Latest / Vox Novus with Victor Fuhrman / Bob Gardner - Built for Freedom

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Bob Gardner - Built for Freedom · Vox Novus with Victor Fuhrman

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Vox Novus, the New Voice, Vox Novus, the New Dimension, Vox
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Novus thought and movement leaders who will share from their experience and offer tools to
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help us navigate our rapidly changing world. My name is Victor Furman. Welcome
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to Vox Novus, the New Voice. As we embark on a new year,
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many of us are seeking ways to break free from the fear and constraints
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that have held us back and hindered our personal progress in the past. So
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what does it take to embrace fearless living, take charge of our lives,
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and unlock our full potential in a significant way this year? My guest this
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week on Vox Novus, the Freedom Specialist, Bob Gardner, emerges as a
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beacon of inspiration with this transformative healing tools and body based approach, empowering individuals
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to break free from self imposed limitations, conquer fears, and authentically live a
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life filled with purpose, joy and fulfillment. His website is Thefreedom Specialist dot
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com, and he joins me this week to share his personal path of liberation
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and new book, Built for Freedom. Please join me in welcoming to vox
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Nobus Bob Gardner. Welcome, Bob Hey Thanks Victor, thanks for having me
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on. I'm excited to chat with you. Thank you, Bob, and
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please share with us your early path and aspirations and how they ensued for you.
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My early path, my aspirations were as a kid, I wanted to
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be the kid that could like fire lightning bolts out of his fingertips and do
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the dragon balls stuff. And in the process of sort of chasing these legendary
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kumfuu abilities and getting a degree in artwork and stuff, I actually realized that
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I had all these emotional issues on the under side of my life, and
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so I started coping with that through pornography and through binging on food and through
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other types of coping behaviors and ended up in an eighteen year addiction and screwed
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almost everything up in my life. That's the early past. Well, your
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bio shares that during those eighteen years you had those addictive patterns, you were
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on the brink of both divorce and suicide. Something inside of you told you
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it was just not time to quit. Where do you think that guidance came
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from and how did that change everything for you? I don't know exactly.
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I mean, everybody's got their own view and what they ascribe it to.
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I'll just say that there was some sort of internal desire to continue to move
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total. It felt like there's got to be a possibility. There has to
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be more than what I had been shared with. Many people around me were
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like, no, addiction is a permanent situation. The depression you're going to
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be coping with that for a lifetime. Stress is a fact of life.
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Anxiety normal, the suicidal ideation and stuff. Well, sorry, you got
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the bum wrung on the ladder. And there was just some intuition, some
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hunch, you could call it an inspiration. I was reading early in scriptural
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accounts and reading things that seemed to indicate that there was more hope than what
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was there. Like, I wasn't reading about Jesus telling people that he wanted
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to see them in his office every week for the rest of their life.
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But it was like, go, your faith has made you whole, Go
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live your life. And so there was some part of me that just clung
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to that as a hope. I had no evidence that it was true in
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my own life, but I or anybody else's life around me, but I
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could not let it go. And just like acquiesced to Nope, that's just
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the way life is. And so when stuff got sour, and when my
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wife looked at me and told me that she wouldn't necessarily be sticking around if
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I didn't do something, and so I was looking at possibly being alone my
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whole life and being that depressed. That's where I said, look, I
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don't want to die at this point in time, but I definitely don't want
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to live the life that everybody's told me I'm doomed for. And so I
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just threw everything out that people had told me, all the professionals, all
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the authorities, all the people that said that they knew about this, and
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I said, watch, let me prove you wrong. And you emerged as
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the Freedom Specialist. How would you define that specialty? I? You know,
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it's a funny story about how I came to that name is as I
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was trying to figure out how to name the company. It was. Originally
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I was only helping men who were dealing with pornographic issues, sexual addictions,
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and things like similar to what I was doing. But then women started asking
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me if it was only for guys and their wives, their friends and so
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on, and I was like, no, I'm just teaching people the mechanics
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of their body, the mechanics of how their mind and body work together to
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produce these experiences of misery and on the other side, happiness and joy.
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So it doesn't really have anything to do about men. So that means I
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had to change the name of the company because it was Liberate a Man.
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And then I was like, well, what would I want to be?
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And I was like, I could call myself the addiction specialist, I could
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call myself the depression specialist. But I was like, but everybody who has
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an addiction is a specialist, and addiction they know all about it. I
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want to specialize in freedom and freedom to me at the time just meant like
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I'm no longer being pulled back into those emotions and behaviors. But then over
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time it became this other exploration where it was no longer freedom to be to
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not do the things that were dragging me down. It was freedom to do
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the things that I cared about, freedom to no longer even have to worry
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about triggers and traumas and stuff. And then it was a kind of freedom
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that eventually evolved into a kind of happiness on autopilot. But it was an
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evolution over time, And I think the name of the company is something that
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keeps my eye on the ball and keeps me away from haunting for trauma or
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focusing on life as a problem when deep, deep down, there's a clear
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understanding with me within me that life itself is this beautiful, glorious phenomenon,
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and humans show up in this heavens and then we turn it into hell.
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Tell us some of the steps that you took after your own freedom awakening.
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So initially I thought that I was a weirdo, see, because I mean,
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I'd been to twelve step programs. I've been to counseling, i'd I'd
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read books, I'd tried online programs and all these different things, and none
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of it seemed to be really helping. I learned a lot of stuff,
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I made friends, I had comforting experiences. It's not like it was bad,
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but I looked around and nobody was getting better. And so I didn't
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have anybody else to ask questions to and be like, well, what do
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I do different? So I just told my wife, I'm like, Okay,
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I'm going to just try whatever comes to mind. The first thing I
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thought was I need more light in my life. Now I lived in Phoenix,
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Arizona, so the notion of more sunlight was a little bit counterintuitive,
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and yet that was the start. So what I started doing was I would
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climb up on the roof and I simply made an appointment with myself to every
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day I was going to watch the sunset and the sun rise. I quit
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watching the sunrise after a while because the roof frosted over one time while I
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was up there, and I almost died on the way down. But it
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was that daily appointment with the sun. Some days I stared right at it.
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Other days I looked around. Other Some days I was cussing about my
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day. Other days I was just quiet sitting there. Some days I was
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thinking about things. It wasn't like there was a regimented thing other than that
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practice of take a moment a couple times a day, twenty minutes or so,
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and just pause and then go back into your day. And that started
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to create some possibilities for me. And then I started doing some basic breathing
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and some use of my own voice to start to create a kind of harmony
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inside my body. Chants or songs or things that I had learned done in
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a way to produce a different kind of feeling inside myself, and so I
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was doing that at different times. And I had been doing body I mean,
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I was a martial arts instructor, so I'd been doing a lot of
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breathing and movement and understanding how to start to release tension from the body for
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a long time. And so as I was doing that and I started doing
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some of these other things. One day, I was just sitting on the
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roof and my body sort of disappeared, and it was like I could feel
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my own heartbeat inside the trunks of the trees fifty feet away, and the
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sky was pouring through my eyeballs in the back of my head, and there
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was this tidal wave of pure happiness. It wasn't what I thought it was.
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I used to think that happiness was excitement, or happiness was like fun
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and laughter, and in reality, it was this effervescence, sort of when
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you pop the top on a soda bottle and these little bubbles fly everywhere.
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And it was just this subtle undercurrent of effervescence that I was feeling, and
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it just washed through me and I wasn't doing anything for it. I was
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just sitting on the roof, and I realized, oh, happiness doesn't depend
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and doesn't come from the outside. But I'd known that in my head,
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but I felt it. And then from that day forward, as I continued
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to do the things that I looked at and developed, it just started to
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bleed everywhere to where that's more or less all the time in the background of
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everything I'm doing. It's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with us.
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What are some of the biggest problems that people have when they seek you out
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for coaching support? And so most people seek me out for the problems that
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they think they have, And the problems they think they have are depression,
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addiction, anxiety, trauma, PTSDOCD, bipolar stuff, sometimes chronic pain,
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and autoimmune diseases. They're coming to me often as a last ditch effort to
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solve what they think is the problem, and those are the diagnoses. And
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I turned the table on them and I try to get them to see that
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that is not the problem. That is actually their body's solution to another problem,
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something underneath the hood that hasn't been addressed. And if you take that
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solution is like a pacifier to a baby. So you take the pacifier away
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but you haven't solved the poopy diaper, then pretty soon that baby's going to
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scream, cry, try to find something else to suck on. And that's
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how people end up jumping from one addiction to the next, or one emotional
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dependency to another one, and so on. And so what I had to
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learn to do was start to educate them as much as possible and put them
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through physiological experiences to help them realize through their own experience that, oh,
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that's just downstream. The depression is a downstream effect. These suicidal thoughts are
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byproducts of the discomfort inside of my own system. And if I handle this
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reflexive, instinctive discomfort reaction, then the suicidal thoughts don't come, the depression
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doesn't come, the addictive behaviors, I don't feel urges. And so what
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I've helped them to see is this is a reflex action. It's an instinct.
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You weren't born with it, which means you can learn it. You
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learned it along the way. And if you can learn to be miserable on
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autopilot, that means you have everything you need to be to learn to be
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happy on autopilot. All it takes is a different kind of training, and
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as they start to discover that, really what's at the root of it is
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my physiological reaction to life that has been trained. It's useful. It has
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one hundred percent success rate at surviving everything life has thrown at them, So
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it's not bad. It's just that now when they want an upgrade, we've
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got to go back and retrain it. And then as they do that,
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they suddenly realize that they're starting to respond to the people in their life differently,
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and they're cooler under fire and they don't go into these bigger swings,
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or when they do feel a big emotion come on, their body starts to
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handle it on its own without them having to will power their way through it,
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all because of the instinct underneath it. So they think that the problem
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is all of these big emotional states, but in reality, the main issue
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that they're having is just that their mind and body have learned one way to
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handle life and haven't been given another option. And we've got to put them
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through some experiences that give them a compelling reason to explore another option. And
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once that happens, you know, then it starts to take over and gain
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momentum on its own. As you shared on your own path, you incorporate
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a plethora of tools to help others. Martial arts, breath work, functional
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psychology, deep tissue release, and numerous other healing modiblities. Let's talk a
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little bit about each of these, starting with martial arts. I'm not a
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person who's ever engaged in martial arts. How do you bring someone in who's
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never engaged in martial arts and sort of get them involved in that? So
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what's fascinating about martial arts in why it's so useful is that martial arts is
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inherently a discipline around resolving conflict. Right, So inside of that space,
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that means what you're learning to do is hold your body and hold your position
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and your breathing and your movement in such a way that if there is conflict,
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you arise victorious. And so what I've done is strip away the sort
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of combative nature of it. And I've taken the same principles and I've helped
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people go through drills that are sort of like you know, sort of goofy
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rough housing that we use various different tools. We'll use knives for instance,
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because that makes people feel a strip response. But we're doing it slowly,
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and we're helping them learn how to unhook their stress response while there's a knife
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in their hand or a knife in somebody else's hand, and nobody's there trying
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to hurt each other. So it's not I've taken the combat out of it,
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but the conflict resolution is still in there. And ultimately I'm helping them
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focus on the fact that in every fight, there are ten battles, and
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the first nine are with yourself, with all your fears, with all your
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worries, with all your pains, with all your limitations, and only the
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last fight is with the person on the other side of it. And if
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you can resolve the first nine, that last fight, whether we win or
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lose, isn't as big a deal. And that's the same thing with all
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the rest of life. Most of the time, all of our struggles are
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inside ourselves, and if we can train ourselves to no longer create that kind
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of chaos inside the rest of life, even if it doesn't go our way,
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isn't that big a deal. Now, most of our listeners practice yoga,
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and in the process of practicing yoga, they do breath work. How
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does your breath work come into play? So breath work is such a vast
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arena. A lot of people when they're training in breath work and they're going
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to these certifications, some of them twenty thousand dollars or more, to spend
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a period of time learning about breathing in various different patterns. What they're learning
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is a practice of breathing, and I think that's very valuable. But there's
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so much more to breathing than just do this breath practice for a few minutes
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a day. And so we teach people breath practices, ways of holding their
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breath that eliminate anxiety or eliminate depression, ways of breathing that help them pair
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it with psychological instructions that help them release old memories and traumatic stuff. We
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teach them how to breathe slow, we teach them how to breathe quickly.
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But more than that, we're trying to train them how to breathe naturally when
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they're cutting vegetables, when they're taking out the trash, when they're driving to
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work, because that's where the stresses build up. And most people are using
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meditation and they're using yoga as these means of helping manage their emotional states.
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That's not what those practices were designed for. Those practices were designed to take
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an already healthy human being to ecstatic states of experience far beyond what you would
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normally get. But that's not going to happen if you're using them as a
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band aid instead of as an exploration. So what I'm teaching people to do
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is use their every day breathing as a and their everyday movement as a means
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of letting go of all this stuff so that when they do the breath practices
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or when they do the meditation, the experience that can have are something that's
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far beyond what they ever thought possible before. And tell us about deep tissue
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release. Please, So every every thought you have, every emotion you have,
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every experience you have, isn't just a thought or emotion. Your whole
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body is involved in it. And what that means is you see it in
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a person. When you see them thinking, you see their face contorting,
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or their eyes twitching, or their breathing change, or their heart will race
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or not race, their body will tense, their posture will change. All
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of that happens with every thought and every feeling that we have, and most
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people that are trying to handle trauma are only trying to talk about it.
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But the problem is that the deep, deep stuff that people are carrying is
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nonverbal. There are just reactions to things that they learned as a kid before
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they had words, or when they were growing up. Such an intense experience,
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how could you ever put it into words. So these these nonverbal,
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completely irrational reactions to life that are essentially boiled down to tension and chemistry in
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the body. And as those tensions build over the course of a person's life,
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what starts to happen is that it starts to cut off blood flow and
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circulation. So then the chemistry kind of crystallizes and gets caught inside the muscle
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fibers, and you have this sort of experience of a life that feels more
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and more and more suffocating, or more and more and more trapped. And
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so these deep tissue techniques that I love learn from this. You know,
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it's an old Siberian method of healing that's been handed down from teacher to student,
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has never been written down. I'm trying to rectify that and is a
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process of challenging that. So essentially what I'm using our different tools, whether
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it's my hands or whether it's a set of rounded sticks, or whether it's
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like a leather cord or a whip, or whether it's like just a piece
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of metal or something that elicits different responses from the body. And then I'll
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press on different spots, or I'll glide through them like you would expect in
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a sort of massage thing. But then what I'm doing is holding it there
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until their brain has this flash image of oh my gosh, that's what's happening
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there that hurts. I'm holding that, and then I'm working with their system,
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teaching them how to breathe through it, helping them actively in the process
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of learning how to relax that area in their own body so that they don't
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continue to tense it unconsciously. As those unconscious tensions disappear. With them,
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goes all the caught chemistry of those old emotions with them, goes all the
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memories that were associated with those sensations in the body. And sometimes people will
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have massive traumatic episodes that have come up to mind and then been released as
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they've gone through this. Other people it's just emotional. Some people it's thought
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related. Some people it's purely physical. But invariably they leave feeling lighter,
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and they have this deeper sense of their own system and they understand that they're
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actually okay. And by the end of it every time, what they've found
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is that space inside themselves that is untouchable by any other human It's a pure,
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clear space, and that's the place that they learn to live from.
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And I'm trying to help them map that in their experience so that as they
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walk through life, they realize, Wow, there was nothing wrong with me
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in the first place. It was all just kind of a story I made
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up to navigate social STI suations, and they can start to live with that
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feeling on the inside, just like you know, I've been able to do
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for so long. And what other body based healing modalities do you bring to
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play? So I use some yoga, Definitely use some yoga, some vocalizations,
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whether those are you know, and people get to choose, So if
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they want to use Christian chants or Christian prayers, or if they want to
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use Hindu or Sanskrit, they can use whatever they do. I'm just showing
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them how to use their voice to activate different areas of their nervous system.
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And so I'm using those vocalizations, yoga, posture meditation. We're doing a
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lot of movement oriented things. As you get the body into different positions,
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the brain is now because they're interconnected, able to think differently. Then we
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use the breath work, we do the deep tissue work. We're doing some
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nutritional things as well, with them along the way each time, kind of
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nudging them along. We do you know, ice bath stuff, but all
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of them in a way that I've learned how to bring the psychology with it,
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so it isn't accidental that a person's emotional past or addictive history or traumas
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or anything else. You know, maybe they'll come up, maybe they won't.
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I'm teaching them how to use that more intentionally, more deliberately, so
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that you know, when it's time to get the work done, we just
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get it done. And you call this the not therapy approach, Why not
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therapy? Well, you can't do this stuff in therapy. I've had a
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number of therapists, a number of counselors come and they are really good people
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and they are committed to helping the people around them. And yet I look
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at them and I see how much they suffer. The therapists suffer, how
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much they take on and how much they try not to, but they bring
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into their own life because of the way they've been trained, because of everything
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else that they listen to on a daily basis, And so they're there many
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times carrying these massive loads and they need help, they need therapy, and
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that to me doesn't sound like a useful system where the person that is trying
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to teach other people how to be free isn't free themselves. They come and
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I'm helping them understand the methods that I developed to cut through all of that
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and to use a person's perception of reality in a way that helps release triggers,
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not so that oh, well, I'm free of it this one time,
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but so that they stop being triggered. How to dismantle that stuff that's
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not taught in therapy. In therapy, it's still and I think it's changing,
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but in therapy it's still. The common parlance is that these diagnoses,
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these symptoms, these things are things you can cope with. There are things
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you can manage. They're trying to normalize it and saying, like, you
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know, everybody has anxiety, everybody has you know, trauma or depression,
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and in some ways that minimizes some people's experience. But in many ways,
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I look at it and I go, you have to tell me what it
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is that you mean by trauma before I'm willing to accept to this blanket claim
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about what it is. Same with addiction, same with anxiety. And when
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I get them to tell me, invariably I ask, how is it that
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you know that you have trauma? How is it that you know that you're
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experiencing anxiety? What is it that's telling you this? How do you know
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you're not excited? And then they key into the one thing that is the
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key factor, which is, well, I feel this in my body.
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I have a pit in my stomach, My eyes are darting to and fro.
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My breath is erratic, I can't catch my breath, or I feel
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like I'm suffocating. Awesome. Those are things that your average person walking down
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the street can work with. That They don't need a million dollar research lab,
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they don't need backing from a government grant, they don't need a professional
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somewhere they can work with. Oh my throat is tight, Oh my breathing
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changed. Oh wow, I need to sit down for a second. Oh
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I'm hungry or I'm thirsty. I got a pit in myself. Those are
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things that anybody can work with. And when I start to teach this to
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the therapist, a lot of them will say, yeah, this is what
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the research bears out, like all of the research we look at, this
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is what they're saying. But they've never been taught that in school. They
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took them coming to find it for me, and even then they still can't
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share it with their clientele many many times just because of the limitations of whatever
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practice they're in. My guest is Bob Gardner. His latest book is called
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Built for Freedom. Bob, please tell our listeners what they can get your
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book and find out more about you and this amazing work. You can go
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to the Freedomspecialist dot com. There you can find an online version of the
24:33
book for relatively cheap, unless you want to get it at Amazon and that's
24:37
fine, as well as a guide book to go along with it. There
24:41
you can find my podcast, you can find links to our online programs and
24:45
retreats. Whatever it is that you need. Wherever we can help you,
24:48
we're happy to have. Let's just start there Thefreedomspecialist dot com. I will
24:52
be back with more of Bob after these words on the own Times Radio network,
24:56
the best of the holistic, spiritual and conscious word Ome Times Radio IOWMFM.
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Ome Times Magazine is one of the leading online content providers of positivity,
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wellness, and personal empowerment. A philanthropic organization, their net proceeds are funneled
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to support worldwide charity initiatives via Humanity Healing International. Through their commitment to creating
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Home Times co creating a more conscious lifestyle. Back on Box Novus,
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my guest this week is Bob Gardner. We're going to be talking about his
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book Built for Freedom. Bob, you've been quoted as saying freedom is a
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skill, not a pill. Once you've trained your body and mind how to
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do it, it will begin to happen all by itself while you continue to
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enjoy all the other bits of your life. How does that work for people
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who spend more time in their heads than working with the feelings in their bodies.
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You know, that's just they're in their body the whole time that they're
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in their head. So a lot of people harp on this notion that you
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know you need to be more present. You need to be you know,
26:21
if I'm just present, everything will happen. You're always present, and your
26:23
thoughts are one aspect of what's happening in the present moment. And so it's
26:29
not a question of being more present with one or the other. It's a
26:30
question of developing the capacity to move your focus where it is most beneficial for
26:37
you. So, somebody who spends a lot of time in their head,
26:38
if it's a good experience, that's amazing. Why would you leave if it's
26:44
not so good an experience? Well, there's other things that I can show
26:47
you how to pay attention to, and then once you've developed the skill to
26:49
kind of attend to those, you may find that the space in your head
26:52
is clearer, and then you can spend more time there. Still, So
26:56
I don't see that there's anything wrong with being in your head versus being in
27:00
your body. I think every person has a certain set of proclivities and a
27:03
natural tendency and a natural set of gifts in certain arenas. And like Stephen
27:08
Hawking, what would you have me do with him? I mean, he's
27:11
in his head all the time, and that's developed a lot of things for
27:15
physics, and had he not had a body that was somewhat decrepit, he
27:19
wouldn't have been able to have spent that much time in his head. So
27:23
I don't think that it's bad that people spend time in their heads. Really,
27:26
what it boils down to is if you're having a negative experience wherever you're
27:30
placing your attention, it's time to learn that that isn't the whole of life.
27:33
It is just a piece of life, and you can actually shift that
27:37
experience. And I love freedom is a skill, not a pill. Yeah,
27:42
for sure. And that was a little Quippi phrase that I developed early
27:47
early on to counteract what my own thoughts were, because early on I thought
27:53
that freedom from the addictive, the addiction that I was struggling with, or
27:57
freedom from the suicidal thoughts or the depression was going to have to be like
28:03
an act of God. It was going to have to come from the outside.
28:07
It was going to be a counselor, or it was going to be
28:08
a guru or a mentor, or it was going to be some visionary experience
28:15
that finally fixed me as if I were something broken. And when I had
28:19
to turn that around, one of the main things I wanted people to get
28:23
out of reading my book is a not just information, but a realization that
28:29
dawns on them in the process of reading. Oh my gosh, what if
28:33
there's nothing wrong with me in the first place. If I can learn to
28:37
be miserable an autopilot, and I have throughout my life at times, then
28:42
I can learn to be happy on autopilot and I just need training. And
28:45
it's a skill set that I haven't maybe developed. I've been spending my time
28:49
in the wrong dojo. How is it possible that your unique approach can help
28:56
people resolve their problems? Per Permanent is always an interesting issue. It feels
29:06
permanent to me, but of course I have no guarantees in my own life
29:08
that I won't experience something later down the road at all. So rather than
29:14
thinking about guarantees, I like to think back to when I was a kid.
29:18
I used to believe in both Santa Claus and Saint Nicholaus. Saint Nicholaus
29:23
was the German version. I spent about six years little less than six years
29:27
in Germany as a kid. My father was a fighter pilot stationed over there,
29:30
and our landlord used to come on December fifth and do a little bit
29:37
of Saint Nicholaus stuff. Now I didn't know at the time, and I
29:40
was just like, this is rad This mystical, magical being is coming and
29:42
delivering treats to us when we leave our shoes out at night. But then
29:47
one winter there was a knock at the door. My mom ushered us into
29:52
the living room and told us to face one way, and if we look
29:56
the other way, like you know, it wouldn't be good, like the
30:00
presence were going to stop, so just keep looking. So we just stared
30:03
facing at the floor on one end of the living room, and then all
30:06
of these chocolates started sliding along the floor. We heard the jingle bells,
30:10
we heard kind of a deep voice, and then the door closed and it
30:12
was gone. And I ran outside and I didn't see him anywhere, and
30:17
I was like, holy cow, Saint Nicholaus just visited. And it was
30:21
later that I overheard my parents talking or telling someone about it, that it
30:25
was my landlord, And in that moment my entire attitude towards Saint Nicholas changed.
30:32
I have never yet since then been at risk for believing or reacting to
30:37
the thought of Saint Nicholaus as if he's real, and the same thing happens
30:42
with all of your traumas and all of your addictions and all of your depressions,
30:47
is when you can see through the story. It felt real at the
30:51
time, and everything in my little kid brain could I could have marshaled as
30:56
evidence that no, this, in fact did happen. I heard the voice,
31:00
I heard the bells, I saw the candy. It was the right
31:03
day. And yet once a new piece of evidence arose, didn't change the
31:08
past at all. Changed what I knew about the past, changed what I
31:11
had filtered out. When that new piece of evidence arose, it dismantled the
31:15
belief in my own misery in the depression sense, or the belief in Saint
31:22
Nicholaus in that childhood experience. And what I've done with the processes I take
31:27
people through is give them a capacity to feel wonderful in their body, and
31:33
then teach them how to use their own memories and their own perceptions as a
31:41
mean to dismantle the very beliefs they have about the past that they think they've
31:45
experienced, because the reality is no one has ever experienced the future they've imagined.
31:49
There's always details that are different, and a friend of mine and I
31:52
would say, no one's ever experienced the past. They've imagined either. We
31:56
have filled in so many gaps, added so many layers of interpretation that the
32:01
reality of what happened, as heinous as it might be, like if you're
32:06
a kid who got kidnapped and was sex trafficked for a long time, not
32:12
what I would script for anyone on the planet. Definitely something worth stopping.
32:15
And yet all of the stories on top of that about how you are worthless,
32:21
about how you don't deserve much, about the nature of your life,
32:23
and whether or not you're going to have happiness. Ever, in the end,
32:27
all of those stories, those aren't what happened. What happened was only
32:30
the physical stuff and all the internal stuff. You can get rid of that,
32:34
and while it doesn't necessarily make the past better, it gets rid of
32:38
the internal reaction to it, and the person then experience is what essentially feels
32:44
like a permanent release from all the trauma. You offer retreats for folks.
32:49
What can people expect if they consult with you or go on the retreat.
32:52
So the stuff we have online, the programs that I've developed, the book
32:57
I wrote and other things are way to both communicate and help people see what's
33:01
really at the heart of this, and also to help them with all the
33:06
stuff I can teach them to do at home so that they can start to
33:08
experience this for themselves. The retreats I started running because I'm something of an
33:15
impatient fellow, and I know if I can get something done more quickly,
33:21
then there's no reason not to. And so I thought to myself, what
33:25
if I could just get them all together over the course of a few days
33:30
and actually handle all of this physical stuff instead of slowly working it over a
33:35
period of months or a year or something like that. And I was already
33:37
seeing some tremendous results with some of the early clients I was working with,
33:42
but I wanted it faster for them, and they, of course wanted it
33:45
faster, so I started running retreats. There. What I've done is curate
33:50
a series of experiences that are carefully designed to stack one back to back on
33:55
top of the other to start to build this sense of freedom and this this
34:00
lightness and energy in the body, while also taking all of the heavy psychological
34:05
stuff rooted in that body and starting to clean it out and break off those
34:09
associations so that the person comes out the other side realizing, oh wait,
34:15
I'm not carrying this anymore, and they build this tremendous momentum and go back
34:20
home. We've had people come to these retreats. The last one we ran,
34:23
we had three people that were seventy years old. They've lived an entire
34:28
life struggling with all kind of anger issues and addictive behaviors or senses of guilt
34:37
and shame or disconnection from their parents because of a childhood that they didn't appreciate.
34:43
And then they've been writing back since then about how much that changed and
34:49
how much freedom they felt that they never thought possible. These are pastors and
34:52
teachers and engineers and truck drivers and people who who have often tried everything and
35:00
nothing has worked, not because the other things aren't useful, but because they
35:05
only handle the verbal side of things. And so I wanted to give people
35:08
a chance to feel the freedom and that can happen when you handle the physicality,
35:15
and to realize how quickly things can change. Because if you're seventy,
35:20
you still got a lot of life left in you. And there's no sense
35:22
in like throwing in the towel and believing that you have to carry that same
35:27
story for the next ten, twenty, thirty forty years. What if you
35:30
could put it down? What if you could get a new lease on life,
35:32
only this time you don't have to start without knowing how to talk and
35:36
walk. That's what those are about. May I respectfully offer that you are
35:42
not an impatient fellow, You're an efficient fellow. I respect that ain't very
35:50
much. Thank you. You share that our bodies have innate power to heal
35:57
from pain. Please explain so pain? Pain is a production in the brain.
36:05
It seems like it comes from the body, but all of the neurology
36:07
indicates that it doesn't. Why is one thing painful to one person and not
36:12
to another. Why is the same thing painful sometimes and not at other times.
36:16
Why is it that you can distract a person and do something really intense
36:20
to them and they don't realize it, and other times, because they're so
36:22
focused on it, it feels more and more and more intense than it ever
36:27
was. Pain is one hundred percent of the time an opinion of the brain
36:31
about what's going on in the body. That is from all of the leading
36:36
researchers in pain science and understanding that. As I was going through a lot
36:42
of the training and a lot of the experiences that I was seeking out to
36:46
try and understand my own psychology and my own capacity to build my own experience,
36:52
I went through a lot of really intense physical ordeals. I've gouged with
36:58
antlers and whipped and and poked and hit with chains and fighting underwater, half
37:04
drowned, like all these different types of things. And there were so many
37:07
moments in there where because of the training it was done. I mean these
37:10
were with ex Russian operatives and people who were training this way so that they
37:15
could be like invisible spies and not necessarily to do what I'm doing, but
37:21
I was training, and some of them were like, I've never felt it
37:24
done with that kind of intensity occur to me. Those types of impacts on
37:32
the body and whatnot. Usually those come out of anger from other people,
37:36
but these people were just kind and gentle and with this intention of like,
37:39
look, we're going to help show you the way that your body makes pain
37:45
so that you can get your body to stop making it unless it's useful to
37:49
you. Because sometimes you know, having pain can be useful, and so
37:54
as I went through it. You know, I'm receiving these pokes in my
37:59
back or in my and as I'm doing it, and they're sitting there for
38:01
long periods of time, I started to notice that the pain would disappear,
38:06
but the stick was still there, or that where I was feeling the pain
38:09
was not actually where the thing was. And so I started to question it
38:14
and ask myself, what if this isn't pain? What if this is just
38:16
information and my body is creating a plan on what to do with it.
38:21
And that plan is make the skin freak out and make the body freak out
38:23
so that it'll move out of the way and go to safety. And as
38:27
I started to question that, I realized you can actually train your body to
38:31
handle pain differently and often, or sometimes at least not even create pain.
38:37
So I had a lady come to me who had had pain, chronic pain
38:40
seven years. She had been using opioids to manage it and developed a massive
38:46
opioid addiction and sort of willpowered away off of it and for the last year
38:51
before I met her, she described it as razor blades moving up and down
38:55
her bones all the time when she moved, and it was just grunting just
39:00
to stay alive, and she was at her wits end. And when I
39:04
met her, I could see that as she was talking about some of her
39:07
frustrations in life, she had given up on getting over pain. She was
39:09
trying to get help with her business and her emotional struggles. So when I
39:15
started observing her talking about all of this stuff, I noticed this build up
39:20
of tension in her back. I asked her if I could just give her
39:22
a little bit of a thump to it, and so I coached her on
39:25
how to breathe, and I thumped it once twice, and the third time
39:29
was a pretty intense one. It was a very systemic thump, and she
39:32
turned around, you know, looking at me, like what are you doing?
39:35
And I told her to breathe and she relaxed, and then I had
39:37
to go. But then later on that night she texted me that all of
39:42
the pain in her body was gone. It was the first time in seven
39:45
years that her body had been quiet, and she's like, what is this?
39:50
How is this possible? Tell me more? I want to learn.
39:52
And all I had done was take her body's habit of rioting and give it
39:59
something to riot. The nosey scepters in the body are busy. They all
40:04
they do is get excited when there's a lot of excitement in some of these
40:06
other sensory nerves, and so when someone starts rioting, they just jump on
40:10
the bandwagon. They're like down with the king or whatever. So her body
40:14
had just gotten used to rioting to the point where all pain was everywhere,
40:19
and when I gave her an intense enough experience, that sort of recontextualized for
40:23
her own nervous system what was going on. And then all of a sudden,
40:27
all the pain disappeared and it hasn't returned since. It's been four or
40:30
five years since then, and she has not had that systemic pain ever since.
40:36
Just from working with the body really intensely over a short period of time.
40:38
That's amazing. Can that work for any type of pain? I don't
40:43
know. I mean, I haven't worked with every kind of pain on the
40:45
planet. My hunch is probably I've worked with my dad, for instance,
40:52
who had cancer, and he was having these bone aches and these bone pains
40:57
with all of these lumps inside of his body, and they were growing in
41:00
all these different areas and massive amounts of pain, and the painkillers weren't really
41:04
doing much, so I taught him some simple, gentle things to move with
41:07
the body, to how to move so that it starts to produce this sort
41:10
of ecstatic almost for lack of a better word, orgasmic feeling in your muscles
41:17
and your legs or something. And then how to also use his breath.
41:22
And we would just lay on the floor and just make noises, and he
41:25
would go to sleep for a couple hours at a time, totally in bliss,
41:30
just because we had done some things to start to ramp up production of
41:32
his own natural painkillers inside of his body. We started to move and get
41:37
his sensory system in touch with areas of his body that felt great. So
41:40
my hunches that it could happen with all kinds of pain. I mean,
41:45
maybe not like a cut on your arm or a broken bone or something,
41:47
but even then, I've dealt with all those different types of pain differently ever
41:52
since I started learning this, So if it doesn't get rid of it,
41:54
it definitely can help in all ways. My guest is Bob Gardner. His
41:59
book is called Built for Freedom. We'll be back with more after these words
42:04
on the Old Times Radio Network. Humanity Healing International is a small nonprofit with
42:09
a big dream. Since two thousand and seven, HHI has been working tirelessly
42:15
to bring help to communities with little or no Oh. Our projects are not
42:20
broad mandates, nor are they overnight solutions, but they bring the reassurance then
42:25
no one is alone and that someone cares to learn more. Please visit Humanityhealing
42:31
dot org. Humanity Healing is where your heart is. So I'm a cat
42:37
and I just moved in with this new human and she's got this little toy
42:39
she's always playing with all day long. Tap tap tap tap blue bloop.
42:45
She can't put it down there it is, Oh, and get this,
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what aggrel showed up Like magic, humans have cool toys. A person is
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43:17
Novus. My guest this week is Bob Garter. Bob, how does fear
43:22
get in the way of our personal growth and spiritual development? So, I
43:29
mean it depends on which tradition you ask from the you know the Christians.
43:32
You know, God is not a god of fear. And a lot of
43:36
the people I learned from these Russians were deeply Orthodox, and a lot of
43:39
the things that they would talk about was that basically fear and tension are the
43:45
same thing. When you're afraid of something, you'll kind of create some level
43:47
of tension to escape fight or flight, to freeze in place and hope it
43:52
doesn't catch you, or to resist it in some way. And so if
43:58
you're trying to grow or something, you have a goal in mind, you
44:02
have an aim, you have some driving question in your life that is urging
44:07
you forward, and then you feel fear. What is fear? How do
44:12
you know you're feeling fear? Generally speaking, the body freezes up. There
44:16
is an amplified emotional response that usually comes in the form of a different type
44:21
of breathing, often heavier, but sometimes the breathing gets shallow, and then
44:25
you have tension that locks your own movement and prevents you from having more opportunities
44:31
and more flexibility and adaptability than you would normally have. And while these fear
44:36
responses are biologically meant to help you in a pinch to focus all of your
44:42
life energy on survival. Most people's fears are phantoms. We're not being attacked
44:49
by dinosaurs and saber tooth tigers and wooly mammoths and all the stuff that's there.
44:54
We're not being generally hunted down by arch nemeses and all the stuff you
45:00
see in Hollywood. Generally speaking, like, what's really going on in our
45:06
lives as we're sitting down having dinner, we're getting up driving to work.
45:07
We're getting paid to do something that we may or may not enjoy, but
45:12
you know, it's very minimal effort. And so when people are looking at
45:16
personal growth and they start to have fears, what's happened is that their mind
45:21
has made up something and it's locked their body up and put them into a
45:23
massively costly physical state, and that drains the system so that they won't even
45:30
have energy to pursue their goals for very long, to the point where eventually
45:36
they give up and they find themselves. They call it self sabotage, but
45:38
it isn't self sabotage. It's just the body trying to protect itself from what
45:43
it thinks is happening. Please share with our listeners some practical strategies removing fear
45:49
and anxiety in the body with movement and breath. So it's a little thing
45:54
I like to call emotional ninjitsu. I grew up on the ninja turtles,
45:59
so get over it. So emotional nijitsu. Actually my son helped me come
46:07
up with the acronym. But it's a B L E. If you want
46:09
to be able to handle your emotional stage, then you do a B L
46:14
E. So a you've got to acknowledge what it is that you're feeling.
46:17
Not necessarily fear in anxiety, but what in your body, what is happening
46:22
and where? And well, this is helpful because you also are going to
46:27
identify the places where you are not feeling it. I don't care who you
46:30
are. Your elbow, the skin on your elbow is rarely, if ever
46:35
depressed. Your butt cheeks are rarely, if ever, romantically inclined. Your
46:42
nosehairs are rarely, if ever angry about what's going on in the next room.
46:47
So there are parts of your body that, as stupid as it sounds,
46:52
are not actually engaged in feeling the emotion, which means that it's smaller
46:57
than you. And if it's smaller than you. You have nothing to fear.
47:00
So the first thing is to acknowledge what's going on in a way that
47:05
puts it in its place. I have people do this just by narrating.
47:09
So, wow, man, I my wife we were driving down the street.
47:14
The kids were screaming in the back of the car, and there are
47:15
six we have six children, which is a lot to put in a car,
47:19
and they were all talking at you know, one hundred decibels higher than
47:22
they should have been. And so I started breathing, you know, I
47:25
started relaxing my body, and we'll get to that. And my wife looked
47:29
over and she rolled her eyes, and my brain went wild. It went
47:32
like, oh my gosh, I have spent all these years learning how to
47:35
manage my emotions and you still think I'm an idiot, and here I'm the
47:37
one managing it, but you're just sitting over there on the corner judging me.
47:42
I could have let my brain run with that for a long time and
47:45
resented my wife for hours, if not days. I was a master at
47:47
misery, possibly a grandmaster at misery, and instead what I did was narrate.
47:53
I looked over at her and I said, oh, my goodness,
47:57
you just raised your you rolled your eyes, and I I totally took that
48:00
to as some kind of judgment in my system. And then I started getting
48:05
all up in arms about how I'm doing my best and all you had done
48:07
was roll your eyeballs. Notice I was narrating only the facts, not my
48:13
interpretation, and only what I was experiencing, not blaming her on it.
48:17
In that moment, she goes, no, I was agreeing with you.
48:20
The kids are really loud, man. Did I misinterpret that eye roll?
48:24
And how many others have I misinterpreted? Over life? So acknowledging and narrating
48:30
what's going on, just as like, oh, this is the experience I'm
48:32
currently having. That's cute is helpful because then you can do the next few
48:37
items. B We've done A, now we're on to b Breathe. It
48:43
doesn't matter how you change your breathing. Just change it from whatever it is.
48:46
If it's erratic, keep it smooth. If it's slow, make it
48:50
fast or make it slower. If it's heavy, make it heavier or softer.
48:54
If it's super calm or frozen, breathe really really fast. You got
49:00
to do. But just change it because when you change it. You've changed
49:04
the state that your body matched to the feeling. So now it's going to
49:07
confuse your body, which is where you want it to be, so you
49:09
can teach it something new. After you started breathing different, then you loosen
49:15
that's the l loosen up the tensions that you found. Most people's shoulders are
49:20
around their ears. A lot of people have all clenched jaw or their facial
49:22
expression is stuck it in their resting, you know that kind of face.
49:28
And then they have or they have like they're not breathing really deeply, their
49:31
ribs are tight, any of those things. So you start to loosen up
49:36
the places you notice tension and then e escape and that is get into a
49:42
body position that feels like it's not attached to that emotion. So one time
49:47
my website had broken and the Doom's Day. The used car salesman in my
49:52
head was spouting doomsday prophecies just non stop about how we were never going to
50:00
food on the table again and the apocalypse was coming and I was a failure.
50:05
And then she came in and she wanted to know if I wanted to
50:07
go fishing with her brother on Saturday with the kids, and you know,
50:10
a couple of years earlier, my mind would have been like, oh my
50:14
goodness, I am working all day long to try and with food on the
50:17
table, and now I don't even get a weekend and all that stuff.
50:20
Instead, what I did was drop on the floor and do snow angels on
50:23
the carpet, breathing in and outs. And she looks at me and she's
50:30
like, are you okay? You need me to like punch in the chest
50:32
or something. I was like, no, I'm good. I'm still doing
50:36
snow angels. I shipped at my website broke, and it's kind of frustrating
50:39
because I don't know what's going on, and I think I'm freaking out because
50:42
we're good. I think we're never gonna have food again, and I got
50:45
a lot of stories going on. Maybe now is not the good best time
50:47
to ask me this question. Can I answer it later? And she looks
50:51
at me, she's like, sure, leaves the room. I felt amazing.
50:54
I got up. I had been free of the resentment towards my wife
51:00
instantly, and I was also free of the frustration that had been mounting with
51:05
the website that I hadn't noticed. And I solved the problem in like thirty
51:08
minutes. I realized what was going on. But I could only do that
51:12
from my most optimal state. When you are happy, you are more creative,
51:16
you're more intuitive, you are more connected to other people. You're stronger,
51:21
you have more stamina, your immune system works better. Happiness is like
51:24
the fuel of human life, and yet we claim that stress should be the
51:28
fact of life. That's where I go not so so abl e. Acknowledge
51:34
what's going on, get really precise about it, and then breathe different,
51:37
Loosen the muscles that are struck, escape, get into a posture that is
51:43
free of that one. And you can do it in subtle ways. Just
51:45
raising your chin up, chest up is great for people who struggle with depression.
51:50
If you're gonna watch a ad movie, fine, just make sure that
51:52
the TV is above your eye level so you have to look up. You'd
51:54
be surprised what that does. Just simple things. Now, this is not
51:59
just for negative emotions, it's for all of them. Let's say you have
52:04
this joyful thing happen to you. You acknowledge it. Don't let it just
52:07
pass by unacknowledged. Acknowledge what you're feeling and where you're feeling it, Breathe
52:14
in a way that allows that feeling to soak into more of your tissues,
52:17
loosen up the areas that are stuck and keeping it out, and then the
52:22
ease stands for enjoy. Get into a position that allows you to fully enjoy
52:29
the blessings in your life, the moments where wonder just sweeps through you,
52:35
or gratitude takes you by the arms and just gives you a git, a
52:37
big hug. If you don't take those moments, then what else is life
52:45
for? And so this emotional nijitsu is both for the negative as well as
52:50
the positive. And you share that freedom from fear is accessible to everyone and
52:55
it's our birthright. Yeah, you were built for freedom. That's the name
53:00
of the book. How do we set happiness and wellbeing on what you call
53:07
autopilot? Yeah, that's a great question. And the next book I'm writing
53:12
is diving into this a little bit more. But essentially, look right now,
53:17
if a fly buzzes by your ear, you reflexively reach up and swing
53:21
it. If you reach out and your hand touches a flame, your body
53:23
reacts before you even become consciously aware of it. And then you say oh,
53:28
even if it didn't really burn you. And so those reflexes are what
53:32
I have learned and spent all this time training, because if we're only working
53:37
with well my mind thinks this and then my body has this emotion, we're
53:39
still a couple steps down downstream from what's really going on, which is instinctive
53:45
reactions to life. You want unconscious competence. Right now, you're unconsciously competent
53:52
and reacting to life in all kinds of different ways, and it happens on
53:55
autopilot. So happiness on autopilot is about training those reflexes, at first consciously
54:04
so that they become unconscious, and then you simply notice, Wow, years
54:08
ago I would have reacted differently. Holy cow, that didn't even bother me.
54:12
Wow, this is amazing. Or you notice things happening and it's almost
54:15
like you're no longer have to be the driver on every road trip you take
54:20
in life. You actually can take time in the driver's sheet and then swing
54:22
over to the navigator sheet, and then sit in the back seat and read
54:24
a book, look out the window, climb on the roof and wave your
54:28
hands in the wind. When you know how to operate the machinery of your
54:31
own human life. You don't have to sit there and control everything because I
54:36
don't care what people tell me all the time. There is nobody that I
54:38
know of on the planet that wants to be in control all the time.
54:43
They want life to work out for them, and it's designed to do that.
54:46
That's what your reflexes are for. That's what your instincts are for.
54:51
You just need to give them the right kind of instructions. And yeah,
54:54
maybe you got a bum rap as a child and you've got some really rough
55:00
circumstances. We don't have to wallow in those anymore. Let's just give you
55:04
some different circumstances so that your body isn't constantly reliving what's already been passed for
55:09
a long time. The wisdom and experience of my guest Bob Gardner. His
55:15
book is entitled Built for Freedom. Bob one more time, Please share with
55:20
our listeners where they can get your book and find out more about you and
55:22
your work. Yeah, just go over to the Freedom Specialist dot com.
55:27
There you can get a digital copy of the book. You can find the
55:30
podcast and all the online programs. You can schedule to talk with a member
55:34
of my team, and you know, if you want to come to a
55:37
retreat, we'd love to have you. I mean, there is some real
55:39
magic that happens there. We also have a nonprofit that we started, so
55:45
if you want to support work like this happening where people are being freed from
55:50
all of these decades of trauma and pain and rape and abuse and all this
55:53
stuff, and you just don't know where to put your money, you can
55:57
get a tax free donation if you go over to the website and there's a
56:00
link there that you can donate to the Built for Freedom nonprofit that we started,
56:06
and that is giving people scholarships to be able to come and get the
56:08
help that they need as well. Bob, thank you so much for this
56:12
work and all of this wonderful information you've shared with our listeners tonight. It's
56:16
been my pleasure. Victor, thank you for having me and thank you for
56:20
joining us. I'm Box Novus, I'm Victor the Voice Sperman. Have a wonderful week