Soul Journey - How To Find Your Path

Spiritual teacher Michael Mervosh discusses his path to the spiritual life in this wide ranging interview with Ted Seides. Starting from the steel mills of Pittsburgh and ending up on a mountaintop retreat in West Virginia, Michael's reassuring journey inspires all of us.

Transcript

Michael,

We are in the mountains of West Virginia in the late innings of another impactful hero's journey.

I'm really excited after the impact you've had on my life the last five years to be able to share your story.

So why don't we start with where it all began for you?

Well,

I came out of my mother,

Awful young,

In the culture of the steel mills of Pittsburgh and shaped by that world,

Blue collar world of smoke and fire and steel.

And forging out a living and grinding out a life with being given just the right amount of things to keep me going and deprived of the right amount of things to keep me unfed and denied enough to make me search.

And where did that search start?

I don't really know where that search started,

But I think the drive,

The sense of something beyond what we do day to day and beyond the stories that were told to me when I realized there's another story,

It probably was in my adolescence when I realized that there's something about magic and mystery and beauty that's called the opposite sex.

You know,

A worthy God as any in nature.

I had the fortune of being part of a youth group that would go on retreats and a man who,

To this day I stay close to,

Who took me along and bailed me out of trouble and looked after me in his own unaware way,

Helped me navigate the world beyond my immediate family,

Which is the first threshold is how does the world find you and meet you beyond your parents?

And many of us don't make it that far really.

What formative experience led you to realize that you had the ability to steer the life in the direction you wanted?

You're assuming I have that ability.

One day maybe.

Well,

I used to think I was steering,

And I steered my life exactly how I was trained to steer.

I learned how to drive well,

I learned how to take hold of the wheel,

I learned how to take charge of the gas pedal,

And I knew how to drive it into the ditch.

Or actually,

The car took itself there with the ways the culture shaped me and taught me if you follow this way of life and you do exactly how we train you and you follow the commandments and you obey the rules and you climb this ladder,

You will enter the kingdom of something and get your due.

And I,

Like many,

Many people bought in fully and I played that game.

I looked to be good at it.

And one day in my late 20s,

And then again in my early 30s,

I realized the prescription does not work and it all fell down.

And the wheel came off.

Yeah,

What happened for you when the wheels came off?

My marriage failed.

And it wasn't like the fairy tale.

You can do all the right things and you can love one another even.

That doesn't mean it works.

And I started to buy in and feel like,

Oh shit,

I'm a failure because if you don't follow the rules and it doesn't work,

Then you failed and then you try harder.

You repent and try again.

And you repent and try again.

And I was fortunate enough to slip through into another way and have opportunities conspire to show me there's a world beyond right and wrong,

Good or bad,

You and me.

Which opportunity stands out for you?

I had many of them.

But definitive ones,

Those ones that are markers,

I was at the Karen Foundation in I guess early 1980s.

I remember the name of Sharon Wegsheder Cruz.

And I had an opportunity in my first place of employment to go get training in understanding family systems.

So I signed up for this training program,

Week long training program in Reading PA and I was nervous and I showed up there and be part of this training group.

And we were first night in a big wide circle of about 50 people.

And this woman comes out and there's this big tension in there.

I'm thinking,

What kind of training program is this?

We're going around and we're understanding that there's gonna be this guy who's gonna be the protagonist in this thing that was going to happen.

I'm like,

Oh,

Okay,

That's interesting.

He had to pick certain people to be in his story.

And he picked a bunch of people and then he said,

You have to pick someone to be you as a boy.

And he looked across the room and he says him.

It was me.

I go,

Okay,

That's cool.

The next day I realized that I was not in a training program and I would have never signed up for what I was in.

I was in a full blown psychodrama experience and I was to represent this man's interior life and the steering wheel came off.

So you mentioned if you knew what it was,

You never would have done it.

Hell no.

Hell no.

I would have scoffed at it.

And what do you do when you run into that resistance day to day,

Right?

The world that I come in,

The financial community,

A lot of the stuff you're talking about is different things that people don't relate to.

What do you do when you realize someone has a different light on and they're humming to a different song than you?

Let them sing.

Let them sing.

Let them sing their song.

I think the difference is to be less troubled by it.

To be less troubled by it.

And it takes a long time I think,

Ted,

For anyone,

Certainly myself,

To realize that everything happened in its own time,

In its own way.

That something's not really,

Really up to me,

Or you,

Or anyone else.

And it's been really humbling to look around like here with men that are here.

They're all ones I'd have never figured.

They do not look the part.

What is the part?

What do you mean by the part?

They do not look like someone who would sign up for something like this.

Yeah.

Present company included.

They don't look like it.

They either look like the guys I grew up with,

The guys I worked in the mill with,

The guys you would have walked down Wall Street with,

Who are humming a different tune.

Like an anthem,

You know?

Allegiant to it.

And shaped by it.

And it shapes their reality.

And it's a self-closed loop.

You don't do anything about that.

You just wait for the trouble to come.

Because it always comes.

So what happened after you had this formative experience at the Cameron Foundation?

What did you do next?

Oh,

It's not what I did next.

It was what was undone next.

That lit the fuse.

What happened was as I went into interior spaces,

I didn't know where in me.

I didn't know they were there.

I had a glass ceiling in my life.

I didn't know that that was a glass ceiling.

I didn't know they were doorways.

I just thought that was the four walls of the world.

And it opened up a whole new world.

What do you do when you're in a whole new world?

And you experience oneness for real.

Oneness for real.

I cried so hard,

My insides turned inside out.

I laughed so hard,

I thought my eyes would explode.

My cheeks hurt.

You know this feeling.

And then with strangers.

And then it starts unfolding.

So that it opened me to magic and wonder.

It was far beyond the world of reason.

And then it went back into doing what I always do.

Which is?

Follow the prescription again.

Drink the same Kool-Aid.

Walk the same way.

Enter back into a world that reflects a reality back to you that says this is actually who you are.

And it took a long time for that other world to come foreground in a way that said,

Wait,

That's real.

That's as real as anything.

That's as real as going into Walmart.

Or more real.

More real than what I watch people do every day.

They call that for a living.

For a living.

They don't look alive to me.

Yeah.

And when you say that's real,

What's the that?

That.

Yeah,

What is this?

What is this thing that animates us?

That moves us?

What is this thing that's intangible?

That makes the breeze blow?

That makes me want to hug somebody?

That makes me want to close my eyes because I can't stand to look?

That makes me want to reach towards a stranger I don't even know and say something that's not clearly formed?

What animates us and moves us and drives this whole thing?

I don't have a clue.

It reminds me of the next thing to happen where I met a woman there at this workshop who worked at a place called Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Aliquippa,

Pennsylvania.

And everything started moving.

My first job at Alternatives was the first and last job I ever sought out in my life.

Everything else sought me out.

And I didn't know how to pay attention to that at first.

Everything sought me out.

That was a whole new orientation.

So she calls me up as a follow-up and says,

Would you like to work here?

I'm like,

What?

At the time,

It was a really prominent place.

And she wanted me to be part of a brand new family program doing these constellations.

And I said to her,

No,

Thank you.

Oh,

Thank you so much.

I'm still so flattered,

So honored that you asked.

But no,

Thank you,

Because I was getting pretty cool at the job I was in.

She says,

OK,

But could you tell me why not?

I said,

Yeah,

It's pretty far.

It's like a 50 minute drive.

It's pretty inconvenient.

I said,

Inconvenient.

And we hung up.

And oh,

Man,

That haunted me,

That word.

I am inconvenient.

An opportunity of a lifetime.

I don't want to be troubled by a driving there.

Two days later,

I called it back,

Thank God.

And that started me on the next part of my path.

So what lit the flame for you in that experience at Gateway?

And where did you go from there?

Well,

It's just how it all unfolds,

Right?

So I started learning how to do family work.

I'm just studying family systems and bringing people together in psychodramas where people step in and play roles,

Meeting very fascinating men who mentored me,

Like Abraham Tversky,

Who was a founder of the rehab.

And Ken Ramsay,

People took me under their wing and showed me things and gave me ways of doing this.

And then it unfolds.

They built this thing at the time that was brand new called Challenge by Choice Ropes Courses outside.

And they're like,

What's that up there in the trees?

And they told me,

Who uses them?

And all the patients.

Why can't the family people use them?

In fact,

Why can't I use them when we're not working?

And we started doing work up in the air.

And so that created a deeper sense of stuff being in your,

A living being in your body,

Where life is in the body and not just in our heads.

And that showed me another world.

How did you create this experience called The Hero's Journey?

I know,

Right?

How did this happen?

You use language that keeps saying,

Like,

How I did something.

The question keeps is like,

Well,

Then how did this keep happening?

And then the next thing,

These are all things that happen.

Reading a man by the name of Joseph Campbell.

And it was like one of those things where the words jumped off the page.

I wasn't just reading on the flat paper,

But something was being transmitted in what I was reading.

And I remember this one time we're meeting.

There's this thing called the zeal of eternity that longs for incarnation in space and time.

I'm like,

What the?

What does that mean?

Like,

What?

That makes no sense.

Like,

The zeal.

But my body,

Something in my psyche is animating the zeal of eternity for incarnation in time.

I didn't know that was my job description.

I never knew that.

But now I know that's my job description.

That's what I do for a living.

That's what I do for a living.

I do that for aliveness to become the zeal of eternity,

The way something just has this passionate zeal that lives outside of time that wants to incarnate into one thing it doesn't have,

Which is form.

And so that started it.

And I got a hole in.

That took me down.

Like,

Who's this Campbell dude?

Another rabbit hole.

Another facet on the diamond.

Ropes courses.

Family systems theory.

Religion.

All these different variables.

Rehabilitation.

What the hell does that mean?

And from there.

Yeah.

This Campbell dude.

This Campbell dude.

Some people might have heard of this movie called Star Wars.

What was it about Campbell that influenced that film?

Well,

George Lucas was a fan of Campbell.

And he absorbed the myth.

This whole sense that myth is something culturally very misunderstood.

We tend to call myths lies.

If it's a myth,

It's sort of a legend that's not true.

Because you can't actually process it with a linear mind.

So a linear mind takes a myth and says,

Oh,

That's a lie.

It's just a myth.

It's just a fairy tale.

It's not really real.

But what a myth is is something that's truer than a historical fact.

Something more true than whatever a linear historical fact would be.

I was born into existence in August of 1959,

Before it all began with my mother.

Historical fact.

But we identify with our historical facts as our reality of who we are.

And that's the trouble.

And that's the limitation.

And that's the glass ceiling.

So what's the myth of the hero?

Well,

The myth of the hero used to be to become more and more a superpower,

This idea that you become larger than life.

And you stand among the others as an example for others to follow.

That's been a real popular myth.

But as culture changes,

It reshapes the myth it needs for itself.

So then it creates a new myth,

Which is still arriving in our times.

We're not there because there's no more one person that can be the hero.

But the hero,

I would say,

Is someone who's always called into unknowing.

Not not knowing,

But an unknowing,

Always called beyond the bounds,

The rigidifying bounds of the familiar.

And what a hero does is it goes beyond the established parameters of the way the world actually is now and experiences what's beyond that world and then brings that back into this world in order to reshape it and renew it and redefine the culture,

Which then reshapes the people in it.

Yeah.

In our field,

We hear a lot about what people call a growth mindset.

Oh,

Yeah,

That and self-improvement,

Man.

They're pretty underrated.

When you described this,

That's what came for me was this idea of going beyond what you already know.

Yeah,

I'm working on myself.

Yeah,

OK.

What do you think is wrong with you?

What needs improvement,

Do you think?

And how are you looking at that?

Is it trouble worth having?

Or are you trying to get rid of that trouble by improving yourself?

Oh,

Keep improving.

Let's see how it goes.

What's the alternative?

Well,

The heroic task is facing what is and not trying to change what is.

That's called a tyrant.

Philip Shepard writes about that in his books,

New Self,

New World,

Radical Wholeness.

No,

That's a tyrant.

Tyrants trying to change the world around them to suit them.

It's also called the infant.

And rather,

We have to change ourselves in relation to what is and adapt ourselves to what is.

And that's hard,

Hard work.

Yeah.

That's hard work to do that,

To mature and ripen in,

To say,

I need you to be different for me so I can be happy.

Have a go at that.

What was the call for you that led to the creation of what we're experiencing here?

Well,

A call always comes when something's missing.

You have to be deprived of something.

Something has to be absent or undeveloped.

And the part of you that's awake and aware knows it.

That part of you knows something's missing.

That was making me want to seek out of the absence of what was there.

So I just always felt like I was seeking and longing for something I knew was missing.

And that's the compass heading.

It took me years,

Decades,

Really,

To understand that love dog's poem by Rumi,

Where it's the longing itself that's the call.

And so I feel that.

And I get scared when I don't feel my longing.

I used to try to cure it.

I didn't know it was the cure.

Like,

Make this longing go away.

But even yesterday,

I felt the longing.

Like when I feel the sunset,

It makes me think of people I miss and times that aren't here.

The melancholic sweetness of a Sunday evening.

Oh,

I got to go into the work world.

And I feel like I'm just approaching the majesty of the sunset.

So what came through that was vision comes through that.

I did a vision quest with Joseph Jastrow in 1992,

Whatever it was that I did it.

And that seeded it,

Of course,

Because I did a journey to get away from everything enough to know not to be shaped by forces around me of what to do,

But to really feel what that ignited in me and to find what was really alive for me that would be worth doing.

That takes a long time.

Why don't you describe what it is,

This journey we're on here this week.

Oh,

You're talking about this particular form we're in right now?

Oh,

Right now,

We're on a mountaintop in a remote setting in the middle of a national forest in West Virginia in the United States.

And we are up here to take leave of our minds,

Really,

And the fabric of our culture that's shaping us every day into who we are to be.

And we're spending seven days or one lifetime or eternity,

Whatever comes first,

Up here to undo the things that are called unquestioned assumptions about what is,

Unquestioned and unexamined assumptions and expectations about how we believe life to be.

That's not why somebody signs up.

Somebody told them to come here,

And they don't know what the hell they did.

Nobody would come here if they knew why they were coming here.

The same way I wouldn't have went.

So what we do is we come up here,

And we go into a giant reflecting mirror called this world around,

The natural world where we have wide open skies,

Vast,

Vast horizons up over that high plains area over there.

We have deep green forest fields to get lost in over here.

We have cave systems underground here,

Where there's these underwater currents flowing underneath us right now that no one can see or touch or feel that are shaping us right now.

And so we come up into this nature bowl,

And we soak in that to get out of this four walls,

The limitations of four walls.

And you notice you have been in very few rooms,

Maybe one room in this entire space that we're in that's square.

That's for a reason.

We bring the background forward.

It's all round spaces here.

We're in a Mongolian yurt built by Bill Coppert Swaithe in 1970 that people are still amazed by.

And so you come up here,

And you enter into a living myth.

Because where can you actually live it?

Because most people read about it and can discuss it.

But where do you say,

I am going to leave everything I know behind,

And then I'm going to undo this next.

And now I'm going to deal with what happens when none of that is here defining me anymore.

And now I will define me,

But I don't know how that goes.

And now there are no instructions,

And the prescriptions are all gone.

And that's the reorientation process towards mythic worlds,

Where your ability to be right here,

Right now,

Which takes work to animate something that starts to take over,

And then you've got to pay attention to it.

And then you have to yield.

Great hero act of our times is to surrender to something beyond ourselves that starts to seep into us,

These water droplets that we are,

Oceans,

Start to swim in us when we yield to the ocean.

So we use elements.

We use different things to take us up in the air and under the ground and into the forests and around fires and all kinds of things to exchange on a body level something else that gets animated that may or may not be coming through to someone who's listening right now that makes perfect sense and no sense at all.

Because you can't grab it.

And the more you try to grab it,

The more confused you are.

But if you let it seep into you,

Hmm.

Well,

Michael,

I know my experience here on the mountain was truly transformative for my life.

And I know it has been for the men that I've been here with.

And I wondered if it made sense to share a little bit about that.

I'm not quite sure how to go about it,

But why don't we dive in?

Yeah,

I think that's the way in.

Just like that is to say,

I don't know how this goes or how to share this or where we can go.

But that's in the spirit of the journey.

And you used two words,

Truly transformative.

And maybe we start there like,

What's really true?

What do you mean exactly for you when you say transformative?

I had heard about the journey from a friend,

Logged it in the back of my head as,

Oh,

That sounds strange.

Yeah,

So that's the call,

Right?

It's an adventure,

Right?

There's something,

You hear a call,

Something sticks.

Yeah.

Well,

It's something stuck,

But it sounded a little strange.

And some years later,

A lot happened in my life.

And I felt the need to dive into something different,

Change in my life.

And I remembered that.

And I called him up.

And he told me next to nothing.

He said,

Oh,

That's going on?

Yeah,

Maybe you should go.

And that first year on the mountain,

I learned life lessons that I just didn't know where they were coming from,

Didn't know how I didn't learn them along the way.

And some came directly,

Conversations.

Some came from understanding the experiences of others.

And a lot came from this sort of magical environment.

Yeah,

Concoction of conditions.

So that's how it started.

And it really transformative in the sense that I felt like maybe the colloquial way of saying it was midlife crisis.

But that,

Of course,

That's not me.

There's no crisis.

I'm not that guy.

Midlife emergency.

The midlife emergency.

A symbol for grass.

Something needed to shift.

And that process that,

Alas,

Me the rest of my life started here.

That's how it was transformative.

The other piece of it,

I think,

Is a man in this financial world,

In this society.

And I was so accustomed to having to rely on myself for everything.

Maybe I was conditioned that way as a kid.

But I learned the power here of what you call the we instead of the I.

Me too.

And in ways that were very good for shaping me,

I was taught to rely on myself and encouraged to,

And also had to.

I had to rely on myself.

Some of that wasn't a choice because nobody was really there.

Why?

What happened for you that that was the case?

Adults were adults doing adult things in the adult world.

And kids were just around.

You didn't raise a kid.

You fed a kid.

You schooled a kid.

You didn't raise them.

You didn't cultivate a child in my blue collar neighborhood.

You kept a child.

The way you keep an egg in a nest and give it the things it needs.

But there was no inner world.

And that wasn't a real world.

And heavenly things were for the next life.

So do the right thing,

And you'll get the reward in the next life,

Which never really comes in this one.

When you say reliance,

It's like even if you give me your hand for a minute,

And rather than rely on yourself and say,

When I lean into you and you lean into my hand,

And we rest in it,

There is a dynamic tension we can feel.

And there's an aliveness I feel now in my body.

How do I give this to myself?

I could do a push-up and be in the same position to give that for myself.

And that's good.

But this feels like a living presence,

Different.

We're relying on one another,

Which is very different than depending on you and you carrying me.

So that,

For me,

Was that transformative process.

And there have been so many lessons along the way that you either hear or,

I guess,

Feel or come to you from being here.

Yeah,

I think these universal truths about the way the world really is or how it works in this world,

I think the biggest suffering that I saw even for myself this year,

That I'm growing in appreciation,

The deep wound a lot of us carry is nobody showed us how the world works.

Sure.

Like,

How it works.

So even you think about financial investment,

And I don't know how.

Do you show me or do you do it for me?

And does that work?

Not unlike the priests with access to God.

Yeah.

Did you show me God or do you talk to him for me?

Or do you barter it or broker it?

This thing around like,

I don't know how to make it in the world is so deep,

Deep,

Deep seated,

This great fear.

Because they don't show us how the world works.

And one of my favorite Campbell quotes is if you want to help this world,

Show people how to live in it.

Show them how to live in it.

Show them how to live in it.

And there's so much shame when we don't know how.

And envy when like,

Ooh,

You know how.

Mm,

You have a really nice house.

How'd you get that?

Yeah.

How'd you get that nice house?

What do you know that I don't know?

That's that deep underground competitive current rather than saying,

Well,

You want to learn how?

Because we don't always want to learn how.

We want to be given.

Just give it to me.

Just give me hows like that.

I don't know how you get one or get alone,

Build one.

Like,

Show me how to access the living myth.

Yeah.

You know,

So that this journey comes alive.

And you show me how you create the conditions.

Like,

We say,

Well,

I can't tell you how you come alive inside.

But I can create conditions that allows me to come alive.

And maybe others to come alive.

And you sit in the conditions.

I can't tell you how to get that raincoat off of you.

But I can get a sun beating on you,

Maybe,

Pretty hard.

Right.

Yeah.

I can't make you take the raincoat off.

Yeah.

You know,

I can't make you want to reveal what's under there.

But I can turn up some heat to make you want to take your shirt off.

Yeah.

It's that kind of thing.

We need the right conditions.

But no one ever shows us how to do it.

I think part of what we do is show people how.

Yeah,

Boy.

I remember you telling me a few years ago this concept that really resonated for me,

Which was,

Wow,

Your parents didn't have all the answers because no one told them.

I think the story you told was you're walking up to a bridge to cross a river.

And the bridge isn't there.

And you turn to your father.

And he says,

Well,

I'm going to go to the river.

Father,

And say,

Dad,

Where's the bridge?

And he says,

What's a bridge?

What do you mean bridge?

Yeah,

They can't give us what they weren't given.

Or they went and weren't given it.

And it created a hunger for them to go get it.

I give.

Some of the deeply satisfying things is learning how to give somebody what I never got.

But what's really painful is watching someone try to give to someone else out of their deprivation,

Out of what they were never given.

They compensate.

All of us,

When we get wounded,

That wound becomes our gift.

Because then through that pain and wounding,

I understand something.

I'm awake to the world now.

And I see you hurting.

And I get how that goes and what you need.

But if I'm wounded and don't know,

I will also say,

I don't want to be the wounded one.

I want to be the one that helps wounded ones.

And I want to be a white knight in shining armor.

And you can be my damsel in distress.

And that's a match made in hell.

So say that again.

If you're not in touch with your wound and your deficit or your flaw,

And you don't know that it's in you,

And active in you,

Because you've disidentified with it,

And you say,

I don't want to go there anymore,

And you haven't genuinely had people go there with you and help you transform it into a healed whole,

You'll compensate by disidentifying.

And now instead of being the wounded one,

You will be the helper.

What is it that brings someone here?

I mean,

I know what brought me here.

Does someone have to have that I had a rough patch?

Does it have to happen that way?

It doesn't have to be like that,

Though.

You can't say you had traumatic childhood.

That's why you're here now.

But trouble always comes.

Here's this interesting comparison about where the Christian Bible has evolved.

You would look at these scriptural passages that are in comparative religions.

These things all line up from different cultures.

That's what Campbell said.

These myths are alive in all cultures in all times.

But like the reductionism from the Greek translation of the Aramaic and in the English is,

Ask and you shall receive,

Seek and you shall find,

Knock and the door will be opened to you.

Well,

Man,

That's a fairy tale for children.

Yeah.

Ask.

First of all,

Ask.

Ask what?

And ask when you really need help.

How hard it is to ask,

Number one.

When you ask,

You don't receive.

You don't just get the answer.

That forecloses.

We all live on the surface.

Ask me a question,

I'll give you an answer.

Can we move on?

Question number two,

Please.

Skim the surface,

Go down the line,

And wait till it's just one gray line of collection of knowledge.

Oh,

Boy.

So ask and you shall receive.

No.

Seek and you shall find.

No.

Knock and the door should be opened to you.

No.

Ask and be troubled.

Seek and get lost in the seeking.

Knock and feel the barrier.

Knock against the barrier.

And where do you go from there?

So in the Upanishads,

They would say,

The trouble that's worth it so that you evolve and grow and learn how and find out how it works,

Not to get to the end,

To get into it by the end,

Is to be fully in this world before you leave it.

And then in that,

Like you experienced here in all the trials,

The boon is underneath the ordeal.

And you get an adventure and you get an ordeal and they overlap.

One becomes the other.

This is so great.

Oh,

Shit.

Oh,

Shit.

Oh,

God,

I am just so miserable.

Whoa,

I didn't see that coming.

So then something rises out of that mix is where God is.

Then ask and then you receive beyond what you ask for.

Then you seek.

And in how lost and disoriented you are,

You find a new orientation.

And when you knock,

You get through the barrier.

And at the belly of the beast,

Where you feel like there's no way through,

It's not the way you were looking.

The forest finds you and something opens beyond what you could see before.

Yeah,

It reminds me of this,

The Headspace Meditation app.

There's this great line about no matter how dark the clouds are,

There's always a blue sky above it.

But sometimes you've got to sit through the thunderstorm.

Yeah,

And you can only see the sun half the day.

Right.

But if you really want to keep seeing the sun,

You've got to look at the moon.

It's a different sunlight.

Right?

And so from the mythic journey,

From Campbell's perspective,

He would say,

Well,

We're always seeking the sun.

Well,

You can't get it every day.

You get it some days.

But you don't despair when it's night.

And then you learn to see that we're all to become like the moon.

We reflect the sun.

But I can't look directly into the sun.

I can't look directly into God.

I'd burn up.

But we can be reflections of that,

Right?

Yeah.

And even that,

Even that will be gone for three days out of the month.

Yeah.

One of those lessons and those dichotomies that I took out of being here was,

And it took me a while to realize that,

Wow,

I've tried to control everything in my own life.

And the motto that you've created for the hero's journey is be the hero of your own life.

And as I've come to embrace that,

Those are actually entirely opposite things.

I think if I would rewrite that now,

Not that it would make much more sense to anybody,

But I think you had to be the hero of your own life.

I'm not even sure that there's any motto I like.

All mottos lack the distillation needed,

Really.

There's no words point to the source.

But to say to be in charge of your own aliveness,

Be the hero of your own life means to be responsible to see to it that you are alive.

Fully alive.

Fully alive.

And includes tolerating all the places in you that are not yet alive and may not be fully alive in this lifetime.

Yeah.

It's not by being you rah,

Rah,

Rah all the time.

That's just bullshit on the surface.

Super interesting that in the financial world,

You hear a lot about people who strive for traditionally defined success and then feel something empties the word or flat or hollow.

And I think that that is a call for this type of adventure,

For sure.

Yeah.

People,

I think,

Come through one or two doorways.

Everything fails or everything works.

Both ways get you there.

I was thinking of this earlier when you were talking.

You know,

This term currency is an interesting term to me.

What it means to have currency.

What does it mean to be current,

You know,

And to be able to obtain the currency?

Any kind of valuable currency is the ability to exchange it.

Not to collect it,

But to exchange it.

And when we have a lively,

A life-giving exchange,

I can give you a current of my poetry.

And you can give me a current of your lived experience of something.

And we exchange,

And it holds value to the two of us.

And when we turn it into a thing,

When we objectify a currency,

It becomes this static thing.

We would call in religion a false god,

An idol,

Because we're worshiping a static structure.

Those statues,

They don't say anything.

They rigidify.

You know,

When you have a false idol,

It rigidifies.

It's dull,

It has no life in it.

So when you think of investment,

Right,

It's very different than paying a fee versus providing an investment that offers a yield with no guarantee.

But we're all looking for the guarantee.

Yeah,

But tell me the one with the least risk.

Oh my god,

Yeah.

Can I go that way?

Well,

In the end,

It becomes the final danger because of the constriction.

Oh,

And now you've accumulated great wealth.

Well,

I guess now you better start protecting it and separating yourself off from the rest of everybody else.

They don't take it from you.

Yeah.

And now begin the suffering.

Right.

And that's why,

That's,

I think,

The meaning behind the Christian version of it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

That's where that comes from.

You know,

Because the eye of the needle was actually a gate in Jerusalem that was a narrow gate.

In order to enter the gate,

You had to take all your goods off the camel to get the camel through,

To get into the inner walls of the city.

And so in that same way,

What's wrong with accumulation of anything?

Wealth,

Status,

Success,

It's great.

Enjoy it.

Now when you cling to it,

You will not be able to get into the kingdom of the myth.

Because it's here.

You know,

That's where I don't want to turn this into a religious conversation.

But when they say that the kingdom of heaven is before you,

But you can't see it,

It's because you've over accumulated,

Or you're starved,

And you're on a survival mode.

So you can't pass through the gate into the sanctums.

I know in this experience,

Every time I've come,

I never would have thought I'd be here,

What,

Five years in a row,

And until next year.

Yeah,

I never thought I'd be here.

20-some years.

Exactly.

It's a different feeling.

And then you go back.

So in a couple days,

We'll go back to work,

And paying bills,

And families,

And kids.

Yes,

After Jack Kornfield says that in his mindfulness book.

The book's called After the Ecstasy Laundry.

Exactly.

Yeah,

That's the name of the book,

Right?

Yeah,

Because they're the same.

Some of us suffer from,

And don't know it,

From grandiose fantasies.

That's not a myth.

That's not unfolding a living myth.

That's a dream world.

And we live in dream worlds.

And so you're in danger when you come to something like this and say,

Ah,

I'm living the dream.

Well,

You know,

After sleeping and dreaming,

There is a third thing called waking up.

Yeah.

I forget who said that one again.

Called waking up.

And now you're awake to the fact like,

Oh,

It's a shithole of a world.

You know,

Oh my god,

Look at this over here.

Oh god,

Airports,

Which I personally can't stand being in.

And look at the poverty here as I drive out of this West Virginia hill.

And oh,

I got bills to pay.

And oh,

I've got the grind.

Yeah,

The world as it is.

And where do you reject ordinary reality?

All the mystics embrace the ordinary reality.

It's in the sip of the wine.

It's in the reading of the poem where we drop underneath it.

Because this is just,

You know,

These are words on a page here that you see.

Yeah.

Where are those,

You know?

So this ability to practice,

Like,

How do we do it in an ordinary way?

Our man Joseph Jostrop here,

You know,

His book,

Sacred Manhood,

Sacred Earth,

That he wrote.

I was part of the vision quest I was on.

He's learned to play in the most ordinary of ways.

He picks up a plate at dinner and starts tapping on it.

And all of a sudden,

We're in the end.

It's a dinner plate,

Man.

Playing one note on a guitar string,

And everybody's buzzing.

What is that?

So it's that ability to have extra ordinary presence and attention in the here and now moment,

Or realizing,

You know,

That's the goal in an ordinary conversation that you and I are having.

It's an ordinary conversation.

We can also take it to a different level.

And so let me try to ask you some questions that might bring you there.

My own experience,

And I think a lot of the listeners on this show,

Are a certain personality type in those four walls,

Type A,

High achieving,

Financial.

We know the model.

I'd love to have you take me through some of the common aspects of that personality type and just share with me what comes to your mind when I mention these things.

So the first is a highly self-confident,

Know-it-all type person.

A fool.

A fool.

Why?

Fools are certain of everything.

What makes a fool a fool is you don't know that you're one.

And you can't make use of it.

And the biggest fools are the smartest people,

The brightest bulb in the room,

Who are seduced by their own minds into a belief that they know.

And they know more than others.

And they know better than others.

And it's a really useful tool because they have cool things you get.

You get things like money and women and power and status and prestige.

Those are deep allures.

But on the Hero's Journey myth,

If we look at it through that terrain and that map,

There's an interesting thing about the boon.

The boon you get is commensurate to the consciousness you have at the time you're gifted with something.

So if I'm awake this much and you say,

Hey,

Man,

I got a genie.

I'm going to let it out of the bottle.

And I'm going to give you a wish.

What do you want?

Someone's going to say,

An ice cream cone.

I really want an ice cream cone.

And oh,

Man,

Was that good.

And you got your boon.

And someone's going to say,

I want a beautiful woman.

OK,

Now here's a beautiful woman.

And you got your boon.

And now the trouble begins with that.

And now,

You know what I want?

I want status.

I want to be rich.

Oh,

Fucking A when I'm rich.

Let's give you all the money you could ever spend.

That's your boon.

And you get the trouble that comes with that,

Because it's coming.

So what do you really want?

And what else is there to want besides any of those things?

And what do you do with it when you get it?

So the fool,

Back to where you asked me,

Won't see the trouble coming,

Won't know what the trouble actually is.

And everything will eventually burn down.

How about perfectionism?

The type of person feels the need for everything to be perfect.

They can't bear their own imperfections,

You mean?

Yeah.

Yeah,

I just had a conversation with probably one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life.

This little punk is 24.

And he's way,

Way,

Way smarter than me.

He's got an intellect and a wit that just makes me want to drop my jaw.

And he suffers from perfectionism.

The reason we suffer is because he's after something that doesn't exist in nature.

So it doesn't exist.

An ideal is something that you strive for,

But this has no landing.

A beautiful woman you strive for,

She's a destiny,

Not the destination.

We seek perfection like it's a destination.

And it doesn't exist.

But we don't know that.

So we rigidify ourselves,

And we point ourselves like a rigid arrow aiming for something in a linear world.

And we go along a timeline or a path or a ladder,

And we climb.

And usually,

That's when the crisis happens.

Uncertainty.

We're dealing with uncertainty.

Oh,

Again,

Same thing.

Put it in the same category as trouble.

What are you supposed to do with it?

Relate to it or conquer it?

Which one you want to do?

You want to conquer?

OK.

Get to work,

Man.

You're going to be busy and tired.

Good luck with that.

And bitter.

But the work of the hero is to embrace a relationship to uncertainty to understand that the more you grow your capacity for uncertainty and complexity,

The more you have ability to navigate terrains in whole new ways when the uncertainty is a doorway,

Not a problem to be eliminated,

Which is,

Again,

This unconscious wedding to an impossible task.

Yeah.

What about dealing with fear?

I think the hardest thing about fear is when you don't understand that you're afraid.

You're scared and you don't even know.

I remember when I didn't even know I was afraid.

I didn't know what fear really was.

But this lack of oxygen moving through the body,

For one thing,

This constriction in us,

And this tightness,

This holding on.

But I didn't know it was a doorway.

And you were asking about these early times at Gateway.

I remember the first time I was up at that rope score.

I was so afraid of fear.

Was that John Kennedy quote,

Anything to fear is fear itself,

Like because it's a quaint cliche that's so true.

I remember being up on a catwalk.

And I remember how afraid I was about being afraid.

I remember starting to shake.

And I was ashamed and afraid.

And then I realized,

I mean,

I am really afraid right now.

But I wasn't afraid about it anymore.

And I wasn't ashamed of it.

I was just really afraid.

Like,

Yeah,

We're high in the air,

So you're afraid.

And I didn't have some impossible task in mind anymore.

And I could finally have fear live in me and not be contained in me,

Eating at me.

Or it could move through me.

It's the ability to have things like any emotion move through and not just shut down or spit out.

If you're on a journey and you're any kind of man on it,

You pick a fear you're worthy of.

And what you want is a fear that can take you somewhere.

Again,

The trouble is trying to get rid of trouble because you can't do it.

But so much of our easy,

Prescriptive four steps to this,

They're beautiful lies,

Beautiful,

Seductive.

Or they give you a boon that's way down here,

Way low on the scale.

But when you choose a fear that you're worthy of and you really get one you're worthy of,

It takes you somewhere.

It takes you on a journey that you would have never chosen to go on.

And before you know it,

You have trouble worth having.

You have a challenge worth facing.

You have a dilemma worth wrestling with that makes you more and brings something out of you that you didn't even know was in you.

That's the function of fear.

And when that happens,

As you know,

In your own body,

From your own lived experiences here,

That fear turns to excitement.

And that's the alchemical force that fear is really unprocessed and unformulated excitement.

Some of the things we do here,

You talk a lot about the power of the we as opposed to the I.

Yeah,

Yeah.

You listen to guys here say over and over again,

I feel inadequate.

I feel uncertain.

I feel doubt.

I has all those feelings all the time.

And I am always gonna feel inadequate.

I try to get rid of inadequacy like I try to get rid of my right arm all the time.

Keeps coming back.

You know,

We're always inadequate because we're shooting for perfection because we reject ordinary worlds.

We don't know how to be in him and among them.

We don't not have a base of good enough.

You know,

So when I have this I,

What I don't know is the I will always,

Always be inadequate because I is just part of something larger than I,

Cut off from the whole.

And that's the great big myth in my opinion and many others who pursue this path of understanding.

It's the great lie of a Western white civilized world that there actually is an I called my body here because I live in a house that gives me a lot of privacy with small windows and shutters to blind everything that makes me feel it.

Who I am is something cut off from everybody and everything else.

And it's out there and I exchange with that.

But the sense of we,

When I feel who I am beyond I is I as a part of a we,

A relational field,

Like who I am is who I am through this way of talking and looking at you right now and feeling you.

Who I am is myself through that.

This is me through our exchange.

I'm becoming myself again in a new way right now.

I feel like me with you.

That's a dynamic living I and that's what happens here on this journey.

It gives me a sense of I.

All I need to do is sit in the airport for four hours and the old me starts creeping in separate,

Contained.

Don't look at me,

I don't want to talk to you.

I.

What do you hope to achieve with this program?

I keep laughing at your questions.

I know you do.

And I keep asking them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

What do I hope to achieve?

What do I,

What does the I hope to achieve?

I am,

I used to try to achieve all kinds of things.

I'm not trying to achieve anything anymore,

You know?

Achieve what?

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

You know,

I think what I want,

What I want to be a part of,

What I want to be a part of is I really want to be a part of a new way of living in this world.

In this world in desperate need,

Hungry for this.

It doesn't even like I once knew.

If you had said,

Would you like to have some of this?

I'd be like,

What is that?

You know,

It's outside of anything I can wrap myself around.

But what I want to be a part of and what I want to see happen is I want to see what we do here spread,

Not necessarily grow,

But spread.

You know,

Where we're enough people who influence enough people and understand there's a different myth at play now.

And we got to get enough people on board to understand that there is no eye,

Eye,

Eye on high.

You know,

This hierarchical,

Patriarchal fallacy.

And I know it's a fallacy because I know some of these eyes on high in this world pretty well to know who's really the wizard over here and what's a massive projection of some talking head,

Shouting voices.

And I know who's behind the curtain too.

You know,

With all those buried inadequacies.

So I want to see us animate this world in a whole new way.

And we have things that we do here that creates an animation and hopefully enough of these animators here will go home and spread this among their people and their ways and keep coming back to this world because this way is terminal.

There's no cure.

There this way,

It's for life,

You know.

And I want my life to be alive to the very and to exchange these ways where the myth is no one more big cheese.

It's a collective ensemble now.

And we need each other to bring ourselves into a new sense of who we are and what's possible in this world.

How do people find out about this journey?

I don't know how they find out about this.

That's the mystery.

That's the mystery.

How does it find them?

Say again,

How will this find them?

How will this find you?

How will this find you again?

How will this find me again?

I have no idea.

But that's what I want to have happen.

This sense of something animates us and awakens us.

Or they go to heroesjourneyfoundation.

Org and look around,

Just peek in the windows a little bit.

All right,

I'm going to ask you some more questions you might not like and we'll see what happens from there.

All right,

Ask me more.

All right.

And then I'm going to ask you a couple.

Oh,

We could do that too,

Yeah.

All right,

Michael,

What was your favorite sports moment?

Oh,

My favorite sports moment ever?

Ever.

No brainer.

So my favorite sports moment,

Here I am.

I'm in the kitchen with my father.

I believe the year,

The year is 1973,

I think,

1973.

I'm still a boy.

I can see it now.

I can see the AM radio on in the kitchen because that's how we can listen to it.

And I'm listening to a football game.

Let me guess,

Pittsburgh Steelers.

I'm listening to the Steelers,

Steeler Nation part of,

Which I remain a loyal follower to this day.

In Steeler Nation,

I am listening to Bill Hillgrove still calling at Myron Coak,

Jack Fleming.

And it is fourth quarter of the very first playoff game the Steelers have been in.

In this new configuration of time,

It's fourth quarter.

I think there's 33 seconds left.

Harry Bradshaw is going back to throw a pass.

He throws a pass.

We're playing the Oakland Raiders in Pittsburgh in the Three Rivers Stadium.

And he throws a pass intended for John Fuqua,

The halfback.

And instead,

Jack Tatum hits him at the very instance the ball arrives and the ball goes flying in the air.

And just as it's about to fall to the ground,

Man by the name of Frank O.

Harris,

Not Frank O.

Harris,

Frank O.

Harris catches the ball at his feet,

At his shoe tops just before it touches the ground supposedly and picks it up,

Runs tiptoes down the sideline into the end zone for a touchdown to take the lead and win their first playoff game.

Thank you for asking.

The immaculate reception.

The immaculate reception that if you watch on the NFL network,

The top plays ever,

It might be number one.

Did I embellish that a little bit?

A little bit.

Well done,

Well done.

What's your biggest pet peeve?

Besides people who drive in the left lane that's the passing lane on a highway?

Why do they do that?

That's the one you pass in,

You don't pull up alongside the other car and just stay there and not pass them.

Why create a bottleneck on a highway?

I don't get it.

How's that for a pet peeve?

Sounds good.

What's the riskiest thing you've ever done?

Probably the thing I'm about to do next today.

Maybe not the riskiest thing,

But I use that as my compass heading.

So it's not anything,

It's dialing that up and say,

Okay,

Where's the vulnerability?

Where's the edge?

I'll be a fool for that,

Fool for love.

I think when I remember the first time I did that,

I think it was when I learned how to tell a woman that I loved them,

I loved her deeply and I didn't need anything back.

But that's when I understood it was the speaking of it,

Was the empowerment,

I didn't need her.

I was willing to tell her without her having to love me back.

What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?

My father had integrity.

What does that mean to you?

It taught me how to respect other people and show respect in order to get it.

That you look people in the eye,

You notice when people need help and you just help without asking,

And you do simple things to give people dignity.

And from my mother,

I learned how to respect other people.

And from my mother,

It's just love no matter what.

No matter what?

No matter what.

What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?

Ah,

Hmm,

What life lesson have I learned that I wish I had learned long before I did?

Hmm,

Probably would have told you somehow about how to make it with a woman.

Really make it with a woman that I have learned and know how to do.

I think I would have hurt less people and been less hurt.

That love isn't a feeling that you feel to feel good about.

That love is your ability to make an ordinary life go better.

And love is the ability to withstand somebody at their ordinary worst.

Their ordinary worst.

Their ordinary worst and to live with it.

And rather than have them eliminate it in them,

You live with them with it better than they live with themselves in it.

And I wish I would have known in order to make it with a woman,

You have to always look for what she teaches you next.

And she has to be able to teach you.

And if you can't find something to learn from her,

You shouldn't be with her.

What is a boon?

A boon is the gift you receive from the world beyond your wildest ability to imagine.

It's beyond your comprehension.

It's the thing waiting for you that you can't even conceive of yet that would like to come through if only it were allowed.

So the boon is for the boy,

Has been that deep longing,

Your deepest Christmas wish.

And it's something that only you can have,

Only you can,

It can be for no one else.

It can only be for you.

And it can't be for you because you wish for it.

It has to be more than other than that.

It can't just be your ego's desire.

That's just a win.

And the winning makes you small when you win like that.

The boon is something that you're given and you feel bestowed.

You feel like it's been bestowed on you and you're like,

Wow,

You're feeling worthy of it as you should,

You don't know if you're up for it.

It's worth like,

You don't even know if you can digest it.

It's beyond what you imagine possible.

A love,

A way of life,

A wonder.

You know,

For me,

Like poetry is a boon,

A boon for me.

One among many.

Let's give an example of how this works.

Why don't you take out a book?

I'm gonna pick a number.

Oh,

I have,

Well.

Give me that.

Give me that.

It's not a book.

This look like a book to you,

Right?

It does kinda look like a book.

It looks like a journal.

It looks like a journal,

Right?

It looks like a magic formula.

I'm not sure what it is.

It's something well-worn.

I'm gonna tell you what it is so that you know what you're asking from.

Okay.

Okay.

So what this is,

This is a well.

It looks like a book,

It's a well.

See?

From the external perspective,

It's a book,

A journal.

From a mythic perspective,

It's a well.

It's a wellspring.

And something rises out of the wellspring.

When you look down in the well,

You can't see it,

But something comes up from the well.

So you want something to come up from the well for you,

Ted?

Yeah.

And for everyone listening.

Yeah,

And for everyone listening.

No,

This could be for you.

What this is here is every,

There's 123 poems in this book that I hand wrote the way you carve and whittle into a stick.

I whittled these poems into this well at the bottom of this well,

Or 123 poems,

Ted.

And if you would like one to rise up and greet you,

You would have to dare,

If you dare,

To pick a number between one and 123.

And the one that popped up for no reason at all is 77.

77,

Always the odd number with you.

And the pairs,

You know,

Number 77.

77 out of 123,

Ted,

Huh?

This is a circle poem.

This is a poem about the we.

You picked the we body poem,

Ted.

No,

I picked you.

You picked the number.

And so,

You know,

For those of you listening,

If you hear it with your ears,

Then you just looked at the menu.

Maybe what you could do is just,

You know,

Sit a little into your chair a little deeper.

You know,

Take a breath,

Close your eyes even.

And you may be by yourself,

But we're with you right now.

We're sitting in a circle,

In fact,

And you,

The listener,

Are sitting beside.

There's been men,

By the way,

Wandering in and out of this podcast,

And we have one sitting with us.

We got Charlie sitting beside us now.

Ted,

You're across from me,

And in the fourth chair is you,

The listener.

We make a circle right now.

Let's play at the circle.

And so,

As you take the fourth seat,

Listener,

We form a circle.

And when we sit still,

And when we become still in a circle,

And stillness grows in us,

An energy,

You know,

An energy of spirit can fill us.

And until we surrender,

And surrender into silence,

Until we surrender into a deep stillness and silence,

We'll remain on the choppy surface of the mind,

And we'll just bob along there instead.

But as our breath goes deep and long and quiet,

We go beyond thought,

As our breathing,

Our breath goes beyond the choppy surface of mind that stills,

We lengthen our breath,

We follow it all the way out.

We go beyond thought,

Underneath confusion,

Past old sticky fears,

And even doubt,

All grows quiet,

They all settle down.

And when we sit here,

And we sit in a circle,

And we share breath,

And we share truth,

And we speak and we listen,

A mysterious speech,

And the listening to the speech begin to mix and interact and transform.

And who is it now?

Is it the speaker affecting the listener,

Or is it the you,

The way you're deeply listening that evokes this speech out of me?

I have no idea.

And it transforms these once separated,

Separate energies and entities into one woven being for a minute in time,

For just one minute in time,

Woven one being,

Present right now and fulfilled,

Present right now in this breath,

Full and filled.

That's my interpretation of Dana Fault's poem.

Number 77 from the book of your counting.

Michael,

Thank you so much for the gifts you've given me and for taking the time.

Well,

We're gonna go over time for one second,

Ted.

Uh-oh.

And I'm gonna shuffle the deck.

All right.

Take out a wild card.

And this is a poem,

One of the groups that I'm walking with.

We're circling around this well of a poem right here,

Again and again.

And just like you look at me for a minute,

And then look at this poem here in a minute.

And I want you to read this to me from the well you have inside of you.

When I met my muse.

Oh,

Ted,

Tell me that again.

When I met my muse.

Oh,

I wanna meet my muse.

Read on,

Brother.

I glanced at her and took my glasses off.

They were still singing.

I glanced at her and took my glasses off.

I glanced at her and took off my glasses.

They were still singing.

They buzzed like a locust on the coffee table and then ceased.

Her voice belled forth and the sunlight bent.

Mmm.

Sunlight bent as her voice belled forth.

I felt the ceiling arch and knew that nails up there took a new grip on whatever they touched.

Hmm.

I am your own way of looking at things.

She said,

I am your own way,

Your own way of looking at things.

She said.

When you allow me to live with you,

Every glance at the world around you will be a sword of salvation.

When you allow me to live with you,

Every glance at the world around you will be a sword of salvation.

That's right.

And I took her hand.

And I took her hand.

Boom,

Snap.

Reviews

Spoke deeply, gouched my soul

Beautiful.

Excellent thread on this human experience I am having
Thanks for sharing!!

Brilliant! Amazing! Loved every second of this talk. And thank you for inviting me to have the 4th seat. I felt like I belonged.

The talk that transformed me. Incredible knowledge and teaching.

✨🙏✨

Filled with incredible wisdom and golden nuggets. One after the other after the other!

This satiated my tender and porous heart. It’s just what I needed. Ty and bless you both for your generosity of spirit 🙏🏻💗🙏🏻

Epic interview. Thank you so much 🙏🏼

The window was open so I peeked in. Interesting stuff going on inside.

That was great, but you only talk about empowering men? Woman are just your muse? What's up with that?

What a wonderful and uplifting conversation. Thank you.

Amazing and thought provoking conversation. Thank you 💙 x

Well. I will be listening to this again. For now, I am speechless. And quiet. Thank you 🙏🏻🌸💕

Thank you 🕉🙏❤️