I remember laying in bed and having this thought and crying saying, if right now, judgment day was happening and my soul got sucked out my body and I had to go see God, am I going to heaven? Am I actually going? And because I couldn't answer that question with a yes, I was like, something's gotta change. Something has to change. So I quit going to church fully.

I think it's hard in the current environment even to kind of be talking about religion because people always have a kind of like a certain set of assumptions of like what that means about what you believe and then by then how you vote and then how you live your life. And I would say like for me it's always been a little bit more expansive and in that.

And that only happens if I start learning about it. It's guaranteed to not happen if I never start.

So I think it can absolutely be a strong ally in our tool chest when we can allow.

when we can allow ourselves to not be the expert, to not have mastery and still do things. Every person alive that has mastery started as a bumbling fool in whatever thing they have mastery in.

Alcohol's been a confirmed carcinogen since 1988, meaning since I was born, alcohol has been known to be a carcinogen and not like a, you know, it can cause cancer. It's at the same level as radiation, asbestos and tobacco. We all know that tobacco causes cancer and yet somehow with alcohol, it's probably a little bit off. Even with breast cancer, I think three drinks a week raises your risk by 15%. And yet they will put those little pretty pink ribbons on our our wine bottles insane insane to me.

I'm thrilled to be here and I really appreciate this time with you and the opportunity to chat and dive in. So thank you.

Yes. Well, it's such a great question, Reese. I think it's one of the questions that answers easily and lives hard. It's easy for me to say, and I really believe it, that when we set an intention to be more deeply connected, to listen more deeply, to tune our senses so that we are more aware, to open our hearts so that we have heart wisdom that has a different kind of intelligence than our rational logical thinking brain.

Two things about being lost for as long as I was it's not normal to feel as lost as long as I was and I know some people have felt that for even longer in their life but like you don't have to feel like that. Actually like you can feel found like you have found something and it has found you and there are ways to get to it and I would like love to help people figure that out and I hope that that's what I also get to do on top of functional medicine.

I will try not to go off too hard, but I think there are a lot of flaws in the five stages. They were originally developed as the five stages of like grieving your own death. Her research was with kind of death and dying and they weren't meant to be stages of grief or for those of us who are mourning the loss of someone else. And I think it becomes kind of dangerous, honestly, I was trying to decide dangerous is too strong a word, but I don't think it is because what happens is a lot of people think they're doing it wrong. If they're not hitting those five stages in order and they're not making progress, then they think they're grieving wrong. And that's just not true. There's no wrong way to grieve.

There still is good in the world and if I can make a small contribution to that then that makes me happy but it's also, you know just personally, like you said, when you can actually you know make someone's life a little better even if it's small it's the opposite of a vicious cycle yeah what they say kindness is contagious.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think my response to that is, it comes back to that negative self-talk echo chamber. We don't, some of these big decisions are very, very difficult to make by yourself. And so to say there weren't very honest, raw, nervous conversations with my wife, and those two days that I had been back to work would be a lie. We were talking from the instant I got home till the time we went to bed those two days

Uh, as me personally, as a Christian, I just have to accept that we only know in part and he knows ultimately in whole. But my theory is that he is utilizing the quantum field where he is literally created everything. And guys, I'm going to give you a perfect example of why I think this. Steve Jobs in the 1980s had the idea for the iPhone.

I think one of the most important things is to go back to the earth and listen to the land and remember who we are as children of the earth and this incredible gift of life. And it all seems so simple, like we should know these things, but the fact is we're not usually connected to them or it's not even something we talk about on a regular basis whatsoever.

I've always been curious about stuff. So, you know, when I left the film industry and started a scuba certification and training agency, it's like, I was curious about how can I parlay all of what I've done over my lifetime into an education program that happens to be around scuba, right? So a lot of it is curiosity.

I have it on a sticky note and it's C -L -W -O -T, which just sounds kind of funny. It's like kilowatt and it's care less what others think. And I wrote, and it's funny because I wrote it as an acronym because I didn't want anyone to see it, which is like ironic. But I share this now when I go do talks to organizations, especially if it's groups of women, I share this because I was like, care less what others think.

That self-growth journey. I think that's something that people don't often go through enough which is why they do have you know they attach themselves to these physical and external things yeah external things because they aren't able to reach into themselves and just like I said be comfortable with yourself.

If everything means nothing, that means that everything means everything. Every moment is super important and the only moment that really matters is this one and this one and this one and this one. Yes, and forever and always.

I think when I conceptualize of awe I think of this as a very internal experience that it's something that I am stepping into within myself appreciating other things. Where does that shift come in to make it also about connecting with the external? It comes in because our sense of self, some people call it the egoic self, becomes smaller when we access the emotion of awe - so imagine yourself going into the emotion of awe and connecting with a timeless vast expansive place and what happens to you as you connect and your sense of self your sense of the world expands expands expands.

There are people who I work with who are not on the creative team. Does that mean they're not creative? No, but I think sometimes they forget that they are because they don't have that label.

I was really good in math growing up and it's like I went into the arts but it's like I wish someone had, I mean allow me more freedom within mathematics to like... to really, I think at the time as a kid, you kind of think these mathematical equations, they're fixed and they're unchanging, and you can be really good at systematically solving these problems. But I was never really creatively thinking about it, even though I'm pretty sure I would have had the potential to do it, somebody would have said to me, like, you can create new formulas for things.

People out there, if there's nothing else that you take from me being here, you should try therapy if you haven't before, because it is the most amazing thing that I ever did for myself.