Paradoxes Of The Spiritual Path

Introduction and David Gandelman's background 0:00

My guest today is David Gandelman. He's a spiritual teacher, author, and guide. He defines his mission. Is to awaken souls on their path of growing into being human and living an enlightened, purpose driven life. He is the author of The Seven Energies of the soul and the founder of the Meditation School app and podcast. He has taught at Cornell University, NBC, SAP, and other places. David, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. Dawson, it's great to be back. I think this is our third conversation.

It's good to see that beautiful smiling face. And it's always good. And there's a lot. If you meditate, there's always a lot to smile about. So how did you get into this path and really begin to make this a consistent practice yourself? Sure. So I actually started when I was 16. I picked up Eckhart Tolle Is the Power of Now. And literally, I don't know, page 2 or 3. I it's something just hit me and it was like a light bulb went off inside. I had what you might call a spiritual awakening. and from there I started meditating regularly.

I didn't know what I was doing. All I had were books. So I started going to Barnes and Nobles and just buying all the books I could. You know, it was before YouTube. It was before, podcasts. And so I really had to teach myself there were no teachers. I grew up in the suburbs in new Jersey, so I was self-taught for years. First meditation class I took was in college, was a Zen class. And I remember sitting for 40 straight minutes going out. Everything hurts.

How David began meditating and found teachers 2:00

I read things like. Relate to that. Yeah, yeah. And, so I did one class at the beginning of the semester, and it felt it felt really good though. And then I did a second class at the end of the semester, and it was much more painful. And I went to the, the teacher and I said, hey, this time around it was way harder. I couldn't sit still. My back hurt. It was it was brutal. And he said, are you in the middle of finals? And I and I thought, oh, I am in the middle of finals. He goes, you're stressed.

And as I had been meditating already for years, but I had never to link those two things dots. And I was like, I'm stressed. I know, but I was and it was coming out in my meditation. And so it really wasn't until I went to India. And then I lived in India for a while in the ashrams lived I lived in Hawaii studying the intuitive arts. It wasn't until I found some really good teachers that I. I built a structured practice and was able to really work through some of that stress and that energy that I was unconscious of.

I was great at sitting still and being present, but I wasn't aware of how to work through the layers of energy that were kind of sitting maybe a little a little bit dormant or suppressed underneath my normal awareness. So I had to go down into the dungeons and bring a broom and do some cleaning and some dusting, and that was kind of how my path got started. I, I ended up living in ashrams just because I had, since I was 16, 17. I dreamed of going to India and doing that kind of a weird dream for a teenager in the suburbs of new Jersey.

But that's what I wanted, and I got to fulfill that and learn from some amazing teachers in the eastern traditions. and here I am chatting with you and teaching myself and still practicing every day. Every single day, sitting down, meditating. I don't know if it ever gets easier, but it does feel like it gets richer. It does? Yeah. And I just reflect on that myself after I've been doing it regularly, irregularly, for 50 years and regularly for 20 years every day. And, I still I'm surprised, David, that my mind wanders every single time.

You think that after 50 years of regular meditation, 20 years of daily meditation, you'd be over that. Alas. not the case. That's right. Well, I, I see the mind wandering is just almost like a function reflection of the movements in the body as well. So there are emotions or feelings. There are physical experiences. And then they bubble up like a bubble rising to the surface of water, and then they turn into thoughts. So I think that's kind of natural. That never goes away. It's a function of the body and and our physiology of the mind.

but the I think the secret in meditation is to learn how to deal with it and not not fight the waves or punch the water, expecting to make progress that way. So I think the key there is in learning to flow with it, let go of trying to control them and then see what's in in the spaces in between the thoughts and what's in the energy behind the thoughts. And that's where I focus with my students, is learning to see the energy behind the thoughts, what they're made of, what their messages are, and then where the growth is in that space.

Yes. Yeah. You're right. Trying to resist them or try to push them away is really successful. You know, I had planned to ask you this day, but I'm curious. I have some friends who believe very strongly that you need a living monster to launch you on the path. Others, believe that you can have a non-living monster, or you don't need a monster at all. What's your take on the must have a living monster living guru versus the other alternatives? Question. Well, let's. Let's just take a few examples.

Eckhart Tolle he didn't have a teacher. He had an awakening in the middle of the night. on the verge of suicide. the Buddha had many teachers, but it's not known that he had a master, Or. Jesus. You know, you could find countless people who had great awakenings and became incredible teachers that did not have masters. So when somebody says that maybe that's true for them at this moment, at this, in this cycle for them. And I went through the guru cycle living in India, and I went to every guru I could find.

And if they had a beard, I was on my knees praying to them and and listening to them. I had no discernment whatsoever. I used to literally have a stack of pictures of gurus in India in my pocket. I would walk around with like baseball cards and all their names and their biographies and their special powers. I knew it all. I was like guru obsessed. And you know, I was in my early 20s, so I was very much in this phase of gathering information of spiritual shopping. And I just thought they if they touch me on the third eye, I'll become enlightened.

And I'm just looking for that grace to be saved, to be healed. And for me, that was a phase I had to grow out of.

The role of gurus, teachers, and discernment 7:00

And I realized the only person who is going to save me is myself. I'm in charge of my own spiritual growth and awareness, and the cultivation of that awareness. And it's amazing to have guides. We're both guides. That's what we do for a living is guiding. So I'm 100% for guides, but, there comes a point where I think you have to let the dream that so master is going to do it for you go and they're going to die. And if and maybe before you do and then again, you'll be on your own. And, I think it's good to not lean too heavily on a master, but there are phases in life where we need that support.

So I'm open to both ends of the spectrum, really, depending on what you need and where you are on your journey. For me, even being part of a spiritual group makes me a little nauseous. I used to run a spiritual school in Hawaii, so I was the director of it, and, and it was really fun. But I just don't like group dynamics. I don't like the politics and the power plays. they oas everything. Every spiritual group does. It ends in a sex scandal or money scandal. You know, there's always weird that goes down.

And I just, I like being on my own and just teaching and letting everybody have their own path. Yes, I know what you mean. That's an interesting take on it. And some people need that. Other people don't. I also wonder how, looking back, whether those momentary or or fragmentary exposures to a great teacher aren't sometimes it up. I know that, in research I'm doing research a with a bunch of neuroscientists on this right now. We find that usually there was, some contact with the monster, and it may have only been sitting in an audience of 2000 people.

may. No, close to that may have been, a really close contact, but. But you're right. The dynamics of ashrams and and and spiritual groups, they're as dysfunctional as corporations and. Yeah. Tend to be even more so, because this is a sort of divine authority that's conferred on people, too, which is an additional layer of power, a power play. So, yeah, it's really it's a mixed bag. And, I'm, I've been just mulling on that question, you know, the the girl, the no guru. Were there any that you noticed that you encountered that you felt were particularly, pure for want of a better word or authentic or were really just interested in worldly fame and fortune and were doing it for, and able to genuinely confer, movement on their students. Yes.

But I think that I placed this idea of perfection on top of them, which was not a reality because we all have a human form. And so I had a guru I would go sit with all the time. He was like seven feet tall, powerful energy. he was a monk in India. And, I thought, he's this. This man is perfect. And if I sit in front of him long enough and absorb, I will become enlightened to. And I remember one evening he was giving a talk and somebody asked him a question he didn't like, and they pressed a little hard, and he snapped, and he was like, if you don't like what I have to say, I'll go back to my room and won't teach anymore.

And I was sitting in the front row and I started shaking because my whole world was was shaking because I thought, this man is perfect, I'm going to follow him forever. And this is my guru. And then here he is snapping and losing it on, on a on a pretty simple question. and it was then when I realized, well, I can't rely on somebody else, but I think there are amazing teachers in the world. Eckhart Tolle is one of them. I love ADHD a lot as well. There's a few out there that I know of that are really wonderful people.

Are they perfect? I highly doubt. It. You know, it's just not, I don't think that's a part of the dimension that we live in. Perfection. I don't think it's a quality that exists here. so the human form always takes a part of it. But the energy and the awareness that can come through, somebody can be very healing and beautiful. And it is very powerful to be in the presence of somebody like that. And it can change you, especially if you're spiritually sensitive and open. But by no means do you need it.

But I think if you are graced with that experience and it's helpful that it's really wonderful, I don't know if you know the story of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. No. Vivekananda was the first person to bring eastern philosophy to the United States. 1893 he gave a talk at the World Fair in Chicago, and he was a hit right out of the gate. And he tells his story that he went to this guru who had no official training. He was just kind of like blissed out Ramakrishna all the time in Vivekananda. are you crazy?

Are you enlightened? I don't know what's going on here. And Vivekananda was very well learned. He was a Vedanta scholar and the story is that he tells Ramakrishna knocked him on the third eye with his fingers, and Vivekananda fell into like a deep state of bliss for three straight days. And on the third day he woke up out of it and he was like, what the f was that? And and he started sitting with Ramakrishna and realizing, oh, this man may not have intellect in the way I do, but he has some kind of spiritual awareness that that I don't.

And, and he, I would say he like, transferred some of it for a moment, but Vivekananda had to do a lifetime of work to embody that awakening and that energy. It's not like you get bopped on the head and you're done. The first step is often grace, like mind was opening, Eckhart told his book. And a light bulb going off that took no work on my part whatsoever. But the next 20 years of meditating and becoming an adult, and all of the jazz that comes with it, that took a lot of work and continues to.

And so I went to this guru before he had a meltdown, the one I was seeing in India. And I said, can you touch me on the third eye? The way Ramakrishna touched Vivekananda and and he goes, well, it takes a Vivekananda to be touched on the third eye. So you say, I wasn't ready. And about a week later, or two weeks later, I was on a bus on a train in India. Long train ride. I had a bed. I was sleeping, and I had this deep, deep dream where this teacher came to me and he touched me on the third eye.

it's hard to describe in words, but it was like this bliss that was beyond level ten. It was so intense. It felt like coming home in a way that I had never experienced or understood. And it was so intense that I woke up with a gasp. I woke up, I was like, like I couldn't breathe. I couldn't handle the level of bliss that was in that. And then I understood, wow. Yeah, there. Maybe I'm not ready. you know, the vessel, your body, your being, your personality has to be ready to handle that kind of energy.

And that was an incredible experience that came through, a dream for me. And now I'm in the. I'm on the other side now. I'm the teacher. And people are always coming to me saying, oh, you healed me, or you fix me, you help me, I can sleep again because of you. I used to have panic attacks. Now I don't and I get to see it from the other side going, I'm not the perfect being that you think I am. Yeah. I always make a point in my workshops of telling a few stories that taught a workshop this past weekend, and I do demonstrations with people, usually as part of those. And, I picked one someone to do demonstration with the other demonstration.

I totally blew it. David. No, I don't she's time I saw I said timeout, stop, and let's just do a redo. I'm going to go back five minutes and start this again. And I was totally wrong a how how big a mistake I'd made and what the mistake was. And it's so useful for them to see that. And if I don't actually make one like that, I'll tell a story what I did. Because you want people to realize, hey, you know, we're role wrestling with these things. Role. You know, here I am, I'm a teacher. And you know, I so what you need to be aware of, of those limitations and realize we're all working on parts of ourselves we may have developed a long way that us mean we've developed all the way in every dimension of life.

So, so exactly know that. Exactly that. And I'm also really focused on this whole concept of enlightenment and what it is. I know in terms of neuroscience, we can see when we look at people's brains, which brain regions are active, and this whole network we call the enlightenment network, that is, series of regions, actually a series

Defining enlightenment and bringing it into daily life 15:30

of four regions that are highly active and addicts and long term meditators. And so we can see what the brain signature of it is. the experience of it is something, something else. How do you personally see and define enlightenment? That's a great question. I think it's a very hard term to define. Maybe I could start by analogy, which is to me, it's like walking into a dark room and turning on the lights. So we wake up, we turn on the lights, we become enlightened. And when we do that, we start to have more awareness.

So maybe there are levels of enlightenment. Maybe there areas in our lives where we're enlightened in our relationships, space or in our creativity. Maybe we are great at sitting still, and then maybe there are areas in our life, in our life where we're not enlightened, like our relationships for a lot of people, or around money, where we have resistance and pain, unconsciousness, where we have, patterns that we're not aware of, old beliefs. Right. So I think enlightenment is much more of a slow process of expanding, healing and awakening than people give it credit for.

Of course, there's the sexy kind. That and Eckhart Tolle talks about in his book of Just Waking up in the middle of the night, and then it happening like one great realization, right? But for most of us, it tends to happen in drips. It tends to happen layer by layer, inch by inch. And even Eckhart says he spent a couple of years sitting on a park bench trying to understand what happened to him and integrating it, and that at a deeper level and a deeper spiritual level. Maybe enlightenment is when we decided to fly with our thoughts and awaken to who we truly are.

Maybe we can call that like the big S for self. It's like the little self, the ego self, I, my name and my history, my bank account, my friends, all the things we identify. And then there's the big self that is really just the oneness that we're all a part of. Or another way to put it would be like a wave on the ocean, right? So the little self thinks I'm this wave, I'm big, I'm bad, I'm going to crash on to you. And in reality, when we wake up, oh, I'm just a movement of this one ocean of consciousness.

And it's taking a specific form in this specific body right now. And so awakening to that true nature is, probably a deeper, we can call it definition of enlightenment. But then we have the awakening, and then we have to bring that awakening into our human form. And I think that's where I work a lot with my students on, is how to bring that into the world as a human being. I love doing that because the old model was that when you'd had that experience, you went away somewhere. And I know I finished meditation some days and two hours had gone by and I don't have to go deal like last, month.

or we have that's a website. And, we got hacked by Russian hackers. And here, now here I am. I'm meditating. I have to go and go to a tech meeting and deal with Russian hackers. You really know that. You can see why the old monks fled to the monastery. You went and lived in the desert, climbed the Himalayas and found a cave. you know, want to go deal with Russian hackers after you've been in that space? And yet it's so magical that, you know, you bring say, for example. exactly that example. My heart was full of compassion here.

I think you're a very talented coders. And they're trying to hack into people's bank, computers and steal data and credit card numbers. And if only those people put those, those talents to good use. And so you feel compassion that that that's the highest thing they can figure out to do. And so you sit there and you actually you actually you are in the meeting having compassion for the Russian hackers and, and setting them love while you're dealing with the problem they pose to you. But, it's so powerful to then come back into the world.

And, you know, what about your marriage? And what about your relationship? And how about you? How do you treat your people, your pets, your neighbors, everyone around you? So, I love that that now the path is much more to move our understanding into the world around us and not something, for one thing, we do here at the at the universe. As we treat veterans with PTSD, we feed it over 20,000 of them in the last decade. So that's a practical way of bringing this into solving a social problem. And I love that more and more people are bringing their practices into prisons, into classrooms, and to consulting rooms and hospitals.

And we're we're really doing things in the world now. We're not fleeing to the Himalayas and locking ourselves in a cave. leave it up to Dawson to send compassion to the computer hackers information. if it was me, Dawson, I'd probably give him a big new Jersey off you and then maybe cultivate. yeah. So let's talk more about bringing your your spirituality, bringing your those experiences into your daily worlds. Sure. And actually, so that's what I just wrote a book about. and maybe this is a good moment to describe that because I think the, the, the book is kind of the foundation I set up to help people understand how they bring their awakening, their enlightenment into the world.

And and so the book is called The Seven Energies of the soul. And the analogy that I use is like when pure light passes through a prism, it breaks into seven main colors of the rainbow. Right? obviously there are thousands of colors and mixtures. but there's seven main colors and the way I look at life is we have these kind of seven energy, these seven areas of life where that awareness moves through the prism of our body and then out into the human world, into it, into the physical realm. And so, for example, one is our creator, our ability to, maybe build something, to grow a business, to, you know, build a home for ourselves, farm and make food and the ability to do and to make.

And then another is the healer, this energy that wants to fix, to solve, to make people feel better, to become whole. One is the warrior. The part of us that wants to take action and have discipline and and conquer fear, right? What part of us is the love or the the part of us that wants to merge with someone else to connect, right? To have compassion? Part of us is an artist where we want to create part of us as an explorer, where we want to experience part of us, maybe as a guide, a master, a teacher of some kind.

And we want to share our wisdom and our enlightenment. So I see it like the light of say so you find some level of spiritual awakening, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it, Nirvana, satori. You know, there's so many words for it. And then, okay, well, what do I do with this light? Am I just going to sit with it and keep it for myself, or am I going to share it with the world? And there's this great quote from Picasso. He says, the meaning of life is to find your gift, and the purpose of life is to give it away.

And that's how I see it as well. Okay, so I found this light. How do I want to bring it into the world, manifest into the world and share it? And I don't think there's one right way. And I think if we focus too much on one angle, like for example, there was a point in my life lesson where I thought everything was about spirituality, and that's the only thing that matters. The human form doesn't matter. Money doesn't matter. Relationships don't matter. I remember I was living in India, in the ashram, going, nothing matters but this enlightenment.

And and then, you know, I was like, I'm hungry or. yeah. I would love to have a partner or, you know, money to be able to travel or to, you know, now I take three music lessons a week. I do piano, guitar and singing every single week. I take comedy lessons. I do all sorts of cool stuff that I couldn't do before when I didn't have money, or I didn't have structure in my life or time or a place to do it. And I love giving. I have a foundation. We work with orphanages in India, in Nepal, you know, so there's all these ways where my energy wants to move into different areas of life.

And I think happiness is when we fulfill all of those areas and find balance. It's a byproduct. and so that's how I see taking enlightenment and bringing into the world. And that's just how I cut up the pie. But I love the analogy of that light coming in through a prism and then reflecting through all of these differentiated ways, whether they're giving and charity, whether they're marriage and relationship, whether they're taking care of our physical body, exercise, fun, play, all of these different ways.

And I, I really am grateful for that focus and that we are we are seeing people now bringing these, these, these techniques to all these different facets of, of life, bringing this awareness to all these different parts of their lives. And then you'll you'll realize I have a pretty good husband, but, you know, maybe I'm not going to make money, so I'll focus on that. I'll make sure I do that, that these two. And, you know, one of the things that I'm always

The Seven Energies of the Soul and life balance 25:00

I'm struggling with right now, I'm struggling with in a certain way, but there is such a huge gap in experience between people who are doing what we're doing, meditating every day, being in tune with non-local self, where you're letting go of your local focus every day, you know, moving into these realms of connection with something greater than yourself, the universe, whatever you call it. And then you bring that down through the prism and into all these parts of your life. And what happens is that you get so happy, so blissful, that for you it's wonderful.

But it also disconnects you with the experience, everything around you. Because here you're in crisis and you're, you know, you're you're in daily life, which people are very aware of. The problems in the world, problems in their own lives. And yet you're in this state of bliss. So for me, bridging the gap is actually it actually takes a lot of a lot of effort every day to to, to to relate one to the other. I don't know if you're finding that or how you handle that or what. You're pretty sure that.

Yeah, actually, the other night I was down in Florida with some friends and we went out in the evening. We're like, let's check out the town. And it was this belligerent, drunk, dark energy, you know, mess. And we were looking around going, oh dear Lord, humanity, do we have a chance? There's this quote from I think it was Carl Jung's. One of his students asked him, is the apocalypse inevitable? And he said, not enough. Not if enough people do their inner work. So what that threshold is, I don't know.

I think people try to do science around that. If it's like 1% of the people or 5 or 10. so you can look at it, maybe it doesn't have to be. Everybody has this great spiritual awakening, but maybe there are enough people on the planet that shift their energy, and that light changes the tide. the Tolle, in his book A New Earth, has this great analogy of, when the first flowers ever came about on Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago, there was probably 1 or 2, and they died very quickly. And then at a certain point, they cross the threshold and then they just exploded all over the earth. Right.

And now there's flowers everywhere you go, especially Hawaii. And we were talking about that before the show. And, so maybe there's a threshold that reaches and then all of a sudden there's a lot of people that start to have an awakening. I hold out some hope for that, but it is something I struggle with as well. You know, the the violence, the unconsciousness, the anger, the resentment, the fear, the selfishness on the planet. But I always go back to, you know, if you look at paintings of the Buddha, he has all these demons around him that that he turned into his servants.

Right. That's the kind of the mythologies these demons came to scare him, to take over. And he he turned them around and made him made them his servants. And so not everybody is in resistance to the way the world is, like you are going, hey, how come more people are awake? Some people could care less. They're in resistance to like, one ex-partner or their boss, or they're in resistance to their family or, you know, some physical ailment that that's that they're dying from. And so we all have different things in life that bring resistance out in us.

And that is our great spiritual path is to find out what that thing is trying to teach us. for me, I always struggled with, like, intimate relationships. I went through some rejection, you know, in my 20s, I was like, damn, this part of life is hard. Many times. Yeah, the Himalayan is easy. Meditating ten hours a day. This whole relationship thing is a pain. So I think we have to find what what, you know really messes with us. And that is our spiritual work. And then maybe that image of all these people being not enlightened or aggressive and angry and hateful, maybe that's the demon that you kind of allow to float next to you, to consistently remind you to have compassion and to continue to do the work, and then maybe that's what creates the healing for yourself and for humanity.

And it's always true that we do have one area of our life. Maybe it's money made of spirituality, maybe it's body, maybe it's diet, maybe it's exercise. maybe sickness and health. There is always one area of challenge for everyone, and it's interesting to see people address those and not address those and then, see how their spiritual journey can affect and influence those. I'm so struck by some of the great mystics had various afflictions and adversities, and yet they they were managing their, their, their process of shining, even despite those.

So, yeah, those, those areas of our lives that are we see as imperfect can be the next step for us. And letting that facet of the prison, I think the light shine through there as well. Look what happened to Jesus, right? He got he got strung up literally by a mob and said, we're not interested in the gifts that you have to offer. and so that's like one of the great lessons of Christianity. Right? And of, of that happening to him and him having to accept that something along the lines of him for saying, God, why have you forsaken me?

And and then accepting the experience, even at that level, for him as a master, he had to accept that experience at the worst was intense, possible level any of us could ever imagine, and that maybe that was his initiation. So David, starting the journey and then staying with the journey. The first of the while we find in research that people who meditate for a while

Starting a meditation practice and working through blocks 31:00

get addicted to all of the feel good hormones and neurochemicals like oxytocin and serotonin don't mean and and mind that are released in the brain during deep meditation. So after you launched your launched Getting Launched, though for most people is really fraught and they try meditate. Their minds are busy, they're uncomfortable in their bodies like you described. And there are all these obstacles. How do you counsel those people? What do you recommend they do at the start of the journey so they can establish that consistent practice in their lives?

Sure. And I mean, launching is a great analogy. So when a, physical rocket launches, it probably needs 90% of its energy just to get out of the atmosphere. Right. And then the rest is kind of easy cruising, using the gravitational pull of the moon or wherever it's going. So it is it is a launch that is the hardest. And luckily for people like you and me, because we get to reach so many people who have these large data sets to find out what's ailing them, where their struggles are and why they have a hard time getting started and being consistent.

So my three most streamed meditations, first is Morning Gratitude. Second is help with sleep, and third is anxiety. None of which surprised me at all. but it's good to actually see it in the data so people are going, I want to learn to meditate in the morning and be and be grateful. And then I'm having a hard time sleeping in. Yes, that probably is true for 80 to 90% of us, right? So why not enter meditation through the area in your life that you're struggling with? Make it, a practice to heal yourself and to grow rather than I'm just going to sit still so my thoughts go away.

Or I could be part of the core meditation club, right? So if it's anxiety, go through the door of anxiety. So for example, with my students, what I'd like to do is, start with them with like a four step process. And I just call it find it, feel it, face it, and heal it. So we close our eyes and usually there's something bothering us excessive ruminating thoughts, anxiety, anger, resentment, regret, whatever it is, if there was nothing there, you would be sitting in bliss and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

You wouldn't need my help. So first find it. What is it? And maybe you start. You start to sense it, right? You feel it. Okay. There's a knot in my stomach. There's a pulsating on my chest. There's a heaviness on my head. You know, I starting to feel it. And then we have to face it and. And what is it? Oh it's anxiety that pulsating is anxiety on my chest. Right. I could feel the heaviness. And and when we start to face it, that's when we can heal it. So we have to go deeper. Where is this anxiety coming from?

I thought it was coming from because I, I thought it was coming from this place of I don't have enough time today, but really, I'm angry at my partner or I have some trauma from childhood. So by sitting with a feeling and not running away from it and starts to show us what it really is now, that may come to a feeling. It may come through thoughts. So you may have some ruminating thoughts. I have to get to work. I have to get to work. I have to pay the bills. I have to do this. I have to do this.

But are those thoughts really what it's about? So we want to look underneath them. What's the energy animating the thoughts or the energy animating the feeling? Where does it really coming from? So you have to sit with that until that awareness or that answer arises. And then through that arising in that acceptance, it naturally starts to heal. Just by accepting it and seeing it, there's a deep level of healing that already is taking place. And then we may have to go into some memories, into a few deeper layers and go, where did that programing, that feeling that pain come from and start to reconcile it.

And then here's step three. Bonus step five is our next step. So maybe we heal some deep level of anxiety, and then the next step of our life opens up that we couldn't see because we were so stuck on this pain, or so stuck on this energy. So we find it, we feel it, we face it, and then we heal it. And then the next step of our lives opens up. And maybe that answer kind of gets downloaded in meditation. So usually what's ailing us is what we need to focus on and heal. And then it's also the gift that we're here to give the world.

So maybe you're also a healer. Maybe you're someone that helps people solve problems, or you want to show up for somebody else. So you want to do charity, or there's this great creative gift that you're ready to give the world once you get through the block. So I can almost guarantee whatever you're struggling with. That's where your enlightenment is, and that's where the gift is that you're going to give the world. So meditating is much more than just getting rid of anxiety or having morning gratitude or sleeping.

Well, it's it's deeply connected to your healing and your life's purpose. And when you frame it that way for people, they're like, I better start meditating. yeah. I'm not on my path. I like that the idea of your life's purpose opening up and that that footstep being an opening to the next phase of your growth. So you you pay attention to what's holding you back now and then as you really are working with that in meditation, the next steps open up. And what I found in my life is that I don't know those next steps, but I begin the process.

They open up as I clarified those things that were holding me back. And and yes, and let me add that our answers are born out of our energy. And so what I mean by that is if you're going, what's my next step in life? What's my answer? What should I do? Who am I? That answer may not actually exist yet. You may have to go through the stages and layers of energy and shift yourself from the inside out. And then that answer is born, almost like a fragrance off a flower as it starts to open. And you have a realization in that answer forms.

So you're you're creating your life as you transform your self from the inside out. So, so many people have come to me. I've done a lot thousands of one on one sessions over the years. What should I do to get a partner? How come I'm alone? What's my next business step? I need to make money. What should I do next with my life? And they're always wanting. Step ten and they come to me and they're on step 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 and I'm like, you're not there yet. To get that answer, you have to you have to do this work.

And some people go, all right, I'll do the work. And others are like, no, I just find someone who's going to give me the answer. So start where you are, work what you have, and then those ask will be obvious to you. David, thank you so much for your wonderful work. Thank you for your hard. Thank you for the way you're really making this into a program that people can follow and get those answers. I'm so grateful to you personally and for the clarity and love in your message. Thanks for being guest here.

I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you, Dawson, and thank you.