Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Don (00:00):
There’s no ability to step away from it. You know, I look at newspapers or look at the national news. I picture with her saying, bride to be murdered in Minneapolis and my name showing up in newspapers. And the story, it was international and it was because of its nature, because of who Justine was. It was like the whole world was scratching their head going, wait, what? What? How would a police officer in Minneapolis kill this amazing spiritual teacher?

Guy (00:48):
This is a podcast that is extremely dear to my heart, and Don is a dear friend as well. He went through what can only be described as an insane tragedy that received global media attention and was under the spotlight. And the lessons that have come from Don’s journey that I feel that we can all learn from are here within this podcast. I’m not going to say too much, but just sit back, get swept away by it, because I feel we can connect deeply to this and all develop our own spiritual growth from it. Enjoy the podcast. Much love. Let me know in the comments below if you’re watching this on YouTube. I’d love to hear from you. Enjoy. We’re recording. Don, welcome to the podcast.

Don (01:52):
Thank you, Guy. Thank you for having me.

Guy (01:55):
Oh, it’s an absolute pleasure, mate. You know, it’s funny thinking about it. I’m always pondering about my podcast subconsciously, I think, for years. It’s become innate to me. I’ve been doing this for 10 years, mate. You know what I mean? And I remember about a moment, I must have been in the shower or something. Not that I think of you when I’m in the shower too often, mate. We’re off to a good start. Yeah. About a year ago, I was thinking, oh, I wonder, for some reason, I thought about you coming on the show, and I was like, I wonder if Don will come on. What a beautiful, and here you are today. You reached out, and I’m excited to see where it goes, mate. I truly am. And I will ask you that question. If you are at the intimate dinner party, and you sat next to a stranger, and they asked you what you did for a living, what would you say?

Don (02:51):
I think I would ask them the, I’d answer the question with a question and that would be, or a statement that would say, I would rather answer that saying who I am rather than what I do. And that to me would open the conversation to the places I like to go. You know, really talk about who we are what matters to our hearts. Yeah, you know, our culture is consumed with doing, and so as I’ve stepped away from doing the job for a while, I’m intrigued with being. Yeah.

Guy (03:36):
Yeah, amen to that, mate. I can so relate to that. You know, and it’s a segment I always use because it’s so hard to encapsulate who we are, what we do and, and even when reading our bios and things like that, you know, we could, we could make it up on the spot and put it out there, you know, so, and it’s always a great conversation starter. So it’s kind of become a thing for me. Yeah. So the first question I will ask you, though, Don, is why now? You reached out to come on the podcast and you instigated this, which is just beautiful. And of course, it’s like we’re here recording. What made you decide to reach out now?

Don (04:20):
Yeah, good question, Guy. I, you know, there’s obviously all of us have a story to tell, and I am intrigued and inspired to share my story, not because I’m so unique or special, but because there’s certain things that certainly I’ve been through in my life, and I’ll share those today, and my journey of healing from those And about, it’s been five years since I lost my fiance at the time, tragically. And that five-year journey has been the most impactful thing in my life, without a doubt. And so I got to this five-year mark, and it felt really important to to begin to share what’s happened. Five years felt like a significant number and it wasn’t the number, it’s the point at which I feel like I’ve gotten to in that healing journey. And I recently gave a talk and I’m starting to do some writing and Wanted to share that and, and you are, uh, you inspire me so much and the journey that you’ve been on, uh, stepping away from. One career into a purpose and you, you really inspire me. So having a conversation with you is not just reaching out to anybody. It’s reaching out to somebody who really can get to the heart of the matter. We share a lot of, uh, similarities and we’re soul brothers, man.

Guy (06:10):
I deeply appreciate it. Thanks, man. I know. And I reflect upon especially the last five years and knowing you probably for seven years, Don, you know, and the meetings that we’ve always had and caught up in the conversations and the depths of where they’ve gone and as our lives have changed so much in that time, you know, and the trajectories we’ve gone on and It’s, for me, honestly, beautiful that we can hopefully capture some of that in this conversation today from the deeper conversations that we’ve had in the past for people to listen in. And the feeling’s mutual. And I feel maybe the best place to start then is to share a little bit about the journey, the story of what happened. So to give some context into the ways into the heart. Yeah, beautiful.

Don (07:02):
Beautiful. Well, you know, you said seven years ago, you, uh, yourself and then, um, me and, uh, Justine who we’ll talk about, um, in some detail today, Matt had a meditation retreat and, uh, I’m just, um, grateful that, uh, you obviously, uh, knew Justine and, um, we got to experience each other in that time. And, um, So, you know, setting it up in 2012, I was a devout student of Dr. Joe Dispenza, as were you. Certainly, we were for a time. And it was very impactful work that he was teaching. And for those who don’t know Dr. Joe Dispenza, he teaches the sort of neuroscience, demystifying the mystical through science. really has evolved to miraculous practices that he’s teaching around the world. So in 2012, being at a meditation retreat, some of the work that Dr. Joe does is we would step into creating our future and stepping into potentials. What is it we want to experience? And in those meditations, the idea is behind not just seeing it and the thoughts, but also the feelings. And what does it feel like? And thoughts and feelings. And Joe would say, thoughts send the signal out, feelings draw the experience to you. And in this meditation, he said, what does your future look like? What do you want to create? And it was wide open. What do you want to create? And in this, we immerse ourselves into a beautiful meditation, throw an eye mask on, amazing music. And there’s a collective power when you’re in these retreats, you know, these at that time only had 500 people. Sorry, it sounds like a lot, but now he’s like 7000 people in these retreats. And it was I said, I want to create love. I want to know what real love is. So in my meditation, I immersed myself in this experience of what would love feel like. I was probably, what was I? I don’t know, that was 10 years ago, so I was 32. I’m just kidding. I was 46, and I hadn’t been married. I’d been in long-term relationships, but none of them really were fulfilling in a way that I knew was possible. So in that meditation, I had an experience of what love would really feel like. What do I want to create? And I called that in. And in this experience, it was as real as our conversation is here. It was this experience with the thoughts and the feelings of what that feels like. And this image of a woman came in, and it was a blonde female. And I was like, blonde? Really, up to that point, it only dated brunettes. I just wasn’t attracted to blondes, not that blondes aren’t beautiful, they are, but my thing was dark haired, olive skin, that kind of thing, and it was my type, if you will. So this blonde female was there and we were laughing and it was light and joyful and so connected and honest and it was a beautiful experience. And I came out of that meditation and was kind of surprised. I was like, blonde. Wow. I didn’t call that in. It just sort of this image of this person emerged in my awareness. And after the meditation, we broke for a while and I went upstairs and I was in the lobby of this hotel talking with a friend of mine and a woman who I hadn’t met up to that point walked up and it was Justine and started talking with my friend. And the minute she walked up, I said, that’s her. That’s the woman in my meditation. That’s her. It wasn’t just who she looked like physically. It was the frequency and this recognition. And I know those who have had that know what I’m talking about, but it was purely a 100% of recognition of kind of like, there you are, not just of the meditation, but my soul recognizing her is the only way I can describe it. And from that point, I kind of followed her around like a puppy dog. She was kind of like, yeah, hi, nice to see you, but she wasn’t interested in engaging in the way that I wanted to engage with her. But clearly there was a connection. So that was 2012. I did have a chance to talk to her, but I didn’t tell her how I was feeling about her. And then she left. A group of us got together the next day. We went skydiving. And then she went back to Australia. She was Australian, lives in Sydney. And a friend of mine asked me when she left, looked at me kind of like this and goes, what do you think of Justine? And I said, I’m in love. And he went, what? Didn’t you just meet her yesterday? I’m like, I don’t know, man. Um, that was, that was something else. So, uh, I had a chance to tell Justine, you know, what, how I felt about six months later, told her that nobody had had the impression on me that she had had. And then I didn’t hear back from her. This was in an email and believe it or not, though, you know, people say, wasn’t your heart broken? And I’m thinking, no. I knew, like there was a knowing with this that I hadn’t experienced up to that point. And so fast forward now another 14 months, I didn’t reach out to her because not hearing back, I was like, okay, there’s, she’s not ready to have that conversation. And she reached out in 2014, and just started having a conversation. Hey, how are you? That kind of thing. And from there, we started to talk more and more on Skype. You know, and her being in Sydney, um, you know, we know how difficult it is to connect in the States. I think it was like a 15 hour difference. So yeah, we, um, we started then to fall in love and we had a conversation in that August of knowing that this was something beyond just friendship. And. Uh, in that conversation where I admitted that I said back in 2012, I love you, or I love her to my friend. I, um, I told her about that. And I said, I want you to know that this is what I said when you left that day that I was in love. And I came back from that trip telling my friends, I met my future wife. I knew it was, and they all said, Oh, I want to, I want to meet her. And I said, well, she lives 9,000 miles away, but. Um, you know, I knew it was, I just knew. And in that first conversation, telling her how I felt, it was like the skies opened and there were rainbows and unicorns, literally like, you know, that was that kind of magic experience and telling her how I felt. And then she reciprocated. It’s like we fell into it together. It was love this energy of love. And from there, we decided to meet for our first date in Maui, kind of meet halfway. And it was beautiful. It was magical. And then I went to Sydney and met her family in October. And then in January or December, she came and that’s when I proposed. And really it was December of 2014. And then in January, she went back and then we made a decision for her to move to the States in March. It was just easier at the time. She was a dual citizen with Australia. So rather than me going through the complexity of getting a visa in Australia, they don’t make it easy there, buddy, we made the decision for her to move to the States. And my son was in college and he wasn’t quite ready for me to move that far away that soon. I was grateful that she was willing to do that. And so she moved to Minnesota. We lived together in a beautiful neighborhood with amazing people around us, near the lakes. She was in love with the lakes. And she found her people and her purpose and started teaching, doing a bit of what you do with retreats and sharing her deep wisdom and knowledge about the heart and about spirit. So I’m going to fast forward a couple years in the interest of we only have an hour because this love story could take up that whole hour.

Guy (16:35):
No, you took me down memory lane as well, Don. I just say it because I remember Justine announcing you because we did six weeks together with Matt Omo, who I work with. We did his every Saturday, which about 20 of us would go through the sessions and through that six weeks. And I’ll never forget her saying, I’ve met my man. and she announced it on the sixth week to all of us. Beautiful, just reliving it now as you share it, but sorry, please.

Don (17:11):
Yeah, no, that’s important to give context because you have personal, you knew Justine and she was so well known in the community in Australia, teaching her um, soul sessions. And, um, so for her to leave that for love was a big, huge step, you know, to come to America. Um, and so, um, you know, I was working in the, uh, for a native American tribe, um, as a general manager, uh, running a large casino resort, uh, operation and, um, Made in 2017, we were looking at some new ventures. And so the place to go when you’re in that industry to look at what’s happening in the industry is Las Vegas. So I didn’t go, I didn’t travel a lot for work, but made the decision that I was gonna go for on a Friday into Las Vegas for two nights to look at some products and systems that they had there. And it’s unusual for me to leave on a weekend, So I went to Las Vegas with my boss and a colleague. And she was home alone and, you know, doing her thing. And things were good. We talked during the day. And yeah, she was working on, we were working on a beautiful program for Dr. Joe. And we talked that evening. and pretty much just said goodnight, you know. It was two hours earlier in Las Vegas, so we had some work in front of us to do, and she went off to bed. And as we were visiting some properties that evening, she called me, which was kind of surprising. And she called me and she said, I’m hearing a noise in the back alley. Now, in Minneapolis, where we live near the lakes, all single family homes, middle upper class, like a beautiful neighborhood, very, very safe. And, you know, it’s not an area where you hear gunshots, the occasional police siren, but like any city. She said she heard a noise in the back alley, and it was a noise of a woman who it sounded like, as she described it, sex noises and that the woman wasn’t enjoying it. And she said, it’s troubling. It’s troubling me. And I said, okay, well, and then she said, I think I just heard the woman call for help. I said, okay, then I want you to call the police. And so directed her to do that. And I said, hang up, call the police, and then call me back. So hung up, she called me back, and I’m not really sure what she was doing, if she was going in the backyard to listen closer, but I said, stay put, the police will be there. And then she, she said, I’ll call you back when they get here. I said, Okay. So she called me back. And she said, they’re still not here. So she called 911 again. And then while we were on the phone, she said, Okay, they’re here. And she hung up. And it I said, okay, obviously call me back. And we had arrived where we were going. We were looking at these, um, nightclubs that we were considering, um, putting into the property I was working at. So we were out kind of late. This was 1130 at night, uh, in Minneapolis, 930 in Vegas time. And, um, as we were driving, um, my phone went dead. So I plugged it in and put it in the car and then. We walked into this property and I kept looking at my phone going, I’m not sure what’s happening. Why wouldn’t she have called me back by now? So I text her and then we met with the individuals we were with. I text her my friend’s phone too in case my phone didn’t have reception. I kept asking him, did she call you text you, you know, cause I’m not getting anything. And he said, no. And I, in my gut, I knew something was wrong. I knew it, but I couldn’t fathom. I just couldn’t fathom. All I could, all I could make up in my mind was she was nothing and non-issue and she went to sleep. You know, that’s the only story I was capable of making up at the time. So, um, Fast forward, I didn’t hear from her. I called her and texted her. It’s odd, but she’s asleep. My friend and I got back to our hotel. We went down to watch a band in the hotel, and I got a call from a Minneapolis number. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it.

Guy (22:28):
We were recording. If you’re watching this on YouTube right now, or listening, you might have noticed a complete stop in the conversation, and I haven’t miraculously changed the color of my shirt or the background to where Don is sitting right now. But we had a couple of technical issues with the dropout, so we decided to re-record. So it’s about three days later, and we’re going to pick up the conversation from where we left off. And there are no accidents. So I’m excited to see where this is. Welcome back, Don. Thank you.

Don (23:03):
Thank you. It’s so good to be here, and thanks for Going through the ride of technical challenges, Wi-Fi, headphones, microphones, all the bit, but none of it stops what we want to create here. Yeah.

Guy (23:22):
So let’s pick up the conversation wherever you feel where we need to be right now. Sure.

Don (23:30):
Sharing with you the the journey, what I call the healing journey. And that journey has been, as I said, surrounded by so much love. So many people have an outpouring of support. And I’m so grateful for all that. I couldn’t have done it without people reaching out. And so when I was working with a coach, And she was taking me through some work actually Justine had done. But I was working with this coach and the last session that we had was she said, I said, I think I’m ready to open my heart to someone. And I kind of held this space in my heart, a space that was reserved for, I felt like magic. But in my mind, I thought, well, nothing can ever be as magical as it was with Justine. So I said that to her. And two weeks later, I went to a medicine journey, meditation retreat. And during that retreat, I met Taryn. And I may be repeating myself here a little bit, but I’m giving more context that in the scope of meeting her and falling in love in immediately, I was aware that I was afraid that it would diminish other parts of me, and yet I was blown away and so shocked at how it could hold all of it. It could hold this new, beautiful love, and it could hold all the love and all the pain and all the magnitude and the amplification of what I walked through recently. And I was blown away, and I remember being with Taryn at that retreat, and I looked at her, having known her for a couple hours, and I just said, this is love. This is love. And the reason I share so much about that is because it was this ability for the heart to hold all this is so magnificent. And so what I want to talk about a little bit is what also happened for me is I’m a longtime meditator, and I’ve been meditating, guy like you for a long, long time. And I had a vipassana practice and Dr. Joe I’d studied with at the time for, I don’t know, 10 years. And I was really aware of how I could go so deep. I mean, first time I met you, you had a profound experience. You were like, I don’t know if I should go into this. And I don’t know if you ever shared that on this podcast, but I had not had that type of experience. I’d had beautiful experiences, but what plant medicine, specifically psilocybin did for me was it opened something in me, it created connections that I couldn’t quite make in meditation. And something really beautiful and deep happened in taking those. And what I’d say about, you know, there’s the certainly what I can share about the journeys themselves. But Also, what’s happened is my meditations have been so much deeper and so much more profound Since making those connections in the brain. I think Michael Pollan recently released so much information has opened this dialogue about plant medicine is so beautifully and in saying shows that the brain Before plant medicine and there’s sort of this activity in a certain amount and he shows the brain while on psilocybin and the connections are thousandfold and there’s touching and connections made in the brain that couldn’t have maybe been able to have been accessed. Well, for me, speaking of myself, for myself, I couldn’t make those deep, mystical, profound connections. And so there is that part of it, but there’s also like this amazing review of what happens. And this review, what it was revealing to me, there’s an intelligence in this medicine. And it’s just this beautiful intelligence. And it showed me the first time I was even on it, had tried it, it showed me how with all the areas in my life, my heart had been not fully open. And it wasn’t like, it wasn’t a shaming or blaming. It was the most beautiful reveal of all the ways which I hadn’t opened my heart. And it had me in tears and not tears of sadness, but tears of awareness of how much more there is to opening our hearts and how I closed off. And in that review, like I said, I didn’t come out of it feeling bad. I came out of it feeling in wonder of what a gift it was to see how much more I can open my heart. And so fast forward about five months is when I met Taryn and a beautiful, very fast relationship unfolded. And it was just this magnitude that we were following. We weren’t even creating it. We were being pushed. There was something so powerful and pushing this that we were called to do. I call that the soul. The soul was driving the bus. for both of us, because it made no sense. You know, it made zero sense. But yeah, in meeting her was magic and profound, and it was compelling. That’s the word I use. It was so powerfully compelling that I had to follow it. And I’ve come to find that there are so many amazing lessons, like in the plant medicine, where it revealed how my heart had not been fully, maybe fully opened. The relationships are in the same way, these teachers, these mirrors for us that are so incredibly powerful. And anyone in a relationship knows exactly what I’m talking about. our partners holding up that mirror and it’s incredibly transformative if we let it. As I continue to I then began to facilitate some journeys at a center with plant medicines. And I just saw profound things happening, profound, like these healings that would have taken years of therapy, people coming to realize and coming to see what stops them, coming to see the wounds of their hearts that they had buried, life of trauma is revealed and shown a path of healing. And I had to witness miraculous healings. And I’ve done years of therapy in my life. I don’t have anything against therapy. But what I’ll say is that the speed and the power of what gets revealed, there’s an intelligence that reveals what the healing journey is through these incredibly intelligent medicines. I describe it like this, that if life is a video game, and you all know video games, Donkey Kong, some of those, show us how dated I am. But if we’re playing this game, we’re going through life. And, you know, you’re picking up these things to get life. Oh, I’m going to pick up this wisdom here. And I pick up this life experience here. And along the way, there’s these little mushrooms that are growing, you know, and there’s other plant medicines, beautiful ones. But I use that one as a visual example. And you pick that up. And now you have secrets to the game. Now you’re revealing the downloaded all this intelligence and these treasures that get you to another level. And video games are a metaphor, you know, for life. And so incredible. Go ahead.

Guy (33:15):
I’m just reflecting on everything you shared there, Don. I can certainly relate to the openings within you and having a new reference point. It’s almost as if there’s a gene expression or new neural pathways are created or sprouted and then you know how to go back there and you have that new reference point where we never had it before. Because I did an ayahuasca journey in 2013 and I was terrified, terrified of doing it and going in through it was bringing up old traumas for me that That was my first night of surrender. But then I had this profound, profound experience, so mystical and oneness with the universe and just like, wow. And then, but then there was a part of me that was like, Well, was that the medicine or was that me? So I actually set the intention to go on a quest to see if I could return there without the medicine. And I think that’s why I ended up having profound experiences, because I had kind of once had a taste of it, but then navigated my way there through meditation instead on that. So many things ring true for me. Curious to know as well, Donna, which even I remember when you came to our retreat, you know, it was our first retreat, our maiden voyage and you and brought your son Zach there. And we were all together. It was like a reunion for three days, which was so beautiful. And And your willingness to just surrender and go there. Because I think about my journey, and it brought up so much fear for me going there the first time. And then I see, no, you, Don, and what you’ve been through. And was there a point where you knew that it’s time, or was it gradual to be willing to go there and do that work? Because the only way out is through.

Don (35:25):
You know, yeah. Yeah. And when you say the work, do you mean like specifically plants or do you mean just doing the work?

Guy (35:33):
I mean, I think in everything. Yeah.

Don (35:35):
Yeah. Yeah.

Guy (35:37):
I mean, I’ve been, I’m a big believer in everyday life in the moment. Oh, yeah.

Don (35:44):
Oh, I think I said early on, hoping it got captured, but that I was aware that I was so grateful that I wasn’t just in the 3D in my life, that I had been, had meditation experiences and understood being multi-dimensional and had an understanding and experience of that through meditation. And although it deepened after plant medicines exponentially, I was grateful that I had that because I was aware that we do go on. We are more than this skin suit. And if anything, I love this saying, this is actually the illusion. This is the illusion. The reality is when we’re able to step toward what’s beyond this, and it’s scary. You mentioned ayahuasca. People who do ayahuasca, my hat’s off to you, man. It is scary because you face demons. Aubrey Marcus talks about his first journey, and it showed him all the ways he could die. That doesn’t sound so pleasant, but then I kind of laughed and said, but you’re not going to die. You’re not going to die now. It is scary, but I’ve always been willing, always been willing. Like, going into your workshop and having my son there. And that was my first ice bath. And remember, I’ll never forget you teaching the breath. And that was really one of the first immersions. I’d done pranayama and yoga, which is so much of the breath. But that breath practice was deeply, deeply impactful. with the idea that we’re then gonna go into an ice bath where you dumped in like 200 bags of ice, you know. But I believe in those types of retreats so deeply because it’s about us reaching parts of ourselves that may be unavailable or inaccessible until we get with others. And there’s a collective power in those groups, you know, in meditation and breath work and yoga and the sound healing that Matt does was just, you know, so profound. But there’s a collective energy that it propels us upward and opens us even more. We can do this work by ourselves and click on YouTube, and there are certainly a ton of resources, but there’s no substitute for the power of collective groups coming together. And one of the things I think that the pandemic has taught us is that that collective power is non-local, so it doesn’t mean we necessarily have to do them in person. But getting on with the technology and jumping on Zoom, I do a weekly meditation class, and it’s incredible what happens. connecting, sharing, and stepping in together. And it’s deeper, you know, where two or more are gathered, there’s truly amazing things that can happen. And I’ve been in groups for years and years, decades, really, you know. So, yeah, I also want to share that I believe I was just on the phone with a family friend, and the family friend is going through an incredibly hard time. And what I shared with him was that this difficult journey that he’s on, because it’s so difficult, can be his greatest opportunity for his evolution. And One of the things I learned doing 12-step groups in my 20s was how many, there was people who would describe their from shame to grace. They had shame about their things and then they see how much grace there is. And it became one of their biggest gifts to describe their darkest moments of drinking and addiction. to evolving to this beautiful place of gratitude and connection and openness and healing and you know, the 12 steps are such a gift from You know, I mean they’re God they’re divine. These are divine steps of living and I But from the darkness to the light, you know, and so from my darkness of losing Justine to Stepping into this amazing evolution, this amazing unfolding of who I am. And part of why I wanted to get on this podcast with you, and I’m so grateful to be able to share this with you guys, is that I want people to know at that moment, like I just told this family friend, that just trust, just go fully into this thing and go through it and trust that there’s something greater on the other side. This third dimension we’re in, it’s fucking hard, man. This is not an easy dimension. This is not an easy place. But it is the difficulties. It came really clear to me, actually, in a plant journey, that the greater the difficulty, and trauma even, can be one of our greatest evolutionary processes. I see this father, some of you may be familiar with the Parkland shooting down in Florida, where it was a mass shooter and lots of young children were tragically killed by a gunman. There’s one father who’s on a crusade. He showed up at the State of the Union. He showed up at the hearings for Supreme Court nominees. He’s showing up. He is on a mission, this man. His life will never be the same, but he’s now found purpose in his life around bringing sensible awareness around guns in this country. And he is hell-bent and on a journey and a mission. And it’s amazing what’s happened. And his heart is broken. It’s shattered, you know? But within that, there was a saying that somebody told me, your heart is broken, must be broken in order to be broken open. And I really think that there, I’m finding that is to be so true. And it holds it all. I mentioned I talked about grief, and there’s still grief. There’s still sadness. I still can get angry. But I can be with it, and then it just moves. And I just feel like I’m so grateful. That is the capacity of the heart. That is our ability to not be stuck, not be static. We are not static beings. We are flowing. We are flowing and moving and growing. And when it stops and we aren’t moving, it’s me. It’s us. It’s myself that’s stopping myself through my thoughts, through my beliefs. So that’s where there’s two things. One is I have to have practices. I have to have yoga, meditation, breath work. Breath work is incredibly powerful. But I also need other people. I need other perspectives. We don’t do this healing in a vacuum. I haven’t done this journey alone. Guy, you’ve been a part of it. All my Australian family and friends have been a part of it. I have dear, dear friends that I’m forever grateful for. And what I want to do, the reason I’m even here is I want people to hear that, to believe it. If it touches one person who’s struggling in their pain, going, how am I ever going to get through this? You know, Start to just follow that support the people that are in your life who you know are supporting you Secondly find a community a tribe of people who are practicing higher principles maybe it’s meditation, maybe it’s breath work, but please just get into a community and Thirdly is um finding a connection with something greater than yourself and that can be the people you know in 12 steps we learn that i just need to know that a higher power isn’t me that a higher power can be other people and but for me it was like this relationship with this intelligence this beautiful loving intelligence that we are all a part of is uh It moves me to tears when I think of how beautiful that love and that beautiful love and abundance and grace is. So I am forever, forever grateful. And I still have days. Honestly, like two weeks ago, I had a very dark day. I had a very, very, I could see no hope. And Taryn just held me. And I was like, I just don’t see any hope. And I’m realizing that I’m touching trauma in my body. And the trauma is from Justine, losing her in that way. But also that I’ve come to realize, and there’s now a really burgeoning study about this, the genealogical trauma. Certainly Holocaust survivors shows that new generations of survivors hold that same trauma in their genes. And so what can also, you know, and Dr. Joe’s beautiful teachings around epigenetics and that we don’t have a genetic destiny, we can change that. But also the ancestral, ancestral trauma is it goes generations. And I’ve in during plant medicine journeys, I’ve seen that, touched it. And I feel like I am changing that timeline. I am changing it. And without getting too wackadoodle about space, time, time, space, right? That as I change, all those generations change. And as we awaken, and we heal, all those heal. seven generations back, seven generations forward. And I’ve seen that, you know, I’ve seen it, I know it. But it’s good enough for me to know that what or for people to know that what I’m doing is just healing me, that that’s good enough. I don’t want to throw the burden of changing all your generations, right? But that we, we can heal. We can heal, we will heal. It’s inevitable. It’s inevitable, and so I’m grateful.

Guy (48:25):
Yeah, it’s huge what you’re saying, Don, because I’ve covered many of those topics in depth on the podcast with ancestral trauma, and even trauma being passed through your genes, your DNA. I don’t know if you knew this, but I think it was Robbie Holtz who I had on, she was mentioning about a study where they had mice. And I think they loved cherries and almonds, mice, right, of all things. And she wasn’t condoned in this study, but what they would do is feed them the cherries and almonds. But then when they went to eat them, they would give them an electric shock. So all of a sudden there’d be a trauma around the cherries and almonds. And then as each generation of mice were born, then those mice had the same traumas around cherries and almonds as the previous mice. And that went down through multiple generations of mice. So, you know, everything is kind of pointing to these things, and it makes complete sense. You know, who knows what we’re holding, really? Because it’s beyond the mind. How do we know?

Don (49:31):
I love it that scientists go and prove what we sort of theoretically or even maybe our frequency understands this to be truth, but science is proving so much about that. Dr. Joe Dispenza talked about that, demystifying the mystical through science, science being the language of spirituality. And, you know, I was fortunate to work with a guy named Mas Sanjati, who we went in and he calls it deletions and disconnections. And through just intention, clarity, and willingness to surrender and let go of that trauma, it changed in me. I could feel it. My family has years of sexual trauma, and things really shifted for me. So deleting and disconnecting with intention and with You know, that’s a big part of his work. But Rob Wordgen is another beautiful, beautiful healer doing that work. RobWordgen.com, W-E-R-G-I-N. You know, this is a man who resonates with truth and higher, higher truth. And so I share that because I want people to know, you know, Mastanjati is a process called Xi. He’s a little sharper on the edges, but his work is beautiful.

Guy (51:09):
I’m keen to know your thoughts as well, Don, because it always seems to me, like they say, I mean, I had a podcast earlier this morning with William Whitecloud, and one of the things he kept stressing was you don’t have to be in pain to lean into this work. We don’t have to go through these these dark nights of the soul to really metamorphose into the butterfly and come out the other side. But as humans, we have this tendency to wait, procrastinate, stall, hold back. And even if there’s an underlying pain within us that we haven’t been able to even acknowledge, articulate, or feel, or put words to, then we do tend to pull ourselves away from people, those communities that you speak about, those practices, and especially if we’ve never had the reference point to actually experience what it’s like to be, because I always used to think opening the heart was metaphoric, you know, like I didn’t realize that was a thing. Beyond metaphor, there truly is this expansive experience that comes from it. And who knows what its limitations are? Like you said, it’s probably unlimited. So I guess my question is, why do we behave like that? And I know there’ll be people listening today that will probably be podcast junkies, but won’t go there. You know?

Don (52:39):
Yeah. Won’t go into this work?

Guy (52:42):
or yeah, or one really. Go, I’m all in. I’m all in. I’m doing this. There’s this intention, there’s this commitment, there’s this acknowledgment to something greater to this. Where you know when every cell in your body is like, I’m in now. I’m in. Let’s go.

Don (53:05):
Yeah. And you mentioned pain and your guest that was on earlier. I think with pain, what we do as humans in this polarity, we call pain bad and happiness good. We put a judgment on it, right? Now think about this for a second. If we said we call pain bad, Why? Why do we call it bad? It’s a judgment we put on it, when in reality, all pain is, is our system showing us where we’re out of alignment. Pain is a feedback mechanism. It’s feedback saying, oh, there’s something to pay attention to. And we call it bad, but we call it bad and we avoid it. We’re aversive to the pain. Ooh, I do not go on there. But in these practices and meditation, when I’d be sitting for hours in retreat and my knee was just throbbing, that’s like, pay attention to me. And the teacher would simply say this, he would say, Let’s not label this as pain, let’s label it as sensation. There’s sensation present in my knee. And yeah, eventually I should move my knee, and my body is saying, yeah, my knee hurts, move me. But I wasn’t gonna die, okay? So I sat with it, and I just fell back more and more into the breath and into the blackness, if you will, until there was no pain. There was no need to feel pain. You know, it was me identifying with the pain and me going, there’s a problem here. It was my mind doing what it does toward pain and You know, do we need to have pain? No. I mean, Dr. Joseph Spence, one of his main teachings is don’t wait for trauma. Let’s do this now. Right. Let’s do this. Don’t wait for cancer. Don’t wait for these diagnosis to show up where we have to pay attention. Oh, this is trying to get me to pay attention to something that is really out of alignment. And so I agree with your guest. And I also will say that we call pain bad, but pain is just something for us to use to ascend, use to evolve, use to grow. If we listen to it, it will guide us. And so it’s It’s not fun. That’s why I say this dimension, this, this earth, this world is not easy, you know? Um, but it’s, yeah, but it’s why we’re here is because it, our souls can grow and evolve. This is my belief. I’m going out there on my belief here, but that’s why I’m on the show, I guess, is that I will grow as a result of what I’m paying attention to. There’s a beautiful author, author’s name, Azria and Benjamin wrote a book called Becoming. Are you familiar with that? B-E-Q-O-M-I-N-G. It’s a beautiful community. And one of the things they say is that problems are the curriculum. Problems are the curriculum of the soul. And that, you know, we feel like sometimes, oh, I have problems in my life, there’s a problem here. But if, as we encounter them and navigate them and grow from them and use them to awaken and work with them, we grow. Think about anything that’s been difficult in your life. Think about all the challenges you’ve had and how we grow. I think of parenting. Parenting was one of the hardest things of my life. You know it, brother. But it’s incredible, the gifts that it taught me. It was very difficult for me because I wasn’t married to the mother. But I became a new person because I had to step in and fight for my son. And it was one of my greatest evolutions. as a result of that problem, that difficulty. And I’m grateful for it today. I think that if I can, I don’t know, did I talk about meditation at all with the police? Did I get a chance to say that? So I do want to say this. I worked with a guy named Richard Gorling, who has an outfit called the Mindful Badge. And I tried to bring, to get the Minneapolis police to do meditation, to introduce meditation, these concepts about regulating yourself, regulating your emotional state, so that in fear, they wouldn’t do something like what happened that night in July. because it was pure fear, pure reaction. And we all have moments of that. Most, the majority of us don’t carry guns and have a license to use them. And so the stakes are so much higher, but we all have that where we react to something, somebody cuts you off on the road, somebody does something rude. And we were like, our instant reaction is this reaction rather than responding. And so I attempted to bring meditation. I introduced Council of People, the Chief, and the team there in Minneapolis to Richard Gorling and his outfit. And it was clear, though, after George Floyd, that happened, that the city was literally and figuratively on fire. And they were in survival. The police, they had 200 plus officers retire, saying they had PTSD. 200 out of 800. Yeah. And they had then been really, people were, how they were seen after George Floyd was people saw them all as bad. And I’m here as somebody who lost the love of his life to an officer who should not have pulled that trigger. And I’m saying not all officers are bad. They’re humans. But like us, they need to have training. They need to have training to manage their emotions. Not just de-escalation, shoot, no shoot, but what am I feeling? And when am I amped up? And I just, I would ask that anybody that hears this, if there’s technology out there, if there’s practices out there, that they work to ask their police departments to please adopt these practices. They’re ancient practices. The military is using them for PTSD with great success. Not to mention they’re also using psilocybin with great success around PTSD, ketamine, great success. But when these officers are in the field, one of the officers who was on the stand and in the trial for Mohammed Noor said, I just wanted to get home to my family and I will pull that trigger to protect myself. so that I get home to my family because he described it as a war zone. A war zone in southwest Minneapolis. Lakes, bikers, families, children. And so, it’s the mind, it’s the thinking, and it’s the regulating, using breath. I mean, even just teaching them that, teaching them a one-two breath, in for four seconds, out for eight, when they’re driving to a scene, in for four, out for eight. having an app on their phone. I was fortunate to be able to work with one of the trainers and they were able to get an app on the phone that had meditation practices on it. And I asked him, I said, what’s the adaption rate of people listening to that? And he said, less than 3%. So it’s clear that it’s not something you just throw on an app and have them listen to calm or some of those other ones. It’s something they need. They need to be, just like they do tactical trainings, they need to use this as a tactical training. One of the officers who does the training for police said, if you paint it black and call it tactical, they’ll do it. So I thought, how can we paint meditation black and say it’s tactical? But it is tactical. It prevents them, you know, the city of Minneapolis has paid out $47 million in the last, you know, in those three years, $47 million. Now think if they just invested 10% of that, how about even 1% of that into teaching officers how to regulate their biology, how to regulate their emotions, using breath, using mindfulness. So when the time comes, I’ll go back and I’ll try again. They were in crisis. They have a new chief they’re hiring in Minneapolis. I’ll go back and try again. But it feels like a mission.

Guy (01:03:35):
Incredible. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him. I had an ex-Navy SEAL on Mark Devine last year. Before joining the SEALs, he was hugely into all these practices and meditation and work, and he took them into the military. He’s just a great guy, a great man, and you can see he embodies it. He was one of the most present people I’ve spoke to on the podcast coming back, and I know part of his mission is training people these techniques and things, especially where you need it most, when you’re in the heat. These extreme moments which are beyond just daily life.

Don (01:04:23):
And you make a great you make a really good point there with Him is that it can’t be Somebody like me it can’t be you it can’t be it has to be somebody inside Who teaches this like he’s on the inside teaching it and it makes it credible And makes it accessible and makes it Relevant for them because they’re like well, you don’t really know what we’re dealing with but he does and You know, and so that became really clear to me. And that’s why Richard Gorling, who was formerly a police officer, is teaching police departments these practices. He has credibility because he was an officer. So Mark Devine, I’ll look him up.

Guy (01:05:11):
Yeah, and you only have to look at the world in general. It’s a war zone after time, like we all need these practices at the end of the day.

Don (01:05:22):
Absolutely, yeah. And you know one thing I taught my class last night, and I invite any listeners who want to join our class, it’s Wednesday evenings, at 7 p.m mountain time. Not sure what that is in Oz time, but it’s probably morning. But we talked about the Buddhists call it the middle way. And the middle way is for us to hold our center no matter what’s happening. And you can say that philosophically, hold the middle way. But how do we do that? And so many of these practices teachers come back to the breath, come back to the body, feel your feet on the ground, feel your body right now and find the middle, you know, even as listeners right now, just tune in to your body at this moment, the inner body, feeling your breath rising, falling. It brings us right to this moment. And from that place, we can respond rather than react. So it’s simple, but it fits up.

Guy (01:06:36):
Thank you. Just to wrap this up today, Don, and we’ve covered a hell of a lot of ground when you think about it between the both recordings, even though they’ll be here as one. What would you like to leave the listeners to ponder on, to sit with, with everything that we have covered today?

Don (01:06:59):
Yeah, it’s a great, great question. And I think, Guy, that kind of circling back is that you mentioned the world and how it looks like, you know, the world is a war zone and that there’s so many challenges in our life. And for us to be in community with like-minded people. That’s one of my main messages, reach out, connect, join our, we call it our high vibe tribe, call on Wednesday evenings, like, but join a community and don’t be, you know, you’re not alone. And the second thing is consider practices that are ancient, that are, there’s a renaissance right now around plant medicine. But I don’t recommend you just go and take plant medicine on your own. Do it in a community, supportive environment, maybe therapy. They call it the set and setting is really important in those practices. The set is your mindset. Why am I doing this? What’s my intention? And then the setting is really important. Is it safe? Am I around with people who are safe? And are they having a similar intention? Surrounded by beauty, you know, but I think that there’s healing available. It’s just healing. And so going back to the ancient practices, that’s, that’s, and not being alone and being with people who love you. Those two things will get us through anything. So, and Guy, you’re one of those. So again, I thank you for being that for me. You kept reaching out and sending your love and just being there. You know, I just, I’ll never forget that. So yeah, thank you.

Guy (01:09:16):
Right. Thank you, and thank you for all that you’re doing. Just being there and witnessing the last five years and your journey, Don, it’s something I hold in my heart dearly, and you inspire me constantly. And it was a huge privilege to have you on the podcast today, mate. I can’t say that enough.

Don (01:09:46):
Hey, mate, the privilege is mine to be with you. Thank you for Thank you for inspiring me and stepping forward into purpose and doing what you do, you know, because you touch lives. You don’t even know how many lives you touch. So you’re planting seeds and there’s trees you won’t even get to see that grow, but you are an inspiration to me and so many. So thank you.

Guy (01:10:16):
Thank you, man. Yeah. Anyway, much love, Don. Thank you.

Don (01:10:21):
Much love. Bye-bye.