Why Burnout Has Nothing to Do With How Hard You Work

Burnout in high achieving professionals is not a workload problem. It is an ancestral wound. In this episode of the Health Pioneers Podcast, soul recovery specialist Dr. Oscar Perez explains why taking a vacation, changing jobs, or going to therapy will never fix the real source of burnout for certain people.

Dr. Oscar is the award winning author of The Flowering War and a healer trained in the Toltec tradition. He helps successful professionals who feel empty despite their achievements recover from soul loss and reclaim their joy, vitality, and sense of purpose. He draws on thousands of years of indigenous wisdom alongside the modern science of epigenetics to help people understand that their exhaustion did not start with them.

In this conversation Dr. Oscar introduces the concept of grief bearers. These are people born carrying the unprocessed emotional wounds of their ancestors. He explains why grief bearers often become the black sheep of their families, why they become overachievers, and why that drive only deepens the exhaustion. He also breaks down what soul recovery actually is and how reconnecting with land, ritual, and ancestry creates a relief that no amount of therapy or self help ever could.

🕰️CHAPTERS

00:00 Why burnout cannot be fixed with time off or better routines 

00:52 What a grief bearer is and how to know if you are one

 04:08 Why sensitive people become black sheep and then overachievers 

08:17 How ancestral trauma is passed down through six generations

 12:20 Why disconnection from the land is making modern people sick 

19:11 What it means to reconnect with ritual and your relatives 

26:14 What soul loss actually feels like in a high achieving person 

36:17 The concept of the heart of the mountain and why it sends rumblings 

43:58 How soul recovery works and what changes when you do it 

59:49 Why your energy is siphoned by untended wounds and how to reclaim it

❓COMMON QUESTIONS: 

Is burnout caused by working too hard?

For most people burnout comes from overwork. But for grief bearers the exhaustion is older and deeper. It is the accumulation of unprocessed emotional wounding passed down through generations. That is why changing jobs, taking vacations, or building better routines never quite fixes it. The root is not in the schedule. It is in the lineage.

What is a grief bearer?

A grief bearer is a person born carrying an unequal amount of the unhealed emotional wounds of their family or ancestral line. They are often more sensitive than those around them, feel like outsiders, and either self-destruct or become high achievers. In many traditional cultures these people were recognized and trained as healers. In modern Western culture they are often labeled as broken, anxious, or burned out.

What is soul recovery?

Soul recovery is the process of calling back the parts of yourself that splintered off through trauma, abandonment, or unprocessed wounding. Dr. Oscar explains that these splits have a real and tangible effect on a person's energy and vitality. When those parts are called home people often experience new capacities, new ways of perceiving life, and a deep sense of wholeness they could never quite name before.

👉Find Dr. Oscar Perez:
Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@TheSoulRecoverySpecialist
Book: The Flowering War
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/droscarcperez/ 

#burnout #ancestraltrauma #soulloss #soulrecovery #griefbearer #epigenetics #indigenouswisdom #highachievers #burnoutrecovery #toltec #healingtrauma #healthpioneerspodcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Burnout is the accumulation of an emotional burden and an energetic deficit that certain people are actually born carrying.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

It's hard to sort of be broken by this Western world and then expect the Western world to fix it.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

One of my teachers used to say that culture is the dream that the earth is having through the humans that live there. What is bringing them to ritual? What does that mean? People need new rituals. We live in a culture that is full of empty rituals. Every tradition has its own rituals that arise from the relationship to the land. Every single thing that we eat that nourishes us, that becomes our life, is a relative. Comes from other relatives that have died so that that thing could live and then die and then nourish me and nourish my life. And I'm connected to all of it.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

And just letting that breathe a little bit. That's it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Today I'm with Dr. Oscar Perez, the soul recovery specialist. He's the award-winning author of The Flowering War, a best-selling book on healing ancestral trauma for natural-born healers. He helps successful professionals who are burned out recover from soul loss and reclaim their joy and vitality so they can thrive in life. Thanks for being here, Dr. Oscar. Thank you. I'm super excited to have you because burnout is like it's such a thing that is happening now. I feel like that's a phrase that's tossed around a lot. But from what I understand with your approach, you're you're getting like much deeper into some of the causes. That it's not just about like, oh, I'm working too much. Like your worldview uh is one that you seem to be reaching uh deeper into the soul, into the psyche to really get at the root cause. In this podcast, we like to, we like to talk with people who are doing things differently. And uh, from what I understand about your work, you're definitely one of those guys. Thank you. So tell me a little bit about um how you see burnout and then you know, kind of that connection from burnout to what you talk about with ancestral trauma.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Okay. So nowadays most people think of burnout as a purely physical thing, as something that they can tend to through uh, you know, time management routines or getting more sleep or taking time off from work. And actually, from my perspective, especially with certain specific people, burnout is the accumulation of a emotional burden and an energetic deficit that certain people are actually born carrying. It's something that affects people that are generally more sensitive to the undercurrents of what's going on in life than, let's say, the average person, right? So my approach actually comes from a very old tradition. I was born and raised in the Tolteca tradition, which is something that is very, very far-reaching. But within this tradition, there is this awareness that in every generation of every family, there is one person that is born carrying an unequal amount of the unprocessed emotional wounding of the family or of the lineage. And that one person has the capacity to transform that energetic burden. But in our culture, there's no real awareness of that. So that person ends up being like pushed away or ostracized because of their innate sensitivity. Well, very often those people either end up getting crushed under the emotional weight of all of that, um, or you find a few, a select few that manage to transcend that and become really high-achieving people. Burnout is one of the most common ways of identifying that person because throughout life they're just consistently accumulating more and more of this emotional and energetic weight. And nowadays it's the easiest entry point, actually, right? To talk to people about what is going on at a very deep soul level versus the the uh like surface level of their um physical or energetic state, let's say.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Yeah, when I've heard you talk about this before, uh it just made a ton of sense to me because it's like you the way you see it explains to me like why like taking a vacation doesn't work, why even changing jobs doesn't work, or like you know, leaving the corporate or the hospital or leaving your uh you know the the clinic that you're in and starting your own clinic, like why these things that people think are gonna like fix burnout, or like I just gotta take some time off. It's like, no, man, it's not it's not that easy. Like if if if it were just this sort of the day-to-day stuff that was overwhelming, maybe that would help. But you know, your work and your tradition and the tradition that you uh grew up in points to something much more profound.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a much bigger context. And and so generally the people that I'm talking about, I call them grief bearers. It's a term that came to me after years and years and years of working with people that are along this spectrum of sensitivity that I was talking about. And nowadays people are really accustomed with the concepts of a highly sensitive person, for example, or an empath. But in my tradition, what is different is that we understand the interconnectedness of every individual person's life, which means that nobody is isolated, right? So what ends up happening with these grief bearers that really makes them unique is that because they're carrying so much, right? Um, and they have this innate sensitivity that doesn't seem to fit into the social environment that we live in now, they they grow up feeling like outsiders, they grow up feeling like ostracized for the exact same gifts that would have made them special in what I call an intact culture. And so many, many grief bearers end up becoming the black sheep of the family, which is critical to those that I work with, right? Now, the path for a grief bearer usually goes one of two ways. Either they they self-destruct and can't pull themselves out of that, or they end up becoming overachievers, right? Like despite their their um, let's say, identification as that outsider or as that black sheep. And then in certain cases, too, it's a combination of the two, right? Where where you'll see somebody, and these are the people that I work with the most, that I enjoy working with the most, where you'll see people that early on in life, they went through that whole black sheep stage. They probably struggled with self-destructive tendencies, and then something critical happened in their life that made them shift ears, and then they threw themselves into the work of essentially changing the things that they see in the world that need to be changed. So a lot of the people that I worked with have been in different healing professions where there's just this innate desire to do things to help others. But then I've also seen it manifest in and I've worked with other people in um professions, everything from you know, activism to law to even corporate positions. But at all levels, there is this inherent desire to want to make a difference in the world from this like really deep-seated sense of feeling, right? And um it can't just be treated at the surface because it is such a deep-rooted thing that involves many generations worth of spiritual, emotional, and energetic work that needs to be done to be able to um to heal that sense of exhaustion at the root.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

And it seems like I feel like I've read some research over the last few years where you know, modern science is identifying on like a genetic level this kind of generational trauma. Have you seen some of these like studies? And it's like the it seems like sort of the new thing for like Western medicine and science to be like, oh, look, you know, we can traumatize a mouse and then we can see effects of that trauma, you know, for three or four or five generations. And and yet, you know, your uh the tradition that you were born into has been talking about this for like how long? Hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:53

Well, in the oral tradition, they say thousands of years, yeah, right. And yeah, nowadays the entire field of epigenetics is is talking about how we can see how environments adjust genetic markers, and then those genetic markers can be tracked down, right? Tracked down lineages. And um, all of that really started with the the grandchildren of concentration camp survivors in a study about obesity, actually. But what's fascinating right now is that at the outer edges of science, we see more and more research that is arising that reinforces the um the understanding of these intact traditions, these intact cultures. And when I talk about intact cultures, I'm talking about cultures that lived in a very interconnected way with with the earth, with the cycles of nature, but also with a completely different understanding of ancestry and and of descendants. So in in the Tolteca culture or the Tolteca tradition, we talk about how we are or we manifest aspects of what our ancestors did or didn't do for the past six generations. So we are the seventh, right? So whatever your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, going back six generations, whatever they did or didn't do ultimately builds the framework for many of the things that you're gonna face in your life, right? And this is independent of your awareness as yourself or your individuality. But likewise, whatever you do or don't do is going to set the stage for six generations moving into the future. When I'm working with somebody, the the reason that that's important is because it gives a context that's much broader than just them. For most people in modern culture or modern society, the most devastating thing is this feeling of isolation. It's something that isn't really spoken to very openly. But in modern society, many, many, many people struggle with this feeling of being isolated, right? And um when I'm talking about somebody that has been the black sheep throughout their life, there's this idea that they're the anomaly in the system, right? They're the one that for some reason is the um is broken, right? Or is um is dysfunctional to use that term, and that increases the sense of isolation and it increases the ideas of self-judgment and self-destruction and self-flagellation in that person. There's this like why don't I fit kind of thing that that person wrestles with. Um well from this perspective, we understand that that person isn't isolated, that person is a symptom of something that is much, much larger. That person is manifesting the or is embodying the fact that the larger culture that we live in is sick, itself is sick, right? But it also gives that person the opportunity to understand what they wrestle with their entire life as a part of a lineage that has just been ruptured because at a certain point in time in that person's ancestral line, there were those just like them that did receive the kinds of training and guidance that helped them be the one that healed that in their family and in their tradition. So when I'm talking about grief bearers, like grief bearers, that's that's never the end point. A person is born with a certain series of potentials. So a grief bearer is like an acorn, right? An acorn, when it's tended to in the proper way, when it's guided in the proper way, it grows to be an oak. And as it grows to be an oak, it can provide shelter and nourishment and um all these different things for all the forms of life around it, right? So grief bearer is like like that acorn, like the seed. With the proper guidance, they become these really pillars of their communities. And they have a much deeper understanding of the emotional, mental, and even spiritual underpinnings of what weaves the whole world around them together.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Awesome. Yeah, this is like I've just like I'm I'm aware as you're talking of like a feeling of relief in my body because this is like I think about my own journey, and I was so fortunate to have a community that was able to support my weirdness. Uh, and I give thanks for it like every day. So, just a little bit of background. Like when I was a teenager, it's like 15, I started seeing stuff, started having visions, started seeing things, started hearing stuff. Like, I won't get into the whole story, but like uh at one point I heard trees talking to me. Like the message was clear, they told me certain things, those things happened, and uh, I was like, what's going on? You know, my mom was amazing, and I was talking to her about it. And then like eventually through some other crazy stories, and anyway, I got connected with uh with a Blackfoot, an elder of the Blackfoot tradition. And uh I think about it because at the time it was like there were basically like two roads, right? Maybe three. Like I could be institutionalized, like in another context, people would be like, he's schizophrenic, or like whatever. You're like straight A's, all good, like fine, you know, but like I'm like talking about seeing entities or hearing things, right? This is like in the mid-90s, like this is long before like this, like whatever kind of world we're living in, where the trends now we're like everybody's like whatever, doing ayahuasca and seeing shit. Um and then uh, or is like, or I could just like I was smart, I was smart enough to hide it. Like I knew I like I didn't have to tell my mom, like I could have hid it as overwhelming as all of that was in me, like I could have hit it. It's fine, right? Right. Or uh what ended up happening was you know, through amazing twists of fate, I was connected with this community and this elder, he would say, he's just like, he's like, you have a gift. And like we need to, we need to amplify that gift, we need to magnify that. We need to give you uh a framework to like help you grow from what I'm I love your analogy, to help you grow from this acorn so that you're not just stuck there in this kind of overwhelming thing. And I and yeah, and that it was like tremendous, and that made like it made all the difference. Yeah, you know, because I was given a worldview. It went from seeing the trees and and you know, the stones and like the dirt as just like stuff to be moved and used to build shit for my human life, to like, oh, these are my grandmother's or grandfather. I was like, we're all connective.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that's incredible. I mean, I was probably going through the same kind of thing at the exact same time. And I had you know, I had the influence ever since I was very, since I was around 10 of people that helped me see the larger world as a conscious, living, uh I want to say living being, but it's more than that, right? Because it's this infinite multiplicity of different forms of consciousness, like living together and existing together. But nobody did talk about that then. So I am uh I'm Apache on my mother's mother's side, my grandmother's side, right? And and the um, or inde, right? Chiricawa Inde. That side of my family moved down into Mexico, which was, I mean, moving is a way of saying that was a big part of just the territory they naturally lived in. But rather than going onto reservations, they went and stayed in Mexico. And at that point, it was safer to be Mexican than it was to be most definitely than to be Apache. So what end up what ends up happening is that, or okay, let me give more context for that. So for a certain time, both the Mexican government and the American government paid people for Apache scalps. So people made their money by killing them. So at a certain point, it became safer to not be seen as connected to those life ways, right? As a matter of life and death. As the generations progress, what that leads to is a kind of forced silencing of the ways, of the way of being or of the way of living. Then with that, you have the influence of religion, in my family's case, the Catholic religion. Um and and that adds more and more silencing to the acknowledgement of this way of living or of understanding things. So for me, when it got to my point, right, like the acknowledgement of any of this publicly was not something you do. Sure. You don't talk about this stuff, right? Because if you do, you make yourself a target. But I always had this really strong drive towards it, this really strong interest in it. And I mean, I sought out ceremony and I sought out medicine people, and it was just, it was always like my driving force in my life. And then about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, Lindsay Lohan goes and drinks ayahuasca, and it blows up and it becomes this becomes what it is now, right? Where all these people are calling themselves all these things without having roots or understanding in it. The people that I work with have these inherent kinds of awareness that you're talking about. A lot of them didn't have the the kinds of guidance to make any sense of it. I've told people, because for years I worked with people in addiction recovery as well. And and I would see these same kinds of inherent traits in people that I worked with. And for years I've told people that the would-be healers of our time, like the vast majority of them are institutionalized, the vast majority of them are in prisons, rehabs, mental institutions, right? There's a select few that against all odds manage to reach positions of leadership in their lives and have this inherent desire to make a difference in the world, right? And even though they've created the success in their lives, there's still this feeling of something not quite being there. Right. There's still something that that they can't put their finger on that feels like it's missing from their lives and from who they're here to be. Now, the reason I work with people that are, you know, struggling with burnout is because their attempt to fulfill that need or their their attempt to like fill that that emptiness that they can't quite put their finger on makes them double down on how hard they are as being achievers. And that creates even more of this accumulated exhaustion. And it's never really getting to the core of the thing or the source of the thing. So there's two parts to it. There's the overexertion in trying to find that sense of meaning and connection. And then simultaneously, there's the shouldering of all of the unprocessed wounding of the past generations. So they get hit from both sides, so to speak. Right. And so the work that I do with people really helps them develop a much larger context for that, helps them understand that the things that they've been experiencing their whole life are natural, even when they're not normal, right? Because what most people think of as normal nowadays is not natural. Right. But these are their natural ways or capacities of perception for certain people in the world. And they have been throughout the entirety of human history. These are, to put it this way. This way of understanding reality is what we would think of as an animist way of understanding reality, right? Which means that everything is animate. Even the things that we don't that don't speak in the ways that we do, right? Everything is animate and has consciousness. And when you can acknowledge that to a person that has perceived that animacy, but thought they were crazy for it, right? Or hid it, like you were saying, it creates a sense of immense relief in that person. And it starts to create a context for who they are in their own life and in the world that makes all of these different things in their life start to fall into place. And if we were to look at human beings as we exist now have been around for about 200,000 years, if we were to look at the entirety of that human history as we know and understand it, it's only been about the last 300 years where collectively people do not live in this way, or where that has become the dominant way of seeing things. So living from an animist perspective is truly the human way to be, and has been the human way to be. And what has become normalized now is the anomaly. So the people that I work with are those that there's nothing wrong with them, other than not having had the kind of guidance to understand why they are how they are and how massively important that is for the work that they do in the world and for who they are in the world.

SPEAKER_00 24:11

I mean, if it was a Blackfoot, then it was Lakota, and I went to acupuncture school in Chinese medicine. It's like I've always sort of looked at at these longer traditions to to give me more context because it always just felt like it made more sense, you know, and this idea that everything is living and breathing, and Chinese medicine talks about qi and energy and life force and all that, and it just makes sense. And um, I remember I I talked to this this gentleman once, and uh, this is what again would have been like mid-90s, and I was like, what do you think is like why is everyone being so drawn to these ways now? You know, why are sweat lodges growing and like you know, chanupa ceremonies? Like, why is all this growing? And uh he said, I think that people have this yearning for the stories that the soil that they walk on created, though. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. He's like, you know, when you look at it, he's like, most of the people that are going to church, those were story, you know, they're living in a story that was born in the elsewhere in the world that's been transported here. He's like, there's good stuff you can learn from that. He says, but for a lot of people, they want to unconsciously, they want to connect with the stories from the soil that they live on, that they walk from, the birth, you know, there.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you look and have eyes to see, you find this everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the world. And, you know, one of my teachers used to say that culture is the dream that the earth is having through the humans that live there, right? So culture as it arises in every unique place is um in these intact ways is directly arising out of that relationship with the land where you are and with the spirits of the land, with the unseen forces of the land. And um all of this, like all of the sickness, the vast majority of the sickness that we see in the world now really can be traced back to people's disconnection from the land. You know, I work with people on on really, we get beyond the the burnout and the that soul level exhaustion, and we start getting into healing the wounds of their ancestors in the past generations. And when people think of that, you know, here in well, in in the states at least, people are obsessed with this idea of imaginary homelands. And they think, I need to go back to where my ancestors were from. And there's a part of that, right? There's a part to that that is important. But I always tell people, like, first things first is connecting to the land where you are, not as uh not as like this pretty new agey idea, right? Like literally go outside, put your bare feet on the earth every day. Learn the names, and they're not, you know, the older names that we can track back, but learn the names of at least five different plants that grow natively where you are. Learn the names of five different birds that are there where you are, start to greet them, right? Start to understand your interconnectedness with all of this. Greet the sun every day. And what happens with people, because I've done this for years, um, what happens with people is that there's this kind of collective relief that starts to arise in people from just doing these things in consistent ways, right? And I tell them, I'm like, it's not that you need to go to the physical places that your ancestors were most recently associated with. It's that you need to start to remember how they lived by embodying it. And the more you do that, the more they start, the more they start to remember you. And when I'm using that term remember in this case, it's not remember as we think of, it's remember in the origins of that word. Remember is to put back together in our way of understanding things. The ancestors have never gone anywhere. They've always been with us and they are with us. And they are starving for us, just like we're starving for them. And these things start to weave us back together. It starts in very tangible ways, but it can't happen in the mind. It can't happen in the mind alone. And so what tends to happen nowadays is people are so used to psychological abstractions, right? They're so used to, you know, doing their little earth meditations and like the comfort of their air-conditioned home and talking about the earth in these completely abstracted ways and like anthropocentric ways, right? Like giving these like human traits to the earth and to nature that are just projections really of humans' obsession with humans. It's got to go way beyond that. It has to be visceral, it has to be physical, it has to be um, it has to be ritualized, actually. And in order for that to happen, people have to have communities that can hold that space for them, you know. And so um, my work with with people that are that are these really high-performing grief bearers, right? Is to help them be able to start to reconnect in these ways and start to understand that they can be a part of these these larger, they can be a part of creating communities that we need to bring more people back. It's a work for a lifetime.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Talk to me a little bit about like what is the what kind of rituals are you talking about? Or what is what is bringing them to ritual, what does that mean?

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Bringing them to ritual communities. I think the first thing there is to acknowledge the fact that we are ritual creatures. We're ritual beings. So everybody has their rituals. The thing is that we live in a culture and society that is full of empty rituals. You know, so really basic rituals can be, you know, one again, like I was talking about earlier, learning how to greet your relatives. And when I say your relatives, I'm not talking about, you know, your cousins, siblings, aunts, and uncles. Like I'm not talking about your human relatives. I'm talking about all that you are related to in the world. Really, when it comes to it, like we were saying earlier, culture arises from people's direct relationship with the land. And the same thing goes for rituals. Because like nowadays, we have people that want to export rituals as well. So, you know, you have people leading ayahuasca ceremonies in places where ayahuasca has never grown. You have people taking psilocybin in completely sterile environments where nobody even understands what environment the mushrooms naturally grow in, where nobody understands the fact that they sing. And you have to know the songs because they taught them to you. Because you went and revisited that hillside day after day for years, just like your parents, your grandparents did during certain seasons when the rains come, and the rains cause landslides, and there are certain kinds of mushrooms that just grow where the land has come has fallen down in those landslides every year, right? Like it's all about relationship. And you can't just hack these relationships apart and expect to receive the same kind of medicine. You know, every place and every tradition has its own rituals that arise from the relationship to the land. You can't just export them, right? It's like, yeah, you can't just like export or mass produce these things if you truly understand them. So when I'm talking about rituals, like there are there are some rituals that continue to exist in in what I would call intact cultures, but in order to experience those things, like you need to go to no, that's not the right way either. People need new rituals, we need new ceremonies. We can't just pick and choose and take from like the remnants that exist in different parts of the world. That's not enough. We need to learn how to live in a new in a new old way, right? So that so that those things start to be born through us again. But like that's the multi-generational plan. Most people don't want the multi-generational plan, right? But it's important. It's important. And so for people as individuals, it really starts small. It starts with shifting the way that we understand all of our relationships to ourselves, to those we come from, to those that come after us, to the fact that every single thing that surrounds us contributes and conspires to our being alive, right? Wherever we are in the world. So every single thing that we eat that nourishes us, that becomes our life, is a relative, comes from other relatives that have died so that that thing could live and then die and then nourish me and nourish my life. And I'm connected to all of it, right? And if I can start to appreciate life in that way, understand it in that way, I start to understand more what's at stake in my being alive. I start to understand that not only am I interconnected to all of this, I'm also indebted to it. And who I am and how I live is important because it influences everything else that comes, that comes next. And it also addresses that degree of indebtedness. If I think I'm nobody or I think I'm isolated, or I think that my life is just about me, I cut off every single connection that has allowed for me to be alive. And I cut out any sense of meaning in the larger scheme of things for my own life. So helping people heal these wounds at the core starts small. It starts with their daily actions and interactions, it starts with some shifts in perception, but then it creates this sense of meaning that is beyond anything that they've ever imagined before. And it starts to address that larger sickness that I was talking about earlier that that is woven through the entirety of modern society.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

I'm just enjoying the moment, man, and just letting that breathe a little bit. That's it's beautiful. It's beautiful. So take me through the journey a little bit of like someone's just a little acorn grief bearer. Yeah. Now they're reconnecting with ritual, with the land. Uh, what's that what's what does that acorn grow into? What's that next phase?

SPEAKER_01 36:11

Um so the next phase is again, the next phase is relief, honestly. It's what I see with the people that I work with. That at first there is that becoming aware of being an acorn or having been an acorn. Then there's this relief in that awareness, and then comes the releasing of all the stuff that they've been carrying. That's a really, really powerful moment. It's more than a moment, right? It lasts a good chunk of time. But that's where people finally let themselves put down all the stuff that they felt that they thought that they needed to carry all on their own. And that involves a lot of tears. There's a lot of grief in that. But going through that grief naturally leads into wonder. And what most people that I've ever interacted with are starving for and don't know how to put their finger on is that sense of wonder. You know, so people chase all kinds of things trying to find that sense of wonder. They chase achievement, they chase highs, they chase sex, they chase all these different things trying to find that sense of wonder. But those things never never quite cut it. And when people start to experience that sense of wonder again, it's interesting because you see their priority shift. They start living a little bit differently than they did before. There's more of a fullness to how they live that that starts to show up and it starts to impact their relationships. It starts to impact their sense of purpose. And through all of that, this kind of gratitude starts to flood through them and into what they do. And, you know, in our tradition, we talk about we we've got this concept that we talk about over and over again, and it's this idea of flowering. And you see this in in different native traditions and different indigenous traditions. But if you look at flowers, you really like spend time with them, flowers are what allows for the cycle of life to continue. There's a purpose for them. It's not just that they're pretty, which they are, right? But beauty feeds life. And when a person really starts to get how they're interconnected with life on all these different levels, and they get to put down all of those unspoken burdens that they've been carrying, that wonder and that gratitude make that person start flowering. And it's not like they have to do anything intentional. I mean, in order to become these, these like flowering beings, but the way that they are in the world shifts, it changes, it like energetically emanates from them, and it inspires other people as well. They start to, without even being able to name it, they can feel how alive that person is, and it makes them curious about it. And not everybody, but some will start to ask what's going on there, how's that happening? And there's these ripple effects that will happen. And so when people are truly, you know, embodying who they are in that way and living life in that perspective, they they become flowering beings, they become those that that empower that desire for being truly alive in others around them. You know, in in my book in The Flowering War, I talk about how I had a teacher that used to call like mainstream society the procession of the walking dead. And she used to talk about how people were going through just these routines, right? These daily repetitive cycles of life, and never quite connecting to what it means to be fully alive, never really like embodying what that is. And there's this deep sense of desperation and this deep sense of sadness in that. And people are always chasing ways to numb that sense of desperation, that sense of sadness. But the the ways of numbing that desperation and sadness that are offered to us collectively just create more of it. You know? So the point is, how do you get somebody to move from being in the procession of the walking dead to being fully alive? In order to do that, you have to connect them with life on a much larger scale. You also have to connect them with death on a much more this real scale or tangible scale. And it's not a morbid thing either. It's the root of gratitude in being truly alive is our capacity to sit with the fact that we're gonna die and that everything around us is gonna pass. And there's a lot of beauty in that too, right? Because that's how you know that you're really here. If you can acknowledge and honor the fact that it's not always gonna be that way, well then a lot of the unnecessary stuff in your life kind of gets swept away, gets sloughed off. The work is all of that, and and it's guiding people through that process, because there is a process to it, there's a way to walk people through developing that increasing understanding and getting them to that place of embracing life and feeling fully alive.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Do your uh your the people you work with that are in this kind of like grief-bearer mode who feel that calling, they've gone and they've had that sort of like black sheep life. Are they feeling like they're living these lives of quiet desperation? Is that something that they're like conscious of? Because I would imagine, like, you know, you talked about them being successful. Like, yeah, imagine that a lot of them have they're doing the things. They're they, you know, there's a select group of them that has figured out the game, they're playing the human game, they're playing this thing, they're wearing that mask really well. But like, you know, what is it? Are they feeling that desperation, or is it like, is it, you know, when they're like going to sleep at night, or is it uh do they feel it before the third, you know, the third cocktail of the evening? You know, there's the that little moment of pause where there's like it's that little ping of like, uh I think that there's there's always some element of it.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

It's an intuitive thing. It's this feeling that, like I was saying earlier, like there's something that just is missing, something that's just off.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Right. And they get really good at playing the game, like you're saying. They get really good at being able to read social environments, that's how they become successful, right? They get really good at reading social environments and understanding what the rules of the game are, but being good at it doesn't, it doesn't suffice, like it doesn't make them feel like like they are um really being who they were born to be, right? Or who they were meant to be. I think if there's a time when that comes up, it's usually somewhere between. Two and three in the morning when they wake up and are laying in bed, and it doesn't matter if there's somebody next to them. There's this deep feeling of um just wondering what they're and sometimes it's not even that, it's not even wondering what they're doing. It a lot of times it shows up as an anxiety. But anxiety is a funny thing because anxiety will latch on to whatever story is nearest to it. But the more successful they are, the more that anxiety, I think, starts to be around health and death. So in our tradition, we talk about these very, very deep parts of the self that are always communicating with us. There's something that we we call the heart of the mountain. It's it's called tepeyolot in the Nahuatl language. And it's this part of the self of like the collective, so like the self with a capital S, but then also the individual. It's the part of you that knows you better than your conscious self knows you. And it sends out these rumblings. And these rumblings, because you know on a larger scale, it's associated with earthquakes. But these rumblings, these like little tremors, they make their way to the surface of your awareness. And at first it's like a little nagging feeling. But like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe I need to do something different. Maybe I need to leave this job or this career. Maybe I need to leave this relationship. Maybe I need to, you know, go see a doctor about this, that, or the other. But at first we ignore it. At first we're like, nah, whatever. But then those rumblings get louder and get louder and get louder. And people know what those rumblings are, right? They can be unique to every person, but everybody can relate to, especially at a certain age, right? You can start to to understand and relate to those little voices or those little rumblings as they're coming up to to your conscious awareness. And it's always this message of something needs to shift or change in the in the way that you're living out your days, because you're not going to always have days to live out. Right. Something needs to change about how you are being and and existing in the world. The people that I work with, they, because they have like such strong intuitive capacities, they're usually aware of the fact that they need to do something for quite a while before they actually do the thing. But when they do, a lot of times it it is a shift in a lot of different aspects of their life. And those shifts can be really, they can be challenging, they can be really scary. But on the other side of it, that person is more who they were born to be than they ever were before. Yeah. I think that that's the more universal thing in clients that I've worked with. I've had so many people come to me and say, and say that, just say, you know, I needed something. Something needed to change. Yeah. I've had people tell me, you know, they they have these awesome careers. They're successful according to all of the standards of society. But there was a part of them that just consistently was was telling them there's more, you're here to be doing something else.

SPEAKER_00 47:27

A buddy of mine, uh, do you remember those? Did you ever see that commercial when we were kids? Uh the guy making the Dug and Donuts where it's time to make the donuts. Yeah. Yeah, the alarm was up at like three in the morning or whatever, and it's like time to make the donuts. And it was just like that on repeat. Yeah. The buddy of mine uh used to say, is like, it's time to make the donuts. You know, it's like you felt the tremors, you felt the rumblings, you've met that intuition. And so it's like, why not? It's time to make the donuts, right? And yeah, and uh, I agree with you, you know, from my own experience that like people know, yeah, they know, you know, and so when when it's like when you're done lying to yourself or when you're done, you know, sort of like pretending, and uh, and you know it's time to make the donuts. So let's get at let's get after it.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

Yeah. Yeah, that concept of the peolo that I was talking about earlier, when it's ignored, consistently ignored, what happens, the reason it's associated with earthquakes in that way, is that eventually what happens is that, yeah, there will be this earth-shattering event that makes the person incapable of ignoring that anymore. And it can be the end of a career, it can be a divorce or the end of a marriage, it can be a terminal diagnosis or the death of a loved one. But there is some event that comes down the line that takes everything in their like curated life, their idea of um the life that they're living and they're meant to live, and it shatters it. And they're left with this golden opportunity, right, to really assess who they are at the core and what comes next. And uh a lot of times people don't like to hear that part though. You know?

unknown 49:15

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:16

You're um the I noticed on on the little bio thing that I started the episode with, call yourself a soul recovery specialist. Yeah, it's an interesting phrase. Um I immediately thought of like I remember when I was I used to be really sick and was doing a bunch of stuff. And uh I had this this moment, I don't know how to describe it, but it was it was basically like I was sitting, I was sitting down, kind of a meditative meditation, just really just sort of observing. And uh I felt, I felt like part of my soul just like came back into my body. It was this really intense experience where actually what it was was like I was like checking in and I felt like the back of my head was just totally missing. You know, almost like a like a ship, a shotgun had gone through it, right? Yeah. And uh like a wind. Yeah. It's just and then all of a sudden it was just like like the perfect puzzle piece came and just like locked in. And I was like, we talked about that relief. I remember just like, oh, I mean, I could feel it now, thinking about it. It's just like, oh my god, like where has that been? Don't know where it came from. I didn't really want to dive into whatever story was there. I was just full of gratitude. It was back. Yeah. So that's kind of like that's where that's where my sort of thought went. Is is there any part of my experience that sort of touches on what it is that you think of when you when you talk about soul recovery? Right.

SPEAKER_01 50:48

Well, that's that's why I I say or ask if it was like a wind. Yeah. So we are these multifaceted, multidimensional beings. There are many, many aspects of us, many sides of us. And we undergo certain experiences in life that make some of those parts of us splinter off. And I mean, nowadays people use the language of trauma, right, when they're talking about all of this. But these things can be really subtle too. And I think generally when when people collectively think of trauma, they either think of something that is very overtly, obviously traumatic, like a very traumatic event. But there are also very subtle ways that this stuff happens where we abandon or we reject parts of ourselves along the way. And again, a lot of people tend to think about this and they're like, oh, well, it's just it's a psychological thing. But there's more to it than just that. There is there is a tangible impact on a person's vitality when parts of them split her off or break away. And a lot of these experiences actually happen when people are very, very young, like before they even have the capacity to acknowledge or name that. New ways of perceiving life show up as well. Like new and unexpected ways of perceiving life. Um, sometimes new capacities or or new um new interests or or um the skills, let's say, like show up. And again, it it's like it's challenging to talk about this in in terms of like the language that we have, right? But the work of healing is really this work of reclaiming wholeness. But wholeness is something that goes so far beyond what people understand it to be. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes like the condition that you're talking about, or that that experience that you had, sometimes it can happen spontaneously. Sometimes it's that spontaneous experience that makes the person say, I need to change everything in my life. No, I need to shift directions in in my life. But it's really, really powerful when the person is consciously engaged in that. And I think one of the differences from with how I work with people versus how I've seen other people that claim to do this stuff is that I was taught you can never do the work for somebody else. You can only give that person tools and provide the support, but they have to apply the tools, they have to do their own work. So nobody can retrieve the parts of you for you, they can show you the way and then be there and walk alongside you, but it all has to start in you, and so again, it it's interesting because you can't quite say who the person is going to be because there's this on ongoing like process of discovery, too. As you know, I work with people and I see them grow and and and uh evolve and approach wholeness in these different ways. Um, that's part of that wonder that I was talking about earlier, where the person becomes fascinated by witnessing their own becoming, by by witnessing who they're growing into as well. Yeah, it's it's an amazing thing to see. But there's a lot associated with the back of the neck if we got into talking about physical stuff, right? And so that's why I was curious. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:10

Yeah. I'm like, do we want to get into it or not? Yeah, it was um, it was pretty wild. It was actually, I was doing now, I'm remembering, I was doing a meditation where of like the they had like three spheres, right? So it was like here was kind of the the future, and then like the present was in the middle, and then the past was in the bag. And I was trying to visualize three separate balls, three sort of distinct areas of energy. And uh, you know, front one, fine, no problem. Middle one, cool, that was good. Point to check into the back, and I was like, the whole back of my head is missing, just like gone. I was like, I was like, oh, that's not good. I was like, oh geez, that's not good. And uh so I just sat there and I was just working, you know, I was like, I was working on it and and uh I'm gonna add some tools and the traditions and stuff, and yeah, and then at one point it's just like phom, this like giant piece came back and sort of locked in with what was there. I was like, oh, that was rad. And then I kept working with it. It took a few months, you know, but then eventually the entire back of my head was like reconstructed. And when you talked about earlier today about remembering, you know, I was like literally remembering, like putting your like Humpty Dumpty. That's what I felt like. I was like, I'm literally putting myself back together again. And there was just this profound sense of uh wholeness, I guess, uh, of completeness, of almost like a cycled ending. And uh honestly, it it also felt like uh like I like I could begin, like I could actually sort of begin in this next thing. Whereas like I'd been trying to like make eggs or make an omelet with no eggs, you know, and now I was like, oh, let's roll. Yeah, and like I would been successful, I was like crushed it at you know, at school, it was like yeah, Stanford graduates, straight A's, otters, like all the shit. Work was going great, practice was going great, like all that stuff was going well, right? Uh, but you know, I felt like shit. Yeah, it didn't feel good, but you know, I could play the game, I could fake it really well. Nobody knew, you know, but I knew. And uh there's uh just that constant kind of like tremble of like, okay, dude, like we sent you here for a reason. Like you've got a calling. Like, it's are you doing it? You doing it? You know? I remember I did this one, uh, I did this one meditation. I I meditation is like too strong of a word, it wasn't that intentional, but I felt like I got pulled down to the bottom of the ocean, and there was like I don't know, Poseidon or somebody that was there. And uh and it just was like this incredible presence. And it was like, are you ready to get to work? And I was like, uh, I don't know. And they were like, you said you needed to like learn more about the body, because I was like, I did, you know. Yeah. And then there's like you said you needed to do this, and like you went to school, and like you said you have to do the thing, right? All these conditions that I put on it that was basically just like kicking the responsibility down the line. Yeah. And uh, and then this energy was just like, cut to bullshit, it's time to get to work. Yeah. And then they also said, you know, all that stuff that you think it makes you great, you gotta forget all of it.

unknown 58:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:44

Because to do the healing work, like to do what we need you to do with at the time, my my patience and my practice, you have to be completely present. Right. And like, it's not about even for me at the time, it was like, it was like, it's almost like like the past trauma or whatever was like, wasn't gonna be as much of a hindrance as like all the stuff that I thought was good. All the stuff that I thought was sort of making me meet, all my accomplishments, all this kind of like ego, right? All this stuff that I was sort of hanging my hat on. They were like, you gotta forget all of that. Yeah. And I was like, whoa. It's just like and then oh baby, and then it's time to get time to make the donuts, you know. It's time to get to work.

SPEAKER_01 59:33

Yeah. No, I hear you. I hear you. I mean, I say, and then what? Because that's always a thing, right? Yeah. If I empty out this vessel, what am I? Yeah. And it's so in our tradition, we talk about like we have a certain amount of energy, and I know it's the same in in TCM, right? We're born carrying a certain amount of energy. Yeah, the Jing, the ancestral qi. Right. Um our attachments and our identities are are like threads that that energy is connected to, and it can get pulled far too thin for you to be able to do what you need to do or what you're really here to be. And so, you know, the vast majority of people they can't change their lives. It's not a lack of capacity, it's a lack of energy. They have so many different attachments and entanglements that are constantly siphoning some of their energy away. And so they can't move forward with new things. They can dream up new things occasionally, some don't even have energy for that. They can occasionally think of new things, but then they can't move forward with those things. And again, from this like modern materialist way of seeing things, people say, oh, well, you know, they're like they're lacking motivation or they don't have whatever, they don't have discipline. They don't, and I mean, you know, commitment and consistency are absolutely important or essential. But if you don't have the energy to get yourself moving, then nothing's gonna happen. So first you need to reclaim energy from all those places where it is entangled before you can do anything. And all of the healing work that we do, that's what it's about, right? Because first of all, all of our personal untended wounds are those unopened connections, and they're constantly siphoning that energy that we need to become who we were born to become. So we have to deal with those things so that we could call that energy back. And then the way forward isn't what you've rationally thought up. It's not what you, it's not like the map or the path that you know you laid out or someone else laid out for you. The way forward arises out of something deep in you that just says, do this thing or don't do that thing. You know, it says sign up for this program and just take that leap, you know. And a lot of times the rational mind pulls people away from taking the the steps and making the decisions that would actually help them get to where they need to get to. And people stay stuck because they don't know who they're gonna become if they actually cut loose all of those energetic drains. So this thing, it's this constant process of of um taking these leaps into the abyss of cutting away all these aspects of who you thought you were in service to who you become next. But you don't necessarily get the clear image of who you're becoming next. So there isn't certainty, not on that conscious, rational level. That much deeper part of you knows exactly where you're headed and what you're here to be. But the conscious part is like you know, a cat clawing the rug, trying to not get dragged out of the room, right? Fighting it, kicking and screaming. Yeah, so that's powerful. I mean, that's why I smile when you say certain things. I'm like, yeah, like I could totally relate. Um, and and I do this work because I've lived it over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:36

So the value of having a guide who's lived it and done this and can speak the language and speak to you know, those invisible threads is invaluable. I mean, it's like navigating this stuff. You know, people have been your ideal client has been navigating this on their own for so long and like it's time. Enough is enough. It's like get get some support, let someone who can see through that darkness, you know, shine some light and and walk walk there with you, you know. And like I remember I was going to a ceremony once, and uh I was I'd been so excited about it, and then like started about three days before that little voice was like, like, bro, you don't need it. You're good. Look at your life, you're good. You got a beautiful wife, like kids happy, like you're good, man. You don't need it. And I was like, I was she was driving me to the airport, and I was like, I can't believe I'm going. This is so dumb. Like, everything's good. Why am I doing this? And then on the other side of it, you know, massive like breakthrough, like all sorts of stuff. And I just remember at one point I just like sat down and I was like, Oh my god, like the that I have a part of me that was like trying to tell me not to do this, trying to convince me that everything was okay. Like Joe Rogan calls it like the inner bitch, you know, it's like gotta keep my eye on that. And that was like I gotta, I gotta keep a sharp eye on that. And so I guess what I'm saying is, you know, for people listening to this that are feeling that inkling of a calling, that are feeling that desire to reach out to you, um, even if all of the other things come in and like, oh, don't make the call, you know, we know what's gonna happen. It's like trust, trust that that rumble, that thing that's underneath it. You know, and reach out, reach out and see um see what kind of conversation you guys can have.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:30

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that I teach people, I call it the predators of the mind. And all of us are we're full of these thoughts or these thought forms that exist inside of us that didn't start with, they didn't start in us, with us. We inherited these things. And there's one that is very, very strong, and it's the one that you're talking about. The one that just tells you, like, ah, you don't really need to do this, or you don't really need to do that thing. But that one is always paired with another one that when you don't do the thing, it shows up and just tears you apart for not having done it.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:08

Yeah. Um, but I think these big transformational leaps, they there's always that resistance because there's always this part that is afraid that it's gonna die. Like calling it what it is. And and that means, you know, losing the job or the relationship or whatever, like all these potential things. This fear of losing all of these potential things, the next level is always just on the other side. And it's always so much more than anybody could have ever imagined.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:40

Yeah, I remember I was talking to this woman, she was she was worried about having a baby. She was like, Oh, if I have a baby, like I'm gonna like I'm gonna miss out, and I'm just gonna, I'm not gonna do all the things that I do now when I don't have a baby. And I was like, Yeah, I hear that. And also, here's the thing so when you have the baby, you won't do those things because you don't want to do them. Yeah, because you want to be with your baby, and so it's like, sure, you can like it's I was like, I was like, it's not gonna feel it's gonna feel different because like if you end up not going to the rave or whatever, it's like it's because you wanted to be doing something else. It's not because you were like, Oh, I've got this, I can't go. It's like, no, if you stay, it's because you want to. And that way that feels is totally different, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, brother. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate the time. Um, is there any final message, anything that we haven't talked about that you want to share with the people who might be listening? Just if you feel that call, listen to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:38

Listen to it. Don't wait until that earth shattering experience makes everything fall apart. Sweetheart. And how can they find you? They can find me at droscarcipedez.com. That's probably the best place. All right, brother. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:55

Be sure to check him out. Thank you guys for watching, and we'll catch you next time.