A Hypnotherapist Explains Why Emotion Always Beats Logic

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. Today's episode is with Sarah Raymond, the founder of the Mindful Movement. She is a trained hypnotherapist, Pilates, yoga and meditation teacher. She runs a YouTube channel that has over 600,000 followers, and the content on there is really good as someone who does meditation every day.

Sean Weisbrot: And I used to do yoga several days a week, when I was in Vietnam. I find that what she does is really helpful for people. This is probably one of the most raw. Episodes you're going to get. I cut out a few minutes of content. Normally I do much heavier editing and you end up hearing half of the conversation.

Sean Weisbrot: But in this episode, I wanted everyone to hear these things. I think it's very important because the topic we were talking about is something that she. Focuses on with her clients, which is how to get your emotions and your logic to work together In this discussion, we talked about meditation, we talked about mental health, we talked about the pandemic.

Sean Weisbrot: We talked about some of the things that I've been going through, as well as some more details about the magic mushroom psilocybin that I've been trying for my own health and the benefits of that. This. Was the hardest episode for me to record, and I hope that you're able to appreciate how hard it is for people to talk about these things.

Sean Weisbrot: You yourself may find it difficult to talk about these things, and my hope is that by me sharing it makes it easier for you to share. Part of being an entrepreneur is being a leader. It's being. Someone that sets the tone and the environment, and my hope with the podcast is to be able to be that leader to help you to be able to do those things that are hard, even though you don't want to.

Sean Weisbrot: But you know that you should. So I hope you enjoyed this episode with Sarah Raymond and thank you for sticking with me in 2022.

Sean Weisbrot: Sarah, why don't you introduce yourself, tell everyone what it is that you do right now. Sure. Well thank you for the welcome.

Sarah Raymond: I’m one of the founders and owners of the Mindful Movement. we're a community primarily on YouTube.

Sarah Raymond: Where we offer guided meditations and hypnosis recordings, some yoga, Pilates, mindful based movement practices, and lots of courses to help folks live more mindfully and more fulfilled. What made you want to focus on this for your career? Well, for the last 15 years I've been in the movement industry.

Sarah Raymond: I'm also an owner of a brick and mortar Pilates and yoga studio in Maryland. And for many years I was helping people meet their goals in terms of movement and their, you know, how they feel in their body. And I found that there was something missing, something that was stopping folks from getting to the goals that they wanted to reach.

Sarah Raymond: And, I. It was really all in their mind. It was like people were getting in their own way, myself included. So I first personally discovered meditation and hypnosis as a practice to uncover more of my emotional beliefs and, really just get in touch with myself and my emotions and. I think I'm a teacher by nature, so when I find something that I really love and works well for me, I go down the route of learning how to teach other people to do that or help them, with those tools and modalities.

Sarah Raymond: Over the last six years I've been working primarily with meditation and, hypnotherapy to help clients. It sounds like a very similar route that I've taken where the meditation has helped me to understand myself. And as I learn things, I try to tell other people what I've learned in the hopes that it sparked something in their own mind that gets them going.

Sarah Raymond: An example of this was every year around the new year, I ask people, what are your goals for this year? Not your resolutions, 'cause that's bs. What are your goals? What do you actually wanna accomplish in this year? And oftentimes I find people come back with like, oh, well I want to be healthier, happier, and I go immediately back.

Sarah Raymond: That's bs. You can't measure that. What are your goals? And they're like, oh, well I don't really get it. I told them my goals. I said, well, my goals are I wanna launch my product. I wanna get 10,000, you know, monthly active users. I wanna raise $10 million for that company. I wanna lose 8% body fat and I wanna move to Portugal in the next three months.

Sarah Raymond: Those are my goals. Those are measurable. That's what you need to be thinking about when you set your goals. And if you're a CEO of a company and you can't set personal resolutions, how the hell can you set goals that you can then actually reach for your company? It's just baffling that people are just blindly going through life like that.

Sarah Raymond: Yeah, I do think that it's important to have your goals be measurable for sure, because how do you know if you ever reach them? I would maybe add that it's important to, like we had said in the beginning, tap into your emotions around those goals. Because when you understand, well, you know, when I launch my product and I get my 10,000 active users, then I will feel, you know, X, Y, Z, and when you can link it to your emotion, then you have something to like give you drive.

Sarah Raymond: To get there. It's like the benefit beneath the benefit is how you will feel when you reach that goal. So not to say that I don't think that measurable goals are valuable, I definitely do, but I think to be even more effective in the process, the journey of reaching those goals, tapping into those emotions is really it.

Sarah Raymond: It's gonna be the inspiration, the motivation that'll get you there. A lot of people I know. Complain that when they reach a goal, the feeling of having reached that goal, it doesn't feel very good.

Sarah Raymond: Hmm.

Sean Weisbrot: And yet they're driven to the next goal. However, the path to reaching that goal sucks. It's hard. It takes a long time, and you hope that when you reach that goal, you feel good, but instead you feel empty knowing that now there's another goal you have to reach.

Sean Weisbrot: And what the hell did I just. Do trying to get there. People don't stop to celebrate that they've reached that goal. Right. And I would just question what's driving the desire to reach that goal? Like I always talk about intrinsic motivation. So like someone might come to me and say, I wanna lose 20 pounds.

Sean Weisbrot: And I will ask, well, why do you wanna lose 20 pounds? Well, I wanna look better. I wanna feel better. You know, all of these things. While that may be true, there is a deeper level of why. And that's really, like I said before, the, the benefit beneath the benefit is like, okay, well that person may want to lose 20 pounds so that they can live longer and see their children get married and play on the ground with their grandchildren or whatever.

Sean Weisbrot: You know, the driving factor is. That deeper level of desire and really why you're doing what you're doing is what's going to keep you motivated to get to that goal, whereas someone else who may have that goal of, like, for entrepreneurship for example, if you have a, a goal of launching your product and getting those 10,000 users, well, what is, what, what's the purpose of the goal?

Sean Weisbrot: Like why, why do you want that? Is it just for success? Do you feel like I'll be happy when I reach this goal? That's where we get into a little bit of trouble, you know, with that emotion and logic, like that goal is purely logical. It's like, oh, well when I reach that goal, I'll be happy, I'll be successful, I'll be enough.

Sean Weisbrot: But that's not necessarily true because those feelings are more of a within. Like you'll be happy when you were happy with yourself. You'll be enough when you recognize that you are enough unrelated to any goals that you want to reach. And that's another interesting point because I know that launching the product will make me feel happy because we've been working on it for such a long time, and so getting it out there into the world is kind of like, oh my God, we actually did it.

Sean Weisbrot: But I know that it won't feel very good for very long. Because without users, the platform has no value. But then getting the 10,000 users while it provides some level of validation, won't make me feel happy because investors are gonna push me to get a million and then 10 million, and the investors will never be satisfied.

Sean Weisbrot: And as long as a there's that external pressure. Your internal happiness is kind of ignored.

Sean Weisbrot: Because as a person the thing I think that would make me the happiest is being able to walk away from the thing I've created knowing that they don't need me anymore. I think happiness is from the success of knowing you're not needed.

Sean Weisbrot: So getting 10,000 users or a hundred thousand users or any of those things over the next five, 10 years, they won't make me happy. It'll just be another day of work. Right. But perhaps, like you said, stopping and celebrating when you do reach the goals will give you an opportunity to experience what success feels like, right?

Sean Weisbrot: Rather than just bypassing the accomplishment and then. Looking to what's next. I have a YouTube channel, and as I said, that's where our primary audience is. And I have this conversation with my husband all the time, and you know, we are just, we just crossed 600,000 subscribers and like, that's a really big number.

Sean Weisbrot: I didn't start the channel to say, oh, I want a million subscribers or any other number. But every milestone. That we hit, it's like, oh, this is really exciting. Look at how far we've come, look at how many people we've helped. But my drive is always to the next milestone. And he always says, well, you know, what's the end?

Sean Weisbrot: When will you be satisfied? When will you decide to stop working on this? And you know, I don't really have a good answer for that. Like you said, taking those moments to really celebrate when you do hit your goal, or when you do hit a milestone and. Absorbing or letting the positive experience really sink in because our limbic brains are really meant to just see the negative to keep us alive and safe in the world.

Sean Weisbrot: And it takes practice and intention to really stop and see the positive that you might be experiencing. Well, congrats on 600,000. I'm, I'm happy for you. I have a YouTube channel with nine subscribers. Well, we can celebrate that as well. I don't know who they are, so that's success. 'cause they're all strangers.

Sean Weisbrot: Assuming they're not bots, which I, I can't be sure they're not bots. I know that YouTube is hard, so congrats for doing that. Thank you. Thank you. If I'm playing therapist for a second, I think I would say maybe the reason why you don't have a concrete answer for your husband is because this is your calling as a person, and so maybe there is no end for you.

Sean Weisbrot: Maybe this is what you want to spend the rest of your life doing. So why does there have to be an end? Yeah, where what I'm doing is building a company around a service, and as long as I build a team that can do that really well and then find someone who can replace me as a CEO in the future, who can continue on with their own vision, why do I need to spend the rest of my life doing that comp?

Sean Weisbrot: It's not necessary. If I, in the next five, 10 years feel that I still love doing it, of course I'll stay. But I think a lot of investors as well want to see that a company can survive its founder. I think that's a measure of success for investors as well. So I think we're just in two different, two different fields in that regard.

Sean Weisbrot: But I could also see myself potentially doing the podcast for the rest of my life because I love talking to entrepreneurs. Yeah. That's like the benefit beneath the benefit, right? It's your intrinsic motivation. It's human nature to want to connect with other humans. I think I feel most at ease when I'm talking with people.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel that more than when I'm alone. Yeah, and I think that that's something to really tap into right? When, when you experience ease in what you're doing, it's important to recognize that and strive for it, I guess. Do you think emotion blocks logic or logic blocks? Emotion? I think of it as emotion will win over logic.

Sean Weisbrot: What I mean by that is our subconscious beliefs were formed when we were very young because the logical part of our mind was not fully developed until around 25. So we lived our life through the lens of our emotional. Mind. And so we pick up beliefs about ourselves. So for example, I might have been five years old and spilled a jug of milk on the ground and you know, my mom came over and was upset because there was milk all over the ground.

Sean Weisbrot: But my interpretation might have that I am bad. Force spilling milk as opposed to like the A, the actual incident itself was undesirable. So I might be living with this belief that I'm a bad person. That belief will always win over my own adult logical, rational mind saying, well, I'm not a bad person. I'm actually quite a good person.

Sean Weisbrot: But that emotional belief will always. Beat out the logical belief. Pretty powerful and it makes sense with what I understand of people as well. I know so many people that had pretty messed up childhoods and it affects their own self-worth. I've also met people who, despite that, how successful businesses and no matter how successful they get, still feel as if they don't deserve their success.

Sean Weisbrot: I've met all sorts of people. Yeah, and most of them are really messed up. Not to say I don't have my own problems. Which I do talk about, but I, I sometimes wish, like I could just give them a hug and be like, it's fine. Just don't, just like, it doesn't matter. I do a lot of mentoring and a lot of it is not around the problems you have in business, but it's around the way you think about your business and feel about and yourself.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. I do think that there's sort of this worldwide belief of not enough, and it's, like I said, developed in early childhood and. It shows up for people in very different ways. Like one person might have this belief that they're not enough, and so they have a fear of even trying anything because they might fail, and so they're just like stunted today, right?

Sean Weisbrot: They're, they're paralyzed, they're, they're held back from doing anything that they want to do, whereas someone else might have the exact same belief about themself, but they're gonna be so highly driven for success. Because enough is never enough, right? They just keep going and going and going, and they might have multimillion dollar businesses, more than one of them even, and it's still not enough.

Sean Weisbrot: And so they just keep going. And so the same exact belief, two very different routes that can be taken. I've discovered as well that the people who I believe are depressed, even if they refuse to admit it to themselves, find that it's easier. To live in the comfort of depression than to strive to do something that would make them happy, which would then bring them out of that depression.

Sean Weisbrot: Because there's this comfort with knowing what depression is and feeling bad about yourself or for yourself or in that regard is easier than. Trying. Yeah. I think a lot of times what you said is true, and also someone who has chronic depression or really anything, chronic, chronic pain, anxiety, they don't know themself without it.

Sean Weisbrot: Like, who would I be without this depression that I've lived my life with for so long? And because our, our minds really like what's familiar, making a change is really hard. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of willpower, and a lot of understanding of what those emotional subconscious beliefs are so that you can see that they're not really true anymore.

Sean Weisbrot: They're from your childhood, and you can then. Change them to be more true in the present. So if someone finds themselves stuck in a situation, which is difficult because the first step is awareness, self-awareness, which a lot of people never get to. But assuming someone can get to self-awareness about this kind of a situation, what's the next step they can take to think about or feel about how to make that reality, as you've just said.

Sean Weisbrot: So I agree, self-awareness for sure is the first step. And then once you recognize that you have this. Issue or experience that you want to change, then meditation or self-hypnosis or working with a hypnotherapist or any professional can help you to understand where or what the belief is that is causing, let's use depression since that was the example.

Sean Weisbrot: So what is the belief that I hold about myself that is not a logical belief, but it's an emotional belief that is now causing. The depression in my current or my present life. I saw a child psychologist. I was like four or five. I don't know why. My parents never told me the reason. I just remember playing games with them, like board games.

Sean Weisbrot: Mm-hmm. And they were fun. I enjoyed the experience. I don't remember what we talked about. My parents never told me. Both my parents and my brother have. Psychologists, they see. I've never seen someone since then 'cause I always felt like I was strong enough to understand myself and talk myself through any problems that I had.

Sean Weisbrot: I think the pandemic changed that.

Sean Weisbrot: I think I found myself become a lot weaker mentally because of it. And so I have been thinking about seeing someone I, and, and this isn't for someone like myself, who I, I find it. Easy to say a lot of things. It's also scary to say these things where other people are gonna hear. I have anxiety and panic attacks. I think it started about six months after I started my company.

Sean Weisbrot: And it got worse over the last few years. And I think the pandemic just took it to a whole new level. And I just got my booster a few days ago. Being in Asia not being able to get vaccinated for the first.

Sean Weisbrot: Year and a half plus, and then flying unvaccinated across the world to get back to America to get vaccinated, and then being stuck in America with my family for the last seven months and just, yeah, there, there's, it's so hard to express in a very short amount of time for everybody, but I think I. Just from what I've said in the last minute, everybody could probably understand how I feel.

Sean Weisbrot: Oh, I would totally agree. I think that we are in a worldwide experience of trauma, right? Like we, we have so much uncertainty and stress and that really causes a dysregulation of the nervous system, which will. Trigger other symptoms or other, other issues that might have been like under control before, and with the additional stress, it's just like, well, this was a little like low level anxiety and now it's full on anxiety or panic attacks.

Sean Weisbrot: Very, very common all over the world for sure. And the one thing I've told myself was no matter what, I wasn't going to medicate. Mm. Eight out of 10 adults in America are on some sort of antidepressant. Do you know anything about that? I don't know the specific statistics, but I, I know that the whole worldwide pandemic has.

Sean Weisbrot: Increased the amount of mental health issues dramatically for sure. But one thing that you said, you mentioned that you felt like you were always very strong minded and now you feel a little more weak. And I would invite you to maybe consider different words, because I think the fact that you just said what you said a few minutes ago about your experience is actually very brave and I would.

Sean Weisbrot: Applaud you and, you know, acknowledge you for your courageousness to share your experience. I don't think it's weak at all. Yeah, I, I guess that's not, that's not what I meant by weak.

Sean Weisbrot: Hmm. Like, in the past I felt I could do anything that I was always, you know, very intelligent, very capable, very confident. But now I feel like. Things are a little bit harder to just get through. Like, I'm still smart, I'm still confident, I'm still capable. I can still learn a lot very easily. Like I, none of that has changed. It's just maybe I'm a little bit less resilient. Sure. I wonder if that's just the underlying stress that the, you know, state of the world has brought on, and so your, willpower over your emotional beliefs.

Sean Weisbrot: Is starting to fatigue, right? I am aware that willpower is something that can be fatigued. It's a very interesting, especially around, eating habits. For example, if you say no to sugar, like in the morning and you're presented with sugar again a few hours later, it's harder to say no. And if you say no again by evening time, it's basically impossible.

Sean Weisbrot: So like you can fatigue, willpower. Yes, for sure. And I would say that that example that you just gave around eating habits really, articulates how emotions will always win over logic. I'll give you another example. So I, I start eating at around eight 30 in the morning. I stop at around four. This I can do, I've been doing this for a long time in the past few months.

Sean Weisbrot: I started every other week doing a 48 hour fast. This I can do when the fast ends. I binge carbs. I cannot control myself, and I know that the carbs aren't good for me. I know the carbs are gonna bring me right back up close to the weight I was at before. I did the fast, but my body is going, you haven't eaten.

Sean Weisbrot: We need energy. Feed me carbs. So logically, I'm aware, physiologically, biologically, I'm screwed. I can't. I can't control myself now. I, I never, I never go above what I was before the fast. And I am able to, you know, I, I, I walk hours every day, so I'm able to regulate my weight quite well, but I'm also fighting against the fact that I was 200 pounds about a year ago.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm now 152, so I've lost a significant, significant amount of fat in a short period of time, and. The fact that I haven't gone up, up again is, is already quite amazing in itself in terms of willpower, because I have quite a restrictive diet. Do you break your fast with carbs or some other protein or fat, just outta curiosity?

Sean Weisbrot: Normally I have a handful of almonds, handful of cashews, handful of peanuts, get some fats, and then some blueberries, some uh blackberries, some strawberries, a banana, maybe an orange. Water about about half a liter to a liter of water. That's like, that's what I eat every morning usually. Mm-hmm. So it's enough fat.

Sean Weisbrot: Enough fat, some, some natural sugars and go for like an hour walk. I wonder if you shifted to like a more high protein type of food to break your fast, what that would do in terms of your carbohydrate cravings after a fast. Well, the, the nuts all have protein in them, so each, each ounce of. So I, I have basically about 20 ish grams of protein in those three ounces of nuts every morning.

Sean Weisbrot: So I mean, I think that's a pretty good start to the day. Yeah. I just was curious if like a purely protein based break fast would change that for you. Who knows? Right. So I get most of my protein from, like plants and nuts and tofu if people are brave enough to be self-aware, which I think self-awareness is like one of my strongest traits.

Sean Weisbrot: Probably most annoyingly to the people close to me because I, I push self-awareness down their throats too, going, Hey, like, you need to think about this stuff. This is your life. Why don't you care? So let's assume our audience is self-aware. Let's assume they know they've got issues. I. They start meditating, doing hypnotherapy or other sorts of therapy, or maybe in the off chance they, experiment with psychedelics, which I've talked about in the past.

Sean Weisbrot: And I will be talking about again in the future. I do now personally have experience with that has been fantastic. Non hallucinogenic, just microdosing. Mm-hmm. and there's a lot of research around magic, mushrooms being like amazing for mental health. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why I got into it.

Sean Weisbrot: So I believe very deeply that now, especially after my experience, that psilocybin helps you to allow your emotions to come to the forefront and work alongside your logic. So, for example, my brother is an extremely logical person. Like emotions very, very rarely enter his. His, his consciousness, and I got him to try it when I was in Atlanta, during the, the, during this several week break that I wasn't publishing content.

Sean Weisbrot: And his experience was that he saw, so his eyes were closed, he had his an eye mask on, he had headphones on. He was laying on the couch. All of a sudden he took them all off and he looked at me and he was like, I love you, Sean. Cool. And he came over and gave me a hug. I was like, what was that for? And he is like, I'm seeing like people's faces.

Sean Weisbrot: And then the faces are like telling me how I'm supposed to feel about them. Mm. It's like, I saw you, I saw Dad, and like I'm just feeling these intense feelings of love or hate or passion or disdain or whatever it is I'm feeling. I'm just, it's so intense and inside of me, I can't control it and I love it.

Sean Weisbrot: It's such an amazing feeling. And then he went to go see his therapist like shortly after. And they talked about something that my dad's going through that has been bothering my brother and I for a very long time. And then my brother went to my dad and they had a really long conversation about those things and I, I believe that the psilocybin, that the magic mushrooms allowed him to open up to his therapist about it, which then allowed him to go and talk to my dad about it.

Sean Weisbrot: You know, when people are highly logical, they're, I always say like living from the neck up and they don't have the emotional experience. They don't have the somatic experience of emotions and it's just all up in the head. Being able to have that opportunity to use the psilocybin as a tool to, you know, kind of crack open, that's, I think it's really beautiful.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that it's going to become a much larger thing, especially in the US because we're seeing after nearly 20 years of legalization and decriminalization, and medical use of marijuana in the US that psilocybin is now taking center stage. And, we've seen parts of. California, Oregon and Colorado and DC have decriminalized and are on the process of legalization for psilocybin.

Sean Weisbrot: But I believe the difference between the two is that while marijuana has been legalized for recreational use, I believe psilocybin might be restricted to therapy, assisted such sessions only, and even if that's where. It remains in America. I think it will go a very long way to helping people and, and I can, I can share this.

Sean Weisbrot: I was having such severe stress that I was causing my blood pressure to go up, and I was giving myself high blood pressure chronically. And after I started taking the psilocybin within like a week or two, I got off of the high blood pressure pills. It's been several months now. My blood pressure is stabilized.

Sean Weisbrot: And I don't take the pills, I haven't even had any psilocybin in, in several weeks. So even if just that's the only benefit I get, it's a huge relief. You know, you don't even have to worry about the side effects of long-term medication use when, you know, in that scenario. Yeah. 'cause the, the blood pressure medication was actually causing me to feel tired and when I would stand up, I would feel dizzy 'cause the blood was rushing to my head.

Sean Weisbrot: 'cause the blood pressure levels changed when you, when you stand up and sit down too fast. It was nasty. I did not like the way it made me feel, so I'm so glad that I was able to get off it. Actually, when I was taking the psilocybin and it together, it was actually causing my blood pressure to go too low, and then I was feeling dizzy and having other problems, so totally caused me to not need it anymore, which is phenomenal.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I think there's a lot of really great therapeutic uses and, and research being done for sure. Yeah, and my, and my dad speaking again with meditation. I've had my dad try it and then meditate and he said that it made it the best experiences he's ever had in meditation. I. Same for my mom, who's a very, very nervous person

Sean Weisbrot: On very high doses of anti-anxiety medications. But I gave her some psilocybin, told her to meditate and she feels amazing. So, so yeah. I, I think tremendously that there's a lot of things out there that a lot of people discount, that can help with the connection of logic and emotion. Yeah. It's, it's interesting too that your whole family was willing to try it with you.

Sean Weisbrot: It took my mom a few months. Yeah. It, it took me, it took me about six months of research and about two months of self experimentation to get a right dose to convince her to try it. my dad was like, I can't wait for you to get home and like, let's try it immediately. and my, my brother as well was like, yeah, let's try it.

Sean Weisbrot: But my mom and I won't do the hallucinogenic dose. I, I believe there's benefits. I'm just not ready. And as you have mentioned, I think the, in a therapeutic setting, you know you have someone to guide you and, for lack of a better word, ba babysit. I think it is slightly relevant, related to logic and emotion because as we're saying, emotions beat out your logic and. Anything we can do to help us with our emotions, to open ourselves up can then make the logic a lot easier to work with. Definitely. And I think when you have a deeper understanding of your emotions, and I always link, I. Our beliefs with our emotions. but when you have an understanding, then you have the freedom to make a change because you know when you understand, okay, well this is the event that caused me to have this belief about myself.

Sean Weisbrot: And it was when I was 10 years old. Well, when I was 10, I was. Dependent on my parents or other adults to take care of me. And you know, maybe that belief was serving me in some positive way. It was keeping me safe or stopping me from making any mistakes or even trying something that maybe I wasn't really able to do.

Sean Weisbrot: But now that I am an adult. You know that belief is not true anymore. I'm not dependent on my parents. I am, I do have the abilities to do the things that I want. I, you know, deserve all the things that I, I desire. So then you can make that change once you have the understanding. I was given the special privilege of watching this happen live on survivor.

Sean Weisbrot: I dunno if you've watched, if you watch it, there was a guy on this past season who was a former professional NFL player. His father died in a car accident when he was very young, so he would've been under 10 while they were taping. The 25th anniversary of his father's death happened during one of the days of the competition, and we got to see it because it was filmed during that time and he talked about.

Sean Weisbrot: That experience with one of the people on the show that he was an ally with, and he said, for my whole life I was angry with other people who had dads. I was angry that other people who had car accidents didn't die. I was beating myself up and driving myself. I. To be this person I thought I should be, but it was all an anger.

Sean Weisbrot: He had this revelation on this 25th anniversary of his father's death that actually he was wasting his time and that instead he should be thinking about how he had a good time with his dad, he had a good experience, and how what he should be doing is honoring his father by being someone who is more loving and more kind and more passionate and more giving and all of this, and, and right after this happened, he ended up winning an individual immunity challenge.

Sean Weisbrot: Because he found this strength inside of himself. He's like, I thought I was coming onto this show to win a million dollars, but I don't need the money as far as I'm concerned, everyone. Yeah. That is really a beautiful example. How of how the recognition, self-awareness, the understanding, allowed that person to really make a change and experience life in a different way, like through a different lens.

Sean Weisbrot: One of the most common. Scenes that people share with me during hypnotherapy sessions is a scene where, and it's different for everyone, but it's sort of the same scene is where one of their parents is leaving. Like they're getting separated and the child is watching the parent leave the household. And it's, you know, it's a very common theme I think.

Sean Weisbrot: There's like 50% of marriages end in divorce, right? I don't know if that's exact. Don't quote me on that, but it's a lot. And so that is a very common thing for people to experience, but the amount of emotional trauma that comes from witnessing that is significant. And you know, it causes a lot of. Issues as adults. Well, now I feel like I wanna go watch Survivor I. Is there anything that we've talked about that you wanna expand on real fast or anything we didn't talk about you feel like we should mention before we get close to the end here? Perhaps we could just expand a little bit on the idea that.

Sean Weisbrot: Everyone has these tools to understand themselves within themselves, right? So meditation we talked about is, is a really great tool to just turn the lens inward and with curiosity and compassion for yourself. Just explore your experience and I, and I say compassion because you might not immediately love what you find when you start to look inward and, and that's okay.

Sean Weisbrot: It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong or you're a bad person. It just. Means you're human. And, so I always suggest for people to, you know, start the practice with a little bit of compassion and kindness and just curiosity.

Sean Weisbrot: It's not really about what you're finding so much as the, the fact that you are looking inward is really the, the practice of meditation. I think everyone has the opportunity to, shift from living above the neck to down into the heart, and. Somatic experience of emotions. I think that's a really great point, and I find that even though I, I feel like I've become quite good at incorporating emotions into my daily experience, that it's also really hard to stay there because if you have, and while I, I definitely think people should have compassion and kindness for others.

Sean Weisbrot: If you are always in that mode, it's like really hard to not just cry all day long.

Sean Weisbrot: Because you just feel so bad that like everyone around you is just has, has things so hard and they're all struggling with their own demons and the vast majority of them, none of us will ever know about. Yeah, we, we definitely as a culture have a lot of.

Sean Weisbrot: Numbing techniques, whether it's working all the time so that we don't have to deal with our emotions or substances or TV or social media. You know, there are so many things that we use to not experience our experiences fully. I guess the last thing I'd like to. Leave the audience with is the best way that I found to get in touch with my emotions is going into nature with no tech.

Sean Weisbrot: Yes, I agree completely. Being outside fresh air, maybe you know, the smell of woods nature. All of that I think is a really great opportunity. I agree.