AA, Transcending The Ego & Spirituality

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For private one-on-one or group coaching, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. What is up SDC fam? It's Barti Arez, the Stop Drinking Coach and we're back with another episode today. Currently, driving again, so I apologize for the imperfect sound quality, but I think they're good enough. I'm driving right now and something that is coming through for me is. This saying that you've probably heard before, right, which is we're not a human having a spiritual experience from time to time. We're a spiritual being having a human experience. So we're not a human having random spiritual experiences from time to time. We're actually a spiritual being having a human experience. And I think it's really important that we take some time to really explore that and try to figure out what that looks like and what that means. For a lot of people who are listening, if you've struggled with alcohol, you may have gone to AA. And I'm not a fan of AA. I've been to 100 AA meetings over the years. And to me, the 12 steps is like a sort of a basic journaling exercise that doesn't give you much. And then reading the big book and looking at their model of just how they run the program where everything is focused on alcohol and that your disease, then that your identity is an alcoholic, and that you've got character defects that you have to ask God to solve. It just doesn't make sense. Realistically, it makes zero sense. But I get it. It was established a hundred years ago when we didn't know anything about trauma and psychology and neuroscience or anything. So it makes sense. You got a bunch of people together in a room and it was like, okay, yeah, like this is what we're doing. Make sure you show up every day so you don't forget because we all know we've got that sneaky little voice in our head that will try to convince us to drink all the time 24/7. So show up, be here. We got to show up our way or the highway or else it doesn't work. We get it, right? It's not hard to see how you would create that type of community, AKA almost little cold. But it's helped, you know, millions of people I think over the course of a hundred years to find freedom from alcohol, at least from a physical standpoint. From a psychological and emotional standpoint, I don't think so. I think a lot of people who are in AA are sort of quote unquote dry drunks where they physically are not drinking, but the underlying drivers that were causing them to drink their quote unquote, their underlying restlessness, their irritability and their discontent with life that's just a byproduct of trauma and an imbalance in neurochemistry and really just like a poor driving of your human car as far as your identity and how you talk to yourself and how you interpret and navigate your emotions and how focused you are on yourself versus like being a service to the world and how rooted you are in your ego versus operating from like a spiritual sense and all those things, right? Like all those things are tied together. So yeah, you know, when we, and so here's the other piece too, is like when people get exposed to AA and they're asked to turn themselves over to God, when it's like a little premature, right? Like in one sense, like, okay, I get it. You maybe at a place where there's like a significant amount of pain in your life and like what you're doing isn't working. So it's like this concept of like listen, it's time to like kind of quote unquote get on your knees and surrender and realize that like the way you've been trying to do this thing doesn't work and that there's something bigger here. There's something bigger at play, right? But when you prematurely introduce God and spirituality to somebody who isn't ready to receive it, it's, there's going to be a major, major disconnect, right? What I've come to understand after working with hundreds of people, my own personal experience is that God and spirituality and the relationship that you have with whatever it is when you look up into the sky and you realize that it goes on for infinity. And then you look around and you see trees and you see biology and you see grocery stores and technology and you look down at your body and there's a beating heart and some like tens of thousands of mechanisms that like digest your food and keep you alive and provide you your five senses like as you look out into the profundity of what it is to just be alive, every single person has reflected on that, right? And so for some people they like to follow an organized religion. They're like, okay, Christianity is the way Jesus is the savior. Other people it's like it's Islam. Other people are like, yeah, you know what those don't do it for me. I'd rather meditate and like look inward and I think Buddha is good for me. And you know, whatever it is, whatever path you choose is totally up to you. This particular podcast isn't about the label or the name. It's about the understanding and the relationship to and the faith and the belief and the relationship. Really that's what it is. The relationship you have with something outside of yourself, right? And what I think is really, really important to preface in all conversations around spirituality or religion is that it's all based on faith, right? There's no science here. There's no evidence. We're not running tests and we're not proving anything, right? And what might work for one person might totally not make sense for another. So it's very personal. And it's supposed to be that way, right? Like consciousness is personal. The voice inside of your head that has 60,000 thoughts a day that's constantly like processing reality. That's very personal. Your deepest, darkest, innermost self is personal. Your grandest, broadest ideas and visions and dreams and possibilities of how you would want it or how it could be is personal, right? So it only makes sense that like the relationship that we might have to something that's called divine or bigger than ourself is personal. I grew up in a different family than you. I have like a different genetic code. I have different tendencies. I have a different personality. I have different biases. I have different, I had different friends growing up. I, you know, like I had different values that were taught to me or not taught to me. And so did you, right? Each and every one of us has an infinitely unique and complex architecture, right? I have different fears. I have different pains. I have different goals. I have different traumas. I have different memories. All of my memories are different than yours. All of the people I've ever met are different than you. All of the experiences that I've had are 100% totally different from you. So when it comes to divine, when it comes to the deepest aspects of like philosophical relationship to something outside of myself, it's going to be slightly different. Now could it carry a set of qualities that might seem similar for sure, but like the uniqueness of that experience and the momentary like experiences that I have where like I might experience what feels like divine or spiritual or some synchronicity, it's all going to be unique. It's all going to be different, right? So it's really important to have this like baseline level of like open-mindedness and compassion to recognize that for everybody it's going to be different. And that's perfectly okay. You religion and your spirituality is not a pissing contest. It's not a measuring contest and it's not a black and white like put it in this box or that box. process. It's so undefinable. So anybody who's trying to do that in the first place is, has gotten lost. They've gotten away from the message. Right? The message is about the tone, it's about the energy, it's about the intention, and it's about how you are using your consciousness to relate to yourself and to relate to the world, ultimately for the highest good of all, through a sense of harmony. Right? That's what it's all about. And what I want to introduce to you in this talk is that for some of you listening, you might be like, yeah, this particular religion is like my deal, or that particular religion is what I do. And beautiful. But what I also want to help you understand from a more sociological perhaps perspective is that spirituality across this domain, across this process forward is a lever. Right? It is an aspect of our life, of our consciousness that we can tap into that carries within it a lot of utility. Okay? Now, before I go further, I want to remind you that outside of spirituality, outside of religion, outside of all this extra stuff, like what we know to be true, what we can measure, what's absolutely real. And in a sense, also not necessary to tap into those things is like biology and evolution. And when we look at ourselves and then we look at other beings that are conscious that have life, or even like plants and trees and things like this. Right? There's an evolutionary process. And as we look at what biology does, right? The prime directive for all biological organisms is to survive, to maximize survival and to procreate. Right? And through that process evolutionarily, adapt to its changing hostile environment. And the biological entities that are the best at adapting the best at learning, the best at refining, the best at making the necessary adjustments are the ones that survive. And are the ones that will pass on their genetic code and will continue forward through this. Who knows? Infinite timeline of evolution, of cosmic cycles of death and rebirth, or expansion into new universes. I mean, I don't know. Right? It's interesting to think about. And so when we look at spirituality, right? And I'm not sure who you are, where you're out listening to this. And please, like I also ask for you to listen here with an open mind and a level of compassion, regardless of what religion you are, or how deeply you feel like you are tied to your particular perspective or belief system or ideology around what all this stuff means, right? Like I get it, like there's books that outline stuff and you can fully believe that and just accept that fully. But I also want to remind everybody that we don't really know, right? And that's okay. We don't have to know, right? Faith and belief in of itself carries enough utility for us to get what we need and to satiate our spiritual cup. You can call it knowing and that's beautiful, right? But you don't have to know. It doesn't have to be 100% verified, right? That's kind of the beauty of all this stuff. So spirituality, what it offers, what it offers is an increased level of adaptable utility, if that makes sense, right? And the evolution of consciousness goes as such, we're born into a body. As far as we know, we didn't ask for it. I know I didn't ask for it. And this is like just a reoccurring theme. Like ever since I started to become conscious around like seven years old, like really like consciousness, conscious, like my brain started to develop where like I really became awake and aware that I was like living. Like I wasn't just like a kid and just like not being able to remember things, right? I started to have these really intense, intense profound experiences where I would feel like consciousness would like the lights would come on or all of a sudden I would be shot from hyperspace like into my body and I would put my, I've talked about this before on the podcast. I would put my arms out and wiggle my fingers and just be so, so blown away like my brain would melt around like what the hell is happening? Why am I here? How am I controlling my fingers right now? Like this is insane, right? I don't know if you've ever had that experience, but for me, that experience is very, very, very real and I can remember it like it was yesterday. Right? So we come into this body, we develop this ego. Our ego is our survival based personality, right? It is the thing that helps us navigate the world and it's based in threat detection. It's very sensitive to pain and it wants to survive and it wants to survive at the expense of its environment and everything else around it. The ego believes it is very separate from everything else. It's separate from nature. You want to call nature your actual physical environment or you want to include quote unquote God or spirit or source in there, but it also believes that it's very separate from other human beings. And so we all get to experience the early evolutions of consciousness and not early like obviously it carries on, right? The ego is always going to be with you, but especially in the earlier parts of our evolution of consciousness, we are operating from ego, right? And that's rightful to do so. There's nothing wrong with that because our ego helps us to survive and it helps us achieve the prime directive, which is to procreate to pass on genetics and hopefully optimize the chances of survival for our offspring, right? And the ego is tied to all the social architecture and dynamics that come along with that, right? Resources, hierarchy, competition, all those things, right? Like made acquisition, resources, and then like the actual like hierarchy of where we find ourselves in the system, right? All those things are connected to our ability to survive. And so through this process, what's happening, right, is it's really important to remember to fundamentally understand that like going back to, are we a human having a spiritual experience? Or are we a spirit of sorts having a human experience? Right? Let's talk about that for a second. Because when you look at it, when you think about it, you look at yourself, I'm looking at myself as I'm sitting here in my car and I've got like this body, I've got this meat suit, right? That's filled with organs that's filled with, I don't know how many gallons of blood and it's got, dude, it's insane. I don't even know how it all works. I know a couple things, a few things, but I'm not a physician. And I can't look at this and be like, yeah, this is exactly where all the muscles are and here's how they work and here's how they developed. And here's exactly what happens when food enters my digestive system and like here the hormones that are being secreted when I get hungry and my energy lowers, like, do this thing is, it's magic. It's actually magic, right? But we look at this meat suit. And then somehow, somehow through the organization of basic chemistry, through the organization of basic chemistry, it's found a way to evolve into genetic code and then everything else that comes along with that to like evolve into like a standing primate, right? And then it developed senses, like how insane is that? How basic chemistry found a way to uniquely like come together in these infinitely complex ways that you look at when you're literally looking at yourself, like you've got legs toes you've got like. deliver the detoxes, you've got eyeballs, like it found a way to organize itself to where now we have five senses and that we can see, we can look out, can see the environment, we can see color, we can see depth, right? Then we've got sound, we can hear all these different tones and frequencies and we get to enjoy music, we get to taste a wide variety of different flavors and foods, we can smell, right? All of these different things and then we can touch and we can feel, right? We can literally navigate, we can interface with this environment that's just here for us. I don't know about you but this is magic, it's pure insanity, you can't even begin to describe the profundity of what's happening here, okay? Every single second, every single moment is the most insane miracle that words come a hundred trillion miles short to actually describe, right? I didn't ask to be here but now I'm here unless my spirit has to be here and I'm on a purpose and a mission to like evolve consciousness and do all that stuff which I kind of believe too, right? And we'll get there. But it's really important to remember that like this whole thing is magic and the fact that you're conscious, the fact that we have AI, the fact that we have quantum supercomputers that can download all of Netflix in half a second, that can crack the code for some sort of complex problem that would have previously taken 35 years and now it can be done in like a minute and a half. Like we have technology that the average person like you wouldn't even be able to understand it if someone explained it to you and still up until this point like neuroscientists or doctors can't actually locate consciousness and determine how consciousness is a byproduct of like the complexity of this raw organic chemistry coming together, right? So, so consciousness itself is like a spirit. There's a spirit that's alive inside of all of us, right? Whether you want to say that spiritual or not or whether you're atheist and you want to just say, oh well that's just a byproduct like, dude, that's a spirit, right? When you say the spirit of something is alive, it's because there's energy there and there's an expression to that energy, right? So, so what's really important to understand here is that you know we go through our evolution and we primarily operate from our ego and that's okay for the time being because our ego helps us survive, it helps us differentiate ourselves from somebody else, it helps protect us. If anybody tries to hurt us, our brain activates, fight or flight and we go into a defense mode where we either fight and try to crush the opponent so that we don't die or we run away or sometimes we freeze, right? We fun. But that's like that's what every biological organism does, every human being and every animal, right? There's a fight or flight. We either go against the fight, we like we go head to head to try to win to protect ourselves from dying in that moment or we run away because we feel like the threat might be too big and so we try to outrun it. And that works, right? That helps us do what we need to do to achieve the prime directive. Now, through that early process, that early developmental phase, I would say from zero to, I don't know what you want to say, 7, 14, 21, right? We're going to have a lot of painful experiences that our consciousness is not going to know how to make sense of in process. Okay, our parents might get a divorce, our dad might be an alcoholic, our mom might be abusive, our parents might be fighting all the time. They might be having us move all the time. Our older brother or our little sister might be a bully. We might be getting bullied on the playground. We might be raising our hand at school or trying to play a sport and getting rejected and made fun of and maybe we're last picked on the team or maybe our first girlfriend or boyfriend says something to us about us that is somehow really vulnerable, damaging. And everything in between, right? We have all of these different types of experiences that overwhelm us as children and as adolescents. And oftentimes into adulthood, right? We get into these toxic relationships or marriages, right? Because that's where we're at in terms of our standards or our self-esteem and what we're willing to put up with and we're replaying our relationship with our mom and dad through our partners and right, like there's a whole evolutionary cosmic spiritual like healing and growth and maturity process we're all going through. But when you look at it through the lens of the ego, which is, hey, this person hurt me, this person screwed me over. This person doesn't love me or this person doesn't care about me. Therefore, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not capable. I'm not cut out for it and it's not possible for me, right? And then you practice that voice inside of your head over and over and over again for years and then that wires into your nervous system. The trigger responses to any data that's remotely close to that. So it produces anxiety and fear and all these different things like resistance and then you fall into these guilt and shame spirals because you know you should be doing more that you have more potential, right? It dysregulates this operating system and we're operating from ego and we're separate. So like that person like fucked me over and they're separate from me and I need retribution and I need revenge and I need to show them and tell them and make them feel the pain that they gave me, right? This is all ego, right? And through the ego, because we're living in such a limited pain focused, pain centric model of relationship to our self and to other human beings in the world and maybe at some level universe, God's source, whatever the thing that puts you here and now forced you to have to wake up and go to work and forced you to be around all these people in your family who were so abusive and hurtful like, you know, it's like we want to get revenge like what the fuck? I didn't even ask to be here and now you're putting me through this like what kind of cruel and unusual and fucked up universe is this? What kind of all loving God and creator would do something like this, right? These are thoughts that we all have at some point in our life and maybe you still carry, right? And so when we're operating from our ego, it's um we're very justified. We're justified. Like listen, I incurred this abuse. I incurred this wrongdoing. I was open. I was loving. I tried to do my best. I showed up. Um, I was innocent. I was X, Y and Z and look at what happened. I was damaged. I was taken advantage of. I was abused. I was hurt. I was neglected. I was, right? And that pain is real and it is justified and it is valid 100%. And the thing about the human evolutionary process when we look at things from a much more biological perspective is outside of the prime directive being to um, procreate and pass on our genetics and try to ensure the survival of our offspring. Um, outside of that, the driving force of all decision of all action and behavior is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. You've heard me talk about this before. So everything that you do, person listening to this, everything I do, everything everybody does is through the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. That's all we have as human beings. Of course, we have neutrality in the middle and then we have all the other sort of emotions that come in between. But like that's the axis. That's the spectrum from which we operate from. We're either moving towards things that make us feel good and better or we're trying to move away from things that we think might feel bad, right? So what happens through this, this process here is that as we incur these really painful experiences throughout our developmental process that form the base of our psychological, emotional and physical, spiritual belief system architecture, we will then go out and our mind unconsciously, right? Not consciously, sometimes consciously, but unconsciously will navigate our life and move us towards very things to get our needs met that will try to sort of optimize for the pursuit of the things that make us feel good and the avoidance of things that don't make us feel good. And if we've got in our baseline programming and architecture, all of these things that were really painful, right, that we have an examined and processed and we're still looking at through this very like three-dimensional ego-based perspective, it's going to cause us to avoid things in life that mildly are connected to or potentially represent that other thing that was painful, right? So for example, if building relationships, right, if there was a fracture in building relationships early on, either with your parents or with your loved ones or with friends at school, right, you were present and open and vulnerable and just seeking love and connection, but then something got fractured, right? Or maybe like your relationship to the feminine got fractured or maybe your relationship to the masculine got fractured because your mom or your dad was abusive or did this thing that really hurt you that like was so fucking overwhelming that you never recovered from that you still carry pain around, right? If that experience fractured you, then you will go out the rest of your life, either knowingly or unknowingly trying to avoid anything that would potentially recreate that experience, maybe you develop social anxiety or in this other way, maybe you will go out and seek relationships that are similar to that one in an attempt consciously or unconsciously to try to exercise some level of will to resolve or fix or control or feel more powerful over, right, to try to compensate or resolve that past experience, right? And so we can see how like this, this is a really common theme for how we live out all the dysfunction in our lives, especially like in our relationships, right? And when we're living our life and we've got this pain from our past that we're guilty about or we have shame over or we feel inadequate over or we feel like we're not lovable enough or we're not worthy, whatever the case may be from these early experiences, we will then find compensation patterns to try to mitigate having to feel that, right? And a compensation pattern is like alcohol, compensation pattern is like smoking, compensation pattern is weed or porn or sex or whatever it might be, right? Like serial dating or gaming or, you know, only hanging out with a certain type of people, right? There's a lot of different ways or people pleasing or overextending ourselves for trying to be the loudest, funniest one in the room, right? There's a lot of different ways these things can show up. So what you have to understand about your relationship with alcohol is that alcohol is just a compensation pattern. I know you love the dopamine and I know it, it feels great to party. I know it like you've developed all these social things to it. But really when you look at it in its rawest, truest form, you started using alcohol as a way to mitigate and compensate against something. And that's okay. We all did because we didn't know. One, we were marketed to and we live in a matrix where the social entertainment industrial complex is literally forcing down our throat alcohol and it's just normalized in our culture. And it's monkey see monkey do that's what humans are by the way. Like I don't take all the credit for being me and neither should you for you. Like you're you're we're all kind of monkeys. We just model in our environment, right? That's what humans do. That's what babies do. They model their parents. They learn. They teach. Right. And then you learn like the other basics of like education that we learn, but then outside of that, like you are a byproduct of the information that you consume. That's it. And there's like no weird shame in that. I think we all have to wake up and realize like we are monkey see monkey do. And then you learn like the other basics of like education that we learn. But then outside of that, like you are a byproduct of the information that you consume. That's it. And we're just like the other basics of like education that we learn. That's it. And we are monkey see monkey do. And we're all just exchanging energy with each other. That's just what being a human is. And we learn. And then we evolve. And then we pass on better stories and better information to our offspring. That's what we've been doing for tens of thousands of years. Right. Before it was storytelling through spoken word and the elder coming in and sharing it with like the tribe. But now we've got other ways to do it. Right. So when we've got all this pain, we are going to seek something to sue us to relieve us. And that oftentimes is a substance or a behavior commonly alcohol. So I know there's a lot of fear around like quitting. Right. Because you're like, oh, but the dopamine in this and that. And it's like, listen, it's going to be fine. Your nervous system will recalibrate your neurochemistry will recover. You can get to a place where everything is so normalized in your life. And life becomes so much better. And like in all the ways you develop better relationships. And your relationship gets healthier. And there's more love and more connection and more sex. And people respect you more. And you can get a better paying job. Like it's all possible. I know it seems scary. Right. Like whatever it is. But it can all get better. And part of your evolution here on earth is to fulfill that mission. Right. And so at this point is where the evolution from the ego to moving into a more spiritual lens of perception and identity serves a really powerful utility. Okay. Life is about utility. If it works for you, great. If it's advantageous for your adaptability and survival. And to help you feel better and happier and more connected. And it's a means to a goal that isn't harmful for you or isn't harmful for other people. Beautiful. Leverage that utility. Right. Spirituality offers a profound utility into not only advanced survival and adaptability. But also serves as a path to deeper wisdom and understanding that you just don't get in the 3D. The 3D is based in science. And can we test it? And that's great. And you can go really, really, really deep there and discover a lot of properties of this three-dimensional physical reality. Right. You can measure things. You can see things. You can make inferences. And that's really valuable. That offers a lot of utility, especially in material-based technology. Right. But when you're talking about consciousness, when you're talking about when you close your eyes and the fact that you haven't imagined nation. And you can visualize something and that you have an energetics that runs through your body where you can set intentions. And like we can go super deep on this, right. For that component of reality, spirituality offers profound, profound life-changing, dimension-altering experiences. And so the path here, the path that we follow that I'm just offering as a suggestion, do with it what you will, if it feels good, explore it more deeply. If you're like, this is what I do, do, don't. You're a sovereign human to do and free to do whatever you want. I'm just sharing my personal experience. Right. And the experiences, I think, commonly and similarly for a lot of other people I've kind of talked to who have walked this path. Is that spiritual, spirituality offers us an ability to transcend the ego and to transcend the "me." It's all about me and I'm the most important thing and it's all about my pain and it's all about what I have to do. And it offers an opportunity for you to be able to look at everything through a more expanded lens. And the most useful expanded lens that I've come to understand around this journey is that our life, this existence that is undetermined in timeline, I don't know, 70, 80, 90, 100 years, whatever, is a sort of cosmic opportunity for us to grow, to evolve, to mature, and to learn a set of principles that will allow us to operate at the highest frequency in the best way, in the greatest level of harmony with ourselves and with other people. And then. to ultimately, if we now look at the collective, if we say that I'm not just an individual, but I'm a node connected to seven billion other nodes and that we live on this earth that provides for us. And in a hundred years from now, everyone will be dead and it'll be the earth will be completely repopulated by new people. So all the fears and anxieties and judgments that you think you have like about going out and being the person you always wish you wanted to be, like you should just do because a hundred years from now, everyone's gonna be dead. No one's gonna remember your failures. Nobody's gonna remember your Instagram video that looked or sounded silly. Like it's all gonna go to dust, right? But in the most beautiful way, right? If we look at that through a nihilistic perspective, it's like, oh, Barty, well, nothing matters anyway. So I'm gonna keep drinking like that. That's a really dumb way to look at it, right? It offers an opportunity to recognize like this collective consciousness is gonna keep going long after we're gone. And there is an element of responsibility that each and every one of us have to try to provide the best level of energetic influence to the shaping and molding of this like huge cosmic, like evolving thing, which is consciousness, right? And I remember growing up, there is this part of me that thought like, dude, there's like seven, eight billion people. What is my voice matter? Like it doesn't matter what I do. Doesn't matter if I recycle or not. Doesn't matter if I, you know, speak up, it doesn't matter if I share it. Like dude, there's way too many people. There's way too much complexity. There's way too many levels above me who have so much more power, so much more influence, so much more pull. Like what am I doing here? Like who cares? I'm not important, right? And then if you have a lot of self-worth and self-esteem issues and a lot of trauma, you're gonna just try to reaffirm that and be like, yeah, I don't fucking matter, it doesn't matter. It's not true, it does matter. Like look at me, for example. Dude, you would have told me five years ago that like I'd have a podcast that ranks number one for stop drinking and quitting drinking on Spotify in the entire United States, like the number one country in the world. Okay, maybe let me take that back. It's not the number one country in the world, but like one of the greatest like superpowers, right? Like a cool country, like we've got a lot of freedom here and I don't think I'd wanna live anywhere else. Like I'm really enjoying the gift of being able to like live in the United States with a sense of freedom. I don't wanna get into the politics of it all, that's not what this is about, but like it's what I'm trying to speak to here is that it's insane. I never knew or thought that I would be here, but I just followed my truth, I followed my heart, I followed my authentic self-expression and I tried to optimize the parts of my life that like we're causing issues, which was drinking. I was obsessed with alcohol. I loved alcohol more than anybody. For me to quit drinking was like God like sacrificing his first born son, you know? Like that's literally what it was. Like that is the level of sacrifice it was for me. The amount of fear, like imagine if you have kids and you had to sacrifice one of them, imagine the fear, the anxiety, the pain, like that's what it felt like. But through that ultimate sacrifice, I was like literally met with the greatest gifts and rewards and bounties, you know, in every way, relationally through all of it, through all of it, through my own spiritual development. And so what spirituality offers us is an opportunity to rise above the ego and to begin looking at everything through a greater purpose, a greater lens, right? So let me use my life as an example and maybe as you listen to this, you can mirror back and try to just with an open mind and an open heart reflect on you. So for me, you know, I was born into a family that was like not your typical traditional Persian family. Totally opposite. Like most typical traditional Persian families are like, you know, they like come to America and like there's some level of success because like education is like really important, right? Dr. lawyer engineer, that's like super common for like Persian parents are like pushing their kids to be a doctor lawyer engineer, like go to school, get an education, right? So a lot of them are like entrepreneurs or business owners and stuff like that and do well for themselves. And they're also connected to a lot of family and Persian culture has all these traditions that, you know, where they're just all these traditions and like, you know, there's just a lot of connection and is it all perfect? No, there's a lot of dysfunction too, for sure. But totally opposite of like Persian family, right? Very kind of like disconnected, struggled financially. And then of course, like mental health stuff and addiction and growing up, there was, for me, it was just confusing. That was like how I took it. I was like fucking confused. I was like, wait, but why? And then there was a lot of why me. I was like, dude, I think I've got a good heart. Like I'm trying to figure out like, I don't have any fucking ounce of like trying to fuck other people over or like, like I'm like a pretty good person here. Like I'm trying to do good, I'm trying to be good, I'm trying to like, I'm cool to my friends. Like why me? Like what the fuck? Like why am I getting this? You know, the pain, the like the fucking emotional neglect because my mom didn't really like bless her soul but just didn't have the capacity because within herself didn't know how to meet herself but then didn't know how to meet me, right? So there was like these major parts of like my development evolution that were just like missed, that were just like the mark wasn't met, that you would normally get in like another relatively like more stable or healthy family, you know? And so there's a lot of like confusion and wondering like why and like shortened the stick mentality. And then over time there is a lot of resentment that built, you know? And there are several things that happen between losing my dad and other experiences that were like incredibly painful, you know? And I carried those things with me and those built my baseline architecture going into my teens into high school, right? There was ways that those things affected me. Now were they connected fully to my drinking? Like when I drank was I drinking because of those things? I don't think ever. I drank because I liked the party. I liked the way it made me feel in the moment. I liked how it opened me up. I liked the social connection. I liked, you know, being fun. I liked being rebellious. I liked getting into crazy shit, taking risks. And I love the dopamine, you know, who doesn't? Everybody does. We are like everything we do is in pursuit of neurochemistry. I've got more on this. Everything we do is in pursuit of neurochemistry. You go to the gym, feels good, right? You're doing it. So in the future, you avoid the pain of like having terrible health, right? You do it so that you can like everything is in pursuit of neurochemistry, right? And I'm very sensitive to neurochemistry. And you know, we go through this evolution and maybe my drinking was connected to it at a deeper subconscious level. Maybe it wasn't. But throughout my 20s, it really became apparent as I like became adult and really had to become like fully. I mean, I moved out when I was 18. I've been living on my own since I was 18, fully supportive, fully self-sufficient, and also taking care of my family along the way financially, you know? And so like throughout my 20s, I definitely became conscious of the fact that I've got like these programs and patterns and self-imposed or self-perceived limitations around like my skills, my confidence, what I was going to do, what my purpose is, what my mission is, like how I'm going to survive, how I'm going to make money, like how I'm going to figure out like my place in the world, right? Like I was always paying very, very, very close attention to those things. Like even though I was drinking throughout my 20s, I was reading a lot of personal development and digging a lot into spirituality and reading all the books and listening to all the YouTube's and podcasts and the Alan Watts and the Ramdass and the power of now's and all the stuff. Like top 50 spiritual books on Amazon, top 100, I've like read them, you know? And what spirituality offers is this lens to look at your life through like, "Okay, so I kind of got off track here." Like I was born into this family, it was fucking crazy. And you know, I'm like, "Why? Why me? Why this pain?" And then from there, right at the tail end of my drinking, when things got really bad and I just, like something just hit me, right? I don't know where you're at in your journey right now in your relationship with alcohol, but where a lot of stuff really started to make sense and kind of come together was right as I started to quit drinking. Up until that, there was like confusion in like, "Why me?" And a lot of pain and ego-based disconnection and like, "I didn't know what the fuck to do or what I was even looking for." But at the tail end of my drinking, when I started drinking four to six bottles, of wine a day and then got sober and then got introduced to this coaching program, do this coaching program, transform my life. I'd read all the books I'd been in in Entrepreneur, I had known about trauma, I had known about like all the stuff, but it wasn't until I had a program that had structure, routine, accountability. I had to fucking show up every day. And then every week I was like getting blasted with like some of the most elite level wisdom from this coach, Julian, who runs my group coaching program. That was just like ripping apart my consciousness in my mind and my understanding and my perspectives and belief systems. And again, keep in mind, I'd like started businesses before this. And I had listened to all the podcasts and I'd listen to 400 hours of Alan Watts. And like I've, you know, experimented with psychedelic mushrooms and had really extreme like doses where like I'm going into like altered states of reality and processing my past and my childhood and the death of my father. Like at this point, I'd been exposed to a lot. And so like I thought I knew, right? But then I was exposed to this this course and this work and this path and this process that radically transform my life. And the biggest piece was like really like what I got from it was like digging into my past and like healing my inner child. And recognizing that the experiences that I had from my past with my dad with my family, the pains that I carried could be reprocessed. And like spirituality offers that. It offers an opportunity free to look at everything through this higher vantage point to recognize that like, you know, in fact, my life was fucking perfect. The family that I was born into, everything that I got and everything that I didn't get formed my personality. It was part of what seated this insatiable curiosity and hunger in desire to figure out why. Why it was like that? What my purpose is? Why I became the way that I became. Why my personality was geared towards X, Y or Z? Why I insatiably wanted to understand this or that? Or why I was attracted to this and not attracted to this? You know? And I'm like, oh, okay. And then I could look back and I could trace every single person, every relationship that worked out the divine timing of how this business started, how I had this guy as a mentor. And then why it ended the way that it ended and how it led me into this new loop of life. Like, dude, it all makes perfect sense. Perfect perfect sense. Why and how it led me to like become the person that I am today? It's because I didn't keep searching for something outside of myself. I was always trying to look inward and like refine the parts of myself and who I am and to recognize and ultimately the big medicine is like, dude, it's not about the outside. It's about the inside. It's about you looking at you. It's about you looking at the parts of yourself that you have shame over, the parts of yourself that you think are inadequate, the parts of yourself that you're like, oh, if anyone fucking really knew the truth about how I really feel or who I really am or something that I did in the past, like it would all be over. Like those parts of yourself and for you to have the courage to go into your memory bank with these very specific strategies that are offered inside of stop drinking coach for you to revisit the past and reprocess the past and release the emotional charge that's stuck in your body. And to reinterpret the stories and narratives and meanings that you applied to your mom being abusive to your dad neglecting you to this person hurting you. Right. You have to understand that who you are in the present moment, the way that your nervous system reacts or responds and the stories that you tell yourself is all a byproduct of the experiences of your past. And if you look at and interpret those experiences through the negative lens that you always have, the present moment in the future will be a painful representation of that. And you're just going to be stuck. You're not going to want to change. You're going to think it's too hard. But let me remind you that if you've already gone through the experience and it was painful, like you've already survived and look how far you've gotten and look at how many ways you've been able to succeed in life despite your trauma and pain and the thing that you're so afraid to let go of, like look at how you've already been able to like fucking handle it and who you are on the other side of it. You may not be perfect. You might still be drinking, but that's okay. Like just because you drink doesn't define the totality of your personality and who you are as a being and what your potential is. So a big part of this journey is like developing the courage to go backwards so that we could go forward. And you have to trust that by going backward and reprocessing some of these aspects, these traumas, these pains that you've carried, like it's not going to kill you. It's going to make you stronger. It's going to make you more resilient. And in fact, it is going to free you. It is going to free you from the slavery and the cage that you've been living in, where you've been accepting scraps. But that's safe and comfortable for you. You know, it's like you've been a slave in a cage accepting scraps from somebody who tells you when you can eat and who pulls it out of your mouth when you're still chewing. But because you get three hots in a cot and you're comfortable, you're like, I don't want to give this up because what does it mean to go out outside of the cage into the whole world? What if I get eaten? What if there's another threat? What if I don't get three hots in a cot and I have to figure it out on my own? And I don't know if I can and I'm scared or whatever the deal is. You know, it's like, dude, you've got to hurl yourself out onto the other side of it. You're going to die one day. So in a very real talk, I'm having with you that nobody else is going to have with you is like, what are you going to do with the next 50 years of your fucking life? You're going to die anyways. You're already all in. So whatever you choose to do between now and then, why not choose the best? Why not choose the highest? Why not just cosmically fucking step back and see that the alcohol thing isn't working. Moderation doesn't work in that. Dude, it like you don't even have to read between the lines. This is like your cosmic heroes journey. You got a fucking quit drinking and it's going to be hard and you're going to fucking bitch and moan about it. And you're going to feel like you're missing out for a little while until your mind, body, and fucking spirit, neurochemistry heals until you get to a place where you're like me, where like dude, it's a distant thing in the past. I don't have cravings. I don't even remember that version of myself anymore. Like, are you willing to do the work to get there? You know, I know it's scary. I know it's hard, but you don't have to do it alone. You don't have to do it alone. You do it with community. You do it with structure and support. And like things that teach you how to do it along the way. I couldn't do it alone. I consider myself a relatively intelligent guy. There's a lot of people who make a lot of money and are highly intelligent that come into my program, millionaires, whatever that come into the program and then they're like holy shit. So don't try to judge your future based on your past. When your past has been dysfunctional and you haven't had the resources and tools and accountability and structure to like really perform at your best. So looking at things through a spiritual lens gives you an opportunity to try to like gain a leverage point to be like, okay, yeah, I take full ownership and responsibility here for the parts of myself. And I can also see that throughout my life, there's also something bigger happening. Like God's source universe, whatever is like orchestrating and organizing experiences for me to learn and to refine and to mature and to test me and to test me, right? It's okay to get tested. I don't know what your relationship with that is if you think that's somehow cruel. It's like, no, we get tested in everything that we do and how we perform isn't like the only thing that it reflects is what we get. It's not a hard definition of our character because your character can change and refine as you learn and grow and mature. You can learn to make better decisions. But a test is just going to say like, are you ready to evolve energetically, consciously, behaviorally, spiritually, relationally, mentally in all the ways so that you can now calibrate to a different frequency of consciousness that offers a different set of experiences, oftentimes more favorable or not. And it's just a feedback mirror all day, every day, every experience just offers feedback offers a mirror. What are you going to choose? Are you going to choose the pain, the discomfort, the safety and the short-term gratification at the expense of the future because you just really want to make sure you're feeling okay now or are you going to evolve? The maturity process of the human being comes from moving out of short-term gratification cycles into playing medium to long-term games. It's about learning to prioritize your future self, not at the expense of, but maybe at the expense of is the only way I know how to describe it. It's like prioritizing your your future self at the expense of your current self in the moment, right? So your current self in the moment will have to incur some discomfort. Your future, your current present self in the moment may have to incur change and that feels uncomfortable. That's okay. This comfort is okay. A big part of this whole journey is just you're you're learning, you're growing, you're evolving, you're learning how to navigate sensation in your body, my friend, that's all you're doing. Okay. Like in a really simple generalized way, like moving through addiction is learning how to redefine, reinterpret and re-relate to and then how to behaviorally compensate for and strategize for things that are uncomfortable. That's all it is. This is like your learning ground, right? Like you didn't you thought you stopped learning in high school or college. Now like you've hit a point where because you've been avoiding doing the things that your soul and spirit needs, the healing that's necessary, the version of you to step up that's necessary to like step into your higher self and start aligning with your truth and authenticity. So you can start sharing and expressing your gifts in the way that is called forth from you by your kids and your family and your wife and your husband and your employer and your community. Like it's not worth your your the strategy you were using to avoid isn't working anymore. And so you're fucking fed up with it and you're tired of it and you're sick and tired of being tired and ashamed guilt and you're getting all these negative feedbacks to be like, yo, yo, your inputs are leading to poor outputs. You have to start changing your inputs. That's all it is. You change your inputs. The outputs will change. But if you don't know what inputs to change, if you don't know what you're optimizing for, if you're trying to climb a massive mountain and you've never climbed it before, like you got to get help and you got to get support and you got to invest in yourself. Like stopping so afraid to spend money on yourself, I spend money on myself all the time. We all do whether you're shopping or you're buying yourself food, like you are continually investing in yourself to survive. So why not invest in like something that's going to catapult you into a new tier of life, right? It doesn't make sense where like people get caught up about like, oh, but I have to pay for this. It's like, yeah, of course, course. Nothing is free in life. Nothing is free. It's paid for at some level. You either keep paying for it with your health and with your time and with your self-respect and the respect of your partner and the respect of your kid and like the possibility of like continuing to put yourself and your family at risk to create like unforeseen tragic accidents or like imprints that cause some sort of pain or trauma into your family members, which then like further destroys their life like, you gotta just act. The buck is gonna have to stop, right? You've heard me say that a thousand times. So spirituality, it offers an opportunity to look at your life and to connect the dots in a way and then at a deep level what it offers is the ability to recognize that everything that's happened can be synthesized for some level of good. And I know if you've incurred tremendous hardship and pain that the thought and idea of that makes you want to throw up. But in everything through our spiritual development, we can find the seed of opportunity. And typically what that seed represents is, if you think about it this way, if what consciousness is doing is exchanging energy back and forth around how to best survive on this planet, right? That's what we've been doing. We tell stories, right? We tell stories, we learn things, we gain adaptations and evolutions in technology and then we leave it for the next generation. Hopefully that they'll take those things and adopt them and refine them, which will give them a better life, right? This isn't like, this isn't up for debate here. You're not like, you're not allowed to argue with me on this. This is what we do as human beings, right? Every parent who has kids wishes that their kids would have a better, more favorable, beautiful life than they did. We want to be able to give them the things that we didn't have, right? We want their life to be a little easier, a little bit more manageable, whatever. This is what this is what life does. Okay, so this part isn't up for debate and it's all connected. So if what we're doing here is telling each other stories and giving each other opportunities to like take on the wisdom to make our life better, the pains of your life that you're holding onto that you don't want to process that you feel stuck by, right? Isn't allowing like, there's a blockage in the collective energy because you're numbing out and avoiding an isolating, the gifts that you have, the wisdom that you have and it doesn't have to be you go start a coaching business, the gifts that you have and the wisdom that you have isn't being shared with your friend who needs it right now, isn't being passed on to your kid right now, isn't being shared with your wife or your husband, isn't being shared at your boardroom meeting at work. Like, and it's not about the specific thing that who you are, what you went through, it's like the tone, it's the energetics, right? Do you see what I'm saying here? Like, it's not even just about the moment in like what you say in a meeting, it's about who you are and the expression of your energy and your energetic field and how that will influence the collective and the people around you. Like, maybe one day you just, you happen to smile at the person who needed it and that like fucking the chain ripple effect of that opens up, right? And then that day like they don't go home and beat their kid or something, you know, or maybe like they're going to wax themselves that, that night, kill themselves that night and that's like, you're fucking genuine smile where you looked into their eyes and like stayed present with them, like gave them a little bit of hope, right? These are like crazy extreme examples that that you somehow think like, oh, that's crazy, Bardia, but it's like, dude, it's true. You just don't know. And it's not about just me and it's not about you, it's about all of us. How are we working together to create something better, more favorable, more present, more connected with less war and more peace and more compassion and more remembrance and more love, right? The way that we build utopia, the way that we build heaven on earth, isn't by running, numbing and avoiding and getting fucked up. We do it by being present and healing. It's the hard work. It's not the easy work. The easy work is go out to the club every fucking weekend. Go out to the bar every night, sit at home and drink after work every night. That's the easy thing to do, but easy doesn't create the life that we want. And it's not going to help you fulfill your potential. If you're an individual who's listening to my podcast who has a growth mindset, which is you're at point A, but like you have a point B, point B represents healthier, happier, more love, more connection, more sex, more contribution, more money, more travel, more freedom, more experiences, more novelty, more fun, more confidence, more self-esteem, more creativity, then you have to understand that alcohol is the thing. It is the number one thing holding you back from all of that because in the moment you get a craving and you just it's a lot. So you're going to sacrifice your potential the next 50 years of your life and then you're going to be on your deathbed and you're going to look back and be like, yo, what the fuck did I do? Because I was scared because I let that bully or that mom or that dad or that experience or this experience or that experience, fucking control my whole life and give me social anxiety for 40 years. Like, dude, what are we doing here? What are we doing? It's time to step up. It's time to wake up. Like, you have so much more in the tank than you're expressing. I was operating at maybe 5 or 10% of my potential when I was drinking because look at what I've been able to build and experience now when I'm able to access significant more of it. A significant amount more of my potential having learned what I've learned healed what I've healed, grown into and embodied the version of myself that feels true and is connected to my high self. And you have that too in your own way and it's your, the reason you're on earth is to discover it and to express it and to develop the courage and the balls to do so. That's pretty much it and alcohol is a distraction but also alcohol remember represents the greatest spiritual gift. It's the coming together of all points of your life finally coming into this point of like explosion of transformation into a higher dimension of reality. Which that's what sobriety is, that's what being alcohol free is. It's a higher frequency of reality. And I know when you're drinking, you're like, "Barty, that's a bunch of bullshit." Sober people are boring. It's not about sober, fucking throw the term sober out the window. It's about being sovereign. It's about being clear. It's about owning who you are. It's about being connected to your creativity and your authentic self-expression, free from limitation. It's about being able to choose what you want to do with your time rather than being slave to compulsions that destroy you and own you and tell you what you're going to do with your time. And then you feel like shit over it. It's not about the alcohol. It's not about sober. It's about you coming back to your truth and to your power. That's what stop drinking coaches about. It's not just a sobriety program. It's like, it's not just a 12 step, turn yourself over to God to absolve you of your trauma, which that just doesn't work because it's not real. Not that God's not real, but because like, by choosing to believe in something your trauma doesn't go away, it still lives in your nervous system. It still lives in your tissue. The memories are still there. It doesn't just wipe the memories. It's not how it works. And that's why it doesn't resonate for you, right? Because you need science. You need psychology. You need to understand what's happening at a deeper level based off of the bells and whistles and mechanics of this operating system, of this meat suit that you're driving. And you're going to have to do it at some point or you don't. The buck is going to have to stop. You can keep kicking the can down the road. I get on calls with people and they're like, yeah, all that sounds freaking amazing. I've never heard of a program like that, but I need to think about it for a week or two. So, okay. So the same program that is causing you to drink because every time you meet a point of discomfort, you run, you're now exercising on the call with me, even though you've listened to my podcast for a month or some a year and a half. And everything sounds perfect and you take a few minutes to fill out an application and show up to the call. But when it comes down to act, it's like, oh, yeah, but no, now's not the right time. It's like that program of it not being the right time is the same reason that you're drinking and driving your life into the ground is because you're afraid to act. You don't have the courage to step up when it's time to step up. And so I'm not here to shame you for it. I'm not here to guilt you for it. I'm here to lay it out objectively so that you can see yourself and recognize that if you want different, you have to do different and you have to be willing to immerse yourself in something that is different. And I know that might be scary. The thought and idea of accountability is scary because what if you failed now publicly in front of a bunch of people? That's what it's okay. You're not here to be perfect. You're here to learn. Stop drinking coaches here to teach you how to relive inside of your mind and inside of your body. And it's not about perfection. It's about refinement. It's about awareness. It's about understanding. It's that if you fall and you scrape your knee, you get back up. You look back at what caused you to scrape your knee. You recognize either your shoes were untied and your laces were got stuck. Or you recognize that there was a rock in a pebble that you didn't see in which case now as you walk forward, every few seconds you scan the ground to make sure that there's no rock or pebble that you can trip up with. Or you make sure that now as you walk forward, every hour you just get down and you tighten your laces to ensure that they don't loosen. So it's about understanding. It's about wisdom. It's about application. It's about integration. It's about becoming more conscious of your own consciousness and its responses and its reactions and its patterns and its programming. And then it's about you developing the courage to go into that space and to do the deep work of reprogramming, of letting go, of forgiving, of reprocessing, of reintegrating, of telling yourself new stories and doing the things that are necessary to literally change the fabric of your consciousness. And by changing the fabric of your consciousness, your body and your nervous system will begin to respond to your own internal state of reality, your own thoughts, your own beliefs, your own memories, your own projections around what's possible and to the world and to the environment, to different people in a different way. Really, really important to understand that whatever your base architecture is, however anxious you are, how fearful you are, how much you don't believe in yourself or whatever these things are that you feel really upset about and have a lot of shame and guilt over is that it all can be changed. Really, really, really important. But it's like, God is talking to you, source universe, whatever your higher self is talking to you through me and is saying what you're doing isn't working anymore and do you have the courage to become the version of yourself that somewhere in your heart and soul you know you want to be and that you know at some level if you could only figure it out, you could be. And that's what Stop Tricking Coach is about. You know? I run a life coaching system that helps you quit drinking along the way and makes the process of going alcohol free easier and more manageable than you've tried before. But you have to go all in. You have to, you have to. There's no other way to do it. You can't tip toe, you can't go half in, half out, you can't keep trying to moderate. We just know that doesn't work. So ask yourself, what do you want? What do you want? What are you really afraid of happening and let that scare you? And then ask yourself, what do you really want? What's important to you? Is your wife important to you? Are your kids important to you? Is your husband important to you? Is not losing half a million dollars in a divorce? Important to you, you know? Is being able to lay on your deathbed and reflect back and say shit, I used the last 20, 30, 40 years of my life in a way that was like fucking awesome. I spent six to 12 months going in doing some deep work laying my head down, making some adjustments to my lifestyle and getting around a bunch of people who operate on a way higher frequency and then the next 30, 40, 50 years of my life were fucking awesome. And I'm so proud of myself and I could lay my head to rest and die knowing that I emptied the tank. There's a lot we can talk about here in this podcast. We talked a little bit about spirituality and kind of the path and process in what happens as we go from living in our ego, rooted and validated and justified in our pain. So like stepping outside of ourselves and recognizing, no, there is all a purpose to it to some degree if we can just synthesize and find the goal and then use that goal to make our lives better and to make the lives of other people better. And man, does it get good? Does it get good? If you would have told me, if you would have told me almost five years ago that I would get to live the way that I live today and experience the things that I get to experience today, it would have just been a dream. It would have been a dream. And the way the dream was accomplished was by developing the courage to make what I felt was the ultimate sacrifice. So it's like, dude, you want to join the club, join the club. Like if anything, I get you and you get me. You want to join the club? Does the way that I speak, does the way that I interpret reality makes sense? Do the things that I share inspire you and motivate you? Then come join the club, man. Come join. I would love to have you part of the community. I would love the opportunity to work with you one on one of its a fit where we can develop like a deep relationship and talk to each other on a regular basis. And you know, you could send me voice notes and we can chat and talk about your journey and life and what you're struggling with. And I'll just like you listen to in a podcast for an hour, I will give you all the codes that will allow you to continue to make forward progress in your life. So thank you so much for listening. Check out www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com. You can fill out an application and you can book a call. I will see you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review, and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.thestopdrinkingcoach.com and book a call with me. I offer private one on one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. (upbeat music)