Welcome to the Love Sex and Leadership podcast where you can discover simple ton teachings to embody your true power, awaken your soul's wisdom and live an inspired life as a natural intuitive and heart centered leader. Well, welcome everyone. We are here to uh discuss gratitude to discuss embodiment. This is a whole series I'm doing with a lot of amazing individuals and I have the honor and pleasure to have Doctor De Martini here with me who it's been a huge mentor really early on in my waking up journey. He came into my life and really, I started to understand how to work with my mind so I could actually get into my body. And when I was writing this book, the Embodied Man, I reached out and I was very grateful to receive his loving endorsement and appreciation. And uh yeah, today we had to dive into really what is, what is gratitude. And you know, there's a lot I know we could talk about for hours and um you know, I, I probably won't introduce you the same way that I feel like you could, but just share a few words about who you are. And really also like the aspect of what gratitude means and, and we'll dive right into this. Well, I'm an educator. Hm, I have been educating over 49 years now and I research and write travel and teach and anything to do with human behavior, particularly maximizing human potential and awareness. And um that's what I love doing. And I really believe that gratitude is uh one of the most significant things a human being can embrace as a daily ritual or daily action. I, I write my gratitude responses every single day. I'm probably the largest collection of anybody you'll ever meet. And um I was born on Thanksgiving Day. So that's probably a factor. And Thanksgiving was just a couple of weeks ago where I hit my 67th birthday. So well, I I love doing that. And, and you know, the executive center in the forebrain, which is the media prefrontal cortex, which is the most advanced part of the brain for self mastery is also called the gratitude center. Because people who are living by highest priority and living with deep meaning and fulfillment doing what they really love doing, learning to delegate lower priority things to others who love doing that um had the most gratitude and fulfillment in life. So I think that self mastery and gratitude are inseparable. Hm Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. II I heard many of your stories at times and you know, the the thing I want to dive into here even deeper is around where does gratitude play into the place where the mind can begin to let go and or if that's even possible, you know, and where the deeper place of the heart can open, you know, which is one of the big premises of this book is supporting male bodies to really do their best to get out of their mind a bit more and into their heart. Because I feel like when my own experience, when I'm vibrating more from my heart, and I can experience gratitude, then I'm living life in more alignment to my purpose and my mission. And I, I just love to hear what your perspective is on that. I really like how do we get out of here and actually feel life more from the vibration of our heart? That's a good question. There's a thing called analysis and synthesis analysis of breaking things down, synthesis is integrating them. Hm. And the forebrain is a synthesis area and the Amygdala is more of a avoid pain, seek pleasure, a separation. A that's lysis analysis. And uh one is uh the forebrain and one is towards the hind brain. When we judge somebody and infatuate with somebody and put them on a pedestal and are conscious of their upsides and unconscious of their downsides. We tend to minimize ourselves and become more conscious of our downsides and unconscious of our upsides. And that's an inauthentic state of self minimization and aggrandizement. Of them. So he's badgering and minimizing himself when we look down on somebody and resent them and are conscious or downside and unconsciously upside. We tend to exaggerate ourselves and are now conscious of upside and unconscious of our downside. So we're too proud to admit what we see in them asciis or too humble to admit what we see in them as cystitis. And we're not being authentic whenever we're judging. So every time we judge another human being, we're really judging ourselves too by minimizing or exaggerating ourselves. And we have, we don't have a state of equanimity within ourselves. We don't have a state of equity between them and us when we judge and when we judge, uh if we, in fact, we get a dopamine rush, we sometimes confuse that with love and we think that's an open heart, but it's just a dopamine rush. And when we resent somebody, uh we also have a testosterone and, and norepinephrine rush because these are fight or flight and rest and digest kind of responses of our Amygdala when we actually see both sides, simultaneous and we're mindful and fully conscious and we don't have to exaggerate or minimize ourselves. But we're actually being ourselves, not our personas and masks and facades, but our authentic self. We're now in a state of equanimity within us and equity between ourselves and others. And we have now a sustainable fair exchange relationship and in that state where we don't exaggerate, minimize, which occupies our mind because we infatuate, it occupies space entire mind and runs us if we resent it occupies space entire mind and runs us. But when we love our mind is treated and a perfectly quid mind, and I've done this on maybe a couple 100,000 people, a perfectly equilibrated mind. If you ask the right questions and equilibrate the mind perfectly, the heart opens. Hm. So you transcend the judging mind that is analyzing and judging and synthesize those two pairs in a perfect equilibrium and the heart opens every time. So a perfectly equated mind opens the heart. That's why equanimity and objectivity and mindfulness is a present state where if we're judging, we're, we're, we're exaggerating ourselves, narcissistic and looking down or minimizing ourselves altruistically, looking up and sacrificing others or sacrificing others for us. And, and all that noise in the brain is a feedback, a response to let us know we're not being authentic. Every, every symptom in our life is a feedback to let us know when we're not authentic in our business, our social life, our relationships, our health, our, our psychology, everything is a feedback to get us into a state of real appreciation and real love for ourselves and other people. It's almost like a homeostatic feedback system to try to maximize our potential, our body and our mind is attempting to help us do. But we sometimes get caught in moral hypocrisies and trapped by these incompetence says that shut our heart off and make us analyze uh instead of synthesize, it's almost like we're, we're built with the right software to know how to handle this. But the, the conditioning and the program, yeah. But, but we get, we buy it. We, we subordinate to mothers, fathers, preachers, teachers, conventions, traditions and mores of moral hypocrisies by those that have um projected their value system onto society um as a controlling mechanism for people who are disempowered enough to believe in it instead of believing their own internal knowing. And I always say that when the voice and vision on the inside is louder than all those opinions on the outside. You begin to master your life and you're and the authentic, you is the most powerful you. That's where you have the most. You can't have love and intimacy. As long as you're too proud or too humble to admit what you see in others inside you. You don't have a mirror reflector. You only have mirror reflection when you see that the sea or the scene and the scene are the same when you can actually realize that that hero and villain in them is you, you know, it's all you and it's just they're there to point out what you're not loving in you and giving you an opportunity to love that part of you. So you can love them for helping you love yourself to come back actually into who you really are at the end of the day, really who you are and the moment you're there, cheers of gratitude are confirmations of your authentic selves. Yeah, my gratitude is so I can speak first person. So I remember the first time I, I came to your breakthrough experience and I, you know, had the person in front of me, not the actual physical form, but the individual had so much anger and animosity and hatred towards. And I just felt this had that moment with gratitude. And I was like, wow, there's a something shifting in my neurology in this moment that changed forever. You, you do have a shift in neurology because the areas of your brain that are not active are self governed by the forebrain. And people confuse uh you know, forebrain with, you know, analysis, but that's not where the real analysis is. It's, it's actually decision making based on instincts and impulses that are breaking things down into parts instead of integrating into hope. Your Morga thought when you have a balanced mind, that's why in the method I taught the break to experience. I'm asking you questions to make you conscious of the unconscious parts. Since you're resenting somebody, you're conscious of the downside, you're unconscious. The upside. What are the upsides when the upsides completely bounced? The, the downsides, the resentments gone. And the same with the infatuation and people confuse infatuation with love and they, they actually are actually addicted with an impulse to somebody and depending on them and fearing a loss of them and that doesn't open the heart. What opens the heart is when you realize you have no fear of loss of that, what you seek and no fear of gain of that, what you avoid, you're just present. That's when your heart opens. Beautiful. II, I wanna speak a little bit more deeply into trauma because, you know, I worked a lot in a field where sexuality is alive in conversations and people bring their, their, you know, they're healing trauma and they're diving into the wounds around their base and activating more of who they are. And, you know, there's a lot of different schools of thought. I feel like a lot of what you're already speaking about here is addressing different pieces and caveats of trauma. But to somebody who really has that like armor on their heart and they maybe have been wounded and they've been, you know, something's happened to them in their past and they're like, how do I ever get through that? And how do I actually like, show up with an open heart because there's all this stuff in the way? Like I'd love to hear a bit more breaking down like the essence of, of trauma, not just again, individuals, but I also feel it on a societal level. It's something that people are almost afraid of. Oh, they're in their trauma, like who, you know, I gotta walk on eggshells a little bit here. You know? OK, what I'm gonna say is probably gonna shock everybody, but I might as well just go for it because II I don't find, I don't find it. I find it a waste of time to pussy foot around stunt thing. Uh There is no such thing as trauma until the individual chooses to subjectively bias their experience and refuse to be aware of all the parts. Uh Because the mind is set up with a memory and anti memory. Anytime you, you believe that something outside you caused you something, you've already got an illusion. It has nothing to do with what happens out there. It's your perturb perception of it. If I came to you right now and you put, I put, I, I took your hand and I put it on the, on the a table and I slammed it with a hammer. You go what? You'd, you'd probably cuss because that it releases endorphins. You probably scream at me and you drive me and you just, just smash my thumb. What the, what's wrong with you? And you think that's immediately would be a bad thing because your association is what good in that is what, what's the good in that? Right? You'd say a bad trauma tragedy. You'd, you'd associate with that. Well, what if I came up to you and said I'm gonna give you a billion dollars cash and a night with your favorite movie star female and, and she, you will be the genie, whatever you do decide they do or maybe you've got a girlfriend that you prefer, put the girl there because I could be getting you to the dog house here. But, but if I, if I said I'm gonna give you a billion dollars cash and I have a, a surgeon that will repair your thumb perfectly in less than eight days. It'll be perfectly normal. I'll smash with them. But you got a billion dollars of cash. Plus the night with a chick or your girlfriend or whatever to do whatever you want you're in it. It's your, it's your harem, individual harem. OK. If I gave you that, would you put your thumb out there for a smash for a billion dollars cash? I'd give it a good smash. OK. Now, now what happens now with that? What happens now with the thumb? Is that a trauma or is that an absolute? Wow. Mhm. Mhm. Ok. Now, it's not what happens to you. It's the associations you put with it. I've taken people through unimaginable things. You know, I have, you've seen it in break two, I've taken people through unimaginable things that they think is terrible trauma, tragedy, torture. I mean, amazing stuff. And there's nothing the mortal body can experience that the mortal soul can't love. But it's about asking the right questions and make you conscious of information you're unconscious of when you judged it in the first place because as long as you're causal and you're blaming something on the outside for the cause of things, that means that you're basically assuming there's a drawback without a benefit and you're the one responsible for that perception just because 100 people might agree with you doesn't mean it's true. It just means that that's what they might agree with because they don't know the benefits. I had a guy recently who was kidnapped on the freeway in Africa, driving down the freeway, four cars pull up around him, stop bang up the windows. When do the car grab him, cover him in a head sack, stick him in a trunk and drove him 5 to 6 hours into a place of nowhere land and then ransomed his family for large sums of money because he had wealth. Hm. He'd been under trauma. Mhm. Right. Mhm. Mhm. So somebody referring to me and I smiled, he, and he wanted to run the story. I said, ok, stop the story running. This story is only gonna dramatize and neuroplastic be run the Amygdala and make you dramatize it and run the story and you're not gonna get worse. So stop the story. I don't really care about the story. Now go to that moment when this occurred. What was the benefit? He said, well, there was no benefit. How can it be, be, be carnival? What's the benefit? He goes, I don't see a be iii I, what's the benefit? Well, how can it be? I, I, what's the benefit? And all of a sudden you said I'm closer to my family than I've ever been in the history of my family. Mm hm. My wife is giving me more focus attention and I now don't take my kids for granted and started to cry teary eyed. He just broke, he got a broken tear. He goes, I don't take my kids for granted. He goes unbelievable. I was a workman, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work since that's happened. I'm now close to my family. Good. What's the next benefit? All of a sudden he goes, man, I've never asked this question. This is months of, of therapy and tragedy and no one's asked me this question. What's the benefit? What's the next benefit? He goes, I was gone for six weeks. My company boomed. People rose to the occasion and took over roles and jobs that I normally rob them of and my, I'm making passive income. I'm not even at work and they were now making me money and they didn't even want me to come back because they want me to be with my family and it forced me to delegate and the people stepped up and I was robbing them of those accountabilities and undermining my business and worked in my butt off. And now I'm making more money and I'm more time with the family and now respecting the people and giving them more fees and making more income. I said, how much of a consulting, if you had to pay a consultant to get you to that? He says I paid consultants like they couldn't get me there. I wouldn't let it go. It was forced to let go. How much is that worth? He goes, millions, millions. I said, how much are they ran? Some? 10? Hm. I said, what's another benefit? He said I was working and working and working wasn't eating well and had hypertension at a young age. My blood pressure's back down. I'm doing yoga with my, with my wife. He says my health is returned. What's that worth? He goes, I don't even know the on longevity. I don't know. I it's a hard one to put a value on, but it's worth a lot. I said, what's another benefit? He said my father and mother were a bit estranged because of who I married when they found out that I was kidnapped. I reestablished my relationship with my mom and dad and now they're there for my grandkids. It's, it's a dream come true. Never would have thought that would have happened. But my dad, whatever we had a major issue with, it's gone. Mhm. Mhm. Because he realized he might have lost his son. He said that's worth a lot. He said, I've got more time to meditate and think I'm actually now more visionary in my business. I've now got a more quality team. He says, I now find out who my real friends are and I, I started let it keep going, buddy. He keep going. What's another benefit? And all of a sudden the trauma perceptions are shifting and he hit this threshold, he cried. And he said right now, he's fully aware that prior to this event in his mind, he felt trapped because he couldn't figure out how to juggle his family and his work. Mhm And he said, I even prayed for something to get me past this right now. I actually feel grateful for these people. I feel like it was a prayer answered. Hm He said right now, I almost feel like thanking those guys. I said, great. There's anything you can't say thank you for with gratitude is baggage. Anything you can say thank you for is fuel. Now you're not traumatized. Your perception. Are you? He goes, no, I just wanna go home and say, tell my wife this. I want them to know this two hours I spent with this guy and made him ask a question and made him conscious of the unconscious and found that the terrific and the terrible, the, the, the blessings and the curse, you know, and the anti memory that was there. Then I made him go in there. And I said at the moment when you were actually in the car and you were wanting to pee and you couldn't urinate and you were holding it for these hours and you were sitting there and you were not knowing what was gonna happen and wondering if you were gonna be killed and didn't know what was happening. Go to that moment and he says, I can tell you exactly where my mind was. I have an absolutely vivid imagery of every memory of my family. Hm. I said, can you see that those were joyful moments in your mind as you were having sorrow and terror? And she goes, there's a thing called dissociative freeze response that the second we have a perception of terror, we dissociate it. Create a counterbalancing anti memory in the brain to neutralize that to keep homeostasis in the brain, the brain will do it. And if it, and if you become aware of both of them, it don't no longer cause trauma. It's just an event. All events are neutral until somebody subjectively biases and puts a artificially injected social label on something. So when I got through with him, he said, I can't believe that I don't even have a troll in my mind. Now, I said, no, I never was. You chose to make it because you got surrounded by people that can't imagine the upsides of such an event. I held you accountable. That's all bring the balance sheet in the minds, make you mindful, not just mindless. You're when you're unconscious and the ignorant, you have missing information you have entropy. You age when you see the fullness, you, you're engaged, not aged. And I and I Beijing made when he went home and I got a beautiful letter from the family. He went home and, and sat there with the entire family and told the entire reframing of it and they all cried together. And so that was now the the transformation of the rest of the family that supposedly was traumatized and one of the kids was having difficulty in school. It was and that just nipped it right there once he shared that experience. So trauma is not something that happens to us. Trauma is what we choose to make it and we can turn it into an opportunity. It's like it's just like Victor Frankel when he was in the concentration camps, when he extracted meaning which means to find the conscious, the other side that you're unconscious of and bringing it back into the mean. When Aristotle said that there were ver vices, he said there were excellent deficiencies of perception that were the vices. And when we balanced out the perception, we have the mean, there's the virtue, it was the poised, temperate virtue, the moderate perception, that was the virtue and that's extracting meaning out of your existential existence. And so if you ask the right questions, you can liberate yourself from these illusions of terrific and terribles because some people get caught in a fantasy and think something's terrific and are blind to the downsides just as much as the other. I've seen people get, I, I saw a woman go into four relationships called Mike. They were alcoholics because she was resenting her husband. I mean, her father was Mike and then an alcoholic, four relationships she was in and she didn't see the downsides and I made her look at the downsides and extract the meaning out of it. And then she started giggling and she goes, it's all these relationships are trying to get me to love my dad. And I said, bang. So let's go clear the dad and that was the end of the mice. Those things you, they, you thought we had, they had downsides, everything has two sides. If you, if you really want to open your heart, you see both sides simultaneously. Wilhelm want one of the earliest psychologists. But even the father of psychology, they, they called him the COFA of psychology. He said there's simultaneous contrast and sequential contrast. Sequential contrast is when you see a positive without a negative or a negative, without a positive and they're separated and they're analyzed broken. But if you see them simultaneously and look for the other side, syn not sequentially but simultaneously, you're liberated and the heart opens and that's when therapy is no longer causal. It's a causal as Carl Young says, it's synchronous and it liberates and it is a confirmation that we're now back in authenticity, not looking down or up at people. We're loving and appreciating the magnificence of why these things happen in our life. We're fighting the hidden order to our chaos, true power of gratitude. Where she w said 011 last thing before we close. I, you know, you mentioned soul earlier in the last chapter of my, my book, the Embodied Man is awakening soul purpose. And I'd love for you to just to, you know, link the place of where gratitude and embodied gratitude and feeling. As you said, the tears, gratitude. And I love that you said that because I worked a lot with the emotional body. When tears are there, it's like really know the emotional body is present. But where does this embodied gratitude open up the gateway to the soul? Like where, where is that um transition in, in place you can be in the soul. Uh Each of us have a set of priorities that we live our life by set of values, things most to least important. Anytime we fill our day with the highest priority action, it is most inspiring, most fulfilling that we spontaneously love doing. We love doing mind's changing the moment we do the blood glucose and oxygen goes in the forebrain and we have a higher probability of objectivity. Objectivity means neutral minded, whole minded wholeness. And we go into our executive center and the executive center has nerve fibers to go down to the Amygdala and calm down the impulses and instincts that distract us with judgment. And in that state, that objectivity state awakens the gratitude. That's why that center of the executive center is the Gratitude Center. It's the self mastery, executive gratitude center. So sometimes call the gratitude and we have grace because we no longer are judging and we no longer have a desire looking up to people wanting to change us into them and no longer looking down, wanting to change them into us. There's nothing to change when there's absolutely no desire to change us, relative to others or others, relative to us. And we, we see as it is the way it is and we're grateful for, as it is human will matches what used to be the theological language, divine will. And now we're in a state of grace and our heart opens and by definition, we're not judging. That's the state of unconditional love, soul, the authentic self, the essential state is not the existential personas, it's the essential soul. Uh It's the actual that, that Aristotle described instead of the potential part, we're now actualizing our life, self actualizing it. So when we live by our highest values, Aristone called that the tell us the end in mind, we're now living not as a means to an end, but in the end in mind, we're now present with what we feel we're called to do in our lives. And we're, we're fulfilling our soul's purpose, the most meaningful and purposeful thing we can do that tell us. And that's when we're in the most unconditional out. So, the purpose, the soul and the gratitude are inseparable. I, I like to say, there's transcendental Emanuel described it as the transcendental gratitude, love, inspiration, enthusiasm, certain in presence, we're present. We're not, we're unwavering and certain that we love. We're in a state of gratitude. We're loving, we're enthused in our body, which means the God within it. And we're inspired, that's, that's the authentic self. That's the soul. That's, that's what our life is designed to be and we're capable of living it if we prioritize our life. II, I don't do anything but te teach research and write. Everything else is delegated if we delegate lower party things and we're not having to engage in anything that is only inspiring. We can have a very grateful life on a daily basis. It's totally so factual liable that most people who live by duty, not design, they don't structure their life by priority. They, they feel like, oh my God, what will people think? And I gotta fit in and I gotta do this and I should do this and they're limiting in imperatives instead of indicatives and that's about prioritization. That's why trying to help people find out what they really value and prioritize their life and give themselves permission to shine doing what, what's really meaningful that contributes the most. That's really inspiring to them. Well, II, I thank you. I thank you for the mission that you do in this life. And really the way you showed up, I mean, the, the time that you came into my life as a young man has made such a massive impact. And you know, I'm, I'm so deeply grateful that I know the thousands and thousands of people around the world that you've impacted and, and I feel more than anything that you do that you follow, what, what's alive and you give permission for other people to do the same. You gave me a, a huge permission field for that and, and so much for my mind to absorb so that I could actually feel the depth of my heart and um from, from my heart to your horses. Thank you brother. Thank you for, for, for fulfilling and during the mission you're doing on this planet, it, it, it means the world to me and I know many of the people listening all over the planet right now. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to be with you and for the great questions and the time to talk about a very important question, call or talk, think about call, gratitude. I think that's a very important topic. And if people want to find you, they go to De Martini Institute uh dot com or where's the best place? Just you know, just Doctor Doctor De martini.com. Perfect Doctor De Marti Drde Ma RT INL a.com. Dr demartini.com, they can, they can go and do their value determination there. They can just go on and I, they could spend the rest of their life just trying to review everything to each other. It's such a, it's, it's a wealth of information here. I, I will, I will raise my hand to that one. I know any. Of course, I feel like I've been digesting it for years after, so it's still digesting it. There's a wealth of information I've never met someone actually that has more information. So I on that so much. Thank you. Thank you for who you are and I it's been such a pleasure to have you here with us today. No. Thank you. Thanks for having me.