transcript: michael mervosh – invest in yourself (ep.68)€¦ · after the ecstasy, the laundry:...

The content and use of this transcription is intended for the use of premium members only. Unless expressly given permission by Ted, each premium subscriber can share two (2) transcripts with two (2) non-subscribers, after which they should consider a premium membership. Corporate members can also share transcripts within their organization (up to 50 employees). Please reach out to Ted at [email protected] for exceptions. All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of the firms they represent. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

Transcript: Michael Mervosh – Invest in Yourself (EP.68) Published Date: September 10, 2018 Length: 1 hr 12 min Web page: capitalallocatorspodcast.com/mervosh

Michael Mervosh is the deeply insightful Executive Director of the Hero’s Journey Foundation, an organization he created that provides experiential learning opportunities for human development and transformation based on Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero’s journey. He has a passion and indescribable skill in enlivening the developmental process and fostering vitality, meaning and well-being in individuals, groups, and organizations. When not running programs or training others, Michael practices psychotherapy at the Nuin Center in Pittsburgh, where he has professionally resided for 25 years.

Our conversation took place in the mountains of West Virginia towards the end of this year’s journey, and covers Michael’s path to creating the experience, the myth of the Hero, lessons in how the world actually works, the call to adventure, perfectionism, uncertainty, fear, and poetry.

If you’re intrigued, I strongly encourage you to check out herosjourneyfoundation.org. Spaces are limited for the annual summer Men’s and Women’s Journeys, so sign up for next year’s trip at the website or reach out to me. I intend to be back on the mountain next year and hope to see you there.

Edited by: Rev.com

mailto:[email protected]

http://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/2018/06/17/portnoy/

http://herosjourneyfoundation.org/

Capital Allocators Podcast EP.68 Michael Mervosh

- 2 -

Book Links

Phillip Shepherd, New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-First Century

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Jack Kornfeld, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path

Joseph Jastrab, Sacred Manhood Sacred Earth: A Vision Quest into the Wilderness of a Man's Heart

Ted: 00:00:05 Hello, I'm Ted Seides and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can keep up-to-date by visiting capitalallocatorspodcast.com. Both times I have been interviewed and shared those conversations on Capital Allocators, I made reference to a special experience I participated in for the last five years called The Hero's Journey. The weeklong journey in the mountains of West Virginia provides a setting and platform for each participant to access their best self.

Ted: 00:00:54 My guest on today's show is Michael Mervosh, the deeply insightful executive director and founder of The Hero's Journey Foundation, an organization that provides experiential learning opportunities for human development and transformation based on Joseph Campbell's mythic Hero's Journey. He has a passion and indescribable skill in enlivening the developmental process and fostering vitality, meaning and well-being in individuals, groups and organizations.

Ted: 00:01:26 When not running programs or training others, Michael practices psychotherapy at the Nuin Center in Pittsburgh where he has professionally resided for 25 years. Our conversation took place in the mountains towards the end of this year's journey and it's different from those you may be accustomed to hearing on the show. We cover Michael's path to creating the experience, the myth of the hero, lessons in how the world actually works, the call to adventure, perfectionism, uncertainty, fear and poetry.

https://amzn.to/2ofVBf6

https://amzn.to/2LvOFUb

https://amzn.to/2MWvWFY

https://amzn.to/2LuFK5u

https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/Edit?token=ue10by-3YrSPUsvut5OjcVeMgnWyQREq9B6cerOxDoSxF92WcO4J5G9iidueql8BpQuCFJ3arN1Yuvbx91JMlKQXej0&loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=5.61




- 3 -

Ted: 00:01:59 If you're intrigued, I strongly encourage you to check out herosjourneyfoundation.org. Spaces are limited for the Annual Summer Men's and Women's Journeys, so sign up for next year's trip at the website or reach out to me to find out more. I intend to be back on the mountain next year and hope to see you there. Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Mervosh.

Ted: 00:02:28 Michael, we are in the mountains of West Virginia, in the late innings of another impactful Hero's Journey. I'm really excited after the impact you've had on my life the last five years, to be able to share you stories. Why don't we start with where it all began for you?

Michael: 00:02:43 Well, I came out of my mother awful young and the culture of the steel mills of Pittsburgh and shaped by the blue-collar world of smoke and fire and steel, forging out of living and granting out of life with being given just the right amount of things to keep me going and deprived of the right amount of things to keep me unfed and denied enough to make me search.

Ted: 00:03:16 Where did that search start?

Michael: 00:03:17 I don't really know where that search started. I think the drive, the sense of something beyond what we do day-to-day and beyond the stories that were told to me when I realized there's another story, I probably wasn't … I had lessons when I realized that there's something about magic and mystery and beauty that's called the opposite sex, [inaudible 00:03:44] as any in nature.

Michael: 00:03:53 I had the fortune of being part of a youth group that would go on retreats, and a man who, to this day I stayed close to who took me along and bailed me out of trouble and looked after me in his own unaware way, helped me navigate the world beyond my immediate family which is the first threshold is, how does the world find you and meet you beyond your parents. Many of us don't make it that far, really.

Ted: 00:04:28 What formative experience led you to realize that you had the ability to steer your life in the direction you wanted?

Michael: 00:04:39 You're assuming I have that ability, one day maybe. Well you see, I used to think I was steering and I steered my life exactly how I was trained to steer. I learned how to drive well. I know how to take hold of the wheel. I know how to take charge of the










- 4 -

gas pedal and I knew how to drive it into the ditch. Actually you know the car took itself there, with the ways the culture shaped me and taught. If you follow this way of life and you do exactly how we train you and you follow the commandments and you obey the rules and you climb this ladder, you will enter the kingdom of something and get your due.

Michael: 00:05:28 I, like many people bought in fully and I played that game. I looked to be good at it and one day in my late 20s and then again in my early 30s, I realized the prescription does not work and it all fell down and the wheels came off.

Ted: 00:05:52 Yeah, what happened for you when the wheels came off?

Michael: 00:05:53 My marriage failed and it wasn't like the fairytale. You can do all the right things and you can love one another even, that doesn't mean it works. I started to buy in and feel like, oh shit I'm a failure, because if you don't follow the rules and it doesn't work then you failed and then you try harder, you repent and try again and you repent and try again. I was fortunate enough to slip through in to another way and have opportunities conspire to show me there's a world beyond right and wrong, good or bad, you and me.

Ted: 00:06:29 Which opportunity stands out for you?

Michael: 00:06:31 I had many of them, but definitive ones you know those ones that are markers. I was at the Caron Foundation in I guess early 1980s. A woman by the name of [inaudible 00:06:44] an opportunity in my first place of employment to go to training and understanding family systems, so I signed up for this training program, week-long training program and writing PA. I was nervous and I showed up there, be part of this training group. First night in a big wide circle of about 50 people and this woman comes out and there's this big tension in the air. I'm thinking, what kind of training program is this?

Michael: 00:07:18 We're going around and we're understanding that there's going to be this guy who's going to be a protagonist in this thing that was going to happen and I'm like, oh okay, that's interesting. He had to pick certain people to be in his story and he picked a bunch of people and then they said we have to pick someone to be you as a boy. He looked across the room and he says, him, it was me. I go, okay, that's cool.








- 5 -

Michael: 00:07:43 The next day, I realized that I was not in a training program and I would have never signed up for what I was in. I was in a full blown psychodrama experience and I was to represent this man's interior life and the steering wheel came off.

Ted: 00:08:05 You've mentioned, if you knew what it was, you never would've done it.

Michael: 00:08:09 Hell no, hell no. I would've scoffed at it.

Ted: 00:08:15 What do you do when you run in to that resistance day-to-day? The world that I come in, the financial community, a lot of the stuff you're talking about is different things that people don't relate to.

Michael: 00:08:30 You know what I do when you realize someone has a different light on and they're humming to a different song than you, let them sing. Let them sing their song. I think the difference is, is to be less troubled by it. You have to be less troubled by it. It takes a long time I think for anyone, certainly myself to realize that everything happen its own time and its own way, that something is not really, really up to me or you or anyone else. It's been really humbling to look around like here, with men that are here. They're all once had never figured. They do not look the part.

Ted: 00:09:12 What is the part? What do you mean by the part?

Michael: 00:09:14 They do not look like someone who would sign up for something like this.

Ted: 00:09:19 Yeah, president of a company included.

Michael: 00:09:24 They don't look like it. They either look like the guys I grew up with, the guys I worked in the mill with, the guys you would've walked down Wall Street with who are humming a different tune, like an anthem allegiant to it and shaped by it, and it shapes the reality and it's a self-closed loop. You don't do anything about that. You just wait for the trouble to come because it always comes.

Ted: 00:09:53 What happened? After you had this formative experience, the Caron Foundation, what'd you do next?










https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/Edit?token=ue10by-3YrSPUsvut5OjcVeMgnWyQREq9B6cerOxDoSxF92WcO4J5G9iidueql8BpQuCFJ3arN1Yuvbx91JMlKQXej0&loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=593


- 6 -

Michael: 00:10:01 It's not what I did next, it was what was undone next that lit the fuse. What happened was that I went into interior spaces I didn't know were in me. I didn't know they were there. I had a glass ceiling in my life. I didn't know that was a glass ceiling. I didn't know they were doorways. I just thought that was the four walls of the world and it opened up a whole new world.

Michael: 00:10:28 What do you do when you're in a whole new world and you experience oneness for real, oneness for real? I cried so hard, my insides turn inside. I laughed so hard I thought my eyes would explode, my cheeks hurt, you know this feeling, and then with strangers and then it starts unfolding. So that it opened me to magic and wonder. It was far beyond the world of reason and then it went back into doing what I always do.

Ted: 00:10:58 Which is?

Michael: 00:10:59 Follow the prescription again, drink the same Kool-Aid, walk the same way and back into a world that reflects the reality back to you. This actually who you are and it took a long time for that other world to come foreground, in a way that said, wait, that's real. That's as real as anything. It's as real as going in to Walmart or more real. More real than when I watch people do every day that they call that for a living? For a living? They don't look alive to me.

Ted: 00:11:39 When you say that that's real, what's the that?

Michael: 00:11:42 That, yeah what is this? What is this thing that animates us, that moves us? What is this thing that's intangible that makes the breeze blow, that makes me want to hug somebody, that makes me want to close my eyes because I can't stand to look, that makes me want to reach towards a stranger I don't even know and say something that's not clearly form? What animates us and moves us and drives this whole thing? I don't have a clue.

Michael: 00:12:11 It reminds me of the next thing that happened where I met a woman there, at this workshop who worked at a place called Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania and everything started moving. My first job at alternatives was the first and last job I ever sought out in my life. Everything else sought me out and I didn't know how to pay attention to that at first. Everything sought me out. It was a whole new orientation.









- 7 -

Michael: 00:12:46 She calls me up as a follow-up and says, would you like to work here? I'm like what? At that time it was a really prominent place and she wanted to be a part of their A Brand New Family Program doing these constellations and I said to her, no, thank you. Thank you so much I'm so, so flattered, so honored that you asked but no thank you because I was getting pretty cool at the job I was in. She said, okay, but could you tell me why not? I said, yeah it's pretty far. It's like a 50 minute drive, it's pretty inconvenient. I said inconvenient and we hung up and oh man, that haunted me, that word, inconvenient, an opportunity of a lifetime. I don't want to be troubled by driving there.

Michael: 00:13:32 Two days later I called them back, thank God and that started me on the next part of my path.

Ted: 00:13:38 What lit the flame for you in that experience at Gateway and where'd you go from there?

Michael: 00:13:43 Well, it is how it all unfolds, right? I started learning how to do family work and studying family systems and bringing people together and psychodramas where people step in and play roles. Meeting very fascinating men who mentored me like Abraham Twerski, who was the founder of the rehab. Nick and Ramsey people took me under their wing and showed me things and gave me ways of doing this and then it unfolds … They built this thing at the time it was brand new called Challenge by Choice, Ropes Courses outside and hey what's that up there on the trees.

Michael: 00:14:20 They told me, and who uses them? All the patients. Why can't the family people use them? In fact, why can't I use them when we're not working? We started doing workup in the air and so that created a deeper sense of like stuff being in … living being in your body or life is in body and not just in our heads and that should be another world.

Ted: 00:14:41 How did you create this experience called the Hero's Journey?

Michael: 00:14:46 I know, right? It just happened. You use language that they keep saying like how I did something. The questions keeps us like, well then how did this keep happening? Then the next thing, these are all things that happened. Reading the man by the name of Joseph Campbell and it was like one of those things where the words jumped off the page. I wasn't just reading like









- 8 -

on the flat paper, but something was being transmitted in what I was reading.

Michael: 00:15:20 I remember this one time where I'm reading, there's this thing called the zeal of eternity that longs for incarnation in space and time. I'm like, what does that mean? Like what? That makes no sense like the zeal … My body is something in my psyche's animating the zeal of eternity for incarnation and time. I didn't know that was my job description. I never knew that, but now I know this is my job description. That's what I do for a living. That's what I do for a living. I do that for aliveness to become the zeal of eternity you know the way something just as passionate zeal that lives outside of time that wants to incarnate and the one thing it doesn't have, which is form and so that started it.

Michael: 00:16:11 I got hole and that took me down like who is this Campbell dude? Another rabbit hole, another facet on the diamond, ropes courses, family systems theory, religion, all these different variables, rehabilitation … What the hell does that mean? From there.

Ted: 00:16:32 Yeah, this Campbell dude. Some people might have heard of this movie called Star Wars. What was it about Campbell that influenced that film?

Michael: 00:16:44 Well, George Lucas was a fan of Campbell and he absorbed the myth. This all sense that myth is something culturally very misunderstood. We tend to call myths lies, you know if it's a myth it's sort of a legend that's not true because you can't actually process it with a linear mind. Linear mind takes a myth and says, oh that's a lie. It's just a myth. It's just a fairytale. It's not really real, but what a myth is, is something that's truer than historical fact. Something more true than whatever a linear historical fact would be. I was born into existence in August of 1959, where it all began with my mother, historical fact, but we identify with our historical facts as a reality of who we are and that's the trouble and that's the limitation and that's the glass ceiling.

Ted: 00:17:46 What's the myth of a hero?

Michael: 00:17:48 Well, the myth of the hero used to be to become more and more a superpower. This idea that you become larger than life








- 9 -

and you stand among the others as an example for others to follow. That's been a real popular myth but as culture changes, it reshapes the myth that needs for itself so then it creates a new myth which is still arriving in our times we're not there because there's no more one person that can be the hero, but the hero I would say is someone who's always called into unknowing, not, not knowing but an unknowing always called beyond the bounds, the rigidifying bounds that are familiar.

Michael: 00:18:32 What a hero does is it goes beyond the established parameters of the way the world actually is now and experiences what's beyond that world and then brings that back into this world in order to reshape it and renew it and redefine the culture which then reshapes the people in it.

Ted: 00:18:52 Yeah. In our field, we hear a lot about what people call it growth mindset.

Michael: 00:18:58 Oh yeah, that's self-improvement, man. They're pretty underrated.

Ted: 00:19:02 When you describe this, that's what came for me. There's this idea of going beyond what you already know.

Michael: 00:19:09 Yeah, I worked it on myself.

Ted: 00:19:10 Yeah, okay.

Michael: 00:19:11 What do you think is wrong with you? What needs improvement do you think? Now, you're looking at that and it's a trouble worth having. Are you trying to get rid of that trouble by improving yourself? Keep improving, let's see how it goes.

Ted: 00:19:24 What's the alternative?

Michael: 00:19:26 Well, the heroic task is facing what ifs and not trying to change what is. That's called the tyrant. Philip Shepherd writes about that in his books, New Self, New World, The Radical Wholeness, that's the tyrant. Tyrants try to change the world around them to suit them so is called the infant and rather we have to change ourselves in relation to what ifs and adapt ourselves to what is and that's hard, hard work. That's hard work, to do that, to mature and ripen in it to say, I need you to be different from me so I can be happy. Have a go with that.











- 10 -

Ted: 00:20:06 What was the call for you that led to the creation of what we're experiencing here?

Michael: 00:20:13 Well, a call always comes when something's missing. You have to be deprived of something. Something has to be absent or undeveloped and the part of you that's awake and aware knows it. That part of you knows something's missing. That was making me wanted to seek out of the absence of what was there, so I just always felt like I was seeking and longing for something I knew was missing. That's the compass setting.

Michael: 00:20:44 Took me years, decades really to understand that Love Dogs poem by Rumi, where it's the longing itself that's the call and so I feel that and I get scared when I don't feel my longing. I used to try to cure it. I didn't know it was the cure. Like make this longing go away but even yesterday I felt the longing like when I feel the sunset it makes me think of people I miss and times like, oh they aren't here, you know?

Ted: 00:21:10 Yeah.

Michael: 00:21:11 The melancholic sweetness of a Sunday evening oh got to go into the work world and I feel like I'm just approaching the majesty of the sunset. What came in was through that was vision comes through that. I need a vision quest with Joseph Jastrab in 1992, whatever it was and I did it. That seeded it of course because I did a journey to get away from everything and often know not to be shaped by forces around me, what to do but to really feel what that ignited in me and to find what was really alive for me that it would be worth doing. That takes a long time.

Ted: 00:21:52 Why don't you describe what it is, this journey we're on here this week?

Michael: 00:21:58 You're talking about this particular forum we're in right now?

Ted: 00:22:00 This particular forum, yeah.

Michael: 00:22:03 Right now we're on a mountaintop in remote setting in a middle of a national forest in West Virginia in the United States. We are up here to take leave of our minds really and the fabric of our culture that's shaping us every day into who we are to be. We're spending seven days or one lifetime or eternity, whatever comes first up here to undo the things that are called











- 11 -

unquestioned assumptions about what is, unquestioned and unexamined assumptions and expectations about how we believe life to be. That's not why somebody signs up, somebody told me to come here and they don't know what the hell they did. Nobody would come here if they knew why they were coming here. The same way I wouldn't have went.

Michael: 00:22:53 What we do is we come up here and we go into a giant reflecting mirror called this world around and natural world where we have wide open skies, vast, vast horizons up over that high plains area over there. We have deep green forest fields to get lost in over here. We have cave systems underground here where there's this underwater current flowing underneath us right now that no one can see or touch or feel, they're shaping us right now.

Michael: 00:23:26 We come up into this nature bowl and we soak in that to get out of these four walls, the limitations of four walls and you notice you have been in very few rooms, maybe one room in this entire space that we're in that square, that's for a reason. We bring the background forward. It's all round spaces here. We're in a mountain going in your built by built corporate suede in 1970 that people are still amazed by.

Michael: 00:23:53 You come up here and you enter into a living myth because where could you actually live it? Because most people would read about it and they can discuss it but what do you say? I am going to leave everything I know behind and then I'm going to undo this next and now I'm going to deal with what happens when none of that is here defining me anymore and now I will define me, but I don't know how that goes and now there are no instructions and the prescriptions are all gone. That's the reorientation process towards mythic worlds, where your ability to be here right here, right now which takes … were to animate something that starts to take over and then you got to pay attention to it and then you have to yield.

Michael: 00:24:40 Great hero act of our time is to surrender to something beyond ourselves that starts to seep into us. These water droplets that we are, oceans starts to swim in us when we out to the ocean. We use elements, we do use different things that takes up in the air and under the ground and into the forests and you know around fires and all kinds of things to exchange at a body level something else that gets animated that may or may not be






- 12 -

coming through to someone who is listening right now that makes perfect sense and no sense at all because you can't grab it. The more you try to grab it, the more confused you are but if you let it seep in to you.

Ted: 00:25:22 Michael, I know my experience here on the mountain was truly transformative for my life. I know it has been for the men that I've been here with. I wondered if it made sense to share a little bit about that. I'm not quite sure how to go about it but why don't we dive in?

Michael: 00:25:40 Yeah, I think that's the way in, you know? Just like that is I don't know how this goes, how to share this or where we can go. That's in the spirit of journey. When you use two words truly transformative and maybe we start there like, what's really true? What do you mean exactly for you when you say transformative?

Ted: 00:26:02 I had heard about the journey from a friend, blogged in the back of my head, oh that sounds strange.

Michael: 00:26:09 You see that's the call right into an adventure, right, someone hear your call, something sticks.

Ted: 00:26:15 You know what? It's something stuck but it ended a little strange and some years later a lot happened in my life and I felt the need to dive into something different, change in my life and I remembered that and I called them up and it told me next to nothing, he said, oh that's going on? Yeah, maybe you should go. You know that first year on the mountain, I learned life lessons that I just didn't know where they were coming from, didn't know how I didn't learn them along the way and some came directly, conversations, some came from understanding experiences of others and a lot came from this sort of this magical environment.

Michael: 00:27:01 Yeah, a concoction of conditions.

Ted: 00:27:05 That's how it started and it really … transformative in the sense that I felt like, maybe the colloquial way of saying it was midlife crisis but that of course that's not me. There's no crisis. I'm not that guy but …

Michael: 00:27:23 Midlife immersions, right?










- 13 -

Ted: 00:27:24 Midlife immersions, yeah. Something needed to shift in that process, that'll last me the rest of my life started here. That's how it's transformative. The other piece of it is I think is a man in this financial world and this society and I was so accustomed to have to rely on myself for everything. Maybe I was conditioned that way as a kid but I learned the power here of what you call the we instead of the I.

Michael: 00:27:55 Me too, I mean in ways that were very good for shaping me was I was taught to rely on myself and encouraged to and also had to. I had to rely on myself. Some of that wasn't a choice because nobody was really there.

Ted: 00:28:10 Why? What happened for you if that was the case?

Michael: 00:28:13 Adults were adults doing adult things in the adult world and kids were just around. You know what, you didn't raise a kid, you fed a kid. You schooled a kid. You didn't raise them, you didn't cultivate a child in my blue-collared neighborhood. You kept a child you know the way you keep an egg in a nest and give it the things it needs but there's no one in the world. That wasn't a real world. Heavenly things were for the next life so do the right thing, you'll get the reward in the next life which never really comes in this one.

Michael: 00:28:50 When you say reliance if like even if you give me your hand for a minute and rather than rely on yourself and say I lean into you and you lean into my hand and we rest in it. There is a dynamic tension we can feel and there is an aliveness I feel and that way my body … how do I give this to myself? I could do a push up and be in the same position to give that for myself and that's good, but this feels like a living presence is different.

Ted: 00:29:17 Yeah.

Michael: 00:29:18 You know like this, we're relying on one another which is very different than depending on you and you carrying me.

Ted: 00:29:22 That for me was that transformative process and there have been so many lessons along the way that you either hear or I guess feel or come to you from being there.

Michael: 00:29:38 Yeah, I think these universal truths that you know about. The way the world really is or how it works in this world. I think the biggest suffering that I saw even for myself is that I'm growing in











- 14 -

appreciation. The deep wound a lot of us carry is nobody showed us how the world works.

Ted: 00:30:00 Sure.

Michael: 00:30:00 Like how it works so even you think about financial investment and I don't know how. Do you show me or do you do it for me and how does that work? Not unlike the priests with access to God. Do you show me God or do you talk to him for me or do you barter it or broker it, this thing around like watch it like I don't know how to make it in the world? It's so deep, deep, deep seated, this great fear because they don't show us how the world works and one of my favorite Campbell quotes is this, if you want to help this world, show people how to live in it, show them how to live in it. You show them how to live in it.

Michael: 00:30:52 There's so much shame when we don't know how and envy like, you know how, you have a really nice house, how did you get that? How did you get that nice house? What do you know that I don't know? That's a deep underground competitive current rather than saying, well, you will learn how. Because we don't always want to learn how, we want to be given. Just give it to me, just give me a house like that, I don't know how you get one or let alone build one, like show me how to access living myth so that this journey comes alive and you show me how you create the conditions like when you say, well, I can't tell you how you come alive inside but I can create conditions that allows me to come alive and maybe others to come alive and you set the conditions.

Michael: 00:31:42 I can't tell you how to get that raincoat off of you but I can get the sun beating on you maybe pretty hard. I can make you take the raincoat off. I can't make you want to reveal what's under there but I can turn up some heat that make you want to take your shirt off. It's that kind of thing. We need the right conditions but no one ever shows us how to I think and part of what we do is show people how.

Ted: 00:32:09 I remember you telling me a few years ago this concept that really resonated for me which was while your parents didn't have all the answers because no one told them. I think the story you told was you're walking up to a bridge to cross a river and the bridge isn't there and you turned to your father and say, dad, where's the bridge? He says, what's a bridge?







- 15 -

Michael: 00:32:41 What do you mean bridge? They can't give us what they weren't given or they weren't given it and it created a hunger in them to go get it, you know how you get it. Some of the deeply satisfying things is learning how to give somebody what I never got but what's really painful is watching someone try to give to someone else out of their depravation, out of what they were never given, they compensate.

Michael: 00:33:09 All of us when we get wounded, that wound becomes our gift because then through that pain and wounding, I understand something, I'm awake to the world now and I see you hurting and I get how that goes and what you need but if I'm wounded they don't know.

Michael: 00:33:28 I will also say, I don't want to be the wounded one. I want to be the one that helps wounded ones and I want to be a white knight and shining armor and you can be my damsel in distress and that's a match made in hell.

Ted: 00:33:40 Say that again.

Michael: 00:33:40 If you're not in touch with your wound and your deficit, your flaw and you don't know that it's in you and active in you because you've disidentified with it and you say I don't want to go there anymore and you haven't genuinely have people go there with you and help you transform it into a healed hole, you'll compensate by disindentifying and now instead of being the wounded one, you will be the helper.

Ted: 00:34:06 What is it that brings someone here? I know what brought me here. Does someone have to have that I had a rough [crosstalk 00:34:16], does it have to happen that way?

Michael: 00:34:18 It doesn't have to be like that though. You can't say you had traumatic childhood that's why you're here. No. Trouble always comes. There's this interesting comparison about where the Christian Bible has evolved. You would look at these scriptural passages that are when compared to religions, these things all line up from different cultures. That's what Campbell said, these myths are alive in cultures in all times. Like the reductionism from the Greek translation of the Aramaic and in the English is ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened to you. Well man, that's a fairytale for children.









- 16 -

Michael: 00:35:07 Ask, first of all ask, ask what? Ask when you really need help. How hard it is to ask? Number one, when you ask, you don't receive. You don't just get the answer, that forecloses. We all live in the surface. Ask me a question, I'll give you an answer. Can we move on? Question number two please. Skim the surface, go down the line and wait till it's just one gray line of collection of knowledge, oh boy. Ask and you shall receive, no. Seek and you shall find, no. Knock and the door shall be opened to you, no. Ask and be troubled, seek and get lost in the seeking, knock and feel the barrier, knock against the barrier.

Ted: 00:36:00 Where do you go from there?

Michael: 00:36:02 The Upanishads would say there's trouble that's worth it so that you evolve and grow and learn how and find out how it works, not to get to the end, to get into it, not by the end, be fully in this world before you leave it. Then in that, like you experienced here in all the trials, the boon is underneath the ordeal and you get an adventure and you get an ordeal and they overlap. One becomes the other.

Michael: 00:36:31 This is so great, oh shit. Oh shit or oh god, I'm just so miserable. Oh, I didn't see that coming. Then something rises out of that mix is where God is. Then ask and then you receive beyond what you ask for then you seek and then how lost and disoriented you are, you find a new orientation. When you knock, you get through the barrier and at the belly of the beast where you feel like there's no way through, it's not the way you were looking, the forest finds you and something opens beyond what you could see before.

Ted: 00:37:10 It reminds me of this the headspace meditation app. There's this great line about no matter how dark the clouds are, there's always a blue sky above it but sometimes you got to sit through the thunderstorm.

Michael: 00:37:23 Yeah, and you can only see the sun half a day. If you really want to keep seeing the sun, you look at the moon. It's a different sunlight. From the mythic journey from Campbell's perspective he would say, well, we're always seeking the sun. Well, you can't get it every day. You get it some days but you don't despair when it's night. Then you learn to see that we're all to become like the moon. We reflect the sun, but I can't look








- 17 -

directly into the sun. I can't look directly into God, I burn up but we can be reflections of that, right?

Ted: 00:37:59 Yeah.

Michael: 00:37:59 Then even that, even that will be gone for three days out of the month.

Ted: 00:38:04 One of those lessons and those dichotomies that I took out of being here was, and it took me a while to realize that, wow, I've tried to control everything in my own life. I had a motto that you've created for the Hero's Journey is be the hero of your own life and as I've come to embrace that, those are actually entirely opposite things.

Michael: 00:38:27 I think if I would rewrite that now, not that it would make much more sense to anybody but I think you had to be the hero of your own life, I'm not even sure that there's any motto I like all mottos lack of the distillation really, there's no words point to the source but to say to be in charge of your own aliveness, be the hero of your own life means to be responsible to see to it that you are alive.

Ted: 00:38:58 Fully alive.

Michael: 00:38:59 Fully alive and includes tolerating all the places in you that are not yet alive and may not be fully alive in this lifetime. It's not by being rah, rah, rah all the time, that's just bullshit on the surface.

Ted: 00:39:12 Super interesting that in the financial world, you hear a lot about people who strive for traditionally defined success and then feel something, empty is the word or flat …

Michael: 00:39:27 [Polo 00:39:27].

Ted: 00:39:27 … polo and I think that that is a call for this type of adventure for sure.

Michael: 00:39:33 Yeah. People I think come through one of two doorways every day. Everything fails or everything works, both ways get you there. I was thinking of this earlier when you're talking, this term currency is an interesting term to me. What it means is to have currency. What does it mean to be current and to be able to obtain the currency? Any kind of viable currency is to go to












- 18 -

exchange it, not to collect it but to exchange it. When we have a lively, a life-giving exchange, I can give you a current of my poetry and you can give me a current of your lived experience of something and we exchange and it holds value to the two of us.

Michael: 00:40:16 When we turn it into a thing, when we objectify our currency, it becomes a static thing. We call in religion a false god, an idol, because we're worshipping a static structure. Those statutes they don't say anything. They rigidify. When you have a false idol, it rigidifies and it's dull, it has no life in it. When you think of like investment, it's very different than paying a fee versus providing an investment that offers a yield with no guarantee but we're all looking for the guarantee. Tell me the one with the least risk.

Ted: 00:40:53 Oh my god, yeah.

Michael: 00:40:55 Can I go that way? Well, in the end it becomes the final danger because of the constriction. Now, you've accumulated great wealth. I guess now you better start protecting it and separating yourself off from the rest of everybody else, they don't take it from you, and now begin the suffering, right?

Ted: 00:41:14 Right.

Michael: 00:41:16 That's why that's, I think, the meaning behind the Christian version of it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, that's what that comes from, because the eye of the needle was actually a gate in Jerusalem that was a narrow gate. In order to enter the gate, you had to take all your goods off the camel to get the camel through, to get into the inner walls of the city. In that same way, what's wrong with accumulation of anything, wealth, status, success, it's great, enjoy it.

Michael: 00:41:50 Now when you cling to it, you will not be able to get into the kingdom of the myth because it's here. I don't want to turn this into a religious conversation, but when they say that the kingdom of heaven is before you but you can't see it, it's because you've over accumulated or you starved and you're on a survival mode so you can't pass through the gate into the sanctums.








- 19 -

Ted: 00:42:15 I know in this experience every time I've come, I never would have thought I'd be here what five years in a row and tell me [crosstalk 00:42:23].

Michael: 00:42:23 Yeah, I never thought I'd be here 20 some years now.

Ted: 00:42:27 Exactly. It's a different feeling and then you go back. In a couple of days, we'll go back to work and paying bills and families and kids.

Michael: 00:42:38 After Jack Kornfield says that in his mindfulness, the book is called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

Ted: 00:42:48 Exactly.

Michael: 00:42:48 Yeah, that's the name of the book, right, because they're the same. Some of us suffer from I don't know what, from grandiose fantasies, that's not a myth. That's not unfolding a living myth, that's a dream world and we live in dream worlds. You're in danger when you come to something like this and say, ahh, I'm living the dream. Well, after sleeping and dreaming, there's a third thing called waking up.

Ted: 00:43:15 Yeah.

Michael: 00:43:15 I forget who you said that one again, called waking up and now you're awake to the fact like, ohh, it's a shit whole of a world. Oh my god, look at this over here. Oh god, airports which I personally can't stand being in it. Look at the poverty here as I drive out of this West Virginia Hill, and oh I got bills to pay, and oh I've got to grind. The wound as it is. Where do you reject ordinary reality? All the mystics embrace the ordinary reality. It's in the sip of the wine. It's in the reading of the poem or we drop underneath it because this is just these are words on a page here that you see. This ability to practice like how do we do it in an ordinary way, our man Joseph Jastrab here. His book Sacred Manhood Sacred Earth that he wrote, I was part of the vision quest that I was on. He's learned to play in the most ordinary of ways, he picks up a plate at dinner and starts tapping on it all of a sudden. It's a dinner plate, man. Playing one note on a guitar string and everybody's buzzing. What is that? It's that ability to have extraordinary presence and attention in the here and now moment we're realizing that's the goal in an ordinary conversation that you and I are having. It's an ordinary conversation.










- 20 -

Ted: 00:44:52 We can also take it to a different level and so let me try to ask you some questions that might bring you there. My own experience, and I think a lot of the listeners on this show are of certain personality type in those four walls. Type A, high achieving, financial, we know the model. I'd love to have you take me through some of the common aspects of that personality type and to share with me what comes to your mind when I mention these things. The first is a highly self-confident, know it all type person.

Michael: 00:45:30 A fool.

Ted: 00:45:31 A fool? Why?

Michael: 00:45:34 A fool is a certain of everything. What makes a fool a fool is you don't know that you're one and you can't make use of it. The biggest fools are the smartest people, the brightest bulb in the room who are seduced by their own minds into a belief that they know and they know more than others and they know better than others. It's a really useful tool because they have cool things you get. You get things like money and women and power and status and prestige. Those are deep allures but on the Hero's Journey myth if we look at it through that terrain in that map, it's an interesting thing about the boon. The boon you get is commensurate to the consciousness you have at the time you're gifted with something.

Michael: 00:46:33 If I'm awake this much and you say, hey man, I got a genie. I'm going to let it out of the bottle then I'm going to give you one wish, what do you want? Someone is going to say an ice cream cone. I really want an ice cream cone and, oh man, was that good and you've got your boons. Someone's going to say I want a beautiful woman. Now here's a beautiful woman and you got your boon and now the trouble begins with that. Now, you know what I want? I want status. I want to be rich. Oh fucking A when I'm rich and let's give you all the money you could ever spent, that's your boon, and you get the trouble that comes with that because it's coming.

Michael: 00:47:24 What do you really want and what else is there to want besides any of those things and what do you do with it when you get it? The fool back to where you ask me won't see the trouble coming, won't know what the trouble actually is and everything will eventually burn down.








- 21 -

Ted: 00:47:44 How about perfectionism, the type of person feels the need for everything to be perfect.

Michael: 00:47:51 They can't bear their own imperfections you mean?

Ted: 00:47:54 Yeah.

Michael: 00:47:55 I just had a conversation with probably one of the smartest people I ever met in my life and so [inaudible 00:48:02] 24 and he's way, way, way smarter than me. He's got an intellect and a wit that just makes me want to drop my jaw, and he suffers from perfectionism. The reason we suffer is because he's after something that doesn't exist in nature so it doesn't exist. An ideal is something that you strive for but this has no landing. Beautiful woman you strive for, she's a destine, not the destination. We seek perfection like it's a destination. It doesn't exist but we don't know that. We rigidify ourselves and we point ourselves like a rigid arrow aiming for something in a linear world and we go along the timeline or a path or a ladder and we climb and usually that's when the crisis happens.

Ted: 00:48:51 Uncertainty. We're dealing with uncertainty.

Michael: 00:48:54 Put in the same category is trouble like what are you supposed to do with it like relate to it or conquer it? Which one do you want to do? You want to conquer, okay, get to work man, you're going to be busy and tired.

Ted: 00:49:07 Good luck with that, yeah.

Michael: 00:49:09 Bare but the work of the hero is to embrace the relationship to uncertainty, to understand that the more you grow your capacity for uncertainty and complexity, the more you have ability to navigate terrains in whole new ways when the uncertainty is a doorway, not a problem to be eliminated which is again this unconscious wedding to an impossible task.

Ted: 00:49:35 Yeah, like dealing with fear.

Michael: 00:49:37 I think the hardest thing about fear is when you don't understand that you're afraid. You're scared and you don't even know. I remember when I didn't even know I was afraid. I didn't know what fear really was but this lack of oxygen moving through the body for one thing is constriction in us and this












- 22 -

tightness that's holding on but I didn't know was a doorway. I knew you were asking about this early times at Gateway.

Michael: 00:50:05 I remember the first time I was up at that [inaudible 00:50:07] court, I was so afraid of fear with that John Kennedy court. The only thing to fear is fear itself like it's a quaint cliché that's so true. I remember being up on the catwalk and I remember how afraid I was about being afraid. I remember starting to shake and I was ashamed and afraid, and then I realized, I mean I am really afraid right now, but I wasn't afraid about it anymore and I wasn't ashamed of it. I was just like really afraid, like [inaudible 00:50:35] you're afraid and I didn't have some impossible task in mind anymore. I could finally have fear live in me and not be contained in me, eating at me or it could move through me. It's the ability to have things like any emotion move through and not just shut down or spit out.

Michael: 00:50:55 If you're on a journey and you're any kind of man on it, you pick a fear you're worthy of and what you want is a fear that can take you somewhere. Again, the trouble is trying to get rid of trouble because he can't do it but so much of our easy prescriptive four steps to this and they're beautiful lies, beautiful seductive or they give you a boon that's way down here, way low on the scale. When you choose a fear that you're worthy of and you really get when you're worthy of, it takes you somewhere. It takes you on a journey that you would have never chosen to go on and before you know it, you have trouble worth having. You have a challenge worth facing. You have a dilemma worth wrestling with that makes you more and doing something out of you that you didn't even know was in you. That's the function of fear.

Michael: 00:52:00 When that happens as you know in your own body from your own lived experiences here, that fear turns to excitement and that's the chemical force that fear is really unprocessed and unformulated excitement.

Ted: 00:52:17 Some of the things we do here, you talk a lot about the power of the we as opposed to the I.

Michael: 00:52:25 Yeah. You listen to guys here say over and over again, I feel inadequate, I feel uncertain, I feel doubt. I has all those feelings all the time and I am always going to feel inadequate and I try to get rid of inadequacy like I try to get rid of my right arm all the







- 23 -

time. It keeps coming back. We're always inadequate because we're shooting for perfection because we reject ordinary worlds. We don't know how to be in them and among them. We don't have a base of good enough. When I have this I what I don't know is the I will always, always be inadequate because I is just part of something larger than I, cut off from the whole. That's the great big myth in my opinion and many others who pursue this path of understanding. That's the great lie of a western white civilized world that there actually is an I called my body here because I live in a house that gives me a lot of privacy with small windows and shutters to blind everything that makes me feel who I am is something cutoff from everybody and everything else. It's out there and I exchange with that.

Michael: 00:53:45 The sense of we when I feel who I am beyond I is I as a part of a we, a relational field, like who I am is who I am through this way of talking and looking at you right now and feeling you. Who I am is myself through that. This is me through our exchange and becoming myself again in a new way right now. I feel like me with you. That's a dynamic, living the I and that's what happens when this journey gives me a sense of I. All I need to do is sit in the airport for four hours and the old me starts creeping in separate, contained, don't look at me, I don't want to talk to you.

Ted: 00:54:27 What do you hope to achieve with this program?

Michael: 00:54:33 I came laughing at your questions.

Ted: 00:54:36 I know you do, but I keep asking them.

Michael: 00:54:42 What do I hope to achieve? What does the I hope to achieve? I used to try to achieve all kinds of things. I'm not trying to achieve anything anymore. Achieve what? What are we doing here?

Ted: 00:54:58 What are we doing here?

Michael: 00:54:59 What are we doing here? I think what I want, what I want to be a part of and I want to be part of is I really want to be a part of a new way of living in this world, and this world in desperate need, hungry for this that doesn't even like I once knew. [inaudible 00:55:21], would you like to have some of this, I'll be like, what is that? It's outside of anything I can wrap myself









- 24 -

around. What I want to be a part of it, what I want to see happen is I want to see what we do here spread not necessarily grow, but spread.

Michael: 00:55:43 We're enough people who influence enough people and understand there's a different myth at play now and we got to get enough people on board to understand that there is no I, I, I on high. This hierarchical patriarchal fallacy and I know it's a fallacy because I know some of these Is on high in this world pretty well to know who's really the wizard over here and what's a massive projection of some talking head shouting voices and I know who's behind the curtain too, with all those buried inadequacies.

Michael: 00:56:21 I want to see us animate this world in a whole new way and we have things that we do here that creates an animation and hopefully enough of these animators here will go home and spread this among their people and there are ways in keep coming back to this world because this way is terminal. There's no cure. This way, it's for life and I want my life to be alive to the very end to exchange these ways where the myth is no one more big cheese. It's a collective ensemble now and we need each other to bring ourselves into a new sense of who we are and what's possible.

Ted: 00:57:04 How do people find out about this journey?

Michael: 00:57:08 I don't know how they find out about this. That's the mystery. That's the mystery. How does it find them? How will this find them? How will this find you? How will this find you again? How will this find me again? I have no idea. That's what I want to have happen, the sense of something animates us and awakens us or they go to heroesjourneyfoundation.org and look around, just peek in windows a little bit.

Ted: 00:57:38 I'm going to ask you some more questions you might not like and we'll see what happens from there.

Michael: 00:57:43 Ask me more, then I'm going to ask you a couple.

Ted: 00:57:47 We could do that too, yeah. Michael, what was your favorite sports moment?

Michael: 00:57:55 My favorite sports moment ever?










- 25 -

Ted: 00:57:57 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael: 00:57:58 Ever? No brainer. My favorite sports moment, here I am, I'm in the kitchen with my father, I believe the year is 1973 I think, 1973. I'm still a boy. I can see it now. I can see the AM radio on in the kitchen because that's how we can listen into it and listen to a football game.

Ted: 00:58:27 Let me guess. Pittsburg Steelers.

Michael: 00:58:29 I'm listening to the Steelers, Steeler Nation part of which I remain a loyal follower to this way. In Steeler Nation, I am listening to Bill Hillgrove still calling it, Myron Cope, Jack Fleming and it is fourth quarter of the very first playoff game, the Steelers have been in. In this new configuration of time, it's fourth quarter, I think there's the 33 seconds left. Terry Bradshaw is going back to throw a pass. He throws a pass. We're playing the Oakland Raiders in Pittsburg in the Three Rivers Stadium.

Michael: 00:59:09 He throws a pass intended for John Fuqua, the halfback and instead, Jack Tatum hits him at the very instance the ball arrives and the ball goes flying in the air. Just as it's about to fall into the ground, a man by the name of Franco Harris, not Frank O'Harris, Franco Harris catches the ball at his feet, at his shoe [inaudible 00:59:36] just before it touches the ground supposedly and picks it up, runs tiptoes down the sideline into the end zone for a touchdown to take the lead and win their first playoff game. Thank you for asking.

Ted: 00:59:49 The Immaculate Reception.

Michael: 00:59:50 The Immaculate Reception that if you watch on the NFL Network, the top place ever, it might be number one. Did I embellish a little nick?

Ted: 01:00:00 A little bit.

Michael: 01:00:00 Okay.

Ted: 01:00:01 Well done, well done. What's your biggest pet peeve?

Michael: 01:00:04 Besides people who drive in the left lane that's passing on a highway? Why do they do that? That's the one you pass in. You don't pull up alongside the other car and just stay there and not













- 26 -

pass them. Why create a bottleneck on a highway? I don't get it. How is that for a pet peeve?

Ted: 01:00:33 Sounds good. What's the riskiest thing you've ever done?

Michael: 01:00:37 Probably the thing I'm about to do next today, maybe not the riskiest thing but I could use that as my compass setting, so it's not anything. It's dialing that up and say, okay, where's the vulnerability? Where's the edge? I'll be a fool for that, fool for love. I think and I remember the first time I did that, I think it was when I learned how to tell a woman that I loved her deeply and I didn't need anything back, but that's what I understood it was the speaking of it was the empowerment. I didn't need her. I was willing to just tell her without her having to love me back.

Ted: 01:01:20 What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?

Michael: 01:01:28 My father had integrity.

Ted: 01:01:30 What does that mean to you?

Michael: 01:01:31 He taught me how to respect the other people and show respect in order to get it, that you look people in the eye. You notice when people need help and you just help without asking and you do simple things to give people dignity. From my mother, it's just love no matter what.

Ted: 01:01:57 No matter what?

Michael: 01:01:57 No matter what.

Ted: 01:01:59 What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life?

Michael: 01:02:11 What life lesson have I learned that I wish I learned long before I did, probably would have told you somehow about how to make it with a woman, you know really make it with a woman that I have learned and know how to do. I think I would have hurt less people and been less hurt. That love isn't a feeling that you feel to feel good about. That love is your ability to make an ordinary life go better and love is the ability to withstand somebody at their ordinary worst.

Ted: 01:02:51 Ordinary.













- 27 -

Michael: 01:02:53 Their ordinary worst, and to live with it and rather than have them eliminate it in them, you live with them with it better than they live with themselves in it. I wish I would have known in order to make it with a woman, you have to always look for what she teaches you next. She has to be able to teach you and if you can't find something to learn from her, you shouldn't be with her.

Ted: 01:03:16 What is a boon?

Michael: 01:03:18 A boon is the gift you receive from the world beyond your wildest ability to imagine. It's beyond your comprehension. It's the thing waiting for you that you can't even conceive of yet that would like to come through if only you were allowed. The boon is for the boy, it's been that deep longing, your deepest Christmas wish. It's something that only you can have, only you. It can be for no one else. It can only be for you and it can't be for you because you wish for it. It has be more and other than that. It can't just be your ego's desire. That's just the win. The winning makes you small when you win like that.

Michael: 01:04:06 The boon is something that you're given and you feel bestowed. You feel like it's been bestowed on you. You're like wow, you feel unworthy of it as you should. You don't know if you're up for it. You didn't know if you can digest it. It's beyond what you imagined possible of love, a way of life, a wonder. For me, poetry is a boon, a boon for me, one among many.

Ted: 01:04:34 Let's give an example how this works. Why don't you take out a book? I'm going to pick a number.

Michael: 01:04:40 I have.

Ted: 01:04:41 Give me the …

Michael: 01:04:41 Well, it's not a book. This look like a book to you, right? That kind of looks like a book.

Ted: 01:04:47 It looks like a journal.

Michael: 01:04:49 Looks like a journal.

Ted: 01:04:53 It looks like a magic formula. I'm not sure what it is.













- 28 -

Michael: 01:04:53 It's something well worn. I'm going to tell you what it is so that you know what you're asking from.

Ted: 01:04:57 Okay.

Michael: 01:04:58 Okay? What this is, this is a well. It looks like a book. It's a well. See? From the external perspective, it's a book, a journal. From mythic perspective, it's a well. It's a well spring. Something rises out of the well spring when you look down in a way you can't see it, but something comes up from the well. You want something to come up from the well for you, Ted?

Ted: 01:05:28 Yeah, and for everyone listening.

Michael: 01:05:29 Yeah, and for everyone listening, this could be for you. Now what this is here is there's 123 poems in this book that I handwrote the way you carve and whittle into a stick. I whittled these poems into this well. At the bottom of this well are 123 poems, Ted. If you would like want to rise up and greet you, you would have to dare if you dare to pick a number between one and 123.

Ted: 01:06:02 The one that popped up for no reason at all is 77.

Michael: 01:06:06 Seventy seven, always the odd number with you.

Ted: 01:06:14 He knows that.

Michael: 01:06:16 The pairs, number 77. Seventy seven out of 123, Ted, huh? This is a circle poem. This is a poem about the we. You picked the we buddy poem, Ted. No, it picked you. You picked the number. For those of you listening, if you hear it with your ears, then you just looked at the menu. Maybe what you could do is just settle into your chair a little deeper and take a breath, close your eyes even. You may be by yourself but we're with you right now.

Michael: 01:06:56 We're sitting in a circle in fact and you listeners are sitting beside. There's been men by the way wondering in and out of this podcast and we have one sitting with us. We got Charlie sitting beside us now. Ted, you're across from me and in the fourth chair is you the listener. We make a circle right now. Let's play at the circle. As you take the fourth seat listener, we form a circle. When we sit still, and when we become still in a circle and stillness grows in us, and energy. Energy of spirit can fill us and until we surrender, surrender into silence, until we












- 29 -

surrender into a deep stillness and silence, we'll remain on the choppy surface of the mind and we'll just bop along there instead.

Michael: 01:07:51 As our breath goes deep and long and quiet, we go beyond thought. As our breathing, our breath goes beyond the choppy surface of mind, it stills, we lengthen our breath. We fall and went all the way out. We go beyond thought, underneath confusion, pass all sticky fears, and even doubt, all goes quiet. They all settle down.

Michael: 01:08:24 When we sit here and we sit in a circle and we share breath, and we share truth, and we speak and we listen a mystery and speech and the listening to the speech begin to mix and interact and transform. Who is it now? Is it the speaker affecting the listener or is it you, the way you're deeply listening that evokes this speech out of me. I have no idea.

Michael: 01:08:52 It transforms these once separated, separate energies and entities into one woven being for a minute in time for just one minute in time woven one being present right now and fulfilled present right now in this breath, full and filled. That's my interpretation of Danna Faulds poem number 77 from the book of [inaudible 01:09:22].

Ted: 01:09:23 Michael, thank you so much for the gifts you've given me and for taking the time.

Michael: 01:09:29 Well, we're going to go overtime for one second Ted.

Ted: 01:09:31 Uh-oh.

Michael: 01:09:32 I'm going to shuffle the deck and take out a wildcard and this is a poem, one of the group that I'm walking with. We're circling around this well of a poem right here again and again. I just like you to look at me for a minute and then look at this poem here in a minute and I want you to read this to me from the well you have inside of you.

Ted: 01:10:01 When I met my muse.

Michael: 01:10:03 Oh Ted, tell me that again.

Ted: 01:10:05 When I met my muse.












- 30 -

Michael: 01:10:08 I want to meet my muse. Read on, brother.

Ted: 01:10:12 I glanced at her and took my glasses off. They were still singing. I glanced at her and took off my glasses. They were still singing. They buzzed like a locust on the coffee table and then ceased. Her voice belt forth and the sunlight bent. Sunlight bent as her voice belt forth. I felt the ceiling arch and knew that nails up there took a new grip on whatever they touched. I am your own way of looking at things, she said. I am your own way, your own way of looking at things, she said. When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation. When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.

Michael: 01:11:17 That's right.

Ted: 01:11:18 And I took her hand.

Michael: 01:11:19 And then I took her hand.

Ted: 01:11:22 William [Stack 01:11:23].

Michael: 01:11:23 My man, William and when I am your own way of looking at things is the boon when you merge and blend with the muse of [inaudible 01:11:34] and every glance is a salvation that's called a boon. Thanks for this time.

Ted: 01:11:41 Thank you. Hey, before you take off, I've started sending out a monthly email that shares a small selection of what caught my eye over the month. I get a lot of emails like this and I'm sure you do too, so I'm only going to send no more than a handful of the very best things that caught my eye. If you'd like to receive that email, hop on my website at capitalallocatorspodcast.com and join the mailing list.









transcript: michael mervosh – invest in yourself (ep.68)€¦ · after the ecstasy, the laundry:...

Documents