[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mark Grove's podcast.

[SPEAKER_00]: Today's a solo episode, I'm going to give you a couple life updates, and also, yeah, podcast updates, and I want to go into the power of congruence.

[SPEAKER_00]: and ritual.

[SPEAKER_00]: Two things that I think are incredibly important if you want to understand both healing and what it means to feel light and free and be able to trust yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: And ritual from the place of not only the rituals that you build within yourself, but the rituals that you build in relationship to your community and the people around you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And why those are so important to the evolution of the human spirit, and actually to heal to heal this big divide that has been forged and expanded and monetized, et cetera.

[SPEAKER_00]: And for us to heal that divide, you know, I've, I've said recently that if you can't handle difference, like other people's different opinions, different political perspectives, different ideological stances, [SPEAKER_00]: then you'll die under the weight of your own contradictions because we of course within ourselves have thoughts that are contradictory to, you know, our values.

[SPEAKER_00]: We will have parts of us that want one thing and one another will have incongruent parts.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll have parts that are [SPEAKER_00]: Shadow-based will have parts that like porn and parts that no porn is, you know, out of integrity parts that know that have had to lie to get a head and parts that exploit being a victim and parts that exploit power.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we have to be able to hold the complexity of other people's experiences because that's the only way we can hold the complexity of our own.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm gonna dive into that [SPEAKER_00]: because I think it's so important.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can sense this deep desire that we all have that is, hey, look, you're going to make mistakes in your life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Listen, that's just a fact.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to violate by accident, your own values.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the only way to know what your values are is to do that.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're going through something in your life right now, and it feels wildly incongruent, [SPEAKER_00]: And you're still doing it, you're going to cause harm and suffering to yourself and then you're not going to love yourself because you don't love your choices and then you wonder why you have anxiety and depression and addiction to sugar and your doomsgrowing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Information isn't out there.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's in you.

[SPEAKER_00]: You already know this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying anything that you don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: So for the podcast, I had some awarenesses that I really am still enjoying getting guests that I've always wanted to interview.

[SPEAKER_00]: So like I had Dick Schwartz on, which was incredible.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh, the founder of internal family systems.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, God, I have to.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm also finding that I'm really interested in bringing you information that is about how do you use technology in a harmonious way and what technologies can help you create harmony.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like if there's a technology that can help you still have a relationship to social media but not [SPEAKER_00]: a computer like the daylight computer that doesn't have blue light or screen flicker and that's going to help you get your emails done and write your substax or whatever you do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, I want you to know about that technology and I'm just so interested in how do we live in a technological world and honor?

[SPEAKER_00]: Our biology, because we are biological beings, and this podcast is really re-centering around humanness, and what it means to be a human, and why ritual is so important because ritual is human.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I remember listening to this clip that Zach Bush did around the idea of fire, that there's something about when you're looking down at a fire that it turns on, [SPEAKER_00]: The stem cells in your body and he was saying that it turns out that your body actually acts different if you're looking above a fire like at the horizon and he was saying I think it's because when you're looking at a fire your present you're there you're in the moment and that [SPEAKER_00]: And we can't get away from how healing it is to tell stories about fires and play guitar around the fire and be with other people around a fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a real mist thing that is so deeply embedded in our cellular structure.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, the first part I wanted to share, I'm reading this book called Ritual by Maladoma Patrice so May.

[SPEAKER_00]: I 100% recommend getting this book.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's so good.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says it and I'm going to share a [SPEAKER_00]: The abandonment of ritual can be devastating.

[SPEAKER_00]: From the spiritual viewpoint, ritual is inevitable and necessary if one is to live.

[SPEAKER_00]: The young ones are the future of the old ones.

[SPEAKER_00]: To allow this future to happen, the old ones must work with the other world.

[SPEAKER_00]: When an elder fails to perform his work with respect to the spiritual, the future of this elder's threatened, not the present, where ritual is absent, the young ones are restless or violent.

[SPEAKER_00]: There are no real elders and the grownups are bewildered.

[SPEAKER_00]: The future is dim.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let's hear that one part again, because it is straight to the soul juices.

[SPEAKER_00]: where ritual is absent, the young ones are restless or violent, there are no real elders and the grownups are bewildered.

[SPEAKER_00]: The future is dim.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think about this a lot that we reject aging as a culture thereby we reject the wisdom that comes with aging.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have all these different [SPEAKER_00]: And look, I'm not negating the desire for vitality.

[SPEAKER_00]: I also want to honor the sad truths that are culture under values, and like the value perception, the culture of a woman, tends to be seen as decreasing with age and the value of a man increases with age.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you think about that from an evolutionary perspective, I would imagine what mostly underpins that.

[SPEAKER_00]: is that fertility is seen to decrease with age for women and resources is seen to increase with age as a man.

[SPEAKER_00]: So these are two things that evolutionarily we've really valued.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to hold the grief.

[SPEAKER_00]: That comes with just the acknowledgement that we have created a whole system that exploits that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, when I talk about this subject, I always want to be very delicate with it because I am part of the gender that is reinforced this reality.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, how do we walk out of this together?

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we say, hey, look, like I can say to you, oh, look, I don't find, you know, things like filler and Botox to be increasing the attraction of women.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet at the same time, that could be true for me, but not true for so many people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there can also be the experience where someone gets those things and feels better.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to hold the complexity of this, that there is a rejection of moving into being an elder.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a fear of moving into being an elder because we're so terrified of death as a culture.

[SPEAKER_00]: And not just big death, like true mortality, but also the death of all the ego and the parts of ourselves that hold on to certainty [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the parts that really see that our value lives and how many likes we get or how many swipes we get or how our many shares or video gets or how many followers we have.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you think about its social media has been the ultimate exploitive tool for this doorway into the human experience and to the human psyche.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, our soul knows that our value does not live in our appearance.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, we live in this 3D world.

[SPEAKER_00]: So how do we bridge those two things?

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we decide to get some sort of intervention and do it from a coherent place?

[SPEAKER_00]: If we were to sit down with our ancestors and set up a time with a fire and sit around and say, I'm considering this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we do it in a way where you don't feel judgment, but you feel openness to your vulnerabilities and your fears?

[SPEAKER_00]: in my fears and my vulnerabilities and ours as a culture.

[SPEAKER_00]: As Saturday is to believe that the aging process would make us become irrelevant rather than relevant, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: That as an elder, your relevance actually increases in the tribe.

[SPEAKER_00]: It makes me think about what we're really grieving is that we're grieving the village as Francis Weller said that we were born expecting a village we were expecting 40 eyes and all we got were four.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think about that quote all the time because that's really what we desire.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if we had a village where we had shared capacity for one another to hold things together [SPEAKER_00]: You know, where mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and grandpas and grandpas and all the people when they're overwhelmed or held by others that were all resourced through each other because we're not all going to be resourced at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're not all going to feel good at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where other people come in and say, hey, I've got this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why we need each other in the rise of Beyonce, independent women and, you know, all that kind of stuff, which, again, not negating or knocking Beyonce, she's great.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's to say that this cultural idea that we don't need each other is bullshit, such bullshit, you and your soul and mine and my soul, we know we need other, I need my wife, I need my son, my wife needs me.

[SPEAKER_00]: What is it strange and weird thing it would be to say that I can't depend on her or she can't depend on me and that would be a form of rupture we would have to figure out how to build out of that, how to hear that feedback for the relationship we're creating together to create something different, something where when she speaks of our experience she says, he's got me, I've got him and yet we're not taught these skills and I think there's a lot of grief [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe there's been a beautiful evolution from relationships that and communities that performed on self abandonment.

[SPEAKER_00]: We know religions have done that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Cultures have done that.

[SPEAKER_00]: That have said, we don't want your different perspective.

[SPEAKER_00]: We don't honor your authentic self-expression.

[SPEAKER_00]: get in line where we don't value the individual in the collective.

[SPEAKER_00]: We hope that the individual washes away in the collective because the individual can represent to threat to the collective.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is where the current modern day weaponization of [SPEAKER_00]: Collectivism and belonging has really been leveraged for so many things for any ideology, you know, for You're a good person if you believe this and if you don't believe it then you're bad and we've done We've associated political stances with those things, but even if I was to point out which politics points to which thing It wouldn't be the bridge back to each other, which is that all of it is bullshit [SPEAKER_00]: They're all just constructs to be able to say you're different than me and because you're different than me, then let's obsess over that instead of saying.

[SPEAKER_00]: how are we more similar than we're different?

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we begin to maintain compassion and curiosity in the company of this difference?

[SPEAKER_00]: What I love in this book is, like quote where he says, ritual is not compatible with the rapid rhythm that industrialism has injected into life.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, this is so good, listen to this.

[SPEAKER_00]: So whenever ritual happens in a place commanded by [SPEAKER_00]: Ritual becomes a statement against the very rhythm that feeds the needs of that machine.

[SPEAKER_00]: It makes no difference whether it is a political machine or otherwise.

[SPEAKER_00]: So whenever ritual happens in a place that's dominated by a machine, it becomes a statement against it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it actually becomes a revolution against it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Think about it if we could bring a ritual to social media, ritual to our community centers, rituals to our families.

[SPEAKER_00]: We start to go against these ideological separations.

[SPEAKER_00]: How do we go out and be an army of force for that without people knowing, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Without even having to use the word ritual, we say, let's break bread together.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's have a conversation.

[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you come over for dinner?

[SPEAKER_00]: And dinner will be the ritual.

[SPEAKER_00]: And do you see how in a space that is demanding political separation?

[SPEAKER_00]: That is an act of revolution, and it counters the machine that runs off of our differences.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we have to do that alchemical process again of going into the parts with in us that are afraid of being in the company of difference because we have not to alchemize the differences that live within us.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's move on to congruence.

[SPEAKER_00]: I recently shared on sub-stack and I'll put the link to my sub-stack because I'm loving sub-stack.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think sub-stack is the, maybe the answer or the antidote to the future because of long-form content.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I shared this note, it says, research shows that chronic stress is in cause by work or money.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's caused by incongruence.

[SPEAKER_00]: The internal split between who you are and who you pretend to be.

[SPEAKER_00]: When your life doesn't match your truth, the body shifts into survival mode, pumping cortisol that weakens immunity and flames the body and fogs the brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's why people in places like Okinawa and Sardinia live so long, not because of diet, but because they live in harmony with themselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the sole point.

[SPEAKER_00]: your body is designed for authenticity.

[SPEAKER_00]: The moment you stop abandoning yourself and return to your truth, your whole system on clenches, and life begins to organize around the frequency of wholeness.

[SPEAKER_00]: The moment you stop abandoning yourself and return to your truth, your whole system on clenches, I think that's huge.

[SPEAKER_00]: This has been true for me.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like how do I come back to a place of coherence in communication?

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I have these two parts, one that likes to cause shit and then the other part that has to clean up the shit.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I go from like a disregulated fight and a system energy to [SPEAKER_00]: an energy of falling.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's not balance or coherence.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you've ever heard me speak, would you probably have from either of those places?

[SPEAKER_00]: They're not healthy because they're still creating the divide and the split that I, and very passionate about resolving.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I have to acknowledge the part of me that's afraid of not being heard.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I don't, I'm not responsible with myself expression.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is such a great way to reflect and learn when you do things that are out of alignment, [SPEAKER_00]: say things that are out of alignment.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're discovering more about yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why you have to be gentle with yourself, but not just gentle.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have to be savage with yourself because you could be gentle with why you do things when you didn't know what you know when you did it, but you must be savage with yourself about the responsibility of learning from what you did.

[SPEAKER_00]: because that experience of healthy shame is saying change now and if you don't change now, you create the doorway for audictions, because addictions are basically inesitizing the pain of your unlived potential of what you know to be true that you're not doing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so you can be gentle and compassionate for the humanness that you have for the mistakes that you make, but don't for one second pretend that any choice you make after you know something is harmful to yourself isn't causing harm to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is because you know you shouldn't be doing it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it actually takes more energy to keep up a behavior that's out of alignment than to choose one that is.

[SPEAKER_00]: because something about the universe God, whatever you want to call it, organizes, around that desire for alignment, that desire for coherency, that desire for connection, because ultimately, isn't that what the universe is always trying to do is to move into coherent, it's trying to move you up an octave.

[SPEAKER_00]: to move you to a different frequency, and you're getting these painful energies within your body when you do something that you know is not in integrity, and then you discover what your integrity is, you discover what your values are.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if you don't live them, then you stay at the lower octave you stay at the lower frequency.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're actually almost like become anxious and depressed in that space because you're circling the drain.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what's so fascinating is it's not actually drain, it's a portal.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you let yourself go through it and the dark energy, the emotion, whatever it is, that you think is actually heavy, is actually the fire to your transformation.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually the thing that if you let it cook you, if you let the heaviness become you, and you just accept what is true about what you've done and who you've been and what you're tolerating in your life, then now you [SPEAKER_00]: can take what you're feeling as a drain that you're going to go through and transform through that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just letting the truth be the truth so that you can actually change instead of denying the truth and pretending you're not who you've been or you haven't tolerated what you've tolerated that you're not addicted to this or that you're not that just admit.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's why one of the most transformational parts of AA is saying, I'm an addict.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm an alcoholic.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now look, I wouldn't say that the next part, which is like a powerless in the face of my disease, it's like, no, you're powerful in the face of the doorway to the things you want to anesthetize, because you're not paying attention to the suffering you've had that's asking you to step in your fullest potential in your power and your mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here's the deal.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm just going to end on this, which is if your screen time is higher than the amount of time you're spending on your mission and your purpose and your transformation, then you [SPEAKER_00]: You've got no excuses.

[SPEAKER_00]: You have to look at that as like holy crap.

[SPEAKER_00]: I am distracting myself from what is possible for me.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I don't have hope.

[SPEAKER_00]: I scroll it away.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the level of responsibility we have to take for ourselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: So as I speak to you, I speak to myself.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you've loved this episode, please hit subscribe.

[SPEAKER_00]: Please share it with someone who you think might be transformative with.

[SPEAKER_00]: If it's been transformative with you, please leave a comment, share it on your social media, tell people to come join us.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can't wait.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is an act of ritual, an act of rebellion.

[SPEAKER_00]: Love you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Can't wait to talk to you soon.