Manders Mindset
Are you feeling stuck or stagnant in your life? Do you envision yourself living differently but have no idea how to start? The answer might lie in a shift in your mindset.
Hosted by Amanda Russo, The Breathing Goddess, who is a Breathwork Detox Facilitator, Transformative Mindset Coach, and Divorce Paralegal.
Amanda's journey into mindset and empowerment began by working with children in group homes and daycares. She later transitioned to family law, helping people navigate the challenging emotions of divorce. During this time, Amanda also overcame her own weight and health challenges through strength training, meditation, yoga, reiki, and plant medicine.
Amanda interviews guests from diverse backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and wellness experts, who share their incredible journeys of conquering fears and limiting beliefs to achieve remarkable success. Hear real people tell how shifting their mindsets—and often their words—has dramatically changed their lives.
Amanda also shares her personal journey, detailing how she transformed obstacles into opportunities by adopting a healthier, holistic lifestyle.
Discover practical strategies and inspiring stories that will empower you to break free from limitations and cultivate a mindset geared towards growth and positivity.
Tune in for a fun, friendly, and empowering experience that will help you become the best version of yourself.
Manders Mindset
Your Happiness Is Not a Product, It's Who You Already Are with Dean Graves | 134
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What if happiness isn’t something you chase but something you uncover by letting go?
In this introspective and eye-opening episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo sits down with spiritual teacher, author, and meditation guide Dean Graves. With over two decades of experience in mindfulness, Dean shares the profound insights that took him from a successful real estate career to a life rooted in awareness, inner peace, and metaphysical truth.
Together, they explore what it truly means to “wake up,” why stress is one of our greatest spiritual teachers, and how meditation can transform not only how we feel but who we believe we are. Dean introduces the concept of the "hierophant" a false self shaped by ego and expectation and offers listeners a path toward deeper healing through self-inquiry, presence, and radical self-responsibility.
For anyone feeling stuck, emotionally weighed down, or craving a sense of clarity, this episode offers a grounded yet deeply spiritual roadmap to reclaiming authenticity and joy.
🎙️ In this episode, listeners will learn:
🧘♂️ Why most people come to meditation running from pain and what shifts when we start moving toward peace
🌀 How the “hierophant” (false self) forms—and why it keeps us from experiencing love and happiness
💭 Why awareness is the ultimate healing tool—and how to begin using it in daily life
💔 The hidden connection between emotional baggage and physical/emotional suffering
💡 How stress serves as a wake-up call, pointing us toward deeper beliefs we need to examine
💬 What it really means to “feel love”—and why it has nothing to do with giving or receiving it
⏳ Practical steps for starting a meditation practice that sticks—even if you feel too busy or distracted
🕒 Timeline Summary:
[1:39] – Dean introduces his metaphysical view of the self and the concept of consciousness
[6:21] – The moment he realized success wasn’t bringing happiness—and why that changed everything
[10:46] – Understanding stress as a guide, not a punishment
[13:42] – How false beliefs shape our experiences—and keep us stuck in suffering
[20:24] – A radical reframe of love as the presence of our authentic self
[27:35] – Why meditation is essential—and how it helped Dean and his wife through chronic illness
[32:06] – Emotional baggage as unlearned life lessons—and the powerful metaphor of the “concrete ball”
[39:01] – Tips for building a meditation routine (even if you’ve failed before)
[41:47] – Dean’s legacy, the Law of One, and his parting wisdom on self-responsibility and change
For those struggling with meditation, Dean offers practical guidance: schedule it like brushing your teeth, start with just five minutes, and recognize that consistency matters more than perfection. His straightforward approach strips away the mystique surrounding meditation, making it accessible to anyone seeking greater self-awareness.
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To Connect with Dean:
Hey guys, welcome to Mander's Mindset. Before we dive in, I wanted to let you know I will be releasing a handful of episodes back to back before I head off to Bali. These conversations are just too good for me to sit on and, honestly, like my friend Sean once said on this podcast here, episode 69, there are no rules. There are no rules that say I have to wait or space things out a certain way, or that I can only release episodes on Mondays. I'm not about to hold on to something powerful just because life is shifting. So I'm clearing space, releasing what's ready to be released and letting you tune into whatever resonates to you. I'm not waiting, and maybe this is your permission not to wait either. Now let's get into the show.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers and a variety of other people where your host, Amanda Russo, will discuss her own mindset and perspective and her guest's mindset and perspective on the world around us. Manders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Manders Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. As always, I'm your host, amanda Russo, and I'm here today with Dean Graves, and Dean is an experienced and spiritual teacher, author and podcaster with over two decades of experience in meditation and mindfulness instruction, and we are going to delve down his journey today, and I am so excited.
Speaker 3:Amanda, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So that's a great bio, but who would you say Dean is at the core?
Speaker 3:Well, I am, as we all are. You and I are both analog projections of our metaphysical self. Analog projections of our metaphysical self, and we're experiencing life according to the body, certainly, that we have in this lifetime and the experiences that we have shared in this lifetime. And we began this lifetime in the condition that our metaphysical self was in as a result of all of our previous lifetimes. So, who am I? I am a perceived 74-year-old male at this point having experiences with the common purpose of all other consciousness, which we are consciousness, and everything that we experience is consciousness to explore ourselves.
Speaker 1:Can you take us down memory lane a little bit? Tell us about your childhood upbringing, family, dynamic.
Speaker 3:Well, a little bit. It was the foundation that I needed in order to do what I'm doing now. I was raised by a single mother that worked very hard and was very open to ideas and thoughts, and so she instilled that in me. I had a pretty normal, I would say, first 50 years of my life pursuing a business career. Academically, I began undergraduate studies.
Speaker 3:Actually, I began undergraduate studies in a pre-med curriculum and I realized pretty quickly that I really liked chemistry but I didn't like biology, and so it's really tough to go into the medical field if you're not keen on biology. So I trotted across to the other side of the campus and pursued a humanities undergraduate and graduate degree in philosophy and English. And philosophy was strategic, and I had a friend of mine from high school ask me just a week or two ago what the purpose of philosophy is, why philosophy is important. My response was it teaches you to think critically, not so much the material that you learn, but it does provide you with that opportunity to develop a certain approach towards life experiences and your endeavors in life.
Speaker 1:What did you do after you got your undergraduate degree?
Speaker 3:Well, I pursued a graduate degree in philosophy, which is absolutely useless from an economic standpoint, unless you're going to teach, and so I went into the real estate business and I developed commercial real estate for about 35 years, until about my 50th year, and I feel that I achieved relative success in what I was doing. But I had an awakening, and awakening is a misunderstood concept. It's nothing more than that point that you reach in your life where you realize all of the things, all the stuff that you've been doing, is not really making you happier. Happiness is not a product of that, and so we are tasked at that point of looking around and exploring other alternatives that will bring you happiness. One of the processes that I undertook at the time was the process of meditation, and I've taught meditation for many years now, and my experience was the same as what I tell my students.
Speaker 3:Almost everyone comes to meditation running away from the stick.
Speaker 3:In other words, the things that they've done in their life may be successful or not, but they're not making them happy, and the things that they have created which I would guess that you would phrase or encapsulate into a mindset are not working to provide you with greater happiness.
Speaker 3:And so you undertake meditation for a while, with some diligence, hopefully, and till one day you have an opportunity to get a bite of the apple, and the apple tastes really good, and so your motivation transforms at that point, from chasing or running away from the stick to chasing the apple, or running away from the stick to chasing the apple. And as you do that, then everything changes. Everything about you changes, everything about your mindset changes, your awarenesses change and your motivation obviously having changed to pursuing what you know are working to bring your hat and greater happiness. And you want to go deeper and deeper, and there's no end to how deep you can go. It's a process, and so we don't have to meditate, but it is one of the most strategic tools that we have available to us to affect healing, as well as providing us with the opportunity for a great expansion of understandings and accomplishing our purpose, which is to explore ourselves.
Speaker 1:Now I like how you termed awakening. You know it's a point in life when we just realize that happiness is not a product. So what happened in your life that you had this?
Speaker 3:awakening, it was just an awareness, and the awareness is it happens the same for everyone. It doesn't necessarily have to be an event or a trigger. While we are pursuing these things in life that we have been provided by osmosis, for the most part, by culture and by family, friends and so forth that we perceive to be our mission in life and that are supposed to provide us with happiness, we have our awareness, which is our innate tool. Inherent tool is pointed outside of us. In other words, I have to observe you, to observe your reactions to me, in order to modify my behavior and my perspectives, in order to elicit from you more of what I like, and we're all motivated to get more of what we like until we come to that awareness that I'm not really getting more of what I like, I'm not getting greater happiness. And so, when we have this awakening, it's incumbent upon us to learn to invert that same awareness that's been pointed outside of us, to measure the world around us, to invert that and to begin to explore within ourselves those things that we've incorporated into our perception of self, that are causing us perpetual stress and stress is our teacher. But we don't realize that until we invert this awareness, invert this awareness.
Speaker 3:We have a specific design, and that specific design is from the moment that we are born. We begin to create a false self. You can call it an ego, you can call it an identity, all the same thing and we create this based upon our experiences and our interpretation of those experiences. It's who we think we are, it is our perception of self, and we constantly modify this with every experience that we have. In other words, if I'm not being successful in my interactions with you to get more of what I like, then I will modify my perception of self in order to try to elicit from you those responses that I perceive to be pleasing to me. This hierophant is something that creates our personality, and we live within this hierophant until we realize that we're not getting more of what we like, we're not getting greater happiness, and then we become aware of these aspects that we've incorporated into this hierophant that are not good.
Speaker 1:Now, you mentioned. Stress is our teacher, if we allow it to be. How can we use stress more so as a teacher?
Speaker 3:Stress. Well, stress is a spectrum. Stress is anything that we don't like, so it is by being a spectrum. There are minor things that we don't want and there are major things that we don't like, all the way up to what we would perceive to be or experience as a trauma. And when we experience an experience that doesn't feel good to us, our sole determination of whether we like it or we don't like it is whether it feels good to us at the time.
Speaker 3:If it's something that doesn't feel good, that we don't like, that in and of itself is stress, because it is challenging the authenticity of this hierophant that we have created. And the hierophant is nothing more than a bundle of beliefs, and that is synonymous with our mind. Our mind is nothing more than a bundle of beliefs that we have incorporated into this perception of self. Consequently, the task is for our consciousness evolution, which is synonymous with the enlightenment process. There's no difference. Everyone is enlightened to the degree they have allowed themselves to become enlightened.
Speaker 3:We are tasked with a twofold step enlightened, we are tasked with a twofold step. The first step usually is healing the emotional baggage that we have collected over the course of our lifetime by experiencing stress in all sorts of different situations which were bringing us messages about ourselves that we need to learn in order to surrender as we do that. That liberates the energy, our vital energy. As we liberate that vital energy, it fuels our awareness, and our awareness becomes aware of the beliefs that we've incorporated into this hierophant and we begin throwing out those beliefs that are not bringing us more of what we like, and that is the healing process for everyone. It is also the source of all mental illnesses, all emotional distress. Most physical illnesses are also as a result of this as well, and so the process is the same for everyone. There's no difference in the process. Obviously, experiences are unique to the individual, but they are the experiences that we have attracted, that we needed in order to bring us the potential awareness, in order to heal.
Speaker 1:Now what would you suggest for anybody dealing with a lot of stress and they don't know what should be their first step to reduce the stress?
Speaker 3:of what are the beliefs that you have about yourself that are serving as the magnet to attract the experiences that perpetuate your stress and eventually suffering. Suffering is nothing more than if you think of stress as hitting yourself in the head with the two before one time. If you learn that it hurts and you don't do it anymore, then you've learned the lesson. But if you don't learn the lesson and you keep bopping yourself in the head with the same two before, that's suffering. And so we control that by virtue of how diligently we adhere to those perceptions of self that are not serving us.
Speaker 3:The first step is self-honesty that you may be tremendously successful by social standards, but are you happy? Is it bringing you greater happiness? And most people will probably say, well, I don't really know what happiness is, which, in and of itself, is a huge awareness that you have not been doing something right in order to bring experiences to you that will provide you with the opportunity to experience happiness. Happiness is not something that we can get, happiness is something that we are, and so if you think of happiness like the wave of the ocean flowing into the beach, and the beach is full of cracks and crevices and holes and pits and so forth, and when the wave comes in, it fills all of those cracks and crevices and holes. As you heal, as you remove these beliefs that you've incorporated into this perception of self that are not serving you, you create a vacancy, which happiness fills those voids. It's not something that you can get, it's something that you allow to emerge.
Speaker 1:I like that. It's something you allow to emerge. I think a lot of people struggle with realizing that you know, because they're looking for it in an external thing, in a circumstance, in an experience, in a person, in a something you know.
Speaker 3:Well, it's the antithesis of what society teaches us, and so, consequently, we have to become aware that society doesn't necessarily know everything or anything. And this is an individual journey. It is not a group journey. We're not going to make progress as a group, we're going to make progress solely as an individual journey. It is not a group journey. We're not going to make progress as a group, we're going to make progress solely as an individual.
Speaker 3:And you have to assume responsibility for yourself. You have to decide that all of the stuff that people are telling you may or may not work, and you can discard those that don't work. But you have to take that responsibility to judge critically those things that aren't providing you with greater happiness, and those will change as you increase your, the regularity of your experience of happiness. Then what made you happy a year ago may not be making you happy today, and you will discard those additional beliefs and allow new happiness to fill that void. And so it is a process, and you can tell if you're on the right path. And you can tell you're on the right path because you're getting happier. If you're off in the weeds and you're experiencing greater stress, then you're not on the path. You need to get back on the path. You need to get back on the path, and nobody can get you on the path but you.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense. I want to transition to Chad. You mentioned about how we're not autonomous beings and we're powerful participants in our lives.
Speaker 3:We're the only one living our lives. No one can heal us. We're the only ones that can heal ourselves physically, mentally and emotionally. And as you learn to explore yourself with awareness and eventually explore awareness itself because that is the essence of who we are at this range of consciousness as we learn to explore awareness itself and use the awareness as the tool that it is for healing and for experiencing greater happiness, then we are fully in control of our destiny.
Speaker 1:Is there something that helped you become more aware?
Speaker 3:What motivated me to become aware was the realization that I was not getting greater happiness in all the things that I was doing. And that's why I say, when you get a bite of the apple and you have that experience of joy of say, when you get a bite of the apple and you have that experience of joy, of the blissfulness of the bite of the apple, then you become self-motivated to do additional work to affect greater healing. We're all motivated to get more of what we like, but the trick is that when we're born we don't know what we like, and so we have to experience both sides of the coin. We have to experience a lot of what we don't like so that we will know what we do when we encounter it. We learn by analogy, we learn by comparison and contrast, and if we don't allow ourselves to have that comparison and contrast experience, then we don't know. If all that we experienced was what we liked, we would not know that we liked that because we have nothing to compare that to. And so we are designed to experience a lot of what we don't like so that we will know what we do like when we encounter.
Speaker 3:Invariably, what we like is our authentic self and our authentic self is always present. It is always available to us, but this hierophant that we create obscures our capacity to feel it and see it. Every time that you have experienced love in your life, every time that you have experienced love in your life, it is because the person, place or the situation that you're in at the time Allowed you to feel comfortable enough that you will temporarily surrender this hierophant. You surrender this perception of self and you are feeling your authentic self. Perception of self and you are feeling your authentic self. You're not getting anything from another person or you're not giving anything to another person. We say, mistakenly, that I love you and you love me, and I'm giving you love and you're giving me love. We're not giving anything other than permission to feel our authentic self.
Speaker 1:So you don't think people give love?
Speaker 3:No, you can behave in a loving fashion, but it's not a commodity. Love is not a commodity. It is as much an inherent characteristic of our authentic self as is awareness. Hmm, okay, okay, no, I'm just thinking you have experienced working with divorce, couple or couples in a divorce?
Speaker 3:yep, okay, if you think about relationships that we go through in order to find the person that we're going to marry, the difference between that person and all the other people that we date is the people that we date. We have reciprocity of the hierophant. In other words, you recognize my hierophant, I recognize your hier hierophant and we feel comfortable in each other's company because we feel less stress. We're with that person, but that's not necessarily the person that we're going to marry. That's the person we like, that's a friend, that's somebody that we like to hang out with. Okay, the difference between that person and the one that we decide that we love is that the person that we love, we feel so compatible with, that we're willing to surrender this false perception of self that we've created and we are feeling our authentic self, which is already love.
Speaker 3:Now, in the course of a marriage, in the course of relationship, we still maintain this hierophant, because this hierophant is what we use to go out into the world, that's who we market to the world that we are. But when we come home, ideally, we surrender that and we become our authentic self again Is when we get to the point in the relationship where one or both of the parties no longer is willing to surrender that hierophant and allow their authentic self to be present. And when that happens, then there's no longer that feeling of comfort, that reciprocity, a feeling of comfort of both parties being willing to surrender this hierophant when they're in each other's company. When both of them, when both people surrender, are unwilling to surrender this hierophant, and they stay in that hierophant, then there's no longer that feeling of love, it's not available in that relationship anymore and that's when divorce happens.
Speaker 3:Healing a relationship can be accomplished. If there's only one person that has Retreated into their hierophant all the time, then through awareness and through counseling, through guidance or whatever, not necessarily as a couple but with that individual, to allow them to become aware of the changes in their behavior and self-perception, you can restore the relationship. But if that doesn't happen, then again divorce is going to be the alternative. So and this is true regardless you know, when you remain in the hierophant and both parties are in that hierophant, then the relationship becomes transactional.
Speaker 3:So would you say, you can show love, but you can't give it a classic example and say the family is at home and dad comes home and he's been out conquering the world all day and he brings this hierophant back into the house with him. Well, the spouse usually will be patient for a while. Okay, well, get over the day and then I want that real self to emerge. If it doesn't really emerge, then the spouse usually in some form or fashion say okay, that's enough, you can take that hierophant back out and put it on the front step and you can come back in as your authentic self.
Speaker 3:Small children are not that forgiving. If they recognize dad coming in with that hierophant, they don't want to see that hierophant, they want to see dad, and so they're almost immediately more responsive to that dad. With the hierophant coming back into the house, and particularly teenagers, they don't want anything to do with them because that's not dad. Same is true. I'm just using this as an example. I mean, both spouses have a hierophant. It's the nature of our experience. But when you become so wrapped up in this hierophant and so unaware that you forget that you're supposed to leave that outside, then that family structure begins to break down.
Speaker 1:Is there a way to avoid that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, with awareness. Awareness is the only way your authentic self is fine. Your authentic self is who you really are. It's always there and if you think of the authentic self as the gold and you buried the gold in the ground and you've covered a bunch of trash on top of it, put a big pile of trash on top of it, our task is to remove all the trash and dig out the gold and when we have that loving, have a loving relationship with someone or with people, that it is that gold that has been loved. It's not the hierophant that is loved.
Speaker 1:Now that that makes sense, awareness is where it all needs to start.
Speaker 3:Awareness is the healing tool, is the discovery tool of what needs to be healed and the healing tool itself. If you imagine that you're going to work one morning, you walk out your front door and you look at your car and your car has a flat tire. You've discovered the problem. You've discovered the flat tire is the problem. Well, you're not going to walk away from the car and never use it again. You're going to get the tire fixed or you're going to fix itself. You're going to fix the problem. The same is true when you discover that these beliefs that you've incorporated into your hierophant are the problem. They're the flat tire. You're not just going oh yeah, that belief. Well, that causes me a lot of pain and suffering. You let it go, you get rid of it and it is that easy. You have to become aware of the belief that you incorporated into that teraphan.
Speaker 1:And would you say meditation helps becoming aware of those things.
Speaker 3:Well, it's the most valuable tool that we have. Yes, for that, Because you're inverting that awareness. You're inverting the awareness that you inherently have to become aware of you.
Speaker 1:How did, oh when did you first get into meditating?
Speaker 3:When I was about 50, which is about 24, 25 years ago now.
Speaker 1:And what made you get into it?
Speaker 3:As I was explaining, a recognition of unhappiness at the time. Also, my spouse had a chronic illness and she had had it all her life and it got worse and there was not a suitable treatment for it, and so a friend of mine suggested that we pursue some other avenues, non-medicine treatments, which we investigated, and both did. It was tremendously successful in healing her condition, as well as in being the dutiful husband that I was, you know, I said here you try it. If you don't get, you know, if it doesn't kill you, then I'll try it, and so, in that usually the way it works. And so she had great successes, and so I began the process also, and we both advanced along this avenue, along this path, and it heals, as I say, physical, mental and emotional.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. You know, accountability helps.
Speaker 3:But yeah, it does. I mean it helps if you have somebody that you can compare experiences and have somebody to talk about that, because the experiences are immutable, they're not unique to the individual. You are unique, but the experiences when you achieve a certain degree of progression, and in that self-exploration, in that awareness, the experiences are the same for everyone and now, how do you regularly meditate?
Speaker 1:Is it an everyday?
Speaker 3:It's a part of my daily routine.
Speaker 1:I love that. And before you were 50, did you ever meditate, or never?
Speaker 3:I well, I, you know, I was a child of the sixties and so it was fashionable at the time, but I can't say that I ever really tried it. It was just something that was culturally permissible at the time. But I can't say that I ever really tried it. It was just something that was culturally permissible at the time?
Speaker 1:Has it been consistent ever since?
Speaker 3:No, you start off and you're running away from the stick. It doesn't matter how you start, as long as you start. I started listening to guided meditations and you reach a point where the guided meditations are a distraction and you don't want those anymore. So you quit doing the guided meditations. Most people will go through a period where they need the candles or the gong in the background. Those are all just permission slips to help you get into that mood. But if you're diligent with your meditation practice, then those all become distractions as well. All you need to do is just sit down and meditate. You sit in Times Square and have a wonderful meditation, regardless of what's going on around you, because you learn to invert that awareness and take control of your interactions with the world around you interactions with the world around you.
Speaker 1:I like how you mentioned. It doesn't matter how you start, whether it's the guided meditations, whether it's consistent, but just starting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and be diligent. You know you'll have peaks and valleys and you'll go through a period of. This isn't going to work for me, but be diligent. And then you get over that hump. You're learning a new tool and you're learning to use the awareness that you inherently have to begin to affect healing and your motivation is to get more of what you like until you really get that bite of the apple and you transform that motivation to doing the serious work.
Speaker 1:Now you mentioned gongs and candles, and any of that stuff is just distractions.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're just permission slips, whatever you think that you need in order to get into that mood, but those will be distractions as well, and so you'll dismiss those. You'll dismiss anything other than just sitting down, calming yourself and bringing your awareness inside.
Speaker 1:Why do you think so many people have a difficult time developing a meditation practice or starting to meditate?
Speaker 3:I'm glad you asked. It requires more energy to sit in stillness than it does to be active, more energy to sit in stillness than it does to be active. And a good measure of where someone is in their emotional load that they're carrying is how they can sit in silence, understand that every experience that we have that is on the stress scale from minor to major has been a message to us, about us, of something that we're supposed to become aware of, learn the lesson and transform ourselves. And so over the course of a lifetime, we have a lot of experiences that we don't learn the lesson. We have the negative experience because we attracted it, it was the message that we needed, but we don't learn the lesson and we get to keep that lesson until we learn it. But we keep it in the form of emotion and that it's called emotional baggage. And if you imagine that every experience that you don't like is a homework assignment, and if you recall from school, just because you didn't do your homework doesn't mean there's no longer do, it just means you didn't do your homework and say that there's a textbook assigned to every experience that you didn't learn and you have to carry that textbook with you until you learn the lesson. As soon as you learn the lesson, then you do your homework and put the textbook down and never have to pick it up again. Well, if you don't do your homework for 30 days and you're carrying 30 textbooks and that's heavy People that experience depression. The one common element of that depression, regardless of who you are, is they feel heavy. So you have to ponder what could possibly feel heavy. Well, what feels heavy is this emotional baggage that you're carrying. One of the first objectives that you want to do is to become aware of the emotional baggage that you're carrying. Do your homework, get rid of that textbook. As you get rid of the emotional baggage, you get lighter, you feel lighter and so, consequently, the energy we all have, the same potential amount of energy, same vital energy that has to run our mind, body, spirit, the whole bit.
Speaker 3:If our energy is diverted to carrying this emotional baggage, then we don't have the resources available to function properly. A hairdryer is a good example. If a hairdryer doesn't have adequate electricity, then it may run, but it's not going to run properly. So when you restore the proper amount of energy that it has, it runs fine. The same is true of our body and our mind. When we restore the energy that we all have available to us, then we begin to function more effectively. But we're kind of like a motor. If the motor doesn't have enough electricity, then we're real active because we can't sit still. We have to be able to take control of these thoughts. We have to take control of our body and our mind and our beingness and calm it down, allow that energy to do the work that it's supposed to do, which is to make us function properly. But while we carry this emotional baggage, then that energy is diverted to carrying the emotional baggage.
Speaker 3:If someone told you that before you were born, your purpose in life is to run down to the end of the street, that's all you have to do and you'll have a successful life. And they give you a new pair of running shoes and a new running outfit and you're all ready to go, you think, man, this is going to be a breeze, I'm just going to run down to the end of the street. And then you start running and somebody hands you a 300 pound ball of concrete and they tell you your mission is the same, but you got to carry this 300 pound ball of concrete with you Well, you think, wow, I can't do this. I can't go to the end of the street carrying this much weight, and so the task is to get rid of that ball of concrete.
Speaker 3:But in this ball of concrete is all those life lessons that you didn't learn, that you have to learn about you, and so it's perfectly permissible to put the whole 300 pound ball of concrete down at one time, but that's in and of itself a huge task, because these are all your life lessons you didn't learn.
Speaker 3:So you take a chunk of it out at a time, and every time you take a chunk of that ball of concrete out, the ball of concrete gets lighter, you have more energy to do more work, and it's like pushing a car from a dead stop. It's very hard to get it going because it has no momentum, but once you get it going, it gets easier and easier and easier. The same is true of healing. As you start taking these chunks of concrete out of the ball of concrete, which are nothing more than the lessons that you did not learn at the time that you encountered it in your life, in the ball of concrete gets lighter, you get lighter. You have more energy to do more work, you have more capacity to direct this awareness inside and to expedite your healing.
Speaker 1:I really like that analogy with the homework assignment and whether you did the homework or not, we still do that makes so much sense and you're still going to have that. Whether you get it done, whether you submit it, it's and just like that experience you didn't want to experience, it just happened yeah, well it did, because that brought you the lesson you would.
Speaker 3:we attract, we magnetic, we attract the experiences in our life because the way that we are attracts that experience to provide us with the opportunity to become aware and heal. As we transform. The nature of our experiences transforms because we have changed, not because the experiences have changed.
Speaker 1:No, that makes sense. If somebody is looking to meditate and they feel like they just can't get into it. They're too distracted, they can't regularly do it consistently. Do you have a suggestion for them to?
Speaker 3:You schedule to brush your teeth every day, you schedule to shower every day, you schedule things in your life that you deem to be important, and so you have to decide that meditation is an important part of your day. It's an important part of your life, and you need to schedule yourself If you're too busy. Gandhi was famous for saying if you don't have time to meditate at least an hour a day, then you probably need to meditate two hours a day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard that saying. You know, I like how you mentioned you schedule a shower, you schedule to brush your teeth. Even if you needed that actual reminder until you got into the habit. Set we all have cell phones set a reminder on your phone to start doing it there.
Speaker 3:There's some great apps out there that you, if you need that guided meditation that you can just follow along, even if you can only meditate for five minutes to start, then start with five minutes and as you do that that, then you'll find yourself well, it's seven minutes oh, I didn't realize I was there for that additional time Then it's 10 minutes and it's 15 minutes and then you just keep adding the time as you begin that process of taking control of who you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So start with whatever you can start with. Yeah, so start with whatever you can start with. Having a group is a great way to meditate, to give you guidance, hopefully with an experienced leader, but if you live in an area that doesn't have that, you can do it on your own. There's more than enough resources on the internet or various social media sites that people are offering help and guidance and so forth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so true. Well, thank you so much, dean, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you.
Speaker 1:Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty? He's an author, he's got a podcast Former Monk and he ends his podcast with two segments and I've incorporated them into mine.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:First segment is the Many Sides to Us, and there's five questions and they need to be answered in one word each. What is one word someone who was meeting you for the first time would use to describe you as?
Speaker 3:Hopefully peaceful.
Speaker 1:I would think, peaceful also.
Speaker 3:Spiritually adventuresome.
Speaker 1:What is one word that if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset, would you use to describe you as they didn't like me? Too rigid what?
Speaker 3:is one word you're trying to embody right now Hungry.
Speaker 1:Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence what is the best advice you've heard?
Speaker 3:or received To assume responsibility for myself.
Speaker 1:Why is that the best?
Speaker 3:Because it's the foundation of our progression through this evolutionary process.
Speaker 1:What is the worst advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 3:Believe everything that you're told.
Speaker 1:Why is that the worst? Because it's not true what is something that you used to value that you no longer value?
Speaker 3:money why, because it has a distorted value in society and it is a major distraction from our evolution.
Speaker 1:If you could describe what you would want your legacy to be, as if someone was reading it, what would you want it to say?
Speaker 3:That I aided one or more people in advancing their enlightenment.
Speaker 1:that I aided one or more people in advancing their enlightenment. If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why.
Speaker 3:There is one law. It's called the Law of One.
Speaker 1:It is the one immutable truth in all of creation, and that's the law you would create.
Speaker 3:Well, it's created. There's no such thing as non-existence, and so it's not a matter of any of us creating anything, as much as it is becoming aware.
Speaker 1:And why would you say that?
Speaker 3:Which part.
Speaker 1:Because it's becoming aware.
Speaker 3:Well, because we exist within a range of consciousness and all of the ranges of consciousness are varying degrees of awareness that explore different inherent characteristics that we are Awareness is the foundational tool, inherent characteristics that we are Awareness is the foundational tool. And when we become aware of the law of one and our relationship to the law of one that it is the same, then we begin to enjoy that privileged position of living in truth.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, dean, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, Amanda.
Speaker 1:I have as well. Do you have any final words of wisdom for the listeners? I just like to give it back to the guest.
Speaker 3:Well, the final words of wisdom be the change that you want to see in the world.
Speaker 1:I love that Well. Thank you so much, Dean, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Amanda.
Speaker 1:And thank you, guys, for tuning in to another episode of Amanda's Mindset. In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you, I'm rooting for you and you got this, as always. If you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five star rating, leave a review and share it with anyone you think would benefit from this. And don't forget you are only one mindset. Shift away from shifting your life. Thanks, guys, until next time.
