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 former Family Law Paralegal now a Breathwork Facilitator, Sound Healer, and Transformative Mindset Coach.
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
You Can’t Heal With Hate: Cesar Cardona on Trauma, Forgiveness & Inner Peace | 160
Feedback on the show? Send us a message!
What if forgiveness wasn’t about letting someone else off the hook... but about setting yourself free?
In this powerful and deeply honest episode of Manders Mindset, host Amanda Russo sits down with public speaker and mindfulness teacher Cesar Cardona to unpack his remarkable journey from gang life and trauma to healing, forgiveness, and inner peace. Cesar opens up about growing up between two cultures, joining a gang as a teen, surviving a violent assault, and how that moment ultimately became a turning point toward transformation.
The conversation dives deep into what it truly means to heal not by denying pain, but by understanding it. Cesar shares how Buddhism, storytelling, and intentional mindset shifts helped him move forward, and why forgiveness is a gift we give ourselves. This is an inspiring episode for anyone carrying emotional scars, struggling to let go, or ready to reclaim their peace.
🎙️ In this episode, listeners will discover
🧠 How childhood instability shaped Cesar’s search for identity
🔥 What led him from gang life and violence to self-employment and public speaking
🚨 The traumatic assault that nearly took his life—and how he recovered
💡 Why forgiveness is more about you than the person who hurt you
🧘♂️ How Buddhism and mindfulness supported his emotional healing
💬 Why asking how instead of if is a powerful mindset shift
📖 The spiritual and symbolic threads that tie us all together
⏰ Timeline Summary
[2:16] Growing up between two cultures and never quite fitting in
[5:26] School struggles, rebellion, and early gang involvement
[13:53] Realizing it was time for change and buying a house at 20
[18:51] Driving across the country to LA and starting over
[25:53] Becoming a boxing trainer and slowly building a new life
[30:36] The power of metaphor and being discovered as a speaker
[36:16] The brutal assault that changed everything
[44:57] Recovery, trauma, and the physical and emotional scars
[48:10] Choosing forgiveness over revenge, what that really meant
[57:12] Buddhism, mindfulness, and the journey to inner peace
[1:04:58] What forgiveness is really about
To Connect with Amanda:
Schedule a 1:1 Virtual Breathwork Session HERE
~ Sign Up for Virtual Mindful Mindset Mondays HERE
📸 Instagram: @thebreathinggoddess
Follow & Support the Podcast:
📱 Instagram: @MandersMindset
👥 Join the Manders Mindset Facebook Community HERE!
To Connect with Cesar:
📸 Instagram: @_cesarcardona
Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers and a variety of other people when 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, will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Mando's Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. I'm your host, amanda Russo, and I'm here today with Cesar Cardona, and he is a public speaker certified in mindfulness from Rice University, and I am so excited to delve down his journey. He has been through it and we were talking off air about forgiveness and anger and we're going to delve into all of that. Thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, Amanda, for having me. I appreciate you very much and hello to all the listeners out here.
Speaker 2:Who would you say? Caesar is at the core.
Speaker 3:That's not a right question, caesar. At the core is how heady are we going to get here? Can we get really heady, or do you want a practical answer?
Speaker 2:Whatever you want to give me.
Speaker 3:Caesar at the core is a conscious being having an human experience. I'm happy to say more, but that is what I resonate with.
Speaker 2:Can you take us down memory lane a little bit? Tell us about your childhood, upbringing, family dynamic in Jacksonville, florida.
Speaker 3:My father is a New Yorker Spanish. My mother is a Floridian Black female and they're very opposite of each other and what's more is that one is a Democrat, the other is a Republican. They both came up from very different ways of living. My mom grew up in the streets. She moved out when she was 16, and she figured out her own life on her own as a way to survive. My father was a straight, a student. He was the oldest of his siblings. He went to the military, got out.
Speaker 3:I have no clue how they got along. I mean two years they were together before I was born, but as long as I can remember they didn't get along. They were aggressive, they were violent to each other, they were really loud and yelling and so on and so forth. So with those two opposites being kind of thrown at each other here, I never felt like I was at home with either side, and their respective families obviously gave me a lot of insight about who they were and a lot of it. I read it as them telling me I'm not a part of them because I am Spanish, but I don't speak Spanish. My facial features don't necessarily lean towards fully Spanish.
Speaker 3:The black side would say I spoke too white. They didn't understand why I like Jimi Hendrix or Beethoven, so I never fit in anywhere. In that case I went through this avenue of most of my younger years. In addition to being isolated because the parents would leave, they would get in arguments or whatever and they would both just split and I would be by myself. In addition to that sort of isolation, it was a cultural, spiritual, internal, intellectual isolation that I never felt like I fit in anywhere. For the most part I spent my life in Jacksonville, florida. I'd go to New York, obviously too, growing up, but in the South in the 90s, cultures were just mixing, really just starting to mix in that area, and when they did it often would be met with questions.
Speaker 2:Do you have siblings?
Speaker 3:I do. Yeah, my mother had a daughter before she met my father. She's an elder sister daughter before she met my father. She's an elder sister. When my parents split because of the times, the court system when they broke up when I was four or five, she would go with my mother because the judge would say this is to my father, this is not your daughter, she's going to go with her mom. And then my dad worked a lot as well. So my sister and I bonded. Whenever the family was fighting, whenever they had any disagreements, any problems. We bonded really well in those traumatic moments. And then, of course, my mom would leave. She would take her with her. So I would have this distant sort of relationship with my sister for a while. As we got older, my sister and I got really close. By my teenage years we were super close and now we talk still almost every day. I live in Los Angeles now for the last 10 years, but she lives in Florida. We talk at least once a day.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 3:She's fantastic. So that's where I started, and they led me to a road of a bunch of other wild crazy stuff.
Speaker 2:How was schooling for you?
Speaker 3:Schooling was mostly not good. Schooling was mostly not good. I found somewhere in the third grade I was doing quite well in school and I was doing well grade-wise and at some point I got a I was making straight a's and at some point I got a b plus or something like that, and I got a lot of trouble. That my dad, he, was upset about it and something in me said you know, if I can do all that work for the last three years, but then do this one blemish and then get in this much trouble, I'm not going to. I'm not going to what's the phrase here? I'm not going to apply myself so much. And from there I was like I'm out, I'm not doing this.
Speaker 3:I started just getting in more and more trouble. I started getting into fights, I started cussing at the teacher. I just got in more and more trouble and stopped caring. I did this every year until I got kicked out of high school. I would just wait till the last bit of the semester, or whatever they're called, and find out what grade I needed to pass, and I'll get those grades real quick pass and then just start to cycle all over.
Speaker 2:so I feel like now you say you got kicked out of high school that's correct.
Speaker 3:By middle school I was already getting in a lot of trouble. And by what is it? The end of eighth grade, the end of of middle school I joined a gang. By ninth grade I was fully in gang. I was selling drugs, I was robbing people, I was at shootouts, gang fights, just tons of stuff. By the 10th grade, I got into a gang fight in school and they sent me to an alternative school. I was there for about I think it was supposed to be 60 school days, so weekends don't need art included, obviously, and I was in the. I was there for longer. You get in trouble. They gave you more days. I didn't care.
Speaker 3:What's more is that like a microcosm of the american justice system. You go into these places and you don't get, for the most part, better, better, you get better at being bad. You get surrounded with other people. Instead of being appreciated or talked to like a human, you're being treated like an animal. So I just got worse. I got a lot worse when I got back to the regular high school. They put me on this contract and said if you get in any more trouble, we'll kick you out. Less than a month later, I got in more trouble. They kicked me out.
Speaker 3:I was 15 at the time and found a thing online that you could do homeschooling from. They'll send you assignments. And I was on probation at the time because I got arrested and so I needed to get a job, also in order to show my PO that I was doing better. I was doing this, got this job at this restaurant. I befriended a bunch of the employees there, some of their mid to late twenties, and I got those. I would get those classworks sent to me. So I just ended up finding one of my friends that I met there and I paid them to do the work for me. I did nothing but cut corners. I did nothing but find ways to get around things. Because of anger, because let's say this, because at the front of it I didn't care, because I was tough, because I was slicker and I was smart, but in reality I was scared. In reality I was hurt. In reality I was alone. I was fearful of failing. That's what it really was. I just masked it in anger and aggression and so on and so forth.
Speaker 2:Do you think some part of you was looking for attention from your parents?
Speaker 3:I suppose. So I mean just knowing what I know about people. You know, the louder you are, the more you want attention, right? If I search my own thoughts at that age it doesn't seem like it, but I'm sure it's deeply psychological. You've been somewhere where someone's super loud and you're like yes, we hear you, we know you're here, don't worry, we see you, you're beautiful, we got it. You know. I'm sure metaphorically, I was doing some of that, but I got in trouble so much when I got arrested Both the parents, I remember they were upset. They couldn't really do much. Honestly, I got to that stage where what are you going to do? Ground me, I'm just going to leave. There's nothing you can do. I would just assume that it was a subconscious byproduct of so much trauma and pain that was projecting outward physically.
Speaker 2:Now I want to transition. You mentioned a moment in your childhood when your parents were fighting over you.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, yeah, so yeah, this set a psychological footprint on me. It really put me in a path that made me look at the world in this perspective. My parents had already split. I was about I want to say, three or four, probably four, though they had already split up. They weren't divorced, but they just weren't together.
Speaker 3:And I was with one parent and the other parent that I hadn't seen for some time showed up, just barged in and they grabbed my arm and they tried to take me with them, and the parent I was with, of course, didn't want that. So they grabbed my legs and they pulled back and over the screaming and the yelling and the threatening my physical body was just actual tug of war. Now, the super painful, of course, and I was freaked out. I remember it like it was yesterday. But what hurt the most was what I took with it. Who am I? Where do I go With this way of thinking the one parent or this way of thinking the other parent? And then it was fueled with aggression on top of it. So I took that with me for a lot of my life. I've always felt like I've been in this tug of war At some capacity. I'm still living with it. Now I've amalgamated it to be a beneficial thing instead of making it a harmful thing.
Speaker 2:How'd you amalgamate it to be a beneficial thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So because of all these sides that I've never been a part of culture, wise, belief, wise, whatever because I always could understand the other side of the conversation too, because I had spent time with people of different conversations and belief systems. They were at war with it within me for so long and then at some point I realized wait a minute, I'm not a part of any of them, I'm with all of them. These are all just different ways to view the jewel of life. Everything that I've experienced is not incorrect, but it is incomplete, and the other part that you're looking at can help complete that first part, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 3:There's that African proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. There's something to be said there about the collective of a society that can understand a little bit more of each other. To get where you need to go, you don't have to agree with them to understand them. You need to go. You don't have to agree with them to understand them. So when I learned how to make more sense of that in my own self, I could settle the sides yelling at each other. Instead, I was able to calm myself down and calm the perspectives down with living within me and I could kind of start seeing the common thread that and now I spend most of my life as a public speaker and as a Buddhist and as a mindfulness teacher and as a podcast host, trying to open up that mental avenue to other people as well.
Speaker 2:How did you go from? You were arrested like a shift came in. When did you? What made you stop and change?
Speaker 3:A shift came in, a shift bigger than any earthquake I've felt in california so far. It was a massive one, you know, and I often think most things in the world are small amalgamations that make the big picture right. One brick at a time makes the house right. A couple key points for me was when I was in a gang and I was doing all this stuff I had was arrested, got on probation, had people looking for me all the time for revenge for what I've done to their family members or their gang members or whatever the gang I was in like. There was always this trouble going on and just so much stuff.
Speaker 3:I consistently kept getting not away with things. But the worst and even some of the mediocre things wouldn't occur to me. I would be in a gang fight or something like that. And immediately in the middle of all this chaos going on, I would turn to my friend who I was 15, so I wasn't driving my friend who was driving. I remember the guy in particular. I'd grab his arm and say it's time to go. We get in the car and like two minutes later one of our friends were like yeah, the cops came, everybody got arrested, like all these little things that would occur right.
Speaker 3:And then I realized, well, if I'm smart enough to get away with all this stuff, what happens if I apply my intelligence that I'm noticing about myself into things that actually are part of the bigger society? Because I also was tired of being stressed and tired of looking over my shoulder every day and tired of thinking of when am I going to go to jail? At 15? It was a slow transition.
Speaker 3:That shift happened there at about 17. Just so many times of escaping death got me there and I realized, okay, the external world's got to change and I did that. I bought a house when I was 20 in Florida and I lived in this house and the external world was much better, but my internal world wasn't. I hadn't done any of the work right. So depression started to sink in and the trauma from what happened to me as a kid and the trauma of what I gave as a teenager was just pouring back onto me because I was in this home by myself. So that led me to getting to more of a depressive sense and all of the things that were bothersome, the troublesome, the traumatic things were happening internally first.
Speaker 2:Now you bought a house at 20 that congratulations thanks.
Speaker 3:I appreciate. Thank you, thanks. That's a lot of that was my mother. By the time I was 19 and 20, my mother, she had completely changed her life around as well. She got very religious and she's like settled. She had a husband that she met and they're still together now. She got like and we started sort of bonding here and there and I was living with my biological father at the time and we got along well enough. We were like roommates and I realized I wanted to go live on my own and she's like you know what? You should buy a house, because this was 2010. The housing market had just sunk two years prior.
Speaker 3:There was a ton of first-time homebuyer tax incentives and homebuying assistance that I could do, that I could be a part of first-time homebuyer tax incentives and home buying assistance that I could do but could be a part of. So I just took advantage of all of them. Not getting political here, but it's the same. It's similar incentives that FDR put on to get us out of the depression and these were put on to get us out of the recession. And it did that and I took advantage of those things and, my gosh, it just worked. It was just wonderful. It was a perfect timing for it, but a lot of it was my mother pointing it out to me. She was like look, there's this, there's that, go do it. And I went and did it.
Speaker 2:That's great that you had that support system and that she pointed that out to you.
Speaker 3:She's fantastic man. I just I love her to death now. I just love her. She's great.
Speaker 2:So you buy the house at 20. Now you're living there yourself, but the internal wasn't what it should have been because you weren't doing the inner work.
Speaker 3:Right, right, I just wasn't doing the inner work. I got to this house as you're 20 and you have a house. I was a musician at the time. I wasn't a spiritual person, I was a complete devout atheist. But with atheism can come science, and science comes data and with data comes knowledge and information. Right. So there's some sort of intellect that I came across as a very smart and well thought out person. I got my own house there.
Speaker 3:It's very easy for people to want to latch onto you for that reason and I have this playhouse, this playroom, I should say, to do whatever the hell I want, but I hadn't done the work, like I said. So because I hadn't done the work is when the drinking comes in and the sleeping around, and then the drama and the depression and the indulging and so on and so forth. And I realized I don't know if I fully realized it, but I had an understanding of I don't like where I am and I would say I don't like it here is what I would say a lot. I would say I don't like it here and I can look back on it and say oh, cesar, did you mean you didn't like it where you lived or you didn't like it in your head.
Speaker 3:You didn't like existing. Which one was it? Or you didn't like it in your head, you didn't like existing. Which one was it? The answer is both, but at the time I think I was saying more, so I didn't like it. In Florida, like I said, I would just go to all these places and neighborhood and I'd be reminded of the trauma from being a kid and the crap from being an adult.
Speaker 2:So you eventually left Florida.
Speaker 3:I left Florida. Right, it wasn't it. It was not. It definitely wasn't it for me. I rented out my house, I loaded up my car, I rented out my house and then moved in with my girlfriend at the time and she was like, just move in with me, rent your house out. And then, of course, you know, when you got to go into your stuff and I packed my stuff up, I was originally going to move to San Francisco. I didn't want to go to New York because I had family there. I wanted to go somewhere fresh, but I knew friends in San Francisco, so I planned on going to San Francisco. And then I woke up one morning and something said you got to go to Los Angeles. I don't know how or why, let alone that atheist at that time was listening to some random voice in his head. That's always adorable when people say you know one thing and the other thing shows up, and they listen to it. So I did. I packed my stuff up. This is 2014. I was just about to turn 25. And I loaded up my truck. I drove from the Atlantic Ocean, which Jacksonville is. On the Atlantic Ocean, there's a beach there. I drove all the way to Los Angeles, which is also right next to the beach, malibu, Santa Monica and I'd never been here before.
Speaker 3:I didn't know anybody and for the first two weeks I slept in my car and then I would go out to bars. This is back when I used to drink and I would meet people and I would meet friends, I'd meet women and they would, all you know, just whatever. Like, yeah, come stay with me, you can stay with me. And I would just bit by bit, stay these people places, bit by bit. And then somebody was like hey, I found a place for you that you might like. It's this part in LA, in the Valley. And I did that. I went in and checked the place out. I had been looking already. I checked this place out. It was a great spot. It was a married couple, these two guys. They were renting out their third room, so I rented there, moved in, walked out across the street, saw this restaurant and said I want to get a job there. So I walked in, talked to the manager a little bit, got myself a job and then started building my life in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:And now you are 24 years old.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm about to be 25. I turn 25 like a month later.
Speaker 2:Now, had you ever done anything like that? Like a road trip, that's a far drive.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a little under 3,000 miles. I have no idea. Can I cuss on this show?
Speaker 3:yeah, absolutely I got no fucking clue how I managed to tell myself hey, go ahead, drive that thing, get in that car and go and take off. Homeboy, what I mean? I guess I do, because if I need to do it again now, I would do it again, but the hubris of I had only driven no more than three hours by myself, that I could say let me get in this car and drive 2,900 miles, which could take two days depending on how you drive it.
Speaker 2:And you were by yourself.
Speaker 3:I was completely by myself.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I was driving with nobody.
Speaker 3:I was trying to get away Like why would I?
Speaker 2:No, I know, but I mean like you're not going to be able to take a bus, yeah that's true, that's true, that's true.
Speaker 3:Maybe I should go tell myself that so I can fucking, because I can like not do it.
Speaker 2:You know, dude, but but no experience similar to that prior, like a road trip.
Speaker 3:Not like that. Well, you know, let me. I guess maybe I can reiterate that, because my dad is from New York, like I said, and when I was a kid we would drive to New York a lot. That's 15 hours. I was a kid though, so I guess maybe the endurance of the longevity is familiar. But I didn't know gas stations needed to stop at this time, and I didn't know that just outside, just west of San Antonio and the rest of Texas, is dark, and if you don't get gas in San Antonio, you might be shit out of luck, and I almost was Like I was completely almost stranded out there. I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:So you get to LA, and now you got the job at the diner. And then what?
Speaker 3:you get to LA, and now you got the job at the diner. And then what? Yeah, so I went there originally to be a musician, because I've been playing guitar, I've been writing songs, I won some singer songwriter awards in Jacksonville and at the time it was the only thing that I had, that was just mine, and I was just going to lean into that as best as I could. I taught myself how to play, I taught myself how to sing, how to write music, and again I wanted to go somewhere else. So I get there, I'm working this job at this diner, I am playing these shows, and if any of you listening here has not been to Los Angeles, I will say that whatever you want to do and when or want to be in Los Angeles good or bad and wherever in between it's here for you, without question.
Speaker 3:This city is and continue saying this now it's the best city I love. This is my home. This is the microcosm of the rest of the world. People come here, they do their work and what they put out into the world influences the rest of the world by film, music, tv, fashion, you name it. We do it here. This is who we are and because of that, you can really find yourself in some horrible places.
Speaker 3:So, being a musician, of course, and a person who was suffering from depression and who was sleeping around a lot and who was drinking a lot, and just being a 25-year-old guitar and I'm aware I'm a well-enough looking person, so it's easy for someone. And women are very confident in Los Angeles, men are very confident, everybody's really confident in this city. So if someone's going to tell you straight up, hey, I like you, we should go do something, they're not going to waste any time. I'm aware of that, and somebody who didn't have any discipline because he was an impulse to his desires to get away from his depression, immediately fell right into the like let's just go do all the crazy stuff while playing music and while trying to build a career and while waiting tables and so on and so forth. But one side is always going to take over and for the most part, it's not going to be the healthy side, because this society doesn't live and doesn't survive on a healthy balance. It survives on getting your internal desires satisfied by the external. But it's a farce, that's an illusion. That's not actually going to happen.
Speaker 3:You're going to keep chasing these external things, the actual word, if you're looking in the world for insight, is insight. That's an illusion, that's not actually going to happen. You're going to keep chasing these external things. The actual word, if you're looking in the world for insight, is insight. It goes within you. You have to find it in here first. If you don't find it in there, you're not going to find it anywhere else.
Speaker 3:And the society has been bred to bleed out the inverse thought process. Look on every billboard, every commercial. Essentially, they're saying you need this to be happy. That's not how it works. That's secondary. You can get this to have some joy, but for happiness you have to go inward and to find the happiness and to go inward, you got to find the peace.
Speaker 3:I didn't have any of that information. No one told me that. I just lived in a society that said buy now, come, get it today, because it won't be better tomorrow. Today's the day to do all the things.
Speaker 3:What's more, because I lived in this traumatic childhood of all this aggression, there was still a part of my psyche that was. There was a part of my psyche that was very I can't think of a word for it but I constantly just felt like I can't think long-term. So when you don't think long-term, you start thinking about the here and now and you want to get out whatever you can get out, and so my trajectory just started getting a little more muddy, a little more murkier, without me playing music as much. I got tired of waiting tables and with all this stuff going on, I was also working out a lot and I met this boxing trainer and he taught me a lot of boxing. We did a lot of boxing together and then he taught me how to train. Then I got certified in boxing. So then I started building a clientele because I was tired of working for somebody. So I slowly started building this boxing clientele as a physical fitness trainer who taught boxing and self-defense. By this time I was 27.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. That's a short period of time that you switched to, that. You were 25 waiting tables and then, just two years later. That's amazing.
Speaker 3:Thanks, I appreciate that. I remember in the moment feeling like it had been forever that I was in LA. But I look at it now I thought, man, that was just two years.
Speaker 2:That's not a long time and you had just up and moved from Florida, so it's not even like you had a lot of connections, if any, in LA.
Speaker 3:Barely Waiting tables helped a lot because I did choose a diner that was like a known institution in the valley so people came through there. They did a lot of filming there, so that get a little easier. In that way I learned how to polish speaking better and being getting across to people. I spent a little time in theater school here at the beverly hills playhouse and that helped me. I thought I was going to be an actor, not interested in it, but what it did do was help me recognize my, the tools that I work with, really well, what tools I have, what natural tools I have, what uniqueness of me that I can start utilizing and putting to the front of the line instead of, you know whatever using other stuff that is maybe not. It helped me decipher those better I gotcha.
Speaker 2:Now you started coaching boxing and how was that? Did you enjoy that?
Speaker 3:It's super fun. It's great. You know you make your own hours, you're outdoors in Southern California, the weather is 95% of the time fantastic, and I didn't want to train in a gym because of overhead. I don't want to pay somebody. That's the reason why I went self-employed, because I don't want to work for somebody right? So I started training at parks public parks or I would go to the person, and that independent training meant that I could charge a little more, because those people usually tend to have a little more money, and so I'm doing that with whatever music they want to listen to. I get to wear what I want to wear, be how I want to be, get the information out to those people. I can change my schedule if I need a weekend off, especially when, you know, depression came in. Super fun. There's a small handful of clients I still work with now because I love them. Yeah, I just love being around them and I'll be with them until I can't or they can't.
Speaker 2:Post that. What made you stop that you?
Speaker 3:got more into the music. So I'm a public speaker is what I am. That's what I am. That's what the very deep, the deep core of me is as a person. I went through all of these iterations and I could see how it got me to a place where I could speak to other people to let them know that I spent so much time looking externally for some sort of ultimate answer. I realized the answer you need is living within you.
Speaker 3:I spent the last five or six years studying all the ways of thinking in life and I can just keep tying these threads to one another and pulling them back to the individuals. He said look how precious you are. You got it already. All this stuff is just to help you get there. I couldn't do that with music. I just couldn't find it. I tried so hard. Maybe it's because you got to do four verses or three verses and four bars at a time, but I need more space, perhaps. So, anyway, the point is I didn't think of those of being a public speaker, even though it's such a bountiful thing for me in my life. I was out we're skipping a little ahead here but I went to a Joseph Campbell round table, and if anybody doesn't know who Joseph Campbell is, he was a famous professor and author and he is the one who coined the term the hero's journey, and everybody has experienced a hero's journey in their day-to-day life and also in film and movie and so on. I went to a round table of people who admired him he died before I was born and one of the speakers there was a person who knew him for two decades. So I was going to go without question because I adored that man. I adore that man.
Speaker 3:So I go to this place, listen to this woman talk. I ask a question First thing, first thing. First, actually, the woman asks a question. They have a conversation. Secondly, another man raises his hand and he says something as a compliment to her. And then I raise my hand and I make a comment about something she said and how it tied back to something that was really important for me and it's a symbolic reference, to a metaphor about the existence of life. It's a lot, and so we're talking and I break that stuff down what it means for me from what she said, what it means for me and then what it means to the rest of the world and she goes stop right there and she says this is something. What you did was wonderful.
Speaker 3:She turns to the audience and she says you see what he did there. He took this story, he found the metaphor of the real life. He applied it to his life and then applied it back out to the world. This is that is genius. You, sir, are genius. I was like listen, homie, I'm just here to ask questions. I didn't like I'm not here, for I wasn't. After all of that, and I'm starting to sweat bullets, you know, I just want to talk about some cool things, man. And so she turns over to the host of the round table and she points at me and says this is your next speaker. Now, I don't have any speaking experience, except for, just, you know, talking to humans. I didn't know what she was talking about. To be handpicked by somebody who knew the man that I revere so much and they looked at me, gave me this massive thumbs up like you're on it. You got your finger on it, kid, keep doing it. So she mentored me after that for some time, showed me how to tell a story, how to build, how to read a metaphor better, how to understand the connecting ties of all the things in the world Because it goes beyond storytelling.
Speaker 3:We are humans who consistently live on symbolic gestures. We take an image and then we find meaning behind it and we use that meaning behind it to tie us together, whether we want to know it or not. From the very beginning of time we've used so many symbols. We have the thread of Ariadne and Theseus going into the labyrinth. He uses a thread to go back out into the world. In the Christian practice there's a story of one of the ancestors of Jesus where he puts his hand out of the womb at birth and there's a red thread tied around his wrist. And then Buddhists we have I'm a Buddhist, as a Buddhist we have these books. The doctrines are called sutras. The word sutra means to stitch, to thread together. We just do this all the time and then we bring it to a more modern sense.
Speaker 3:You and I are talking over the web. It's a web, also called the internet. It's a thread connected to itself. When we study quantum physics, we're made of matter, you're matter, I matter because we matter right, and you break that down into molecules, the atoms and the quartz and you get very microscopic by it. There's these little vibrations that everything is made of and it's connected and that practice and that study is called string theory, like the thread, is just there constantly. So I kept finding those over and over again and she helped me form it right to tell stories that way. So then I picked up public speaking and did a first talk. I did a talk that living in LA, you living in LA, maybe this is everywhere. I could be just signaling or putting LA out externally, but it could be everywhere.
Speaker 3:It's that circular cause and consequence of you need, I need this job, okay. Well, you need experience to get that job. Okay, I need a job to get the experience. So I can't get the job Right. Over and over again, the cycle continues. You need experience, so I can't get the job right. Over and over again, the cycle continues. You need experience, I need the job, you get the experience. Well, you don't have the job. Okay, can I get the job? No, you need the experience. This circular cause and consequence. The same thing happens here. Right, I am a public speaker. I didn't have any speaking experience. Nobody's going to hire me.
Speaker 3:So what did I, friends? I built a talk that I have something that I want to talk about, and it actually was this story of the thread my girlfriend. She was a film director for a long time, so she put these two cameras up and we shot it like a TED talk, filmed it I had a microphone, recorded it synced it together and then cut it up and sold it and shopped it out to these places saying, hey, I've given this talk recently, I would love to give a talk to your place and your place, and so on and so forth. Since September I've done 15 speaking gigs already. This has been less than a year. This is a lot. It's just completely skyrocketed. Then I got certified in mindfulness and I'm writing a book and I'm just kind of toiling all these things together.
Speaker 2:That's so amazing. So you didn't have the public speaking experience, but you got people together that you knew and you found a way to show that you could do it, even though you haven't done it Like. I love that.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Finding a way to make it work from where you were at with the situation.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in this society of work, task-based work, in a capitalistic society, I realized that if I changed my perspective from not if I could do something but how everything just changed for me, and I would offer that to every other person listening, change your thoughts from if I could do something but how everything just changed for me, and I would offer that to every other person listening. Change your thoughts from if I can do this to how. The how might be saying not now you know, but you can do pretty much anything you want. You just got to just think of it as how, not if.
Speaker 2:I love if we could transition a tad. You probably know what I want to delve down into. I'm not sure exactly when this happened in regards to like when you were in LA, as opposed to like after you were coaching boxing before public speaking, the incident you got into, yeah.
Speaker 3:So this was way before being a public speaker. This was before I was public speaker, this was before I was a Buddhist, this was before I was sober. And this was during when I was a musician still, and a trainer still a trainer. I was assaulted by a group of men. I was out somewhere late at night with my partner at the time.
Speaker 2:When you say out somewhere, was it like a bar?
Speaker 3:Yeah, like a public restaurant and it was packed. I live in LA. Everything's always packed at night. And there was a woman that was there. She was talking to this guy and I think he's being a little unsavory to her. So she turned to us because we had had some sort of conversation before. She kind of mouthed to us help me, like give me a hand here. This guy's being a little weird. So my partner and I walked up to this woman, we put our arms around her. We were like hey, she's a friend of ours, we're with her, we're together, whatever the hell we said. And the guy didn't like that.
Speaker 3:So this pushing match kind of started and my girlfriend and I went to go leave after that. But he went and got two of his other friends and they ran outside and ran up to us while our backs were turned and jumped on us and just started beating us down. My partner. They knocked her down, they hit her down and held her down and then the other guys all three of them actually jumped over on me. I was trying to fight back and they knocked me out unconscious and then, once I was unconscious, they just started stomping on me. Now I have no recollection of any of this. There's footage. I had to watch for it after the fact because the men had got arrested and my partner remembered all of it. So hear about that and I don't have any recollection of it. But I again experienced it later on in video footage. It sucks. Nobody should have to watch themselves be treated like that how old were you I?
Speaker 2:was 28 what happened to you from this, so I was unconscious.
Speaker 3:So I was unconscious. Even though I was unconscious, they still continued to stomp on me and kick me. They fractured my eye socket, fractured my nose. The forefront teeth and the bridge above those teeth were completely shattered and out they were gone somewhere in the street somewhere. The front of my tongue had been cut off. So the hospital had to cut off the rest of it because it was kind of dangling and my bladder was punctured from them stomping on my body. So they had to cut me open, stitch close my bladder and then staple my stomach shut.
Speaker 3:And so I woke up some hours later, post-surgery. As per the medical records. I did wake up in the ambulance and I fell back unconscious again and then I woke up in the hospital and I gave consent for them to do surgery on me. That's as per the records, but I have zero recollection of this, nothing. I barely remember going into that place. But I woke up the next morning super early, like four or five in the morning, and the nurse was waking me up out of surgery I suppose, and I look over to her and I say I'm dead right. She says no, you're not. You're in this hospital here where you've done some surgery on you and I turned to her I said could you do me a favor? Could you just kill me? I don't want to be here anymore, I've seen enough and I'm tired.
Speaker 3:I look back on stuff now and I see stories and there's a documentary recently that came out of somebody who had committed suicide and they said often I'm tired and I'm like, oh, what a feeling to feel. Because I remember that feeling. It's not sleepy tired, it's not body tired, it's exhausted of existing, it is heavy. And of course the nurse is like I'm not going to kill you, I can't do that. She didn't say any of that. She's like obviously I'm still here. So she didn't nurture me, but she kind of calmed me down a little bit and I had to go from there and start healing. I had no teeth in the front of my mouth, my face was all swollen and banged up. I couldn't sit up. I couldn't let alone stand or walk, because my stomach had been cut wide open and I had to spend time healing.
Speaker 2:Wow, now they found the guys and they were arrested.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it took them about a year to locate and arrest them. I had spent that following year healing, getting better, rebuilding a clientele. I wasn't necessarily like I didn't change everything. It slowly occurred, right, I slowly changed over time, but in that year's time they did find them and they arrested them. They excuse me the three of them, they arrested them. Excuse me the three of them they arrested too. One of them left the country. Exactly that person was offended out there too, I agree.
Speaker 2:I didn't know. You could hear that.
Speaker 3:I didn't know that they could hear me. I mean, they were appalled just as much as I was.
Speaker 2:Now, this year, that before they found, before they found the guys and arrested them. How was that year for you?
Speaker 3:Brutal, really brutal. I mean, there was so much pain in my stomach. My, I had this like the front of my tongue had been cut off, so because it was open skin for the most part, it would burn. When I ate food I had to chew Immediately. I had this like the front of my tongue had been cut off, so because it was open skin for the most part, it would burn. When I ate food I had to chew Immediately. I had to just mash up food and put it to the side of my mouth so I could chew it. Speaking was really hard for me. Again, the front tongue was cut off and the forefront teeth were just not there. You know, it took me a while to get that right. I also was still depressed. You know, no one like gets the shit kicked out of me and say like you know what? We're good, let's go now. Thanks, thanks. I appreciate you guys. Thanks, here's a $20 bill. Thank you so much. That's not what happens, right? Essentially, some people, it does happen.
Speaker 2:They hit that rock bottom and over time they change, but not in that moment, you know. So I feel like even that first year, though, would have been like nerve-wracking. Like these guys are on the loose. You like I'd have been scared shitless even more so. Like, yeah, it wouldn't have been good if they were arrested right away, but like I don't know that almost like feel factor of is this gonna happen again to me?
Speaker 3:yeah, oh, I hear what you're asking. Yeah, the fact that they were just flying you're anywhere around that thought was a lot in my mind. For sure. That thought is in my head plenty at that time. Because one, yes, we crossed paths once. Good chance you can cross paths again. Two, they were big guys. I mean, I'm 5'10. At that time I was 165 pounds, I had boxing under my belt but I was still very injured you know, it's three of them versus me my back's hurt. They're bigger than me. Those are a lot of disadvantages.
Speaker 3:So there's a part of me that was like, well, there's a good chance I could see them and then I would defend myself with what I know, right, but also, on top of all that, I don't know what they look like. I have no recollection of it, so I really don't know. So there was for sure a level of being mindful of the people you run into. I knew their names so you could kind of categorize what they might look like because of their names, but otherwise you didn't know. And so there's a lot of fear living in that, a lot of on alert at all times. But isn't that like the on alert that I had when I was young in a gang. Isn't that just like me being mindful?
Speaker 3:Like that trauma was still there, even though I didn't go out actualizing it for myself. I didn't put myself in an environment of gang members. I still happened to be in an environment full of people who were divisive and anger induced. So I was doing it again. The cycle came back around at some level. So, yeah, that's a really good point. I had to spend a lot of time with that. I definitely stayed in my area more than not. I didn't go too far away.
Speaker 2:I get that, and so about a year later, they arrested two of the three guys, and so how has the recovery process been for you? How has the recovery process?
Speaker 3:been for you. The recovery process has been hard and it's therapy for the trauma. First I got some. If anybody's watched this video, they can see the front of my face, my teeth, particularly normal. These are all fake.
Speaker 3:I had to get these done. It required a lot of time because you gotta let the bone in your mouth heal and then they make fake bridge, which is the bridge of the bone that's below your nose and above your top lip, that bone back there. You have to make fake bridge, put that in there, let it heal. And then they gave me these temporary they're called flippers these four dentures that kind of pop into your mouth and pop back out, and that was a real pain. And then, of course, my stomach was constantly some sort of pain, because staples in my stomach at the time hurt. When you cough, when you sneeze, when you laugh, whatever your stomach contracts, it tightens up. So to pull on those staples hurt.
Speaker 3:But after that the scar tissue and it's in this moment now I mean, this is what, seven years later and my sometimes I still get pain. At least once a week I get a little bit pain in the scar tissue in my stomach and I gotta live with it and there's night terrors, having dreams, stuff like that happening again. There is being in crowded places and someone standing too close behind you. That's there. I still live with that. I can feel all of it slowly going away. A lot of me being calm about it and, even earlier, being able to laugh about it is me becoming a Buddhist. That helped me a lot. It's one of the top three best things I've ever done for myself was that the healing process was tough. In that way it's a super long one, if you're thinking about that one.
Speaker 2:No worries, would you say, you've forgiven those guys.
Speaker 3:Well said and great question. So when they got arrested? When they got arrested, they went to court for filing and for sentencing and so on. The judge of the courts one or the other, I forget who got in touch with me and asked I want to make sure that they got maximum sentencing. Here's an opportunity that I don't know what these people look like that I can take this long-handled spoon retaliation on them. I can really stick it to them without having to get my own hands dirty, for lack of a better term, and I spent my whole life being filled with anger and aggression. This is one of the best ways I could get back to them that they would have to pay restitution. They would have to go to jail for a while. They could get back to them. They would have to pay restitution, they would have to go to jail for a while, they could get maximum sentencing and I don't have to think about if I see them somewhere in the world Right.
Speaker 3:And then I recognized and by this time I was a Buddhist. I recognized the anger that was leading that thought, the desire for revenge, the thought of they hurt me, I hurt them. I realized that if I held on to that anger and therefore informed my choice of saying yes, give them maximum sentencing. I would have allowed them to beat me down again for the rest of my life Because I would be holding on to that. They can hurt me one time, that's their choice, but every single day after that I make the choice whether I am going to be hurt by them. It's amazing that, after 30-something years of my life of nothing but A and B going to war with each other, it's amazing that I realized that, even though it was justified if I said, no, this is law, there should be justice, there's a point in me that recognized that I was still speaking from a place of hurt and anger, and so in that moment I started to practice the forgiving of them. Forgiving them for who they are or what they did to me, because they're also hurt too, because if they were able to do that to somebody, that means that they were hurt right. That's the phrase. Hurt people, hurt people right. And then the cycle will continue from there, because they're going to be angry for more reasons and go out and do more things, and I am going to not feel justified.
Speaker 3:You might think that giving it back to somebody who gave it to you is going to make you feel better. Tell me somebody who lives in peace, knowing that, because if you did live in peace then you wouldn't keep doing that because the cycle is going to keep continuing. So I didn't. I said judge you, find what is appropriate for you. They still had consequences, they still were going to potentially go to jail, they still had to pay resuscitation and blah, blah, blah. Totally understandable.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to be a part of that anger anymore. I won't do it. I saw where it got me so much of my life and in that instance I was just being helpful to some woman who was in need. So that doesn't necessarily compute to one or the other. I still was at a space after the fact, once they got arrested, that they could reap what they sow and I could be in charge of that. But I don't want to be in charge of that.
Speaker 3:The Buddha says holding onto anger about someone is like drinking poison expecting them to die. That's what anger is. I won't have that anymore. I won't do it. So I forgive them wholeheartedly and I hope that in these last seven years, this level of peace that I found in my own life and joy and bliss and desire to be here. I hope that they find their version of it I hope they already have even and, what's more, they've been instructed to not talk to me ever if they ever see me in public. No-transcript In the world Of a society that you have to rely on.
Speaker 2:If you could relive that day, would you still help that woman.
Speaker 3:Yep, absolutely. No question about it whatsoever. It's to say no Is almost to say I regret it, which in some level says I regret a part of my past which I don, it which in some level says I regret a part of my past which I don't. And why wouldn't I just give my heart to somebody else if I can? Because of all that, I've learned how to be just better at this sort of stuff. I don't know, if the situation happened now with who I am, I would still step in. I would just have found a cleaner way to do it. But yeah, absolutely. There's no doubt in my mind, without question.
Speaker 2:Now you say now you would still step in. Do you think this? I don't know. Now, having seen this side of people and you gone through this, I feel like I'm going to answer this question for you and I don't want to answer the question for you. But like, does that make? Does it make it? This is me answering the question for you, but basically, it makes sense that people don't. Sometimes people don't step in.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Would you agree with that?
Speaker 3:I would agree. Yeah, I think that people, first off, people just feel like they got their own stuff they got to worry about. And two, if they go and do something and then this stuff comes back, now all the stuff that they have to worry about is not going to be even worse.
Speaker 2:Oh, like what if could potentially happen if they try to help it's a valid thing to think.
Speaker 3:It's a valid thing to be scared. Without question, one of the best things I've found in my life lately is realizing my thing is my thing, and in no way do I need to judge or bring down somebody's other way of doing whatever that is. Their choices are, even if I don't agree with it, okay, understandable. I don't know the situation of what got you to this point and make that decision, so why would I give you guff for those choices? I have no clue what you're holding onto, what you're protecting, what you're avoiding.
Speaker 3:You ever notice that when somebody talks about another person's actions, they say, oh, they did A because of B, they did A because they are B, they did this thing because they're that way, right. But then when you ask that person why they show something, they're going to give you all the scenarios and situations and the circumstances that made them choose that. Can we please give that same understanding of circumstances to every other individual? I'm not saying let them be a doormat either. You don't got to let somebody walk all over you, but you can try to understand that there's something way more than what you'll ever understand because you're not tied to them 24-7.
Speaker 2:That's key. We don't know what led them to make that decision. What they're currently dealing with you hit the nail on the head right there heart, that is, try to do every single thing that you like.
Speaker 3:Try to say no to it for 30 days. See how hard that is. You have trouble with your own governing of your own thoughts and mind, because the monkey mind goes crazy. So tell me how you're going to understand someone else's mind? Tell the computer.
Speaker 2:So now you said you were with your partner at the time of this, did she get bad injuries, as bad of injuries like you did?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this partner at the time is a different partner than the partner I'm with now. Just to clarify that she was. She did get some injuries. Yes, she was hit and she had bruising on her face. There was a. She had a cut on her hand from falling down from broken glasses and whatnot. That was the majority of her injuries, because they didn't jump on her. They kind of hit her down to kind of get her out of the way and then they jumped on me.
Speaker 2:Gosh.
Speaker 3:Yeah, unfortunately, I wish her the absolute best. I'm not in touch with her. I don't know where she is, but I know that she has to live with that for the rest of her life, and she did help me heal so much, and so I thank her for that. There's an immense amount of love for her at all times. I hope that she finds what she's looking for in this world as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can't imagine having to witness you go through that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean, think about the person that you're with, your partner, somebody you love Watching. Them have to be unconscious and be just kicked around. She described it to me in pretty graphic detail about it. She often said it was like watching Gumby, like the way the body just kind of flopped around. It's brutal. We're two different people now. I haven't seen her since before the pandemic but we started really growing apart and I'm not really interested in connecting with her. But there's a part of me that like sends her a deep hug, like here and now.
Speaker 2:Because of what you went through together, absolutely.
Speaker 3:And you know, I know her heart is in a good place. I know what she wants out of herself. We spent so much time together. I know who she wants to be, what she wants for herself, and I hope she's obtained that in some capacity.
Speaker 2:What would you say has helped you have such a resilient mindset? Post all of this.
Speaker 3:There's a ton of things, but the main ones that come up for me is one I took myself into some buddhist temple sometime after all of this. Around that same year of the accident, I walk into a buddhist temple. I had been a very strict, and I've been a very strict, materialistic, reductionist-like, harsh atheist and there's nothing wrong with atheism. It just didn't bring the best version of me out. I have a ton of friends who are atheists, and they're great people, but it brought out a not-so-great version of me. So I knew, though, and I was suffering, and I knew that the Buddhists had some sort of conversation about suffering. I knew I was like suffering, and I knew that the Buddhist had some sort of conversation about suffering. I knew I was like oh, they say something about suffering. And I also knew that you could be a Buddhist and an atheist at the same time. You know it's not required to believe in God, so is my ego saving itself? Right? It's like, oh, you can go do this thing, but you can still, I can still be here, right? That is never the case. It's just adorable, the ego. You're just so cute. You want to tap the top of ego's head. So you're so adorable. Look at you trying to save yourself, get out of here.
Speaker 3:So I walked into a Buddhist temple and, interestingly enough, I was sitting with somebody there, a kind of a circle. We were all sitting in and one of the persons who were, who was in charge there, was talking about a figure, a public figure, who is a very unsavory person, and I was very much ready to like, lean in, because the kind of person that they are is not really liked by people who live in los angeles. So I knew everybody was gonna be oh God, this person, that guy sucks, you know. And instead the person in charge, instead of saying the things that you expect him to say about this public figure, he says you know, I probably. It feels like that person is so hurt inside and I was like whoa, hold on, what. That's an option. You can say that about somebody you don't like. I didn't know that was a choice and I was astounded by this level of compassion, something that I wasn't ever taught. So therefore, I didn't really have and I realized I want some of that.
Speaker 3:I want to grasp and understand how he got there. I want some of that. I want to grasp and understand how he got there. So, between meditation and reading a lot of Buddhist texts, the Buddha was enlightened by 35 and he died at 80. So he had a lot Motherfucker, had a lot of stuff to say, like he cuz was just and he also, he was just. He's just like the ultimate mic dropper, by the way. I like the ultimate mic dropper. By the way I mean homie just laid out bars, basically, and imagine that for 45 years. And so there's tons of books you can read from and it's endless. You'll never run out of Buddhist books to read.
Speaker 3:And he would talk so much about watching the mind and understanding why we suffer in this world. It's because we hold on to things and we want them to stay the same. But the nature of life is change. It's inevitably going to change. So it's not your job to throw it away either. It's your job to appreciate it for the iteration that it shows itself in right here and right now, and then when it changes. You've expected it, so you can appreciate its iteration.
Speaker 3:Then Ethical is the same for your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions, and then, when it changes, you've expected it so you can appreciate its iteration. Then Ethical is the same for your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions, your skin, your hair, your body, your age, the people. You know the things, you love the music, you love the food, you love everything, inside and out. And when you meditate, little by little, you start to find that bit of space between all of those things and your self, capital S self. And that capital S self is consciousness, your conscious awareness. That thing has been there with you at all times and it's never changed. It's got no smell, no sound to it, no color, no form. Doesn't run out of air, doesn't run out of energy. It's active.
Speaker 3:Right now, you and I are talking in my dreams and in my deep sleep it's always there, it's never changed. So you resonate with that and you get to watch the ever-turning cosmic symphony of this planet, of this world, of this human experience, of the mystery of it. And everything after that changes a little bit. You start to realize the beauty of every given moment, because I had depression, and depression is the trauma of the past and anxiety is trauma of the future.
Speaker 3:But if you are here right now. This is the only eternity you're ever going to find In this human realm. That is Because to be present right here and right now is not thinking about the past and the future, so that cuts out time, and that actually is eternity. It's got nothing to do with time, it has to do with being present. When I got there, the waters of my mind calmed down and I could see so clearly. After that, buddhism is what really did it for me. After that, I found joseph campbell, and the rest is those are my two pillars I hold on to, and everything else is byproducts of that wow you hearing that phrase when you went in the temple about they'll help people, I got chills.
Speaker 2:when you said that, I got chills. I know I didn't go through what you went through, but hearing that must have helped. It must have.
Speaker 3:My job is not to change those people's minds and their actions. My job is to change my own perspective of it. Somehow that changes the world as well, which is a very funny way of the way the world works. Rumi, that famous Arabic poet, I'm paraphrasing, but he says I was smart so I wanted to change the world, and then I became wise, so I changed myself. I love that line. Another mic dropper Rumi. You know Rumi? Yeah, he's fantastic, he's just so great.
Speaker 2:You have been insightful.
Speaker 3:Thanks, that's a lot of reading.
Speaker 2:I get that Now.
Speaker 3:I'm picking up where Matt's using it. I can tell you have a lot of books.
Speaker 2:If you don't want to delve down, that's okay, but I'm curious, like changes post this incident for you, like your body, are you able to walk now? Like how is that? How are you able to function? Post this, yeah, yeah a beautiful question.
Speaker 3:Thanks for asking that. Yeah, I can totally walk. I can do pretty much everything. What some things occur is that every once in a while, because of the impact on my right eye, I get a little fluttering of light sometimes. Sometimes I get a little bit of a headache from the impact. There's almost always pressure where my teeth and the bridge are. There's just a little bit of pressure because there's screws in there and it's just like twisted and you just feel it the front of my tongue actually not all of the tongue, but the front of it. It'll grow back and it grew back actually.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that, I didn't know that, yeah, when I do workouts.
Speaker 3:If I do a little too much ab work, then I'll feel it too, so it's a matter of doing just enough consistently, without going overboard. So, yeah, yeah, otherwise, aside from those things, I'm okay. I feel okay physically in that way and, ironically, I feel better than I ever felt in my life, psychologically, spiritually, mentally.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Thanks, thank you, that's fantastic. So what's your biggest tip for people listening to us? To forgive somebody.
Speaker 3:Forgive somebody. Oh wow, yeah. So the biggest tip to forgive somebody. There's so many. Oh, here we are In order to forgive somebody. You got to recognize that forgiving that person is not releasing them of the shit they did. It's releasing you of holding on to it. Forgiveness is more about you than it is about them. If you consistently not forgive that person, then you're just giving yourself anger for it. You and I had this conversation before we started recording in the dialogue. Think of any person, whoever you are listening right now. Think of a public figure that you don't like, that you really don't like. Think about them right now. If that person doesn't know you, they have no idea you don't like them and there's a good chance they probably don't care. So who are you hurting because you're angry at them? Who are you affecting? So your job is to forgive and it's releasing that person of their hold on you, and that is doing a better favor to you than it is to that other person.
Speaker 2:I love that that's true. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, Amanda. You have been fantastic. You are an absolute jewel. I appreciate you so very much. Thanks for laughing at all my silly, stupid jokes Absolute jewel, I appreciate you so very much.
Speaker 2:Thanks for laughing at all my silly, stupid jokes. Oh my gosh. Thank you, I appreciate it. I thought they were funny. Have you heard of a man named Jay Shetty?
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely, he's fantastic.
Speaker 2:I'm a big fan and he's got a podcast called On Purpose. You might know what I'm going to reference, but he ends his podcast with two segments and I've stolen them and I end my podcast with those segments.
Speaker 3:All right, great Great.
Speaker 2:First segment is the many sides to us, and there's five questions that need to be answered in one word Each. What is one word? Someone who was meeting you for the first time, which used to describe you as calm. What is one word Someone who knows you extremely well would you use?
Speaker 3:to describe you as Warm.
Speaker 2:What is one word you'd use to describe yourself?
Speaker 3:Resilient.
Speaker 2:What is one word that, if someone didn't like you or agree with your mindset, would you use to describe you as?
Speaker 3:Optimistic.
Speaker 2:What is one word you're trying to embody right now?
Speaker 3:Kindness.
Speaker 2:Second segment is the final five, and these can be answered in a sentence what is the best advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 3:Be kind to yourself.
Speaker 2:Why is that the?
Speaker 3:best. It's the best because we have to live with ourselves every single day. If you love somebody externally and they came to you and said they did some stuff that was bad or wrong and they felt terrible about it and they don't like what they did, do you say to them yeah, it's because you're an idiot, because you're dumb, because you're stupid, because you're wrong or whatever you don't? Usually, if you love that person, you're going to be kind to them. So why would you use those sort of words to your own self? Be kind to yourself.
Speaker 2:I like that example. What is the worst advice you've heard or received?
Speaker 3:You cannot do that.
Speaker 2:Why is that the worst?
Speaker 3:Because the person is projecting their own fears onto me. They're assuming that what they don't think they can do, that I can't do it. And also, what's more, if I can be it's a little braggadocious here. I've done a lot of great things in my life because I've been resilient about it and because I was focused and I cared enough about it, so to tell me that I can't means that you don't know me.
Speaker 2:What is something that you used to value that you no longer value?
Speaker 3:Drinking.
Speaker 2:Do you drink at all now?
Speaker 3:Totally sober. I take that back California's sober. I do psychedelic mushrooms, but I do it as a meditation. You sit, you meditate for a while, you write things out, you cry it out, so on and so forth. But other substance-wise for like escapism, no, none of that.
Speaker 2:Love that. 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:Oh my gosh, Can you read it to me again please? He gave more than he took he gave more than he took.
Speaker 2:If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? And I want to know why. Oh, my gosh, that's brutal.
Speaker 3:The law? Huh, Everybody, everybody should have to spend a month with somebody from a culture or belief that they don't agree with. And you can't be violent. You gotta figure out how to work things together, like problem solve or something. You know why? It's because you will find out so fast how much more we have in common. You will find out so fast how similar we are as conscious beings in this world. You will find out so quick how unimportant the separation, the things that separate us are. They're so unimportant, they're so trivial for the most part.
Speaker 2:I like that a lot.
Speaker 3:Nice.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. It's been an absolute honor being here. Thank you for asking these amazing questions and being your wonderful self.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. And now, where can listeners connect with you?
Speaker 3:So my website caesarcardonacom I'm sure you'll put the show notes for it, but my website's there. I highly recommend you join my newsletter. My newsletter just sends out stories of resilience, of cool things happening in the world. I share also evidence-based good news happening in the world, because there's a lot of good things that still happen. We're just not being shown it. And then I share companies that treat their employees well, who are good to their investors and good to the environment, and we can vote and spend with our dollars good to their investors and good to the environment.
Speaker 2:We can vote and spend with our dollars. Love that? Yeah, I will link all of that in the show notes and I do like to always give it back to the guest. Any final words of wisdom you want to share?
Speaker 3:Yeah, your clarity is closer than you think.
Speaker 2:I like that Well. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:And thank you, guys for tuning in to another episode of Mando's Mindset. Phew, what an episode. That episode with Caesar was so powerful. Honestly, I'm still sitting with a lot of it. I hope this episode was as inspiring for you as it was for me.
Speaker 2:The biggest thing that stuck with me is how Caesar framed forgiveness. He said holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, as Buddha said, and that hit me. Forgiveness isn't really about letting someone else off the hook. It's about setting yourself free. Another piece that really resonated with me is resilience. Caesar has been through so much and yet he still chooses compassion, peace and growth. And that's such a reminder to all of us that resilience isn't about pretending things didn't hurt. It's about facing the pain and deciding who you want to be after, want to be after. And then there was this simple mindset shift that Cesar shared. Instead of asking if something is, you can make it happen, that one small word, that one small word change opens up so many doors. If you ask yourself how? So I'll leave you with this when in your own life could forgiveness bring you peace? Where could resilience change the story you tell yourself? And what would shift, if you started asking yourself how, instead of if. This conversation left me inspired and I hope it spoke something in you as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you guys so much for tuning in to this episode of Mando's Mindset. I really hope it was needed with you and I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can connect with me on social media. Thanks guys, until next time. Thanks guys, until next time. 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.
