Latest / We! / The More I Pursue My Passion and Purpose, the More What I Want From Life Keeps Changing — The Personal and Spiritual Awakening That Helped Me Let Go of What I Thought I Wanted and Discover What I Really Want

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The More I Pursue My Passion and Purpose, the More What I Want From Life Keeps Changing — The Personal and Spiritual Awakening That Helped Me Let Go of What I Thought I Wanted and Discover What I Really Want · We!

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you felt lonely, isolated, disconnected, with an empty feeling inside and just yearning for more, knowing something is missing, then this podcast is for you.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: So here's your host, Joe Mittigan.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome to We.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever worked really hard to create the life you thought you wanted?
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then one day looked at that life and realized I don't want the same things anymore.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: For me, that was a really strange feeling.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because most of my life, I thought I knew what success would look like.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'd work hard, make a bunch of money, build something big, have a bunch of achievements, get people to notice me, prove that I was successful, prove that I mattered, and maybe most importantly, prove that I was enough.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And for years I thought if I could accomplish enough things in my external world, eventually I'd feel successful in my internal world.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: But something happened as I began healing.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I began changing.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And as I changed, what I wanted from my life began to change too.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Things that once seemed incredibly important to me didn't seem quite as important anymore.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the things I spent years chasing didn't give me the feeling I thought they would.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the things I once overlooked, you know, things like peace, love, connection, faith, purpose, passion, let alone gratitude and freedom, those things started becoming really important and valuable to me.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: At first, I have to tell you, it was really confusing because the world had taught me one definition of success.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: But somewhere along my spiritual journey, I began discovering something very different.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I started asking myself the question I don't think I'd ever seriously asked myself before.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I said, you know, what do I actually want my life to mean?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Not what does the world tell me I should want, not what will impress somebody, not what will make me look successful, not what will prove that I'm enough, but what do I really want?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe even more importantly, what does my higher power want me to do with the person I'm becoming?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the beginning, to understand that healing wasn't the destination, I finally started to realize that healing had changed me, and becoming something new is also changing me.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now the person I'm becoming is beginning to want something very different from my life.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's what purpose really is.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe purpose isn't something we find somewhere outside ourselves.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe purpose begins to reveal itself when we heal enough of the fears and pain and insecurity and the need for approval that kept us chasing things we thought would make us whole.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then something incredible can happen.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: We stop asking, how successful we can become, and we begin asking, what can my life become?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: What if success isn't only about what we accomplish?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: What if it's about who we become while I'm accomplishing it?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: What if success is having peace when nobody is applauding?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: What if it's loving people well?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: What if it's waking up knowing that the life I'm living actually belongs to me?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what if having the courage to follow where my higher power is leading me, even when that direction does not look like the life the world told me I should want?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what if the greatest success isn't proving to the world that life matters, but discovering why my life matters.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I am today.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not rejecting success, I'm redefining it.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I still want to grow, I still want to create, I still have dreams, I still want to accomplish things, and I don't want achievements to determine my worth though anymore.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: I want achievements to become an expression of who I'm becoming.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very different way to live life.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because when I stop needing the world to tell me that I'm successful, I finally begin to be free to ask what success really means to me.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's what purpose really is.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's where purpose truly begins.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So today we're going to talk about why becoming someone different can change what you want for your life.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about the difference between achievement and purpose.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to look at why so many of us spend years chasing a definition of success we never consciously chose.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about why money, work, relationships, recognition, approval, faith, meaning, passion, and the fear that comes when life we've been called towards doesn't look like the life we thought we were supposed to build.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And most importantly, we're going to ask ourselves: if we no longer have to prove that I'm enough and I'm willing to let go of who I used to be, then what do I want to do with the person I'm becoming?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's the question on the other side of healing.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's the beginning of true purpose.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe becoming who I was created to be isn't simply changing who I am.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's changing what I believe my life is for.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Joe Mittig, and this is We.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome everybody.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the We podcast from around the world.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to have everybody here today.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's been a very interesting several past days for me.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: I had some amazing experiences with my book, Filling the Void, where I just had a real full circle moment, I call it, which I'm going to talk about in more detail in later on in this episode.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I've also had some real challenges.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: I've had some buttons pushed here lately that is kind of unusual for me.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't had it in a while.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when I'm going through emotional growth myself and I'm going through expansion at the same time, fatigue sets in.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to tell you, my last podcast, I was on top of the world.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was full of energy and my heart was exploding.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm very, very grateful and full of gratitude today, but to be honest, I am tired.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to do the best I can here tonight to share with you as openly and as honestly as I can.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm in a great place, I'm going to tell you.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm tired and kind of confused, I'm going to tell you that too.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And right now, tonight, that's more where I feel like I am, a little fatigued, a little worn out, you know, a little bit of the what about me kind of emotions coming up a little bit.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to do the best I can to share with you.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Over the past year, literally it was right around this time, a year ago, where I met Wendy Stevens, the producer of the We Podcast, and we had a nice conversation.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, You'd be great, Joe.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: You need to start a podcast.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, Wendy, I don't know anything about a podcast.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And she said to me, I'll never forget it.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: She says, Joe, you push play, you talk, you push end, and I will do the rest.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And lo and behold, 61 episodes later, here we are.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this is my 61st episode.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm extremely excited that we're here.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've gotten pretty good at, you know, creating the episodes.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: In the very beginning, I was just in pure blind faith, which we're going to talk about that tonight a little bit more because so many of us, so many people are really being guided in directions and asked to do things now from a position of a higher self that they're just not comfortable with, you know, that you're just not.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I get it, I really do.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: This whole podcast concept, I knew nothing.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I literally knew nothing.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And my kids would make fun of me, you know, jokingly, of course.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, Dad, how can you do a podcast?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're not even online.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they weren't kidding.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, literally, before I started the podcast and this whole process, there were five pictures of me online, literally.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: And now there's thousands.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not because I really knew what I was doing.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I didn't at all.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to talk about the unfolding process.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about what it really means to live as a surrendered being.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I've gotten pretty practiced with it over the years.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think I can put it in words tonight to make it clear for people because, quite honestly, that's what I've been doing over these past years with this entire podcast concept.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the Wii podcast is a podcast designed to heal humanity.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I get people, they'll comment to me on LinkedIn, heal humanity, Joe, how are you going to do that?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm going to teach 100 million people that their answers are inside.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to mirror it back through technology.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the truth of the matter is, if I can help 100 million people understand that the God of their understanding, the created in God's image, is inside of you.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's inside of all of us.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I can give you the techniques that I used to embrace that.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: My communion with a power greater than myself happened as a consequence of emotional growth.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was never pursuing a relationship with a God, never.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I was not a God guy at all.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I've shared the story a thousand times.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted nothing to do with God.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not that I was an atheist, I never was, but it just didn't make sense to me.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: All of the beliefs that I was raised in, it was just an oxymoron.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do it one way or burn in hell, and God loves you.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, for Joe, it never worked.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so as I got older, I challenged that.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: And basically for the longest time, I just walked away from the whole concept.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: You leave me alone, I'll leave you alone.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: That was my message.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It really was.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, things come full circle.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: I went literally through a time period where I was in so much pain, I went all the way to the F you God concept simply because I believed with all my heart that if there was a God, there's no way I should have to live in the pain I lived.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And now I consider myself a God guy.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And through my process, through the awakening and the emotional process, the healing concept that I went through, it's why I can do a podcast like this.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's why I can put words to spiritual concepts and I can explain in the best of my ability the concept of spiritual growth and spiritual awakening and emotional growth and personal growth and all of the concepts that might be a little obscure to people.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: I can put it in words because I lived it.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And nothing happened fast for me.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Everything was very slow.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: The program says, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was always on the most of the time slowly train.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: So as I would grow and I would heal and I would shift and I would change, I had plenty of time to figure out what the heck was going on.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's basically how and why I can share it so clearly today.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So this episode, we're going to talk about how do you know that you're in your higher power?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the experience to where you really have a sense of accomplishment with it?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because the whole idea of living from a grander sense of yourself, how do you know when you're doing it?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the experience that you have inside yourself that makes it so worth it?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got two stories I'm going to share today.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: One is an emotional full circle moment that happened to me many years ago, and one is a spiritual full circle moment that literally happened to me two days ago.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to share both those in detail.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to remind people, you know, I'm asking everybody, if you're here, welcome.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: I always like to kind of caveat a little bit in the beginning of each episode because there's so many new people coming on.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, everybody.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: My heart is filled.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: I am humbled that the audience here at the Wii podcast, the community, the Wii community is growing the way it is.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I make fun.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoy poking fun with myself sometimes because it's just the truth.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know a lot about this.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned just not, oh, I don't know, 60 days ago what this thing called Spotify was.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: No idea.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Clueless.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure if, you know, especially younger people out there, you know, you got to think I'm nuts.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't blame you.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: I would think my kids think I'm nuts, but I didn't know what Spotify was.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: What the heck is a Spotify?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, before I started this whole best, I didn't even know what a podcast was, literally.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, part of my story today is I heard a woman on a podcast, which kind of started this whole thing.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I did not know as a podcast when I was listening to it.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that term.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: So when I first started, the only thing I knew was Apple Podcast.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, lo and behold, there's a thing called Spotify.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: My kids say that for younger folks, that Spotify is a real important place.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people will listen there.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I am thrilled to say that the We Podcast is ranked number four on the trending podcast on Spotify, which from what I hear is a pretty special thing.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And why I share that is because, especially if there's a younger audience on Spotify, I believe the generation of change is all of us.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you know, I'm in my 60s, and the bottom line, you know, I have the emotional and spiritual capacities to nurture and empower my children, which now are young men, growing out into the world and making a real difference.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I also believe that there are younger people, people in their teens, their 20s, their 30s.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's a thing I call generation lap.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I see it all the time, where there is a generation of the youth out there that are coming in, they're being born differently, more connected, more in tuned, more intelligent, more connected than you've ever seen.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: And my boys are examples of that.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: My youngest son is literally what I would call a modern-day Mozart.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: What he can do on the piano is absolutely bizarre.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: My oldest son, he was able to memorize the presidents in like 10 years old, in like, I don't know, three hours, all 50 of them.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: They're different.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that because everybody on this podcast knows some younger human, some younger person that has those same types of uniquely different characteristics.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if the Wii podcast is expanding and exploding on Spotify, that means that I'm hoping that there's a younger audience also being drawn to this message.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're a human being, the divinity that I'm speaking from is in you.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's in everybody.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not unique to age, it isn't unique to anybody.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not unique to gender.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's not unique to religion.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's not unique to color of skin.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter where you live.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's why the Wii Podcast, and I always like to welcome people from around the world: Canada, United Kingdom, Norway, Kenya, Malaysia, South Korea, Germany, Taiwan, China.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the list goes on and on.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's absolutely phenomenal.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the countries that the Wii Podcast is ranked in, let alone the countries that we just, you know, we have a growing audience in.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: And why is that so important to me?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because technology allows us to do grand things.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it isn't me.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I say it all the time.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the man.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you knew me, if you saw me, it isn't me.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the guy sitting next to you in the Kroger in church.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the guy standing next to you at where you buy your groceries.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you were in the Southeast, you saw me at a Little League park.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just a guy.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: I am absolutely no different than anybody else.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: I am certainly not a teacher.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a preacher.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a therapist.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm certainly not a researcher.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a guy on the same path you are on.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Period.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I will say, I've been on it a long time.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: I started this in the mid-80s.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I had my first therapy session in 1990, and I've been on a conscious hardcore path for almost four decades.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I am unique in the length of time I'm doing it, but there's a lot of you on there with more sobriety than me.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of you on there that just get it faster.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've been on it forever because I was slow at getting so much stuff.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And as we wake up, the we in us wakes up because humanity is waking up.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: More and more people are connecting consciously that they have a higher power inside them that can guide them.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in the guidance of that higher power is how we heal humanity.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: How does that happen?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because if you weren't here, if you're here, that means there's a higher part of you guiding you here.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: You would not be able to last on one of my podcasts with the intensity of the conversation, the depth of the emotion, the pushing back on social norms that I do repetitively, purposely on a per-episode basis.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you weren't on a spiritual path, you wouldn't be able to hang here.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like everything I've heard a thousand times.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you want a self-help podcast, listen to this guy.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he gave me a three or something.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: I laughed, kind of hurt my feelings, have to tell you.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it was kind of funny.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Snore, snore, grandpa.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I get it.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: I believe it.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, this is a self-help podcast.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because we're all growing.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're all seeking something.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're all pursuing something.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're all craving the next thing.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in my opinion, the previous 40 years where the new thought movement was a powerful generational change type of perspective from zero consciousness to massive consciousness.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: People are identifying their thoughts.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And now the weak podcast and others like this, we're just taking it to the next level deeper.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a podcast that's really about changing your mind or changing your thoughts.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a podcast that helps people understand the source of why you have the unloving thoughts or the hurtful thoughts.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all based on an inner wound.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Full circle moments are magical, quite honestly.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm super excited to share that with you today, what has recently happened.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I want people to understand that the living of your higher purpose, the living of a passion, the living of a grander you, the actual measurement of success, sometimes for the most of it, most of the time, it's between you and yourself while you're brushing your teeth.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: You basically say, you know what, it feels good.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: I like helping.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: I like giving back.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like my life has a little bit of meaning.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm doing something grander for the world.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a lot of that's what it is.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a consistency over time that kind of grows upon itself.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I know for a lot of you, the question is well, Joe, what the heck is a higher purpose?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And how the heck do I find it?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can tell you the easiest place, the easiest way to start to hear, verbally hear a power greater than yourself is.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: In silence is in the sacred silence technique.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm asking people to start with five minutes a day.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And in that five minutes, sacred silence is not about no motion.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's about sitting somewhere where the external stimulus is gone.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: No radios, no cell phones, no scrolling, no kids' noise, all of that, where you just sit with yourself, self with self.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you're going to hear your voices.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're going to hear the voices in your head.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: You might see them and hear them.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if they get too aggressive, please write them down.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Always have paper with you to write them down.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually you sit there long enough, you're going to hear a quieter voice.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that quieter voice is your higher power.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's an all-inclusive voice.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: You practice it long enough, you'll get more and more connected to it.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I will tell you, there are plenty of people out there that know exactly what I'm talking about, but they do it in a different way.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: They do it with intuition, they do it with gut instinct, they do it with their sense of doing right and wrong, and they've been doing it for years.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do they call it a higher power?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Some people do.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people don't.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: I say it all the time.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Every miracle that has ever been created started out of somebody's higher power.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the concepts that have changed all of humanity.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the concept of the light bulb, electricity.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: On a Monday, it didn't exist.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: No electricity.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then eventually, two different men, and I don't know the history of it all, but then eventually, through two different people, it's there in them.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then they start acting it out, and then they start figuring it out, and then eventually electricity becomes a thing.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Wright brothers, the same way, think about how crazy the neighborhood and the people at church and the people at the grocery store had to think of these two humans called the Wright brothers.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we're gonna fly, we're gonna make wings and fly like the birds.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine what the people said around them.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Where'd they get that idea?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they got that idea from their divinity.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: To me, that all falls back in the biblical phrase, ye shall do what I have done in grander things.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm quoting Jesus, of course.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Ye shall do what I have done in grander things.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus never said how.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus said what?
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not suggesting that you can go poofo and turn bread into feeding 5,000 people.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not suggesting you can go heal the sick and the dead, like this particular guy did.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's how he did it per miracle.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus never said how.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: He said you could and we would.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say if Jesus was sitting here right now, he'd say, Yeah, it's pretty good.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: The guy, you know, in Jesus' life, he cured, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 people of blindness.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, whoever the heck came up with the concept of the glasses cured a billion people of blindness.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus never said how.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: He said that we would.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say, if Jesus was sitting here right now, he'd say, mission accomplished.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know who created glasses.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know who created the vaccine for leprosy.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus healed a bunch of leopards, somebody cured it.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I would say, mission accomplished.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Ye shall do what I have done in grander things.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole idea of the internet allows a message like this.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every time he would speak, 100 people.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I speak, a million people.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, am I comparing myself to Jesus?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: Are you freaking kidding me?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, not uh, not even close.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm hoping there's some people out there that can walk on water, and it's not me.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: I can promise you that.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I can share my truth, I can share my experience, strength, and hope.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference is now I push a button, and the internet and the technology allows my message, this message of hope and of growth and of passion and of expression to reach a million people or more.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's a pretty cool thing.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's here in this generation.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, my practice, I was guided back into silence.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've shared the story a couple of times, a couple two or three months ago.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I follow my higher power presence very clearly, 99% of the time, guided back into silence.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I resisted.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, no, please, dear God, no, I don't want to.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I was equating silence with solitude, like the seven years I spent.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, my higher power wanted me to take my headphones off.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And for the past couple, since about the first of August, I've been doing it five, six hours a day.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I work puzzles.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I do during my silence.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm about 5,000 pieces into a 40,000-piece puzzle.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Right now I'm doing a 4,000-piece portion of this puzzle.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: I finished Bambi, which is 4,000 pieces or so.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm working Beauty and the Beast.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it is an absolutely beautiful rendition of the Beauty and the Beast, and the colors are fantastic.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: I like colorful, I like colorful puzzles.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the reds alone, the different shades of red, are probably eight or nine different shades of red.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in silence, I sort.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: In silence, I separate.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: In silence, I get everything organized, and then I start taking action.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of the same metaphor on how we live from a place of higher purpose.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Your higher purpose typically isn't a wham-bam, here it is, go get them, tiger, you know exactly what you're gonna do.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, most of the time that's not the case.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for some people, maybe it is, maybe it is.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that have had masterful lives and they just reach a place in time where the way they're living is changed because they're ready to do something different, and they've just got this big philanthropy position in them, and they're ready to express it.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe there are people like that, then one day are doing something and they've got the freedom to just either retire and stop and then start something pretty magical, and literally from day one to day four, it's up and functioning.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: For the rest of us, that's just not how it works.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever it is that you're being guided to do, and how do you know it's of the higher you?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's because the difference between dreams and inspirations, dreams come and go.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Inspirations are steadfast.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Things you are inspired to do are emotionless.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: They do not rely on emotion for motivation.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: They don't.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: But you say, Well, Joe, I thought purpose was supposed to, you're supposed to love it.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you are supposed to love it.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: But loving your purpose, love isn't an action step.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: Love is a state of being, it's a state of presence.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: That which you're doing, when you are doing it, you are living in a state of love, a state of presence.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I call God.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't call God's love an adjective, I call God's love a known.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: It is all inclusive, it's not a moving target, it's not a sometimes yes and a sometimes no.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's an all the time.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's the same with a passion and a purpose, whatever it is.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: And no one can tell you what yours is.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: And size of external result means zero, nothing.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Size of the external influence, it doesn't matter.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is you're following something in you that is grand than you.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's all that matters.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because it feels good and it's cool and it fills your day, and you can be having a crappy day and hate and work, and your kids get an F in school, and your husband or wife are complaining, but you can always fall back on this higher state of passion, higher state of purpose.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: You see it a lot, you see it a lot with people that tend to volunteer in churches, people that tend to volunteer in walking, going to the hospitals.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: The volunteer world is kind of a world full of people that in those eras of their time, they're doing it because when they're taking the action, they feel love, they feel good, and that's a really wonderful thing.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, does it change?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and for some people it stays the same, but it's an ever-growing event, it's an ever-shifting event.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: The grandness called you is an ever-growing expansion.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: I've been going through that a lot lately, and it's not easy sometimes, you know.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: You go through psychic death, you grieve what used to be, and it can be challenging.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: It can be.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not all lovey-dovey.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the spiritual path is for warriors, truly warriors.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of times it freaking hurts.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: It does, it's painful.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because from the feminine side of self is opening up, humanity is waking up to a grander sense of consciousness.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: It just is.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it just is.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: I give the example of 200 years ago owning a human here in the United States, perfectly normal.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, think about how nuts that is.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: That was only 200 years ago.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: How freaking crazy that was.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity of the day, the consciousness of the day, normal.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, fast forward, fast forward.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're waking up into a consciousness today that is just different than the consciousness of days in the past.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why, quite honestly, there's a larger percentage of people every day waking up and when asked if they share the truth, they consider themselves more spiritual than religious.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And why is that?
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make religion wrong?
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, it makes religion as beautiful as it's always been.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And religion has beautiful concepts for people it works for, fabulous.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I always caveat, I, Joe, am not about teaching people about your eternal life.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm here about teaching you how to follow a higher power today and tomorrow.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not about your eternity, I'm about your today, just so we're clear.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because people ask me, you religious, Joe?
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do?
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: All of them.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I believe all modern-day religion, one monolithic God in love.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the structures of religion.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_00: Each religion has its own structure, and that structure works for billions of people.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: And every day there are more and more people that are expanding beyond the structure of a religion.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: They just are.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make them right or wrong?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: No, it makes them more similar to me.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make me better or worse?
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just on my spiritual path.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're on this podcast and you're a repeat visitor here on this podcast, we are on the same path.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: You just are.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: And in the whole idea of personal growth and spiritual awakening and spiritual growth, there is no such thing as right or wrong.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why there are certain types of concepts out there, including religions, that basically say, do it our way or you're burning in hell.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but your God is all unconditional.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that never sat for me.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going there, I'm not getting into that debate.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever works, right?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever works for you and eternality, that's up to you.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever your beliefs are, and whatever your structures are for your eternal life, follow it, please.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Find your answers inside.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: But what is spiritually awakening?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean humanity's waking up?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: It means that we are, as a consciousness, each person is waking up to a grander sense of themselves.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: You just are.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that grander sense, I call your higher power.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: I call in this podcast divinity.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the concept of the we came into play: human self, higher self, inner self, a we.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Three components of a we.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: And in the inner self, the inner child has multi-dimensions.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: As a being, we have a male side and a female side.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: The female side of ourselves is where our emotions lie and our spiritual sense of self lies.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: Our male side is where the thought process and the physical beings sit.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: And in that world, right, that balance, that empowered balance, is what is causing the world to change.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's what's causing the world to heal.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that, to me, I help 100 million people remember that their higher power is inside of themselves, and they can be guided by that higher power, your Christ consciousness, created in God's image.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: Ye shall do what I have done in grander things.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: All of those phrases I'm quoting generally from the Bible, it all says it right there that there's a power greater than all of us in you.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Are you following it?
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And for most people, they're trying to, if you're on this podcast, and I tend to give techniques on how to do it, how I did it.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously it's working and helping people because people keep coming back.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: The We Podcast is really a podcast that has multiple episodes, 60 episodes on different topics.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So keep coming back.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to different episodes.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let my voice keep you company if you're going through a tough time, and let my voice celebrate with you when you're in the grand times.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: And visit my website.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I say it all the time, joemitica.com.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Download my book.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: My book, it's free called Filling the Void.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to talk about filling the void a lot here in a minute, but go get it.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: Get it for free.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Download it.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I promise you, you'll connect with what it has to say.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: You really will, because if you're here, this message, the difference is that's just in book form.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you can download it immediately and have it immediately.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you know.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very humbled to be able to give that out.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are full circle moments?
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for me, a full circle moment is when I have the opportunity to help another human being because of the deep, dark depth of difficulty I made it through.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that the healing that I went through as I walked through my darker times because I healed, then when I'm sitting with somebody else while they're in a dark time, I can share with empathy.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: I can share with compassion because I've been there.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: Full circle moment.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: My first ever truly high power full circle moment happened probably 20 years ago.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And for those of you that don't know, 50 some odd days on my path of sobriety, I had memories of being sexually abused as a kid.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what started my seven years of darkness.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: I went into a seven-year journey.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: I lived on less than$3,000 a year,$250 a month.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just in sacred silence for seven years.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: Absolute solitude for seven years.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now you have to understand the timing of this.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is in the 90s.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Cell phones were barely a thing.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I had a beeper.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was no cable television.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't own a TV.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't own a radio.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, I lived in a warehouse with a finished room in a warehouse 50 miles north of here in Gainesville for two of those years.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I lived in a room which had a bathroom.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And there was no sound.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: There was no anything.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Me and me.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, during that period, I healed and I had memories and I was always in therapy.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: I always had support.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: I learned about the inner child.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I learned about the dual hand journaling.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: I gave a voice to my inner child by writing with my dominant hand and answering with my non-dominant hand.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where emotions started coming up.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: You let the little kid talk long enough, eventually the little kid will grieve or get anger out.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: For me, anger was first.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: We have four basic emotions: mad, glad, sad, and scared.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: And for most of us, we grew up in an era of time where the honoring of our emotions wasn't part of our daily behaviors.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Consciousness of the day did not know that to honor and to embrace emotions was a good thing.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: It just didn't know.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if your emotions weren't honored when you were a child, they were suppressed.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: Period.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: And those suppressed emotions cause hurts and wounds in us.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the holes, those are the vacancies in our belly.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's because of those wounds, every one of those wounds causes a voice in your head.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we say you can talk to the voices in your head all you want.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: The voice in your head is not sourced in your head, it's sourced in your heart.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, during my journey, during my healing journey, I gave a voice to that part.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: And for the longest time, when I started grieving the depths of being abused as deeply as I was, it was very, very hard.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_00: Very, very hard.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I made it.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: I did.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: I grieved deeply, I raged intensely over and over and over for a long time, always having help.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, help for me was my counselor Nancy, who was also my 12-step sponsor, and I would see her once every couple weeks, but she was always available by phone.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: So we would talk, and then I was just in silence.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: There was nobody around.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: So when I had a motion come up, it would come out.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_00: I would grieve it.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, while I was in the depth of that pain, I always wondered why.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why do I have to do this?
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: What is the reason?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: I never knew.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, fast forward eight, nine, ten years, and a friend of mine's family member got in some trouble because of his sexual addiction.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: He was going to prison because of it.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he was convicted of sexual abuse.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in this particular case, there was no actual victim, there was no person, but he was in the act.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: And an FBI agent caught him, thank God, put his ass in jail.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I said to him, you know, I'll support you.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: I will.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: Did I condone his behaviors?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm the one who drove him to prison.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: He spent 110 months in prison, this particular guy.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: But as we were talking, I could listen and I could hear and I could love him, anyways.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: I did not identify him as his sick behaviors.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: I did not identify him as his sick fantasies.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: I did not identify him as his sick actions.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: And by the grace of God, he did it with a federal agent.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: So he never literally acted out, thank God.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't know if you can ever heal that.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't know.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he never had to, because he tried to act out.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Federal agents swamped him, put him down.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: He never left prison again.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, literally.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I was driving home one night after listening and helping, and I had no judgment.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: None.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: No judgment of the human being sitting across from me.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, did I believe he needed to go to jail?
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I broke the law.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: Did I take him to jail?
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I did.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: But did I judge him?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: Did I make him wrong?
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: I saw him as a hurt person.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: I saw him as just a wounded, hurt puppy.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was in that moment I realized the only way I could see him as a human being, not his actions and not his disgusting fantasies, is because I had gone through so much myself.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: I had healed so much myself.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I say all the time, I did a bunch of crazy shit.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_00: I did a bunch.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: But me and little kids was never even a fantasy.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was just never a thing at all for me.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: Zero.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I had aggressive, ugly thoughts though.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was hurting.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: During my six and seven years of healing, I was able to get to the reason I had such ugly thoughts.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a hurt little kid in Joe years before.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: So while I'm sitting here with this person, he kept saying, Joe, there was no kid.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: There was never a kid, Joe.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was no kid.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I believed him.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: What he was saying was he had all these crazy, hateful, hurtful fantasies in his head, and he was powerless to his behavior.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he went to prison because of that powerlessness, but I could love him anyway.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: I could see him as a man who was hurting.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I took him to prison.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't condoning his behavior, but I wasn't judging him for his behavior.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it was in that moment I realized I was driving home.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: I grieved for a day, too.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: It made my seven or eight years make sense on why I had to go through such intensity all alone, all by myself, because in that moment I could be there for somebody else.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: That was an emotional, full circle moment to me.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_00: That six or eight weeks that I was able to be with this person, when the whole world thought he miserable.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: His whole world thought he was hateful, and half of his family threw him down the, you know, the toilet, literally.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: And did I feel sorry for him?
• 45:36
  unknown: No.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: I called him all sorts of dumb, a blank, blank, blank.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can only imagine.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: But did I judge him?
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: No, I didn't.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: I could have empathy and compassion.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: I could see a man who was hurting instead of a man and all of his behaviors.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: A real full circle moment for me.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: The only reason, the only way I could do it is because I'd done so much healing in myself.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: The next story I'm going to tell just happened, literally, with my book.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to tell the story, and I want people to understand this whole concept of living as your higher purpose.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it ever really has a final spot, a final ending.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a life journey.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And some people have been on their life journey for a long time.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: Some people haven't.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: Some people have had the desire to be on it for a long time.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Some people haven't.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot of misconception, I think, that when I'm living my purpose and living my passion, and everything's going to be great.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to happen effortlessly and it's just going to unfold easily.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_00: And well, no, I mean, maybe.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't for me, that's for sure.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the whole concept of living a surrendered life.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: So many people, what happens is they surrender and then they hold back on.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: Literally.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: They'll surrender whatever they were trying to surrender, and then the very next action step, they're holding on.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean holding on?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was literally just supporting a man the other day where he's creating a job in this company, and the job is unfolding.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't even there.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: He kind of sold this company on the idea of his skill sets.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: And his new boss is trying to figure out how to make it work.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, every time the new boss says something in the creation of this job, my friend, John, which is not his name, attaches to it.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then John believes he knows what the next step should be.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the next two or three days later, the boss does it something different.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then John thinks that something's wrong.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: John thinks that it's going the wrong way.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: John thinks there's something incorrect.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, John, you made it up.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't know what the next step was going to be.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's up to your boss.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the boss would say A, B, C.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: John would expect XYZ.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when the boss didn't do XYZ, John thought the boss didn't like him.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: John thought the boss was going against him.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, John, you made that up.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: Boss never said that.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: You did.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where the unfolding process of living as a surrendered being, we take action where action is necessary.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the unfolding of whatever we're in, as behaviors and interactions unfold, things are going to change.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're going to change.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as they change, if we just allow it to change, however it's supposed to, feel the emotions associated with change, because no one likes change, but feel the emotions associated with it, then it just flows and grows and shifts and expands effortlessly.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's when we're in any one spot in our world where we decide it's supposed to be a particular way, whatever the it is, an interaction with a partner, a brand new job, the type of car you're going to drive, the amount of money you're supposed to have, the work you do, whatever the it is.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: When you decide that's it, and that's exactly how it's supposed to be, and you hold on to that belief, you are in trouble because the world is going to come and things are going to shift and change.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I want to tell the story of my book, Filling the Void.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: Filling the Void, that book was channeled through me literally over 30 years ago.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now I was two years into my sobriety.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_00: I was in that room I'm telling you about.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: So it's probably about two and a half years in, where I'm in a room.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: No TV, I had a room and a bathroom.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: That was it.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: No TV, no phone, no nothing.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I heard a voice.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm in a room by myself, no talking, no one around, nobody.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I heard a voice.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: I said, You're gonna write.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I'm not writing.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna write, Joe.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not writing.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna write, or you're not gonna sleep.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, what the blankly blank?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: What the hell?
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you are.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, now at the time I didn't know this.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm literally I'm arguing with my higher power.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: Did I know it at the time?
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: The next three or four nights, I did not sleep.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: My head was crazy, my brain wouldn't slow down, it wouldn't stop.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna write, Joe.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_00: All right, what the heck?
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: I got a piece of paper and a pencil and I wrote, I just listened.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing that came out was a poem called Soulmates.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: It dates back 1994.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: I found that piece of paper not long ago and I wrote.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, wow, that's pretty cool.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought I was done.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, Joe, you're gonna write some more.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm not.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, you are.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, that battle went on back and forth for a while, and then eventually I just stopped fighting.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: The writing.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: 22 months later, 106,800 words, a book was channeled through me.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now you have to understand how crazy that was for me.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even like God at all, zero.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now I wasn't an Few God.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was kind of an Few God at this time because I was in so much pain.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: But when I was writing, I wasn't in pain.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: But did I correlate those two things?
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking, this is not me writing, but I'll never be able to tell anybody that God channeled a book for me.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: They'll think I'm nuts.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: But that's exactly what happened.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: And took about 22 months to write.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: And literally, the only book I ever read, because I'd go out into the woods as far as I could go without getting lost, but nothing around except me and trees and a stream.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I read the book, Conversations with God, Neil Walsh.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: And lo and behold, he writes a book and he's talking about how God is channeled through.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: That book's about 275 pages.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_00: At the very end, I said, I'm reading the whole thing, and it never comes to me, never dawns on me.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what the heck?
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: That exact thing happened to me.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: That exact thing happened with my book.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now back then I called the book Your Inner Child Has Rights To: A Common Man's Quest to Become One with God.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, I found a lady to edit it.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: Her name was Denise, and she charged like$600 or something.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Denise, I don't have$600.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: She says, Joe, pay me little by little.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I did.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_00: I paid her 30 bucks at a time.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: Took a couple, you know, probably several months.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I learned by Denise.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_00: She says, Joe, there's a difference between authors and writers.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: Authors are people that can channel their work and put it on paper.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: And writers make sure that the readers know what the authors are saying.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, that's pretty cool.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: I had no idea what she's talking about, but it's pretty cool.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, she would edit my stuff.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: I sent it to her because back then they had the new technology where you could, I had a computer, I could borrow my mom's computer, you could talk into a microphone, and it would dictate.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is all brand new technology back then, folks.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking 30 years, and it only had it had 95% accuracy.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the problem is when you have a hundred thousand words, five percent inaccurate is five thousand mistakes, literally.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: And she had to fix every one of those mistakes, which she did.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the most amazing thing because I'd read my stuff, I'd read how I wrote it, and I'd read how she wrote it.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, wow, that sounds really cool.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: She made me sound really cool.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_00: Book was called Junior Child has Rights 2.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's me of a little boy, a little picture on it of me as I'm three.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: And again, brand new technology, this whole print on demand.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was literally a year or two old at the time.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: Print on demand.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I had 50 books printed.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now, where I came up with that$250, I had to be working by this time.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I still have several of those books now, all these years later.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_00: Another book called 21st Century Salesman's Soul.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in that period of time, I just, you know, thought I was going to go out on the road.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to be a speaker.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to be the next John Bradshaw and Wayne Dyer.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I was going to emulate this brand new young stud out there, just getting started in his career, a guy named Tony Robbins.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to be just like Tony Robbins.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I literally believed right then, right there, at that point in my path, I was going to go out on the road speaking.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that isn't what happened.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: Literally, all that stuff got put into a box.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: Tony Robbins became an icon worth a billion dollars.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: John Bradshaw, 30 more years of sobriety.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: Wayne Dyer, 50 books.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: What was I doing?
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: Living life, catching up, getting married, having a life, literally.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so the unfolding process of my channeled book, there was two of them.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Your inner child has rights to 21st Century Sales from the Soul.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_00: 21st Century Sales from the Soul was never finished.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: About 150 pages in, it was never finished.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_00: So right then, right there, I believed I was supposed to go speak.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: A man talking about emotions, mid-30s, upper 30s.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that isn't how it unfolded.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: It all went into a box.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: And lo and behold, that whole concept, nothing happened with that stuff.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: Fast forward 25 years, married, divorced, two kids, three businesses, my business, Avion Energy, all of that fast forward.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the stuff is still in the box.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: I still have it in my closet.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_00: And out of nowhere, literally on September 20th, 2022, I hear a woman on this thing called a podcast, which I didn't know what a podcast was.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: All I heard was a voice.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I could tell, by the way, she was speaking from her heart.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: And my heart opened.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: I read a document she wrote.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: I could tell she's speaking, writing from her divinity.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: My divinity reawakens after 25 years of completely silent.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: My higher power and inner child work was guided in and around building a business and empowering my children and doing the best I could as a husband and all of that.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was married for 10 years.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: We went our separate ways.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: And here now September happens, September 22nd happens.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_00: And another book starts pouring through me, just like it did 25 years ago, called Unequally Yoked.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it was that unequally yoked concept.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a biblical phrase, which I didn't really know what it meant at the time.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't, so I kind of researched, but that's where I went on chat, because I'm not a Bible reader, I've never read the Bible.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked Chad, I wonder what the last thing Jesus said.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a pretty important guy.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_00: I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, all time is created around one man.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_00: Our calendar is created around one man's death.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: The concept of B C A D, our September 29th, 2026, is because of one man's death.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, pretty close.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: I said, that's pretty special.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care what your religion is, I don't care what your beliefs are.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you believe today is September 29th, then you have to believe the guy who's the calendar started around was a pretty special man.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_00: I said, I wonder what the heck the last thing he said before he ascended.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I asked Chad.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Chad said, and I'm paraphrasing, as his disciples were going crazy, he's like, dude, where are you going?
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is a crazy place.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can't leave us, they're going to kill us.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says to his disciples, I have to go sit by my father.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: So my father can place the same spirit that guided me in all of you.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_00: In all of you.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it was in that moment, right there, that the concept of the we came to Joe.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: Divine self, human self, inner self.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, and I'm like, I wonder where those old books are.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder what happened to that book.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: So sure enough, I walk into my closet two minutes later, it's right there.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's been in the same box for 25 years.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: I get that box, I get it out.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: And my book, back then, the technology of the day was the 100 meg disc technology.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: Before that, it was one meg disc, little floppy disk, 100 meg disc.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, well, fantastic.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna get it off there.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: Four months.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: It took me four months to find somebody that could actually translate the technology off of a hundred meg disc onto today's technology, a guy who does recovery of data.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: Four months.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, so now the book idea is coming back.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: Inner child has rights too.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's fantastic.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: I love the picture.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: I love the cover.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: The book was channeled.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's all God, it's all wonderful, fantastic, great.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so I give it to a buddy of mine who's done work for us.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Tom, can you edit this for me?
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, sure.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: I give it to him.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Joe, it's backwards.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what do you mean it's backwards?
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_00: He says, it's in a PDF, but instead of the book being one, two, three, four, five, the book in the PDF is saved 275, 274, 273.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's backwards.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the technology way back when must have needed it to be backwards.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_00: Technology today needs to be forward.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, that's fine, just change it.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I've tried everything I can.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I keep telling you these stories?
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because a blip in a road, a bump in a road, did I stop?
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: Four months to get it off the disc.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: I just kept looking until I found somebody.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I would.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: Shifting from 275, 274, 273 to 123, that took him three months.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: Cost me a lot of money.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: Did I care?
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: We just kept moving forward.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: Here we have it.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Your inner child has rights too.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's the book.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there's the cover.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he got it all in a thing and it could be downloaded and all that.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, you know, after all of this, now we're moving now.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're heading forward.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's time to keep going.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we're getting closer.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I need a publisher, right?
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I come across this gentleman named Tom, publisher for 30 years.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, he looks at the book and he says, I said, so Tom, what do you think of the cover?
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I don't like it.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: I can do better.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, first off, I love dishonesty, but that's been the book cover for 25 years.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, was Joe attached to the book cover?
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Did it kind of hurt my feelings?
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: Not really.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: Did I have to grieve that the book cover wasn't going to be the same cover?
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: Did I hold on to the old cover?
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, I didn't.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: I still have the old cover.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: But he said, Oh yeah, and we have to change the name.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what?
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, your inner child has rights too, Joe.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's too much of a niche market.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: We have to change the name.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, okay.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he's the expert.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we changed the name to Healing Addiction.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I pay, get it pupped, get it edited, get it whatever.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, okay, here we go.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're going.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's moving.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's going to help me get the book out.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to sell a thousand copies.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: He gets the whole thing done and he says, Here you go, Joe.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: New cover, new book, new title, new this, new that.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: Everything changed, unfolded, unfolded.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bumps, blips, changes, no holding on.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, what now?
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: He says, What do you mean, what now?
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: I said, What are you going to do to help me get it out there in the world?
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_00: I said, wait a minute, wait a minute.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: I pay you this money, you get it all shiny for me, you make it sellable, but you don't do anything to help me distribute it.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: He says, No, Joe, that's not the publisher's job.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's the author's job.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: You have to create, you have to create your own market.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, well, new information.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: Did not know that.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_00: No idea.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Another blip in the road?
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Another change in the road?
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: So now not only the name changed, not only the cover changed, not only my definition of a publisher changed, now I have to go create an audience for it.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: I knew none of this.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_00: I just keep walking forward, keep moving forward, keep moving forward.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: I get a phone call.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: A guy says, Hey Joe, you want to do a TEDx?
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, Yeah.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Great, meet me in South Africa.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, South Africa the country?
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Yeah.
• 1:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: Meet me in South Africa.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'll get you on a TEDx stage.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: So while I'm down there, meet the most amazing people on the planet.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: I find out that over 400 million people in the continent of Africa do not have running water.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_00: My head exploded.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: I did not know.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: I just didn't know.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, I'm a guy of action.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can't not unsee something.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_00: So when I come back, I start a live stream.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: Did I know what a live stream was?
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: Nope.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: I called it Project Smile because that I started a nonprofit called Project Smile.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: You can find me now, projectsmile.world.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: I support two caregivers in Uganda, about 80 kids, 80 orphans.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in that country, there's no infrastructure.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_00: Parents die, kids are left on the side of the street.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's just how that culture is right now.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm I support two of them through Project Smile.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: And as I have this live stream going, I get my live stream up to 50,000 people.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay, I'm creating my audience, just like Tom said.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: But then I realize the audience that I'm creating is some of the poorest people in the entire planet.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: I love them.
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_00: They were tuning in weekly.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: I had done it for a while.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then out of nowhere, I'm watching a football game.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: I have a Red Hawk moment, and I'm guided online.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, that's a year ago, right now, I meet Wendy Stevens, my producer for the We podcast.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: And she says, Joe, you'd be great.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: Great at what?
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: Podcast.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: Fine.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I go from a live stream of 50,000 people that we had been building now for six months on track, doing great.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_00: I had guys out of India promoting it.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we got it so popular.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: And now, you know, a social media presence out there.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_00: Find me on social media, my Instagram.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I follow a dozen, about 40 people.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've got 20,000 followers.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: There were different times we promote videos out there.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: One video went viral, had like four million views or some craziness like that.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how the heck they do that.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_00: But, anyways, so here we go.
• 1:05:27
  SPEAKER_00: Change again from the live stream to a podcast.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't know what a podcast was.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, but did I hold on to the live stream?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, I just stay and change.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't holding on, I was allowing it to unfold.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was allowing it to unfold.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: Wendy said, Joe, you push play, I'll do the rest.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: Push and I'll do the rest.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm literally creating an audience, right?
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I thought I was creating a cool audience with the light.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Stream well that audience couldn't get even the book, they didn't have email address.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we start we well, sure enough, we explodes, and here we are today.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we hit the top 100 charts in January and top global charts now.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wendy introduces me to a PR person, Adrian.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, hey Adrian, what do you think?
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, here's my book.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: She says, I don't think she said I hate it, but she said something like that.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: She says, That'll never sell.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, what are you talking about?
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_00: That'll never sell.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, Joe, that's going away.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_00: So Inner Child has rights too, which I loved, and I loved the picture.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: Healing addiction, which I liked, loved the book cover.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: Adrian didn't like any of it.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what her title it was?
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Filling the void.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I share that story because Adrian comes up with filling the void.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Adrian says, This is how we have to do it.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is what we're gonna do.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is how we're gonna get it out there.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_00: You're creating the audience, we're creating the webpage, joemidega.com.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's up there now.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: Please go get it.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's free, joemidega.com.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_00: You can download it for free.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you can hear all the change.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: It started 20, 30 years ago.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: The book changed names three times.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: None of it of me.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was like inner child has rights too.
• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't about me.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: God channeled that book through me.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was the vessel.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as that book came out, and that now filling the void, that's when I had my full circle moment.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to read a testimony, the best I can, from a gentleman who saw one of my posts on social media.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now his name is Michael O.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh is not his last name.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: I can't pronounce his name.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: He's from Nigeria.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: And he saw something that drew him in, his words.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: Then he goes to LinkedIn, finds me on LinkedIn, and follow me on LinkedIn, please.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody listening.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then he sees my book, Oh, Joe Medica.com.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: He clicks, and the title, Filling the Void, really drew him in, his words.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm literally three days ago, I see a post, he follows me.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_00: I see a post, and I'm like, that's my book.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then I read it, and Michael gives his testimony about my book, Filling the Void, on LinkedIn, because he's so passionate about it.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this is what he writes What if some of the things we call ambition are actually attempts to fill a void within us?
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: That question stayed with me after reading Filling the Void, A Common Man's Quest to Become One with God by Joe Mittigah.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: One of my biggest takeaways is how easily we can try to fill an internal void with external things: success, money, work, relationships, recognition, achievements, yet we still feel like something is missing.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: The book changed me, the book challenged me to ask, what am I really trying to fill?
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was also deeply impacted by the idea of the inner child and how unresolved emotions, fears, and experiences can influence the way we behave as adults.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: As a business person and entrepreneur, this made me reflect on how much our internal world can influence our personal lives.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_00: We make decisions under pressure.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: We face rejection, uncertainty, failure, criticism, delayed results, and the pressure to prove ourselves.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: If we aren't self-aware, fear, ego, insecurity, or the need for validation can quietly influence our decisions.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_00: I want to build from clarity rather than insecurity, purpose rather than pressure, and conviction rather than the need for external validation.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because building a business isn't only about strategy, revenue, products, or branding.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's also about developing the person responsible for making those decisions.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Mr.
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Joe, for being vulnerable enough to share your journey.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Your honesty made this book more than a book for me.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_00: It became an invitation to look inward.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_00: One lesson I will carry with me becoming more whole on the inside can change what we believe we can build on the outside.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now I read that and I almost fell over.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_00: My heart exploded.
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Literally.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_00: That what I just read there is this man's experience in Nigeria.
• 1:11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I live in Atlanta.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he got it because technology allows it.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he was drawn to it because the same God who wrote it in me is in him.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_00: He went to joiniga.com, click, click, click, and technology downloaded it on his computer instantaneously for free.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_00: And by reading it, and I'm sure he's reading it over and over, he's understanding exactly what the concept of that book is.
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that is our answers are inside.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And as we heal inside, we will commune with a power greater than ourselves.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the more we connect inside and live from that power inside, the more our outside world becomes a grander thing.
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you talk about a full circle moment for me.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned in that little story, probably 20% of the bumps and the bruises that I'd gone through over the years, from the channeling of that book 30 years ago, to a man literally having a spiritual awakening 30 years later.
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I do the We podcast, folks.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_00: That right there, that message right there, that reply right there.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope all of you go get that book.
• 1:12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I really do.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And there'll be others.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna have other authors too over time.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: The We podcast is about bringing awareness.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the awareness?
• 1:12:59
  SPEAKER_00: That we are all created in God's image.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And how do we live it?
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Through the emotional healing of the depths of ourselves and which causes the communion with a power greater than ourselves.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And full circle moments, how do you know when you're living your higher purpose and you're living your higher passion?
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_00: For most people, it's not going to be an all-inclusive 24-7 event.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be an event that happens along with your normal day.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And for you, it might be the thank you you get.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_00: For you, it might be the gratitude somebody feels because you help them.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_00: For you, it might be that sense of deep, deep satiation that when you're brushing your teeth, you say, you know what?
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_00: That just feels good.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when people say to me, Where's the money?
• 1:13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Joe, are you doing the podcast for the money?
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And how are you going to monetize?
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no, that isn't why I'm doing it.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_00: I do it for that, for Michael O's reply.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And my goal is a hundred million people.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are plenty of people on this podcast right now listening to this that have those similar types of experience every time you listen to one of the podcast.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's the higher power in you.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's your divinity that's tuning you in.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it's your divinity listening to my divinity.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the divinities are clear.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's the human sense of self that's confused.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's through the listening, it's through the repeat, it's through going back and listening to other episodes.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about pursuing whatever it is you're born to pursue.
• 1:14:43
  SPEAKER_00: You will find the intention in you, whatever it is.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's not an emotion-based thing.
• 1:14:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to be kind of emotionless.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_00: It will withstand the highs and it will withstand the lows, whatever it is you're supposed to be doing.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And for a lot of people, you know, if you're busy and you've got family and whatever, the power of your purpose might be to raise two beautiful kids.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderful.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't always about the pursuit of an external change the world experience, but we are all here for grander reasons.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And as you remember it, as you feel it, as you sense it, as you acknowledge it, as you speak about it out loud, then you start identifying yourself as someone living with a passion and with a purpose, the way your self-esteem will grow is absolutely amazing.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Think about the first conscious thought you had, which puts context to how long you've been on a conscious path.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then think about if you put in perspective and put it into conscious awareness that your intuitions, your gut instincts, your pursuit of pursuit of passion, pursuit of purpose is all you working to follow a grander you, then your definition of yourself grows.
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Your worth grows, your self-esteem grows.
• 1:16:13
  SPEAKER_00: And as worth and self-esteem grows, as we become a grander us, we live in the ultimate sense of a grander us, we become the best version of ourselves.
• 1:16:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's how we have more and more to give back.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how we heal humanity.
• 1:16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Together, we're doing it.
• 1:16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Together, we're healing.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And together, folks, we are truly making a difference.
• 1:16:37
  SPEAKER_00: One smile at a time.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And from around the world, I want to welcome you to We.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_01: So that's it for today's episode of the We Podcast.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_01: One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a$25,000 private VIP day with Joe himself.
• 1:17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Be sure to head on over to WePodcast.global and pick up a free copy of Joe's gift.
• 1:17:19
  SPEAKER_01: And join us next time for the We Podcast.