"I’m looking for caves to go into because now I’ve been trained, and I know there is always light in there. I’m going to go find a bigger Pit because I know I’ll come out with light."

--Brian Davis

Coach Sam Falsafi and Marine Corps Vet Deric Keller have an amazing conversation in this week's episode, where they share stories of war, anger, decisions, turning points, and liberation.

Parable #1: Anger Suppression

• Sam: When we’re kids, we're given this checklist of what to do and what not to do, and part of that checklist is how we're not supposed to be angry at our parents. As children, there are emotional events and incidents that take place where we involuntarily adopt certain patterns and behaviors that are associated with that event or situation, which patterns unconsciously stay with us for years.
• If anger is a feeling that takes place as a result of that event or situation, since I'm not "supposed' to show my anger towards my parents, I begin sedating and suppressing it. Eventually, at some point later in life, that anger will show up because I'm never been given the frame of collision.

QUESTION: What emotional event took place when you were a child that you have been suppressing for years?

Parable #2: Shattering the Armor

• Coach Sam: When we deal with anger in whatever ways we learn to process it, the feelings of blame, guilt, and shame get forged into a type of armor that we carry for the rest of our life, until we go through the process that breaks the fucking armor with a hammer, and we suddenly feel 300 pounds lighter.
• Deric: I went through similar instances having shame and guilt with my kids. I used to sit on the couch and watch tv, then when it was time for punishment, "dad" would react. Today, we're in constant communication to where when it’s time for me to be the disciplinarian, it’s in a completely different way.

QUESTION: What has been your experience surrounding shame and guilt?

Parable #3: Child of War

• Sam: Between the ages of 8 and 10, my family and I lived inside of a Civil War. I saw things I should not have seen and witnessed so much pain. I would go to school and see the empty chairs of my friends whose homes had been bombed during the night. I didn’t know what the fuck was happening.
• For me, this was normal because I didn’t know anything else. There was no television or social media exposing us to another world, no education exposing us to another possibility. When we left the country and went to Canada, war was never spoken of again. I didn't talk about it, I suppressed it; I suppressed anything that symbolized war.

QUESTION: What reality were you previously unaware of but can now clearly see? What happened?

Parable #4: Worm On a Hook

• Deric: We called ourselves worm on a hook. Basically, we were bait. On April 4, 2003, we got attacked by militia as we were headed into Southern Baghdad. We had a new lieutenant with bright blue eyes who ended up getting killed on that mission. Until an evolution at Warrior Week, for 14 years all I could see were his bright blue eyes staring at me each night went to sleep.
• It’s not that we’re leaving it all over there, the majority of our feelings don’t hit us until we’re back stateside. We’re processing things at a different level and a different manner. Over there, you just keep moving. You’re losing people and people are falling off to the wayside, but you’re constantly moving forward.

QUESTION: What emotional event has haunted you for years?

Parable #5: The War Within Never Ends

• Sam: For the past four years, I’ve lived and taught the Warrior’s Way and have been living in the greatness of being a dad. Inside of 24 hours, I have become the most shitty dad - twice. That’s proof that the war within never fucking ends. The old self? He’s always fucking there. The minute I believe he’s no longer there, he takes over.
• But if I acknowledge he’s there, from time to time I can be a shitty man, husband, father, or leader. If I don’t acknowledge that, then all I’m fucking searching is this imaginary game of perfection that doesn’t exist. I’m chasing something that is telling me to fail every time I chase it.

QUESTION: How long have you been chasing the imaginary game of perfection?

Parables from the Pit:

"You’re a man of war, I’m a child of war. Here we sit side by side. Although we can say the war within is not fucking over, we’ve won some major fucking battles and we’re at peace right now. But we know for sure that the war within never fucking ends."

-- Coach Sam Falsafi

"I didn’t realize that I was trying to hide that I had PTSD because to me it was a weakness. I didn’t want everyone to judge me. I had a vision of guys with PTSD living in gutters or my uncle living in a VA home. That’s how I envisioned PTSD. So when I was labled with it, I did everything in my power to make sure people didn’t know. I was scared. I didn’t understand that I could still function."

--Deric Keller

Coach Sam Falsafi has a powerful conversation with Warrior Week 37 graduate, Matt Skinner. Parable #1: Warrior Week 37

• Matt: When I signed up for Warrior Week, I thought it was going to be something very physical like SEALFIT. Yes, the physical aspect is part of it, but it’s so much deeper than that. It’s a mental endurance test, an emotional deep dive into the Pit and back.
• Getting into a program where I had to be somewhere every day at the same time, do certain tasks, follow assignments and listen to people tell me what to do – all of which I knew was benefiting me – my immediate knee-jerk reaction was fuck you. It was so difficult for me to get into that pattern, and I initially rejected the structure of it.

QUESTION: How do your knee-jerk reactions play out in your life? Parable #2: Fat Matt

• Matt had a very traditional upbringing. He looked up to his father and aspired to be manly like him, yet he totally rebelled against his father’s definition of being manly. Matt wanted power and respect and found that he could gain these through violence and sex. “I thought these were the stronger, more masculine traits that my father didn’t possess that I could outperform him in.”
• In fifth grade, I beat the shit out of a kid for calling me Fat Matt. He was bigger and older than me and had some social status on campus. I gained respect that day from the other students and learned that through violence and intimidation, I would be respected. That violence carried on through high school and eventually into football. Offseason, I was looking for fights. I was a fucking bully. My motto was drink, fuck, or fight.

QUESTION: What does “being a man” look like to you? Parable #3: Midas Matt

• Matt: At age 21, I was a horrible person doing all kinds of crazy shit. My dad sent me the book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. My first reaction was, fuck you. Once I started reading it, I realized that everything I had chosen up to that point was my responsibility, and therefore everything moving forward would also be my choice and responsibility. For nearly a decade, I felt like Midas Matt.
• Coach Sam: Everything is going your way, production is the name of the game, everything you touch turns to gold. You meet this beautiful woman, you’re on the path to a white picket fence life, and two days before the wedding you get hit with the news that causes the world you’ve known for nearly a decade to begin crumbling and falling apart all around you.

QUESTION: What book has had a significant impact on your life? Parable #4: Significance

• Matt: The stress of the situation kicked in on my honeymoon where I spent all of my time on the phone trying to save our asses. Eventually, everything collapsed. I no longer felt like a man and returned back to the behaviors from the past that had given me respect and power. I started training at a boxing gym in L.A. with a professional fighter, eventually leading me to get involved with mixed martial arts.
• I know now that I can feel powerful with just being myself. I don’t need to have that fight or step into a cage, I don’t need to beat down another man or be with other women – things that, at one point in time, made me feel whole and significant as a man. Once you can find that peace and truth in your heart, when you can say, “Hey, I’m enough,” that’s so powerful.

QUESTION: How do you find significance? Parable #5: Iron Sharpens Iron

• Matt: Life’s a team sport. There’s no man that does it on his own; there’s no fucking ranger who handles all his business on his own. We need to stand independently, but we’re stronger when we’re interdependent. Iron sharpens iron. When as bothers we hold each other accountable, we are stronger together.
• When truth finds us, or when truth is presented to us, we know it’s true because we already had it. What Warrior does is attach a system to it and a Brotherhood around it, which is the magic of Warrior. Being able to utilize that and being able to lean on other men is powerful.

QUESTION: How does being accountable to others affect how you choose to live your life? Parables from the Pit:

“There is impact in education that is backed up by experience.”

— Coach Sam Falsafi

“Sure, we get power from physicality, but we really get our power from handling our business. In CORE4, when you’re standing up to the plate and handling your shit in every category and advancing forward at least a little bit each day, that makes a man feel significant.”

–Matt Skinner