EFR 752: Shifting From Chaos to Calm, Shedding External Validation, and the Road to Inner Peace with Eben Britton

0:00:01 - Chase Well, dude Eb, welcome to the show man. Thanks, brother, Good to be here. My tiniest guest ever, I think. Can you fit in that chair, you good you come to the world.

That's a good chair man, I like this chair, I like this chair. You know out of the gate man, somebody that has never heard of you. I think if we just look at you and, as we're going to get familiar more with your content, what we hear you talk about and what we hear you do, I'm just going to say it doesn't make any sense.

0:00:27 - Eben Interesting.

0:00:28 - Chase I mean, for example, like in a good way in the best way possible. When we were scheduling this, I was looking at a morning slot and you go no, actually I teach yoga and Malibu that day in the morning.

I had to look at my phone like this dude, you were like six, five, six, six, six, two hundred and fifty pounds teaching yoga. I can't imagine my response if you walked into teach my class, man. So you don't make sense in the best way possible. But I know it's been a long journey to get here and we're going to get there. But you know just out of the gate why do you do what you do now. Why are you in this? You know, to kind of use some of your words, you're in a very ebb and flow period of your life and it seems like you're you're calming down, you're becoming more still and you're not only integrating practices into your life but sharing these practices and teaching them with others. That, again, don't quite line up to what people might think when they initially look at you.

0:01:24 - Eben It's a great question, dude, great question, and it's feeling like a reminder to me of why going. Why do I do what I do? What do I do? I spent a lot of time in my life with a lot of noise, a lot of noise in my head, lot to prove, a lot of voices, really self self, attached to everyone else, everyone outside of me's idea about what I should be doing, who I should be being, how I should be spending my time, how I should be handling situations.

And, interestingly, it still comes up, you know, here and there, like family situations, and then somebody's telling me make sure you do this, make sure you say this. And it's interesting, it happened just a couple of weeks ago actually, with a thing that's going on in my family that was happening. I thought, oh, isn't that interesting. There it is again, somebody wanting to make sure I knew what to do. You know, and couple that with I'm a super sensitive guy. I've always been super sensitive, just sensitive to stimuli, sensitive to my thoughts and emotions, sensitive to what's going on around me, other people's energy, other people's words, how other people are being. I came up in a family that was very affected by alcoholism, which anyone who's who's been, who's grown up in that atmosphere. There's a hyper awareness, a hyper vigilance that comes with that you need to know, dancing around certain people behaviors Exactly, yeah, exactly.

You need to see. You need to make sure you're safe. You need to. I need to make sure my little brother's safe. I need to make sure mom's okay, dad's okay. What's going to happen when they leave, or what's going to happen when, if I don't do sex? You know a lot of this stuff. It was a very there was a lot of noise it's the simplest way to put it and football was this incredible vehicle for me to block that out, focus my energy and attention on something and become really successful at it.

But coming out of football in 2014 was my last season and all of a sudden, I was back in the midst of all of that noise you know, and and along with that, like a lifetime of stuff that just came crashing over me like a tidal wave and I had to look at it, I had to do something about it, and it started with Al-Anon 12 step programs. Al-anon is for families of alcoholics, then there's AA for the alcoholics. So Al-Anon's I always put it this way is I didn't have a drinking disease, I had a thinking disease.

0:04:39 - Chase Yeah, I've heard you say that before and it's, that's really intriguing. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us?

0:04:44 - Eben Yeah, so it's. You know, it's not about it was never about a substance for me, but it was about how I can radically overthink things to the point where it paralyzes me, makes me completely immobile, incapable of taking action, incapable of speaking up for myself. It's easier for me to become really small and tiny, just to be safe and keep everyone else okay, and then I'll worry about my wellbeing sometime never.

0:05:24 - Chase So you put yourself on the back burner, essentially For a long time.

0:05:27 - Eben Essentially, and that's that's a super subtle dance, like you might. Looking at my life, you might not even think that you know people who knew me 10 years ago or five, seven years ago, whenever it was that I started this, this process, this journey of changing how I'm living being more in stillness and kind of this quiet space.

Yeah, people might have said, oh, ebb's, ebb's a superhero, ebb does it all, ebb's a. You know, ebb's this and that and I've played pro football and all this stuff, and you know, meanwhile there's a. Inside there was a fucking terrified, wounded little boy who was doing everything he could just to survive. I felt like he was suffocating completely. And so why do I do what I do now? It's happened out of necessity.

You know it was either I was going to start unpacking this stuff, reconciling this stuff inside, developing a relationship with that that noise, essentially Because it hasn't necessarily gone anywhere, it's just my relationship to it has changed, and you know, and that started with Al-Anon and 12 step programs going into a communal sharing experience. In my case, it was a room full of men. This was a men's group, al-anon meeting here in LA, and it was a really powerful thing to inform me that I wasn't alone. This wasn't something that was just totally unique to me. There were other people out there, other guys, men in particular, who had been through similar things, were struggling, had been through suffering and had found their way into the light again. Did you really?

0:07:27 - Chase believe that you were alone up to this point, because I think we oftentimes probably think there's got to be somebody else going through something similar like us. I just don't know them. Did you really believe that? Or was it just a matter of you finally were in a room around these people and it made it real? You actually had to put yourself into a different environment.

0:07:46 - Eben I think that's one of my mechanisms from my upbringing is that I will get when I'm not doing well, I'll get myself into a mode where I think I'm totally alone and I've got to handle the situation on my own. I can't reach out to anybody, God forbid. Anybody knows I messed up or this is happening or whatever's going on. That's part of that brain chemistry.

0:08:19 - Chase Is that maybe because you didn't want to open up, or you didn't want to feel like? You felt like maybe you would be a burden?

0:08:26 - Eben That's a good question. I mean, that's a really good question. This is definitely something that is very, it's very. You know this isn't a rarity in the community of alcoholism. In this psychology it's. You know, it's an interesting thing to use the word alcoholism because it's so much more than that. It's a very specific brain mapping. You know, it's a very specific psychological structure.

When we're looking at the world of addiction and it's not necessarily just about alcohol Right, you know, that's my point is that when we say the word alcoholism, everybody immediately goes oh, the fall down, drunk, the blackout, drunk, you know, but it's not necessarily that Kind of have this stereotypical picture in our mind.

Yeah, I mean, it's the little things, it's the, it's the, you know, communication via shame, it's the communication via guilt, it's sarcasm, it's gaslighting, it's narcissism, it's no consideration for anybody around you. It's a whole array of things that are behavioral things, you know.

0:09:45 - Chase Was it because you think of all of that surrounding alcoholism and your family dynamic that that led you to really believe that? Because it's so complex, I have to be alone in this matter?

0:09:59 - Eben Yeah, definitely You're going to get yelled at. Somebody's going to say what the fuck did you do? You know? You're going to get criticized. You're going to get lambasted. You're going to be. You're going to be exiled because you fucked up and you can't do that.

0:10:15 - Chase You know so, even at the height of living in fear and this unique family dynamic you had around alcoholism, at the end of the day, the end of that thought process, it was still I don't want to disrupt, not being a part of this tribe or this family, absolutely so. Even no matter how bad things got, it never crossed your mind I got to go, I got to get out of here, I can't be involved with this. You still had that attachment.

0:10:39 - Eben Well, football is my. I was like football is going to take me out of this. Okay, you know that was, this is and it's not, you know, and obviously it's not a thing where you're walking around conscious of any of this.

0:10:52 - Chase This is just how most of us aren't you know this is just how you're living.

0:10:56 - Eben This is what you understand to be loved. This is what you understand to be family. You know it's difficult. It's hard, it's heavy, it's. We're alone, we can't mess up. We got to be perfect. All this stuff when else?

0:11:09 - Chase am I going to go? Who else is going to love me? What?

0:11:12 - Eben Yeah, you're not even. I mean as a child, when you've got a roof over your head and food on the table, you're not thinking about. You know where else am I going to go, you know? For me, though, football was this vehicle. I said that that's what I'm going to do, like that, and that wasn't even conscious of like I got to get out of here. It was just. It was more about skyrocketing myself to start them into the light, into the sun, to raise myself above it, to prove to the world that I'm not, that, that I'm to be feared and respected and loved, and all of these things you know.

0:11:54 - Chase I've heard you talk about not to jump ahead. When you chose to leave the NFL, you said a big part of it was this, this rage that you felt that you had or needed to play and to compete at that level. You no longer had it was there. Now let's go back to the beginning. Here Was this the source of that rage.

0:12:15 - Eben Definitely, man. Yeah, this was my whole childhood was the source of it. You know, and look, this is one of those things too, where, when you really get down to the bones of your being, you recognize that everyone's doing the best they can and a lot of the tools that they have right With the tools they have.

And a lot of it was the perception I had about what I should have gotten you know and letting go of that. Letting go of any idea of like I wish my mom did this when I was a kid, or I wish my dad could have done that. Letting go of all that and recognizing that they were always doing the best that they could, what would have been loving me enough.

0:13:01 - Chase What would have been?

0:13:02 - Eben supporting me enough, because all of that has to be about me anyway. You know what I'm doing for myself, so you know, once you come to that, that understanding all of that stuff falls away and you recognize it was all perfect anyway. But that was well said, man, well said. You know that was, that was the fuel on the fire. You know that was the fuel on the fire, feeling like I was always second to something or not cherished, love, supported the way I thought I needed to be, or you know it almost. There's no words to articulate it because it's. Whatever I thought I needed was a fantasy. Anyway, that was a fantasy.

0:14:00 - Chase Wow, you know what a tough yet necessary realization.

0:14:03 - Eben Yeah.

0:14:04 - Chase Yeah. So, then you found this group of Al-Anon and you kind of finally realized or for the first time realized I'm not alone. So how, then, did you kind of embark upon letting these walls down and opening up to these other guys and putting you on your journey now?

0:14:21 - Eben It was little by little, you know, that Al-Anon meeting led me to therapy, led me back to yoga, into meditation. You know, life took over. The universe happened, god happened, brought some really important people into my life, some really important mentors brought me into some plant medicine experiences and, just little by little, starting to investigate what's going on under here and starting to develop this relationship and learning how to let go and learning how to love myself and learning how to just be, rather than have my entire life, my entire self-worth, be about how much I'm doing or how much I'm creating or how much money I'm making, and all of this, all of these unreal ideas about what it means to be a human. You know, and that's the truth. So why do I do what I do? It happened out of necessity, because, for as far back as I can remember, even that little kid, what I was craving, what I was desiring, was peace and freedom. You know.

0:15:38 - Chase So maybe do you feel like finally, at this point in your life or when these moments kind of transpired, you had the confidence, you had the bravery to say out loud and to take claim to what you wanted finally for your life and kind of going back to what this, even this little boy, wanted all along.

0:15:57 - Eben Definitely, I think, through this, through that fire of complete obliteration. You know, coming out of football I was mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually destroyed. No idea who I was. What am I supposed to do? What do I even like, what do I want? I have no idea, no idea.

0:16:19 - Chase Because you were. How long did you play in the NFL?

0:16:21 - Eben I played for six years. I mean spent 15 years in football, from the time I was 13 years old until I was 28,. You know some of the most formative years of your life.

0:16:31 - Chase That's identity. That's right there.

0:16:33 - Eben Totally, you know. You know what that's about. You know that what can happen when you focus your entire being on an endeavor, on a mission, and then you come out the other end and maybe you did what you wanted to do, maybe you didn't, whatever it is, it's over. Now you've got this whole expanse of infinity in front of you and you have no idea where to even begin. So all of that stuff the Alenon, the therapy, and just this, this willingness it was all just a willingness, because I had been brought completely to my knees by life.

I was suicidal and homicidal dude, you know, getting into that Alenon meeting, the first thing that, the thing that happened before that was a call to my wife at the time saying I'm going to kill myself or I'm going to kill somebody getting on the freeway to drive to this CBD company. I'd started, you know, and I even felt that one, you know. She went to my mom, thank God. She went to my mom's house in tears and said I don't know what to do, I don't know, like, how to help this guy.

0:17:39 - Chase What was the physical state of being when you said that out loud? If you can go back to that, totally suffocating.

0:17:46 - Eben I felt like I hadn't taken a breath in my entire life. You know, just like choked. Choked on shame, guilt, self-hate, all of it. Dude, like nothing. I had done nothing with my life. Here I am, I'm at that point. What was that? It was 2016. I was 29, 30 maybe, and I'd wake up days, man, and I'd look back at my life.

0:18:21 - Chase I'd go what did I?

0:18:22 - Eben even do you know? I spent my life working my ass off to achieve this dream that was planted in my mind when I was about eight years old. Did it? I did it, Played six years. Most guys played 2.7. I would look back and think I did nothing. I've done nothing with my life Crazy.

0:18:51 - Chase Do you think you were living your dream or were you living someone else's dream? I know we kind of talked about how you had a lot of other input, of this is what you should do, who you should be, but honestly, looking back now, do you feel like you asked yourself that question? It was prompted because it was never your dream to begin with. It was my dream.

0:19:11 - Eben I think it goes to a deeper truth that, even if we're living our dream, that's not going to be the thing that makes us content and fulfilled.

0:19:19 - Chase So, even in pursuit of, and even living our dreams, it's not going to be enough 1000%.

0:19:25 - Eben Dude. If that's the thing you're going, this is going to fix it. This is the thing that's going to make me whole. It's not. I've done it multiple times. I've had, I've had, a handful of my dream jobs. I've been very lucky dude. I've had dream jobs multiple times and every time I find myself walking out the door of the building going, man, this ain't it actually, or better yet, or better.

More specifically said, this is not the thing that's going to make me happy, fulfilled content, free. So what it's about? What is it about? It's got to be about something else, this deeper nourishing of the heart and the soul. That has to be. That's a day to day thing which has nothing to do with your job, has nothing to do with your partner, has nothing to do with what you're doing with your life, has nothing to do with how much money you're making. That is something that is so deep and intimate that we can only really know when we've taken time to get really quiet and know ourselves, know ourselves. This thing that's happening inside of here whatever you want to call it, I don't know what it is the soul, the heart, the highest self there's, there's a voice inside that's constantly whispering and nudging and encouraging. That's the thing, that's the only thing that will, in the end, reveal itself to be a prosperous journey in bringing you deep happiness, fulfillment and wellbeing is listening to that?

0:21:16 - Chase Why do you think we don't listen to that for so long? Why do you think we even actively try to quiet that inner knowing voice?

0:21:24 - Eben It's a good. I mean, this is a. This is something I'm fascinated by, dude. You know I'm fascinated by this thing. Is it our conditioning? Is it the society that we live in? We live in a very dualistic reality. So good, bad, right, wrong. This is great. That shit. I got to have that job to be the thing that I want to be. Yeah, when I make X money, then I'll get to be happy. All of these ideas that are totally nonsensical and fantasies because it doesn't matter. Man, you set a goal for yourself today. Say, hey, when I make a million dollars, then I'm going to be happy. You get the million dollars. You're going to be happy for about a month or something. Maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe, yeah. Then it's going to be man, I need a hundred million. I need a hundred million, dude.

0:22:16 - Chase Why is that? What is about the human condition that enough is never enough?

0:22:19 - Eben Well, we spend our life. This is something I'm stumbling on in the moment, which I'm really excited to talk about today, because it's top of my mind and it's something I've been thinking about a lot and for the last year or so I've unintentionally, though instinctively, maybe better yet intuitively fallen into an open focus, meditation practice, An open focus meditation practice.

So open focus. So for me, my meditation practice every day for the last year I've been meditating for seven years every day, super disciplined, changed my life. Wow, Beyond anything else, meditation is fucking completely changed who I am as a human being.

0:23:12 - Chase I'm new to the game I'm pushing about four months. Love that, love it, love it, love it.

0:23:16 - Eben Shit just gets weird.

Life opens you start experiencing life in a completely different way. So I've been doing this open focus meditation which I intuitively fell into. I had a guy who I was meditating for a long time and I just I'd either do guided meditations or I'd listen to my breath, very disciplined, got a lot out of that. And then one day I met this guy and he said to me, eb, when you're following your breath, when you're when your meditation practice is following your breath, that's still, that's a fire mode, the element of fire. It's very narrow, focused. He didn't use that word. That's the word I'm using and putting on it.

0:24:04 - Chase And less Femi.

0:24:05 - Eben Okay, less Femi wrote a book about open focus. He's a. He really pioneered this idea, this concept, and he was also a devout Buddhist and Buddhist and Buddhism. There's three levels of of meditation. Essentially, there's meditation, there's concentration, then there's contemplation and contemplation is the highest form and it's an open focus, meditative state that you get into. And it's essentially where you are eyes open and you're taking in everything in front of you and you just continually let go of your mind's need, the mind mechanism of identifying everything in the room. So we've got door, refrigerator, shelf, couch, so you just, if you can, let go of that and just be in it.

And so for me, for the last year I've been practicing this listening meditation. And listening is one of the most ancient forms in yoga, ancient forms of meditation, and it's the fastest way to the deepest center of your being. So in my meditation I do eyes closed, set a timer for 20 minutes and I just bring my attention to the sounds coming into my ears. I bring my attention to the sounds coming into my ears and immediately I recognize that my mind wants to go air conditioning, dog barked outside, birds chirping, what's that humming out there? And little by little I just let it go and I just keep coming back to being in this atmosphere, this ocean of sound that's coming in, and you realize how much time the mechanism of the mind is to identify and analyze everything that it's coming into contact with.

Hands down, that's it, yeah, and we're constantly doing that. We're constantly doing that in our life and so it's a very narrow focus. And with a narrow focus there's an element of stress because there's an element of danger. There's an element of having to kill your food to eat. You know there's. There's all of these. When you're in a narrow focus, think of it, you know, think of a lion out in the, the plane. Narrow focus would be it locks in on an injured antelope that it's going to kill. Bring down, eat it, bring it back to the, the water lines.

0:26:46 - Chase The pride, then the cave. The pride yeah.

0:26:48 - Eben Yeah, so provide food for its family. Open focus is the lion just chilling there under the tree in the shade watching the whole herd go by. It's very open. It's very restful recovering. So when we're in this narrow focus, we're in narrow focus so much of our lives. Think about it. You're on your phone, you're in narrow focus. You're scrolling emails, you're sending an email, you're accomplishing a task, you're preparing food, you're eating food, you're engaged with somebody else. You're constantly in narrow focus and think about it. Dude, get to a certain point You're just looking at life through a pinhole. Man, seriously.

Yeah, literally just through the scope, through this tiny fucking dot, this little keyhole through the scope. So when you train yourself in open focus and this isn't to say narrow focus is bad good you know. Open focus is good because time and place.

0:27:49 - Chase We need narrow focus.

0:27:51 - Eben Yeah, we need narrow focus, but when you train yourself in open focus, that little pinhole starts to open up and you start to be able to take in more information. You start to be able to take in more of life. And so when you're able to do that, your life becomes less about the stuff that you're doing and it becomes more about how you're being in the state, the inner state of your life, all the life going on around the things we're trying to do to make our life.

Exactly yeah, which gives you and this is beneficial for just about anything you could possibly think of in business, in relationships, in health, all the things this because this opens up the pathways, the possibilities, the opportunities that are available to us. You know, when you're looking at life through a really small lens, in that constant, narrow focus, it's very limited. The way to that, the way to that target is very limited. There's maybe one way to get there. But when you open your focus you see, oh shit, I could go that way. Yeah, I can go over the top, I can go underneath, I could go around the side. There's a million ways that I could do that. I can take this thing to achieve what I want to achieve. And something popped in my head this morning that I love. I love this guy Osho. You know about Osho?

0:29:25 - Chase No.

0:29:26 - Eben Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. He's also known by that. There's a great, there's a documentary about him called Wild Wild Country. It's sort of about him and they paint him really as a cult leader and he had this property in Oregon and this whole all kinds of crazy shit went down because people fell in love with this guy. He's a guru, he's a spiritual guru, super profound, very deep, very wise. A lot of really interesting ideas. I mean, check him out. Okay, love him. He's written. All of his books are his, his spoken word. He would speak oh wow, Do these talks you could also check out his talk so.

Spotify. Okay, when you hear it, I say that they paint him as a cult leader in this documentary. Of course, because they want to. There's this weird societal thing with killing God and killing spirituality that I think is an interesting thing yeah.

Um. But so Osho said this thing, that his goal with, with what he was speaking about, was to inspire a new kind of human being, and he wanted to. He envisioned this new human being as Zorba the Buddha, and what he meant by that was there's Zorba the Greek. Who's this character factor fiction? I'm not exactly sure. The the, the idea of Zorba the Greek is he's. He's devoted to the bliss of life Love, music, food, joy, dance, family togetherness. You think about the dancing Greek and you know, you get that image.

It's just like good times, good vibrations, love, enjoying the the delights of life.

0:31:25 - Chase Is it like a Dionysus also? Very yes, okay, that's a great.

0:31:30 - Eben That's a great analogy.

Dionysus would be what Zorba the Greek was sort of embodied with Okay Tracking. So Zorba the Greek, zorba the Buddha, so combining that, that love of life, that love of all the delicious material joys of this thing, I get to have wonderful thing to eat good food, to dance, to love your people, to be in good company, to do a job that you absolutely love, that fucking fires you up every day, that's purposeful and meaningful and you just get excited. Doing it Doesn't get any better than that. That's amazing. That's it what else do?

0:32:09 - Chase we need bro yeah.

0:32:10 - Eben So to combine that with the Buddha, which is the ultimate in purity, openness, compassion, clarity, centeredness, peace, stillness. So to combine those two seeming dichotomies, to put those into one being. So, someone who chase essentially is like a guy like you and me, a man or woman who's interested in their spiritual well-being and also recognizes the divine bliss of modern life. This is where this is where we're at. So when you spend this time investigating, it's an investigation at first, and then you reconcile the dark parts and you reconcile the things that you feel like are ugly, or that you don't like, or that you've thought your whole life Everybody else is judging about it.

You've said no fucking way. And then you get to this place where you're not stiff arming anything, you're just in it all, you're just available to it all.

0:33:20 - Chase Yeah, no something. You kind of tell them my story, right? Well, this is our.

0:33:25 - Eben This is the hero's journey. Yeah, you know this is the journey to a full, loving life experience. We're not going to stiff, arm the shit into the darkness and pretend it's okay over here when we go home. You know that's impossible. We've all tried to do that. You know you try to like keep the job over here and the family here and my sexuality down there and my fucking drug addiction back there and none of it's going to co-mingle. But it's all here.

0:34:02 - Chase That's the life happening outside of the focal vision that we choose to have on any given thing at any given time. It doesn't mean it all doesn't exist and it's not there, we're going to have to deal with it at some point, exactly.

0:34:13 - Eben Yeah, that's God. That's God right there, man, you know that's, and that's that difference. We're in the narrow focus, we're in our ego, we're in our self will. Open focus. We get into God, we get into life, we get into divine will. So when you're in that open focus, you're more available to okay what's really important to me. Actually, what's really important to me, for me, it's peace, it's love, it's freedom. Those are three really important things to me. When I come into situations or modes where any of those three things start to get compromised, I know that I need to find another way to solve the issue. How?

0:34:59 - Chase do you measure those? How do you know? Going throughout your day, your work, your life, now that your peace, love and freedom are either happening or not, are there in jeopardy or in homeostasis?

0:35:10 - Eben I wish I could say it's this thing, but it's really a moment by moment, situationally based measure where it goes okay, and it's about recognition too. There's a lot of, and the more you peel back these layers, the more aware you can be of who you're doing business with. Right, right, right. Who are you in conversation with? What's this situation happening here? And if I do X or if I do Y, what is that going to inspire here? What's going to happen, what's going to come out of that situation? And so then you can get to maneuver and it's like okay, what's? What are the hills I'm willing to stand on and fight for and what are the things that are not worth sacrificing my peace, love and freedom. Now, sometimes there are things you come into contact with that on the other side of that is a greater expanse of peace, love and freedom. Like what?

0:36:10 - Chase How do we, how do we know we're on one side of this greater expansion? Maybe you're starting a business.

0:36:15 - Eben And the business isn't going the way the way that you thought it was. But you know you're just so. You, this is. This has been a God trip of coming into your divine purpose. You've gotten the download and the insight to create this thing and put it out into the world, and it's not quite happening yet, or you need to do something else. It's like there's something on the other side of that.

You know, I'm not sure there's something on the other side of that. You know, that's where you say to yourself well, I've literally laid my entire life on the line for this endeavor and I believe in it with all my heart and soul, and that's part of it too. You know, there are things that we do in life that we come into contact with, for instance, that CBD company. At that moment in my life this is back in 2015, 2016. A part of me thought this is my divine thing, but then I was in a room with people who we were all weren't on the same page, and it had turned into something that I wasn't interested in being a part of, and I recognized that this wasn't something for me to stand on the hill for and die on.

0:37:36 - Chase You know. So what did you do?

0:37:37 - Eben I walked away. I totally walked away and you know the company ended up falling apart not not long after that, and God bless those guys. But it was. It's one of those. It's this delicate dance in life, right, like, how much energy are we willing to give to something? And if you sold the farm to do this thing that you believe God put in front of you or some divine entity spawned in your life, then that's usually something that it's worth willing, it's worth sticking around for the miracle to happen. Do you call that faith? Thousand percent man. Faith is a. Faith is a key ingredient.

0:38:30 - Chase Faith and trust. What would you say to someone that is hearing what you're saying right now, maybe quite literally? You know I started the business or I'm on this new endeavor, I'm in a new relationship and you have that gut God knowing feeling, but for whatever reason, it's just not executing the way you planned. How would you help someone develop and keep faith for this endeavor their own, Because it sounds easier said than done. Thousand percent.

0:38:59 - Eben How many?

0:38:59 - Chase times have we heard you know, have faith, have faith have faith. It's just like fuck, like all right, but when am I going to get something in return?

0:39:07 - Eben When is this?

0:39:07 - Chase actually going to land? When is this going to stick? When is this gut feeling going to turn into my life? Uh huh, yes.

0:39:14 - Eben Good question, man. First, it's really important to get out of the mind noise, get out of the fear, fantasy, get, get time alone, get time and quiet, because that's the first thing that we come into contact with, that's the devil, that's the confrontation in the wilderness, that's Jesus coming into contact with the devil and the wilderness right after being baptized and God says you are my beloved son. Talk about a fucking duality.

Dude when I read that when I read that, I was like this is our story right here, man, because you get the God hit, you get the divine thing. That's like this is what I need to do. God's like you're the guy, man. You are the guy to bring this into the world. You start doing it immediately after Jesus rises up out of the water, spirit comes down. God's voice says this is my beloved son, with whom I'm well pleased. Right from there, spirit takes Jesus into the wilderness to confront the devil for 40 days. It's Perfect, right. It has to.

0:40:24 - Chase It has to happen Exactly.

0:40:25 - Eben Yeah, and over and over again, jesus is coming into contact with him. Over and over again, the devil's hammering him, hammering him, and by the end he says fuck you man.

0:40:36 - Chase Essentially, I'm God's only way. Jesus knows how to say.

0:40:41 - Eben I'm God's son. I don't have to prove that to anybody Be gone, and we have to do that for ourselves, because how many times you're you're in the God zone, man? You're doing the thing that you feel guided to do. You've gotten that far. That's a big step in itself, because that means you've cleared yourself of all of your. You're needing to prove, you're needing to show the world, you're needing to do something to conquer all of these ego driven tasks that we all have for ourselves.

Like for me, the NFL is about conquering the world. For me, when I'm really honest about what that was, it's about proving how big and scary I was, because I was fucking terrified, dude. I was terrified and hurt and I needed to show the world that I was big, strong, fucking scary as fuck and I wanted to conquer the world. That's what I wanted to do. That's what football was a vehicle for me to attempt to achieve that. And I destroyed myself in the process of trying to do that back ruptured disc, torn labrum, concussions, torn ligaments and muscles all over my body All sorts of shit, you know. So you get on the path. You've cleared out all the stuff. You feel divinely guided. You're doing the thing you feel you were born to do.

It's not quite hit the way you thought it would. You were sure next month the fucking big deals coming, the emails coming, the phone call, all of that stuff doesn't come, and then you're in your kitchen, inevitably. This is how it happens. So this is how it's been for me at least. I'm in the kitchen. It's late at night, I'm cleaning up the kitchen just before bed. Just before bed Feels quiet and calm and still and peaceful. And then this voice comes in. And what do you think you're doing, man? You don't have anything to offer people. Who do you think you are? Well, this time we've prepared dude, all right All right.

We've prepared because we've been meditating every day for the last five years. We've been praying, yeah, we've been developing ourselves, cultivating our energy, our inner fire, been working hard, we've been disciplined, we've been fucking vigilant. We've set the trap for this voice, thousand percent, bro. So this voice comes in now and you hear it, and you see it, and you go oh, there's that son of a bitch, there's that devil motherfucker. You stand up tall and you go. I know exactly who I am, I know exactly what I'm doing. I know exactly what I'm here to do and I'm doing a great job. Look at how fucking far I've come to get here. Man, life is a miracle. I've worked my ass off to get here and I'm not stopping now. Do you think that's?

0:43:56 - Chase worth saying to ourselves, maybe even before we get to that moment confronting our devils Absolutely Is there power in just voicing that, saying, that writing, that power of affirmation, brother I write about it in my book.

0:44:11 - Eben I wrote a book about my my journey out of football and these tools that have helped me put myself back together and then cultivated a fucking rock solid spiritual foundation. That proves itself to me every single day, man, because life keeps happening, brother. Life keeps happening. There's difficulty, there's challenge, there's adversity. This is what life does. Are we prepared? We have to be prepared, and you prepare yourself one day to time, every single day, with discipline and vigilance, and the fucking, the dojo is in the mind.

Oh yeah, and other truth, man, the meditation, the prayer. So affirmation, prayer and affirmation. I don't know if there's there. There may be bigger believers in it than me. It's one of my staples. I'm walking around praying, I'm driving around LA praying to God, and affirming prayer is affirmation, whether you're saying the serenity prayer, the Jesus prayer, or just saying to yourself over and over again I love myself, I support myself, I approve of myself. Louise, hey, you can heal your life. Highly recommend that book. I read that book around that Alan on phase and it totally changed my life, changed my relationship to my words and how I was speaking to myself. Because the ego feeds off the devil. The devil comes in the enemy, the demons, the conditioning. This is all the. This is the same different words for the same spirit that lives inside all of us.

You know the questioning side the uncertain side, the criticism you've ever come into contact with.

0:46:10 - Chase Absolutely yeah.

0:46:11 - Eben The all the people who have ever told you you can't do that, man, you can't do that. All those people, that voice, that's what that voice is. And so you rewire the mind, you rewire the inner being, the programming, by stating those counter statements to all of that stuff. I got. This Life is a miracle. I approve of myself, I love myself, I'm doing a great job, absolutely. And then when that voice comes in, it's quieter and quieter. One day it's just yelling in your ear, man, you know that feeling. It's right here on your shoulder, that son of a bitch is just loud as fuck, just telling you how hard it's going to be. Can you do this? The doubt, the all of that stuff. It's right here, but over and over again, one day at a time, you just keep in your practice, you stay in the dojo, man, you work, your, you prepare yourself, you train and little by little, that voice is just way out there.

It's way out there and it just becomes this whisper, just barely a shadow, you go oh, there it is. Yeah, I remember you. You're still there, huh, but you're much stronger. Yeah, you've. You've developed yourself, you've cultivated yourself. You're in the light.

0:47:39 - Chase What you're talking about here, I think, is great advice, great words Of wisdom for anybody to kind of take in and ponder and hopefully apply. But it really kind of hits home, makes me think of men, cause I think, at least in my personal experience, I've waited much longer than a lot of women I know especially my wife has great intuition of these things of ignoring that voice and suppressing it and trying to do anything else but address it and work on it. Do you think this is something that men, more so nowadays, are dealing with, or rather not dealing with, and why what?

is going on with the modern man that we're we're not doing, working in concepts like you're talking about here.

0:48:31 - Eben Hmm, it's very true and very true that I that this, this is a very, very, very this. I feel the same. This is a more difficult thing for men to step into, start looking at, than it is for women, seemingly.

0:48:53 - Chase Even just these words, these concepts, I think just just saying them out loud in a group of men, most guys would get uncomfortable, you know mm, hmm, I think it goes back to.

0:49:06 - Eben This is what I keep coming to. It goes back to as men, our primal purpose was to hunt, bring food back to the tribe and protect the territory. Hmm, this was our primal purpose. This is beyond anything else. This is what we are wired to do Go out on a hunt with our brothers, kill a big animal, bring it back to the women and children, feed everybody and then go to battle, go to war to secure our territory. We don't have that anymore. Dude, we live. We don't have any of that. Hmm, for a moment, we found a an illusion of the hunt in work and industry and corporate jobs and making money. Hmm, that has faded for a number of reasons, I think through through the rising of the feminist thing, which is just, you know, women should be able to work and have jobs and make money, just like men, and great, that's all great. However, that's turning into this toxic masculinity thing, and men are are kind of pushing it, suppressing women and then.

So now it's like well, men have to walk on egg shells and men can't even really be the macho, even if that was fake. Hmm, you know, and this is what I'm saying, we've come to critical mass on on how far from hunter protector We've come, we've we've gone, and we can't even fake the illusion of the machismo masculine. We make money and bring it home to the family and we're the breadwinners and you know the drinking and the, you know the fucking like having that, that sort of fifties.

Male archetype thing of the dad goes to work in the suit and tie and comes back and the whole family is ready on the table.

0:51:43 - Chase Dinner's on the table.

0:51:45 - Eben That type of thing. So that illusion is completely faded and now we're left with this thing, and we also came through this, this moment, through the sixties and the seventies with the hippies and Vietnam, where men felt like being masculine was too dangerous and we needed to feminize ourselves, we needed to get quiet, and women took on this really masculine dynamic to their, their way of being, and so the relationships got really thrown out of whack, with strong men sort of weak, weak and and feeble men who felt like they, they betrayed, that, their fathers had betrayed their mothers and men had betrayed women, which is partially true.

0:52:32 - Chase I mean, we've got a lot of that happen.

0:52:33 - Eben Yeah, A lot of that is real, Like the thing coming out of the. The hunter, protector archetype was we're the bigger, stronger sex of the species, so we use that to our advantage to dominate and fucking really hurt women. And so it came through this thing where we had to. We had to heal that and reconsider the masculine urge, which I think we've done to death. And now at this point we're looking at okay, so what is a man in modern society? What? How does a masculine male, what? Where does masculinity reveal itself in the modern world? And what I've come to is because we can say all of these things like masculine is the mountain, it's the king, it's the benevolent protector, it's the hunter, it's the protector, all these things.

But in modern life, like what is? Where does our masculinity really reveal itself? It's in integrity, dude. It's in being able to have difficult conversations, it's, in truth, in our word, it's in showing up for our people and that's. We've lost that as men, because I'm in the tail end of leading this six week men's workshop called the Wild King, which has been amazing, and every guy in there, myself included, has revealed at some point during this, this process. I don't spend any time with men. I don't really spend any like real time with my bros.

0:54:19 - Chase That's such a theme right now, at least in my life. I'm seeing that in a lot of I don't have a lot of other regular male relationships in my life, the ones that I do talk with. This is like literally this morning at the barber shop, my barber telling me the exact same thing.

0:54:35 - Eben Of course it's rampant. This is where we're at, as men you know, and I've got my brother excuse me.

Other than that, I don't hang out with many dudes anymore, and I was thinking I've been saying this because I've also had multiple conversations about this with guys in the last like two days, yeah, and I was thinking the last time I did it I was playing pro football and when we would get together, there's a lot of drinking. There's not much deep discussion going on. We're not talking about what we're struggling with, what's going on, what we're fired up about, we're talking about. We're talking bullshit, news, weather, sports, women, drinking there's not a whole lot there.

0:55:28 - Chase Yeah, I go back to the same thing, other than, like you know, some gym buddies here and there when I was really getting into kind of discovering fitness and barbell life. If I had to be God's honest truth, I haven't had that in my life since the military.

Uh huh, and you know it makes me wonder. You know, like you're talking about with sports. Why, why is that? Why do we only get this time, this camaraderie of brotherhood in these silos, but yet when we're out of them, why is it so difficult for us to bring that with us? It's an interesting thing, isn't it? I've been. I got out of the army in 2009. A decade plus now, like that's on me. Why have I not cultivated that at this point?

0:56:14 - Eben Yeah, yeah, it is on us.

0:56:16 - Chase Why do I have to reflect back so far ago to get that? That's crazy. I'm the same bro.

0:56:20 - Eben I'm the same.

0:56:21 - Chase Should we hang out? Yeah, let's go. Let's go in the garage and do kung fu right.

0:56:26 - Eben We need to do that, we need to hang out, we need to get guys together, you know, and then go on hikes, get a workout and do some ice tubs. Do something that feels maybe a little uncomfortable.

0:56:44 - Chase That's not the typical.

0:56:45 - Eben Hey, let's go drink some beers, watch the game, watch the game. All of that that's great. That's great.

0:56:51 - Chase It's a great starting point for a lot of guys too, if you've got a men's group.

0:56:55 - Eben Good buddy of mine, cal Callahan, he's got a great podcast Great on learn, great on learn, yeah, yeah. He runs a weekly men's group and I'll get in his backyard gym, I've gone a handful of times and it's a fucking special thing and it's nothing particular, you know.

It's a bunch of guys coming together to hang out, talk business, talk about what's going on in life, share encouragement, share hope, share ideas, share resources. One day it might be a super intense hit workout. Another day it might just be hanging out in his office listening to records, smoking bags.

0:57:43 - Chase Yeah, you know we did that on a show.

0:57:45 - Eben Yeah, like tobacco and herbs and good stuff and you're probably going to wind up getting a smoothie at Sun Life.

0:57:51 - Chase Yeah, dude, and it's just, it's time with your brothers, man.

0:57:55 - Eben And I don't think we need to put any stress on it Like we got to. We got to fucking save the world and and change our lives every single time we get together. I think just spending time together is really powerful.

0:58:09 - Chase And not even to your point, not even needing. Well, I might be putting words in your mouth here, but if we don't have a men's group, let's say you know. And to my point of of like, oh, if we're going to play sports.

0:58:21 - Eben we're together, oh, if we're in the military, we're together.

0:58:22 - Chase Oh, if we're policemen, we're together. Like taking that concept but starting a small snowball Like I like, look, let's just. The thing is we're going to build time together and I need to get uncomfortable first. So where and how can I start? Yes, dude.

0:58:40 - Eben I want to share something that I've witnessed that made me so fucking fired up. And Thursday mornings I go to the 70 am yoga class in Atwater village and I go with women. It's almost all women in there but me. That's not what I'm fired up about. After the yoga class, we walked down the street to get a coffee, and outside this coffee shop every Thursday morning I see these two dudes and they're playing backgammon or they're playing chess.

Yeah, they're playing cards and older gentlemen one older, one younger, Really and I watch these guys and I just thought to myself this is awesome, this is what it's about right here.

0:59:25 - Chase I see this all the time I usually it's a group of older guys they're probably 70s, 80s every morning a certain coffee spots or lounges and they're just shooting the shit. But they're there every fucking day and that's it, man.

0:59:38 - Eben Maybe we just meet for coffee at this place every Wednesday morning and there's a lot of people that are playing and there's nothing on the agenda. It's just come in, get present, hang out with some brothers, that's it, just to your point it has to start by coming together somewhere, somehow.

0:59:55 - Chase That's a great, great takeaway.

0:59:56 - Eben That's it. There's an incredible book, Iron John, by Robert Bly. Have you read it Long, long time ago? Yeah, I mean, this is a quintessential text for men in particular. Women can read it too. I think you'll get a lot out of it, learning about what's happening inside the men in your life. It's so right on point and he talks about there's. There's many instances around the world throughout history of tribes Um, I think, like aboriginals and all sorts of different peoples do this thing where literally the men will go and live separately from the women.

The men live in their own little tribe and they come together for gatherings and feasts and food and you know all the stuff. And the children will live with the women for a certain number of years and then the boys, when they turn 12, 13, the men will come in and take the boys away from the mothers. The mothers know this is going to happen, but they have to act like surprised. Yeah, Because, and the point is, it's a very intentional and powerful separation for the young boys from their mothers. Because I was, I was pretty much, I was raised by a single mom. My dad was always around and very present and, um, my father did a wonderful job and I love my dad to death and he was. He was very present in my life. That being said, 75% of my time was spent with my mom, and that raises a very certain individual especially for young men.

My grandmother, my stepmom, you know and there's a certain thing that women, mothers, are simply unable to give their sons. You're simply unable to give it, and the identity is a, an essence, is a spirit that must be handed down from men to boys and must come through the men. And we lack that because we don't have any rights of passage, we don't have rituals around this, where we've been completely severed from the hunter protector energy that lives in us.

1:02:30 - Chase It's almost like our. Our lifeline, our lifeblood to the masculine has been severed. Severed, deluded for sure.

1:02:38 - Eben Deluded all of that. We've been completely disconnected from that and it's on us, because now we're starting to come in like you're having a thaw, dude, I gotta hang out with some guys. I don't hang out with any guys. I'm surrounded by women too in my life. Great, love it. Yeah, love my women. You know so much.

1:02:59 - Chase I've just us and girls night. Yeah Me, her and her, like four friends, and her friends and you're like yo, which are my friends. I love, I love, love them all Of course, but it's just like there's something else.

1:03:12 - Eben Can we get some dudes in here? Yeah, dude, Can we just? And it's just that energy, right? Like you said, we don't have to fucking go play a football game we don't have to go lift rocks or something we can just hang out, but just being in the presence, use this energy exchange. You know what I mean, that we need as men, that we're losing.

1:03:34 - Chase I think for me, when I reflect on this, it's more so what happens after the fact. What I mean by that is whenever I do have to work this podcast today, and you know we got coffee in a Sunlight Bowl weeks ago and not to say that what happened during that time was not appreciated, but after the fact I had such a deeper level of appreciation because it was that unique masculine energy exchange that I don't get very often and that lingered with me.

And it happens. Every other time that I'm with my friend Caleb I was telling you he's in town. We had dinner last night, even just shooting the shit with my barber. Any time I'm with another guy and it's just the guys what I walk away with. Lasts way longer than that experience. And I think every guy listening if you get really honest and reflect on that, I think they would agree. Yeah, I think they would agree. So let's just copy paste, copy paste.

1:04:32 - Eben Yeah, it's important for our well being beyond anything that we can really wrap our mind around. Once again, we want it, we get. We live in this world where it's got to be specific, it's got to be goal oriented. We got to get something out of it. What if the thing you get out of spending time with a group of brothers, a group of your boys, is just a greater appreciation, a deeper sense of well being in your life? You know?

1:05:03 - Chase that's not a bad thing.

1:05:04 - Eben Not a bad thing it makes you more productive, that makes you more available All of that, that's good. I love that dude.

1:05:15 - Chase What's because you're big thing. You've been talking a lot about things you know, of the physical self, of the mental self. I mean, you're someone that has been a warrior you know physically for many years on the field of NFL, and now what you're doing, you know to kind of guard and protect your own heart now, but also bring a lot of this to other men and to other people. What is maybe one practice you have for physical resiliency and one for mental resiliency, that is, you're non negotiable which you go to daily for physical, mental resiliency.

1:05:48 - Eben Right now I'm either lifting weights which I love.

1:05:52 - Chase But you're back.

1:05:54 - Eben I know you said you'd kind of taken quite a while off, taking like almost a year off serious lifting. I'd go in and kind of fuck around and find out, yeah.

Not really, I wasn't really finding out actually when I'm back and I love lifting weights. Lifting weights has always been something that I think resistance training really important for men, as far as having an outlet where you can really express that primal energy. I don't think there's anything better than lifting weights. Just feeling your body moving through resistance strengthen your muscles, strengthen your skeletal system, but it also really strengthens your mind. I mean, we come into a lot of resistance in our life.

Yeah, I think we bring that guy back up a little bit bring it up. Man right.

1:06:46 - Chase Man, Merce machine over here Crank it.

1:06:48 - Eben There we go. It's great for your mind, man. We come into a lot of adversity. What are you going to do when you, when shit hits the fan, when you're facing resistance, think weight training is weight training? I've been reminded it's a non negotiable for me between that and hot yoga. Do a lot of hot yoga, beacrum and then some hot vinyasa. I try to get two to three classes in a week, 60 to 90 minutes. Damn. The hot yoga beacrum in particular is a completely psychedelic experience. I mean, you're brought.

1:07:25 - Chase I've done it once. I've done it once. I'm still recovering.

1:07:28 - Eben Exactly, I'm still recovering A decade later. That's what happens, dude. I can't tell you how many times I teach beacrum also Really, yeah, yeah, monday mornings, if you ever want to come out and burbank to my ticket by that man, so many people come in there. They say I'm like, hey, have you done beacrum before? They're like, yeah, 10 years ago, yeah, oh, welcome back.

1:07:54 - Chase Because big ones, what around 110, 105? What's the room temperature?

1:07:58 - Eben Oh, yeah, 105, 50 percent humidity. It's brutal in there, dude. You do the same 26 postures every time and once you've done it, once you come back the next time, you know it's what to expect and it just becomes this completely emotional psychological experience where you get to look at all of your little things all of your little idiosyncrasies, the things you want to do, how your mind works, your attachment to comfort. All of this stuff comes right to the surface and you have to face it.

1:08:36 - Chase So would you say, then, this practice of mental or physical resiliency also serves your mental resiliency. Do you have?

1:08:41 - Eben a set of practice, big time, big time I do, and they serve. You know one serves the other. You know, it's definitely one of those things I mean. So that's the physical stuff which is definitely directly linked to my mental well being. Then I also meditate every day. I do breath work every day and the meditation, like I said, it's this really important experience for me of stepping behind all the stuff happening in life, all the mind noise, all the structures and the ideas about how it's got to be or what's going on or what we need to do. I just step behind that and get immersed in the infinite, eternal vastness of God which is right there all the time. You'd be surprised if you're telling myself from 10 years ago, all you got to do is meditate for 20 minutes and you do this, this and this and you'll have an experience of God.

1:09:51 - Chase It'd be like you're out of your fucking mind, bro.

1:09:54 - Eben Go take another mushroom, dude, you know, it's true.

1:09:58 - Chase It's really true. That's why it's one of those things meditation I've been hearing for years years and years and years and years, but literally, like I said, up until about four months ago I didn't make it a regular thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:10:11 - Eben Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that gives me that space between myself and all the stuff going on out here. If I'm not and again, this is now I've been doing it for so long that I've witnessed how I've developed momentum. But it's beyond momentum, it's I've reprogrammed the whole system so that even when shit comes in and the mind might try to take off in one direction or go on a a thought train a million miles away in anxiety or panic or something that might have occurred before, immediately I'm like it's all good, you're playing a different game now.

1:11:13 - Chase Yeah, it's a different game.

1:11:14 - Eben It's a different game, um, so meditation is crucial. Breathwork has totally changed my life 1000%, and breath is one of those things that we're not taught how to do it properly. Most of us are doing it wrong.

1:11:32 - Chase Weirdly Do you mouth tape by chance at night.

1:11:36 - Eben I don't. I don't. I know how great that is.

1:11:39 - Chase Game changer. I didn't bring any with me. Normally I have some of my bag. I've been using this Elevate ELVT breath tape major strips at night. I'm a guy who prioritizes sleep above everything. When I tell you like, literally overnight, my body changed is an understatement. I would love to try it. Better sleep, some of the best sleep I've ever had. I'm waking up sooner, waking up more rested.

My resting heart right now is down in like the low to mid 50s. I've noticed also in my training when I go to the gym. Not that I would say I was a big mouth breather before, but I'm now consciously catching myself that. I'm only nasal breathing.

1:12:17 - Eben And if I?

1:12:17 - Chase ever do go to mouth breathing. I'm stopping it right away. I'll hop on the treadmill sometimes.

1:12:23 - Eben That's a game changer.

1:12:24 - Chase And I can do 30 minutes incline level 10 on the treadmill walk completely through my nose now. Love that, bro.

1:12:30 - Eben That's a big deal. It's crazy. Get on the mouth taping game I love that and I've been doing the yoga, the exercise, everything is a nose breathing. You do that all day. For me that's worked really well and I would say I mean my sleep has been really good for the last five, six years as this. It's sort of naturally fallen into a good rhythm and I think anything that we can, any tools that are available to us, yeah, fucking do it.

And I would be down to try the mouth tape. But nasal breathing is a life changing, it's a life changing technology that we don't even fucking think about.

1:13:15 - Chase Anybody's curious, have you read? Should check out the book's breath and the oxygen advantage. Oh, yes, yes.

1:13:22 - Eben Who wrote oxygen advantage Breath is James Nester.

1:13:26 - Chase Yeah, that should be in schools. That should be in schools. Is he the Irish guy?

1:13:30 - Eben Yeah, yeah, oh, that's McEwen.

Yes, yes yes, yeah, Uh-huh yeah, yeah, I was just talking to my buddy about. He mentioned him the other day. That's funny. Mine more stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good stuff.

You need to read those books if you have them. If you haven't read those books, well, it's such a fascinating thing, man, because we've got this nervous system inside our body and it's totally regulated by your breath. So simple, just by breathing in and out of your nose, you quiet down the amygdala, the reptilian brain, the center of fight flight freeze fix. You turn on the prefrontal cortex, the godhead, the center of executive decision making, when you're in fight flight freeze fix, which is activated through mouth breathing. By the way, breathing in and out of your mouth is like hitting the panic button on your nervous system. Cause, think about it, if you were out in the forest and a fucking grizzly bear mountain lion came and was stalking you and running you down, immediately, you'd want to fly into fight flight freeze. You'd start breathing in and out of your mouth, pumping more adrenaline, pumping more energy, pumping cortisol, so that you could prepare your body to survive to try to do its best to survive.

Give yourself the optimal advantage here. Hormonally your blood vessels restrict because if you get cut or you lose a limb, you don't want to bleed to death.

All of these things happen when you're breathing in and out of your mouth. All of that stuff is going down. So think about how many people are walking around the world in this low hum of fight or flight Cause your amygdala is turned on. You're breathing in and out of your mouth. Just by breathing in and out of your nose, you quiet that down. Your body produces its own nitric oxide, dilates the blood vessels, lowers the heart rate, lowers blood pressure, gets you into rest, digest, recover, detoxify. You can't do any of that stuff when you're in fight or flight. Do you realize?

1:15:34 - Chase that Just by changing your breath. Isn't that a fucking?

1:15:37 - Eben trick.

1:15:38 - Chase The most powerful tool we have to take dominion over our lives. Reduce stress, step into homeostasis is just something we're already doing, but we're probably doing incorrectly. Yeah yeah, it's a mindblower, and it's so.

1:15:53 - Eben It's really, when you get down to it, like the root cause of all illness. Inflammation. All of this stuff is because can so much of it maybe not all of it so much of it can be addressed through how we're breathing? Then it's probably what we're eating.

1:16:09 - Chase Our muses are first line of defense, lives and the mucous membranes in your nose.

1:16:12 - Eben If you're not nasal breathing.

1:16:13 - Chase you're doing it a disservice, Exactly.

1:16:15 - Eben Yeah, exactly, you got all those little hairs, all those little hairs that are collecting all the stuff that we don't want to take in. It's getting locked in there, then it goes into your mucus, you swallow, it goes into your digestive system, burned up by the stomach acid.

1:16:32 - Chase Otherwise you're just inhaling it right into the lungs, taking it right into the blood and if you want to nerd out like me, ever since mouth taping on my whoop data, like I said, my resting heart rate has dropped about eight to sometimes 10 beats per minute. It's amazing as well as my respiratory rate has dropped significantly Interesting.

1:16:52 - Eben So that's how many breaths I have a stronger pulmonary system. I love that.

1:16:56 - Chase How many breaths per minute that you need to take. It has gone down, and these are good things, going down as a good thing. Yes, yes, it's just incredible. Well, you're a guy that I know we could sit here and we could just hush out the rest of the day.

But what you bring to the table here for EverFord radio is a lot. You bring a lot of your story and your expertise and your curiosity of how we can finally take dominion back over our life, what we want our life to look like, to feel like, how to stay curious with it and how, in a lot of different areas, we can move forward. And that's what the show is all about, man. So I'm going to ask you my final question Living a life ever forward. When you hear those words, what does that mean to you?

1:17:39 - Eben That means a lot. It means a lot. I love that. I love that concept ever forward, thank you. And I think it goes back to something we were talking about earlier. You know, when you come into contact with adversity, your demons, the devil, whatever it might be, that thing that's trying to convince you to doubt yourself or to doubt the situation, it's important to be able to look back first and go look at how far I've come, dude. Look at how far I've come to get here. Wow, and I did that, one step at a time, moving forward in the direction of light, love, prosperity, goodness, god, and that's what I'm going to keep doing, one day at a time, just going to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I knew exactly who I am, what my purpose is, what I'm doing here. I'm just going to keep moving in the direction of that good feeling. That's it.

1:18:48 - Chase I love how you reminded us to look back when we're trying to move forward, and I've definitely done this. We think that's all it takes.

We think I just need to choose to move forward. I need to put one foot in front of the other, and that is very important. But I can tell you honestly, the biggest ways I have ever moved forward in my life is when I finally paused to first of all take a breath, take a pause, but then to look back and really acknowledge how far I have come, but also to really kind of acknowledge how much of my past am I just running away from for the sake of moving forward.

There's a difference between moving forward and just adding a link on a chain to a pass that is just still there, still weighing us down, but until we look back and acknowledge it, honor it, respect it, thank it, I mean then, we can turn and fully move forward freely. I believe Mike drop bro. Well, that's the end of the show. So perfect timing man, let's go. I'm going to put all the information and all the great resources we've been talking about in the show notes, but where can they go today, right now, right here, to connect with you? What are you doing most on the world right now?

1:19:59 - Eben Um, check out. Check me out on Instagram, that's. That's got everything that I've got going on at EDS Britain and the ebb and flow podcast. And the ebb and flow podcast and you can check out my book the ebb and flow basic tools to transform your life.

1:20:16 - Chase All down the show notes for you guys and video notes for on the video Ab. This was great man, so good to sit down with you, Appreciate you.

1:20:22 - Eben Thank you bro.

1:20:23 - Chase I just go crush the Sunlife Bowl.

1:20:24 - Eben All right, let's go.