#91 - Dealing with Baggage in Order to Grow
It is important and beneficial to connect yourself with really good people. Someone who will motivate and inspire you to grow as a better individual. Growing connotes becoming the “better” version of oneself. But in order to grow, one has to take a big leap. And that big leap will enable you to acknowledge and accept the things that are keeping you from doing so. Growing is a process - wherein along the way, you’ll slowly recognize and be able to deal with the mental, emotional, and spiritual baggage that you have.
In this episode, Andrew and Benjy talk about the events at the recent staff retreat where their families joined as well. They share the meaningful experience that they had, and the biggest realization from that experience.
If you’re someone who wants to grow as a person but doesn’t know how or where to start, this episode can guide you to get yourself together as you hear about the importance of positive people in your life. Also discussed in this episode are the effects of freeing yourself from unnecessary things in your life. Listen to Episode 91 to learn more!
Importance of connecting with people physically
The process of being able to loosen up
Habits that you can adopt to get rid of porn
Realizations from the retreat
How to maintain good healthy habits and be inclined to the deeper work
How to experience fullness in your daily life
Being a good listener as the greatest gift that you can give someone
Importance of deep conversations
Challenging yourself to set an internal goal
The divine principle 101
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love
Welcome back to Love, Life, and Legacy, a podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hypersexualized times of ours. And in today's episode, Benjy and I are grappling with the idea of, first, cleaning out your junk. Making the purposeful, intentional time and effort to get rid of a bunch of junk that you have inside in order to then grow exponentially. You see, a lot of us want to skip ahead to get as much growth under our belt as possible. Changing our habits, changing our mindset, and all this stuff without addressing the real reasons why we're being held back in the first place. So in order to grow without bound, without limits, you first need to be able to see which chains are holding you back. Which mental, emotional, spiritual baggage that you have and deal with that, process that, so that you can then turn around and grow so much that it's almost unbelievable. Does this sound interesting to you? Join us. If it doesn't sound interesting to you, give us a chance. Join us. Let's get into it.
Welcome back, everybody. We're here. We're happy. How are you doing, Benjy?
Benjy Uyama
We're doing good. Excellent.
Andrew Love
We are back from a staff retreat. We did something unprecedented. I think in human history, I'm sure it's happened before but not to my knowledge, where we had a staff retreat. All staff flew in with our wives and our children, or in Carina's case, her husband. But we all brought our whole families. A staff of five or six turned into a retreat of 21 or 22, which was unprecedented and amazing. We had marshmallows and firecrackers, and it was incidentally the 4th of July which helped. I don't think we would have had firecrackers otherwise.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, it was really something else for sure.
Andrew Love
So in our staff retreats, we typically want to have one a year because we're usually in different states or different countries. It's really hard when Sammy's in Korea because every moment that he's awake we're asleep and vice versa. So we need to meet once a year to connect and heart and to clear out some stuff. Because you start to build up concepts about people if you don't see them face-to-face. You just see their bust which is like their shoulders in the head for a year and then you're like, oh my god, you have legs. You have feet and legs. This is amazing. But why we're talking about this is because we did something that we typically do. We're in the business of people. That's what we do. And so, we, as people have to be healthy if we want to help other people become healthy. So we had a 4-day staff retreat, and I'd love for you Benjy to outline how much of that time was spent talking about emotions? And how much of it was talking about practical like, let's take over the world kind of stuff?
Benjy Uyama
Yes, I think typically you'd expect when you finally get a bunch of stuff together, you just want to get going. But we literally spent more than half of our time together talking about emotional things and clearing the air, and just getting to know each other and being vulnerable. It's like we're using that analogy, our organization High Noon is like a body. Together, we're all functioning together as moving parts and moving limbs. And basically, half of the retreat felt like getting a massage deep tissue, getting the knots out. And then when you can get those painful knots out then you can just move way quicker like we just started sprinting as soon as I felt like things were cleared up.
Andrew Love
Yes. I thought you're going to go somewhere else with that analogy being a body. I thought we were going to go to the doctor or something. But massage makes a lot more sense. So we spent two and a half days talking about emotional stuff between us. You think, how is that even possible? And like, is that even work? We had a facilitator, we had an amazing facilitator there, David Young. And he noticed that especially the men in the room were very eager to be like, so what now? When can we work on our plan? What are we going to take over the world? And he kept on drawing us back to, well no, let's resolve these things between you guys. So it was exhausting. I don't know, how did you feel after a day of watching people cry and talking about heart stuff?
Benjy Uyama
It's pretty intense. It's not usually a situation we find ourselves most comfortable in as people, because it's not something you do every day. You don't go down the street or go to the mall or to school or wherever, and are asked how are you doing? What's challenging in your life? The phrasing of this is like, what do you incomplete about? What is incomplete about you in relation to your work in High Noon and the world and God, and what is love? So we basically talked about those kinds of things like, what is love? What is unconditional love? Which on the surface seems pretty obvious, but actually people have very different interpretations of what unconditional love is and how we express it. For me, apart from actually having our families together, that was the biggest impact for my experience personally like having my kids, having my wife, and all the spouses and children. They just made it so much more real and so much more. Like we're applying, basically, what we're trying to do with High Noon is we're trying to provide healing and health for our people. And how can we even touch that or even go there unless we feel like we're living ourselves? So for me, that was like I said just that deep massage, and ever since that, was like a week ago we got back? And I just feel like a lot more loose and in Zen right now.
Andrew Love
He's on a rocking chair, by the way. I can attest to this looseness. He's borderline conscious at this point. He's so loose. But the reason why we're bringing this up, why we decided to make this worthy of your time and attention is because that's the process that is very much needed for any deep work. First, you have to clear out anything that's blocking you emotionally in order for you to have access to the good stuff, to the good ideas, to the state of flow and recovery and healing in the possibility of a better future. So you cannot be tied to the chains of the past and all this nonsense that you've associated yourself with and accumulated. You need to cut those chains in order to be free to do what you got to do. So in recovery, it's the same thing as a lot of people just want to skip to the habits. Okay, which habits can I adopt to get rid of porn?
You might be able to, for a while, even there are some people who may be permanently were able to do that very, very rare, by the way. But you're missing the point because even if you're able to habitually eliminate porn, you're not understanding why you went there in the first place. What it did to you, to your mind, to your heart? How it manipulated your perception of the world? And in order to heal that, so that you can be a happy healthy thriving person, you need to do that deep work which is stereotypes aren't always great but sometimes they're stereotypes for a reason. But men typically are less desiring of the process of dealing with emotions. And you are in Korea in 2015. I don't know if we talked about this on the podcast, but the men and women were split after being a month together. We were there together with each other, co-ed, everything for a month in Korea, traveling the country, seeing all these cool things, doing all this cool stuff, learning a bunch of stuff. And then they're like, here you get guys night and girls night. Do whatever you want. The men degenerated. We took our shirts off, we took our socks off instead of wrestling and having arm-wrestling matches. Granting that there is a good chunk of time when we were running around the room grunting incoherently in caveman talk, just that's where we were at. That's what we needed. And then the women, we got a report from them. They came downstairs and first of all, they're like, what is that smell? And it was us being men. And we're like, what did you guys do? And the women across the board sat down and basically cried.
Benjy Uyama
Yes.
Andrew Love
We're emotional for the entire night. And we were like, wow, we were clearly different creatures. So it's not necessarily intuitive for, guys, but doesn't mean that we don't need to do this stuff.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, I think for me, the big realization going to this retreat and getting this deep massage, it seems like if you've ever done consulting or like, clean your house. If you ever cleaned your house and did a deep clean, minimize it, throw away a bunch of stuff. And if you don't worry, if you consult someone ask them to do it for you and tell you what you should do, then usually what happens is you last a few weeks or a month. And then by the next month, it's back to normal. And the reason that happens is that you never figured out how it became that way in the first place. So when you're saying that, and that came to mind. If that analogy is helpful, is like if you're unhealthy or overweight, whatever, if you don't figure out what led you to in the first place, then you're just going to go back to where it was.
Andrew Love
I really like the metaphor that you touched. They're both great. You're on metaphor fire today. But the one that you glossed over was the cleaning one. And I've noticed this about my wife and about myself and also my best friend years ago, I'm a very good daily cleaner. I do the dishes. I maintain the house really well. But I don't do those deep cleanings intuitively. My wife doesn't clean up after herself. So I clean up after yourself on a daily basis. But when it comes to deep clean, she will scrub like once a quarter or whatever. She would just clean something until it's so sparkly and beautiful. And we just did that. We just got a car, and we just cleaned it like crazy. And she's so good at that. So that's a good metaphor for people's recovery as well. Some people are maybe good at maintaining pretty good healthy habits whereas other people might be more inclined to the deeper work. But you need to be able to have that versatility of both. You need to maintain a certain regimen of healthy habits. Great, but if you don't do that deep cleaning first, you're just keeping a really deeply dirty floor clean as a dirty floor can be. Because it got stains and whatever, like shoe marks and stuff like that. That comes out on the deep cleaning. And so in our relationships, it's true like in marriage, but with ourselves as well.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, that's something I realized personally. If I could share just personally what I gained from this retreat. I know for our listeners, the retreat sounds so ambiguous. But basically, we were at the Wolfenberger house. Uncle David took me to his house for five, six days or longer for some. And you can imagine all the kids and how chaotic and fun it is. All the cooking and cleaning and sleeping people. A few people sacrificed and slept outside in the intense, and rainy, cold, misty Washington State weather. And to be honest, leading up to this retreat, I was feeling rather empty. I say that meaning kind of empty in terms of my capacity to love and to accept and to forgive, and to just be a decent human being. And I think a result of that feeling is like hitting a limit in terms of understanding or feeling love in my life and feeling full of love and also feeling passion and feeling synergy with God especially. I realized that I haven't connected with God on a one-on-one level in a long time. And when I went to the retreat and saw these people interacting with all the families and dynamics, and everyone has a different faith base, faith systems, and belief systems. I really realized that I have been hiding from God, honestly. I've realized that I was pushing God aside in hopes that I would experience God or I didn't need God because I'm a parent and I have everything I need. I don't need some entity to make me feel alive and passionate and loving anymore. As before, a long time ago, I rely on God for everything. But then I realized that a lot of the fullness I was feeling in life before was disappearing. And I was relying a lot on, especially, my wife to feel that desire of love in my life to receive love. We all need and desire love. And I was willing, my wife loves to do that. And it's just fine, she's a very loving person. But sometimes she's not, honestly, and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes she's critical, sometimes she says things I don't like. And in those times it's like, where do I go to? How do I de-stress from that and actually be able to love her back and accept her?
So that was all going on my mind going to the retreat. And when we got there, I just felt that there was a lot of love. If you could imagine all these people here, the Wolfenbergers and all these families, there's so much love and so much God. I realized that this is the feeling of being full. That's what I felt. This is the feeling of feeling full of love. And this is the feeling of experiencing God's love. Father even states that the feeling of experiencing God's love is like a feeling of calmness and a little bit of sleepiness, but you're not really wanting to sleep but you're feeling alive but just relax, kind of like that. And that's how I felt the whole time. And so ever since coming back from there, I've may have been maintaining that feeling. And the question comes like, how do you keep that feeling alive? How do you connect to that feeling of fullness and the ability to the capacity to love people? As opposed to just focusing on me and my family, my kids, but how do I receive that love and just give it to other people? I think that fullness comes in different forms for different people. To some people, it's God. To some people, it's family. To some people, it's following your passion. To some people, it's exercise, whatever it may be. But I feel like that rhythm or that vibe, that energy in keeping that up is really important. We're talking about sexual integrity, about recovery, we're talking about living life to the best potential possible, then that fullness for me at least, that's where I want to be all the time and that's where I want to gravitate to.
And so ever since the retreat, I've been praying and meditating more. I don't pray a lot, honestly. I stopped praying to God and trying to connect with God since when I had kids actually which I know is crazy and ironic. But I just felt like, I'm a parent now. I'll just experience God naturally. God will just come to me. And in many, many ways it has God has come to me, and I've experienced God a lot. But it's not like an intentional thing that I try to connect with God every day. So I started doing that, like every morning, just sitting outside and just receiving love and asking God, how I can help and just connecting on that level. And it's been really different because then my source of fullness and love does not come from my wife, although that's not a problem. But she's not the only source of love in my life for my kids or anything like that, but really from something deeper within myself. So yes, just wanted to share that.
Andrew Love
Well, that's really important. I think we all felt really good after that. I think we were really full spiritually, but especially, physically, a lot of food.
Benjy Uyama
That's right.
Andrew Love
Anytime you go to the Wolfenberger's house, there's a lot of food. So practically speaking, because not everybody listening to this podcast is going to be going to our staff retreat, AKA nobody really probably. Maybe. Maybe some of you will join the fold and work for High Noon. But for the average person, then how could they recreate that experience? What really occurred in that time that provided you with that sense of fullness? How could somebody like the average Joe who's going through a recovery program, go and do that deep dive? Without having to go to a retreat, how can they do that in their daily life?
Benjy Uyama
What I observed with a lot of us who's a lot of just being really, really honest with ourselves. Coming to a conversation and saying like, oh, I know the answer to this. I know what love is. I know what the answer is. And then realizing like, oh, wow. If I'm really honest with myself, I'm limited in many ways. And this having give-and-take with people, I think is the key to experiencing that. It's having give-and-take on that, whether it's through your accountability partner or with your group or with someone in High Noon, with a parent, with a spouse. Having a give-and-take and just being honest about it, and not being defensive. There was very little defensiveness at the retreat. That's what we noticed. If somebody has an issue with you and brings something up, that they're feeling incomplete about, then there's no defensiveness or like, no, that's not true. It's like, I'm trying to hear you out. Is this what you're saying? And then just being honest about that.
Andrew Love
So deep conversations and open-heartedness, so that you can hear constructive criticism or feedback. What else took place?
Benjy Uyama
Well, what happens to you?
Andrew Love
What's funny is, I wasn't really involved in any of this stuff. I didn't have any beef with anybody. Nobody seemed to have any beef with me. So I was more of a passive observer. I called myself the golf bag, remember? I was just there. If somebody needed something, they needed to snack, I was there, or whatever. Spiritually, I would just say the joke here and there. But if you can imagine, that's an important role too. To have just somebody steady to hear other people, to support other people, to listen, to be a good listener, to be an active listener. If you are an accountability partner, that's one of the biggest skills or facilitator or you are a parent, or you are married, or you want to have friends, to be a good listener is one of the greatest gifts that you can do. And that means really listening to somebody. Really hearing them out and trying to silence the voice in your head that's coming up with a response and just really focus on what are they saying. And then trying to participate in giving an appropriate response. So if they're looking for feedback, giving them feedback. If they're just looking to be heard, giving them validation and be like, my God, thank you for sharing. I know it's not easy to talk about this stuff. You're like the roto-rooter.
I had a friend that was a roto-rooter. He brought out the snake. If somebody had a clogged toilet or something, he had this giant snake-like matrix that would unclog things. So you're like that. You're helping them unclog their heart stuff, their spiritual stuff when you can just be there and listen. So that's mostly, my function was to create a sense of lightness by just joking around a little bit. But if people needed me to be serious to be that, so to be a good object, we have that in the Divine Principle. But I don't think many people have read the Divine Principle of practice being. It's really hard because it means to go to zero to be like water and just refract whatever is being put into you, and to reflect light. So yes, but I would say the process from a practical standpoint is like, pick up a phone. Call somebody. I know that's so old school to actually use your phone to call somebody. I know most people think the phone is for Candy Crush. There are other purposes than Candy Crush for your phone. You can call people, and it's highly recommended.
They just look at someone who you feel estranged from, by, I don't know. Do you feel that you've just haven't called somebody? Or do you feel like there's an existing rift in a relationship? Call that person and be like, hey, I value your friendship or our relationship, did I do something wrong? Can we talk about it? It'll be open to that. Initiate conversation. And these kinds of deep conversations, you realize that they add up. That person said something to you a few months ago so you haven't talked to them since, that gets stored up in you whether you notice it or not. It gets stored up into you. It's a blockage from you being able to experience love.
You have a fight with a random stranger, and it just leaves you feeling weird. That adds up. It all starts to stockpile, little by little, and all that is preventing you from experiencing God. That is preventing you from being emotionally available because it's like crust, you're losing the practice of actively loving the people in your life. So call somebody up. I also started challenging people yesterday to when you leave your house, have an internal goal for everything that you're doing. Going grocery shopping? Go say hi, and start a conversation with at least one person. If not every single person you see, especially the cashier. Don't just be like, hi. Yes. Paper, please?
Benjy Uyama
No eye contact.
Andrew Love
Don't be an Android version of yourself. Just say something like, what's your favorite food to eat in this giant supermarket? What's the one thing that you love to eat most, or something like that. And just prodding them to see if they're alive and to see if you can engage. It opens you up. But all this is just, it adds up to a life of being alive. And death is the accumulation of not doing stuff and slowly falling asleep. Slowly going into this modality where you just wish you were somebody else.
Benjy Uyama
Yes, I had an experience about this point with my neighbor. We just moved to a new house here, and we went to say hi to our neighbor. They're extremely friendly. And then I got their phone numbers, and then that next day I was like, oh they're friendly people. I want to build a friendly relationship. They have two kids, two small boys. Let's build a friendly relationship. So I texted them and said hey, do your boys want to come over to play on the trampoline? Because we have a trampoline. And then they didn't respond. And then I text again, no response. So basically, I'm building a story in my head or having give-and-take in my own head that saying that they don't want to get to know us. That's the narrative that's going on in my head. And that narrative is being created based on give-and-take with myself, not with them.
So I think by just calling somebody, having give-and-take about whatever you're going through in life, whatever you want to create in your life and the issues that you have, you have give-and-take with somebody about it, that creates something new. That is the Divine Principle 101. Everything is created on give-and-take. Whether it's a negative thing or a positive thing, a good thing or a bad thing, everything is created. If you want to create something new in your life, you want to change things up as to be based on give-and-take with someone else. If we're just in our heads all the time thinking, oh, I can be a porn addict. I'm not addicted because if I was addicted, then I'd be able to quit anytime and just in our head, then we're creating our own narrative that is probably false and probably not even true. So as we talk to someone, therapist, a parent, an accountability partner, a group, anyone at all. Andrew or myself, then we create a new narrative. We realize like, holy crap, I have not been seeing myself clearly. And I can create something new. And it's based on a give-and-take that you can actually create something. If I go to my neighbor and say, hey, I sent you a text. Do I have the right number? Maybe I have the wrong number or something, and you didn't respond. And they'll say, oh, you know, whatever. I don't know. So I have this crazy fear that they looked me up online and saw a bunch of my YouTube videos for High Noon or something when they think I'm some weird. This story in my head, it's so funny.
Andrew Love
Well, the thing about it is most likely that that's not the case. But even if it were, that's the thing is that you're now taking this defensive position. And every time you see them, you're coming with that perspective, and you're giving that, you're radiating that defensiveness. And they're reacting to that. It's like you're manifesting your thoughts in a negative way in that situation. So yes, this is true, guys. If you guys are struggling with pornography, with masturbation, this is the same thing as you're telling a story about I'm a screw-up. I have no control over myself. And you're creating this destiny for yourself because you're reiterating this feeling of doubt, lack of self-worth. And the more you say it, you're cementing. And so you need to change the story that you're telling and how you feel about it, and you'll just experience it in a totally different light. And that's relationships with people, relationships with yourself. Like Benjy was saying with God, it's like you just were out of practice in having a conversation with God. Because that's the other thing, and I don't want to get too into that is, as we evolve, our relationships are supposed to evolve, including God.
So how we even pray and all that most likely will change over time. And how we connect and communicate with the divine, it's meant to change just like all relationships are meant to grow and shift. They're frayed at times, and they're thriving at times, and that's what it's like to be alive. So anyway, guys, the reason we brought this up is that we experienced a lot as an organization. And the reason why we do this is that we want to create the opportunity for everybody that we helped to benefit from our breakthroughs as an organization. And there is a cascade effect. But you, as a listener, as somebody who's working on yourself, please understand that there is a massive need for you to clear out your junk and do a deep cleaning and then do maintenance thereafter. Benjy's talking about how do we maintain that feeling after we've had it? Well, that's what I'm good at. That's what I was saying about surface cleaning. I'm really good at surface cleaning. That's just maintaining really healthy habits. So both are needed. The deep cleaning and the surface cleaning are both necessary. And we encourage you to have these conversations. Set aside time to have deep conversations because that informs the rest of your days. If you have really rewarding conversations, you feel better during the day, your life gets better. So it's worth the time and the effort even when they're awkward conversations. It might not go well the first time, it's a practice. You got to keep on trying to have good healthy conversations because sometimes confronting to hear when somebody calls you out for being shady or unreliable or you haven't been full of integrity. Maybe you said you do stuff and you didn't do it, whatever. It's not nice to hear, but that helps those weird feelings. Then make way if you can have the humility just to say, yes, I screwed up, it allows love to flow again. So we encourage you so much. If you truly want to break free from porn permanently and build a life of sexual integrity, you got to do that deep cleaning. Any last words Benjy?
Benjy Uyama
No, that was well said.
Andrew Love
Awesome. Well, thank you. Maybe we'll have a giveaway, Benjy. You are always in charge of the giveaways. We'll have a giveaway for somebody to come to the next retreat, and they can experience that too. Very cool. Anyway, guys, as always, please, we want to hear from you. I'm challenging. If you've listened to this far in the podcast, it means that we're giving you something that is of value. Please tell us, what of our podcast really resonated with you? And what really you didn't like at all, or what we can do better? We want to hear from you. We need more feedback. In this line of work, feedback is a scarce resource because people are so afraid, so please let us know. We know that you're listening. Just let us listen to you. Give us a little something, something. Email us. All of our emails are on the website or find us on social. Just reach out to us. See you later, everybody. We love you to death.
Hey, Andrew Love here, and I wanted to plant a seed in your mind before you go. You see, a lot of people when they start to consume our content, they listen to our podcast, they watch our videos, they read our blogs, they start to believe in the idea of freedom as a possibility for them and their lives, and it is. You can break free from porn, you can build amazing eternal relationships, but it requires you to make the jump. It requires you to commit to transformation. And that only happens when you invite other people into your journey. You see, a lot of people think that because I got into porn by myself, I can get out of it by myself, and that's the wrong thinking. It's not about simply removing a negative force from your life. It's about creating fulfillment and connection and intimacy with other people. So we really recommend, first and foremost, that you build a team of accountability partners, facilitators, group members, and we can do that. We have all that waiting for you. But you need to first reach out to us. If you already have people in your life that you think can help you, we have online courses that will teach you both how to create a dynamic that works in terms of accountability. But if you don't have an accountability partner, we already have volunteers who are waiting for somebody to help. We have groups that are waiting for somebody like you. But your role and your job are to merely reach out to us, and we can work together with you to create a powerhouse team so that you can build the life of your dreams. We look forward to hearing from you.