#261 In this podcast episode, Guy speaks with Jason Pickard, a former top trader in the world who transformed his life and learned the true meaning of wealth beyond financial gains and success. Jason shared his story of how he was mentored by Paul Chek and his shamanic journeys, as well as the wisdom he gained on his journey back to himself.

In this episode, the importance of finding and following your passion is emphasized as a key factor in making a positive impact on the world. Jason suggests that by identifying what makes you unique and what you love to do, you can bring out your gifts, skills, and talents to express yourself fully and make a difference. It’s not just about having a job that pays well, but rather incorporating your passions and interests into your work. He also suggests asking yourself questions like “what did you love to do when you were a child?” and “if you died tomorrow, what would you want to do?” to help identify your passions.

Furthermore, Jason emphasize that real wealth is not about net worth, but rather net impact. They encourage listeners to consider how they are circulating their wealth in society and what impact it is having on the next seven generations. Ultimately, the message is that by following your passion and making a positive impact, you can become indispensable to the world and leave a meaningful legacy.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also like: Exploring Cranial Sacral Therapy: An Incredible Spiritual Awakening | Etienne Peirsman

          

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About Jason: Jason Pickard became a billion-dollar portfolio manager and partner to hedge fund legend, Paul Tudor Jones, at Tudor Investment. By the age of 26, he was recognized as one of the top 30 traders under 30 years old in the World. Yet his health was on an absolute decline. He was 330 lbs. and suffered from a mental and physical health crisis.

On a quest to become a master of both his inner and outer worlds, he decided to travel the world –– spending thousands of dollars and studying for thousands of hours learning directly from the greatest masters of a wide variety of healing arts, martial arts, holistic nutrition and movement, cutting edge psychology, and wisdom traditions of the East and West, ancient, indigenous and contemporary.

He has now integrated the wisdom gained on this journey by creating The Abundance Archetype method to help you discover and actualize your super-natural capacities to create wealth and well-being in your life, to thrive at work while also feeling your best. This, in turn, will give you a greater sense of your reason for being alive –– at this pivotal moment in human history.

►Audio Version:

Key Points Discussed: 

• (00:00) – From Wall Street to Spiritual Awakening: A Journey of Self-Discovery
• (04:36) – Education for Wall Street investors.
• (09:33) – Success and finding fulfillment.
• (14:20) – Addiction to Excess Exercise.
• (18:38) – Mind-blowing plant medicine experiences.
• (23:10) – Real wealth and chakras.
• (28:01) – Spirituality and wealth.
• (32:27) – Integrating all parts of ourselves.
• (39:26) – Choosing a sustainable career.
• (43:16) – Childhood passions and talents.
• (48:11) – Life and death perspective.
• (51:27) – Unconscious belief systems.
• (57:18) – Namibian Bushmen persistence hunt.
• (01:00:58) – Tribal songs and dances.
• (01:04:42) – Indigenous cultures and ways of life.
• (01:09:14) – Living an abundant life.

How to Contact Jason Pickard:
www.jasonpickard.org
www.instagram.com/jasonpickardofficial

 

About me:
My Instagram:

www.instagram.com/guyhlawrence/?hl=en

 

My website:

www.guylawrence.com.au
www.liveinflow.co

 

TRANSCRIPT

Guy (00:00):
Hello, Guy here. And today my awesome guest is Jason Pickard. What a great human being. I loved our conversation today. Jason shares his story of that he was actually one of the top traders in the world, aged under 30 years old. And also he was 330 pounds in weight at one point. And today we dive into the conversation and how the lessons he’s learned from that aspect of his life to the journey he now lives today. He was mentored by Paul Chek. And we dive into the topic today, not only about wealth and wealth creation, but what is true wealth beyond just our financial gains and success. We dive into his shamanic journeys as well and everything and all the wisdom he has learned on his road back to himself. Fascinating conversation. And I really enjoyed my time with Jason today. Of course, if you enjoy these podcasts, please let me know. Share it with a loved one, a friend. If you’re watching it on YouTube, leave a comment below, hit the like, the subscribe, anything to continue to support me and get these conversations out there. I love doing them, but without you guys, they don’t go anywhere. So it’s always deeply appreciated. And of course, if you’re new to our myself or the work and you want to check out more what we do here in Australia and now around the world with Live In Flow, there’ll be some links below from free meditations to our one day mini retreats that we run up and down the coast here in Australia. And also our deeper three and five night retreats where we create some amazing transformations. Anyway, much love from me. Let’s go over to Jason. Enjoy. Jason, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I’ve been really enjoying getting to know you through other podcasts and Paul Cech who introduced us. And the first thing I thought was, boy, this guy is a man that’s traveled from his head to his heart over the years. Would you say that would be a fair assessment of your journey? I would say that. And as the saying goes, that’s the longest journey we ever have to make. It’s certainly the longest journey I’ve ever had to make. Exploring that a little bit before we get into, well, getting into your own journey, were you ever familiar of the work of the heart or is it always just being in the head? And then at what point do you know there’s something stirring inside of you? Because I feel that’s a great challenge for many of us. That was my challenge.

Jason (02:57):
Yeah, I think I can tie this into sort of my biographical story in terms of introducing myself to the audience. And then at the same time, answering that question, I went to very mainstream education in the United States, public school. I went to a great university and I quickly went out into the Wall Street world at a very young age, right out of university and was very, very successful at a very young age. By the time I was in my early 20s, I was making millions of dollars. I, yeah, 25 years old, I was ranked one of the top 30 traders under 30 years old in the world. I was on my way to becoming the youngest partner ever to Paul Tudor Jones, who is considered one of the world’s greatest investors of all time. But at the same time, I was stuck in my head. I was 330 pounds. I was obese. I was nearly dead. So the paradox was, despite being incredibly successful on the outside, I was totally broke metaphorically on the inside. I was depressed and I was in a mental and physical health crisis. And so I realized that up until that point, my education had not served me. Despite being educated to be financially successful, to be a Wall Street investor, to be a top performer, nobody had taught me anything about the heart. Nobody had taught me anything about simple things like how to eat, how to eat for my body type, how to move my body, how to sleep, how to have play and beauty and creativity in my life, how to reflect, contemplate, relate, make love, make love, have any spiritual connection. So I realized that despite the fact that I graduated from this incredible university and I was working at this top Wall Street firm, I really knew nothing about who I really was, why I was here and how to manage myself well and how to live life well. The paradox about it was it wasn’t until I met Paul Chek, who only has a fifth grade education, that I really started to learn a real education about who I was and what it meant to be human.

Guy (05:29):
That listening to you there, that’s incredible. Did you feel like you had to climb a top of a financial mountain? Like, hey, I’m successful, I’m here, I’m achieving this. Or did you feel like you were just in the wheels of emotion and never really questioned where the end game was? Or was it stirring within you the whole time? Like something’s not quite right here, but you couldn’t articulate it.

Jason (06:20):
Yeah. So the best way to describe that is that in the work that I study, one of the tools that I have is I’m a process-oriented process worker, process-oriented psychology by Dr. Arnold Mendel. I studied this and I practice process work. And in process-oriented psychology, we look at somebody’s earliest childhood dreams or their earliest childhood memories that they remember as sort of a guide to their life path. And in those memories include our core woundings and our core powers. And so just very simplistically, one of my earliest childhood memories was coming home with my first report card from school in first grade to my mom, expecting to get a reward for having a good report card. And my mom telling me that it really wasn’t up to the standards she had expected of me. And this hit me very hard. And I flipped out, I had a big tantrum, I threw myself in the air, and I landed on the ground, smashing my head on a flower pot and cracking the pot and cracking my head and needing a bunch of stitches to repair it. So how does that answer the question? Well, if you look at that as a dream, what it set up for me was this idea that appreciation was from the external. External appreciation, and accomplishment in terms of other people’s eyes was my version of success. So from that moment on, I started chasing that report card. I felt like I had to excel in school. I had to be the biggest trader. I pursued a career of trading that is a constant report card. I started, when I got into my path, I started studying with people like Paul Czech and mentors and teachers and gurus all around the world. And all of them would report back to me that I was their best and hardest working student. But through all that process, I realized that all of this time, I was really chasing this idea that in order to be successful, I had to get somebody else’s approval. Now, what’s interesting about that is that it’s also my core power. It pushed me to the heights of Wall Street, but it was also my core wounding, and that it was this insatiable appetite for external approval. And when you look at that dream symbolically for what was missing and what I ultimately needed to learn was I needed to become the nourishing, accepting mother, but to myself. I needed to feel that acceptance on the inside. And ultimately, all this path of being this eternal student was leading me to becoming the teacher that I now am with my new course, The Abundance Archetype, that I’m bringing out into the world. So to answer your question, this was sort of my life’s path to go into excelling and achieving and looking for success on the outside, to only realize that success can really only be felt, that really deep feeling of fulfillment from the inside out. But it took me 30 years to get there.

Guy (10:06):
Yeah, it makes complete sense. This is a random question, but what’s it like being 330 pounds?

Jason (10:20):
Oh, man. It’s making me a little bit emotional right now, to be honest. It’s very challenging. It’s very challenging. I mean, I really felt like as big as I was, I felt that small on the inside. Just physically, I mean, it’s hard to find clothes that fit. You have very low self-confidence and self-esteem. For some reason, I always remember being sweaty all the time, snoring, being sweaty, being uncomfortable, feeling just stuffed wherever I went. And just no matter how large a life I lived, I was living at the height of New York City. I was 25 years old. I had tons of money. I had access to any nightclub, private planes, restaurants, limousines, anything I wanted. But at the end of the day, I was going home at night feeling completely empty and very depressed about it. So the real paradox was that I kept eating to fill this void. And it was a very, very challenging experience. Yet I look back at it now as the wounded healer, realizing that I needed to experience that so that I can relate to others in that situation and help people today. And that makes it all worthwhile. But it was a very, very challenging time. And a lot of that started even when I was a kid. I was an athlete. I exercised a lot, but I could never really get down to a weight that was fit. I always had extra weight on me. And I think part of that problem was a lot of the belief systems that I grew up with, this childhood dream that I mentioned, but also just growing up in the United States in the 80s and 90s with absolutely confused ideas of what to feed children and what to eat. We’re talking microwave dinners and hamburger helper and diet snapples and you name it. And so I felt like I was in this kind of finger trap where no matter what I did, I couldn’t get out of it. And that just really exploded for me when I was graduating college and going on to Wall Street and starting to live this bigger and larger lifestyle at the same time, having a lot of access to money, having a lot of access to people that wanted to take me out to dinner and do things for me. And it just kind of got to a very, very unhealthy tipping point where I had to look at myself and say, what’s all this for? Why do all this if you’re going to not be around to enjoy it? If you don’t have a family to share it with, if you don’t have any health, what’s the point? You’re going to be spending all of your money on surgeries and medical bills and medications and so forth. What was the tipping point? Yeah. So one of the things Paul Cech says is that you can either run towards your dream or run away from your nightmare. And for me, it was really a nightmare. My nightmare was I didn’t want to die. I wound up having this purple leg infection. I had this infection that was creeping up my leg into my groin. I was rushed to the hospital, pumped up on antibiotics. And I remember just lying there. My family didn’t live in New York City where I was living at the time. I didn’t really have anyone around me. And it was a dark night of the soul, so to speak. The fascinating thing about that is by destiny, I met a Czech professional who lived in New York City and we started exercising together for two years. And over the next two years, I lost 170 pounds through pure sweat. But at the end of the 170 pound weight loss, I found myself not feeling much different on the inside. I had really just transferred my addiction to excess, to excess exercise. And that’s when I met Paul and I realized that, oh man, okay, I had the bank account. That didn’t make me feel fulfilled. And now I have this body that is slim and fit. That doesn’t ultimately make me feel any different. In terms of course, I was physically different and people looked at me different. But on the inside, I still felt a little bit shallow. And then that started this whole inner journey that I’ve gone on that I’ve been on now for quite some time. Yeah, got it. What was it about Paul that attracted you to work with him then? Paul was the first person who made being healthy fun. He made it fun. It was easy. It was accessible. It was playful. It was fun. He made me feel alive. He was super caring and inviting. And I was like, I’ve waited my whole life to answer these questions. I would sit up at night as a kid and just think about death and ask questions about it and not have any answers. I would think about space. I would think about the universe. I think about all these questions of why did I feel like I’m looking in from the outside of the world? And these questions just went unanswered in my life, day after day, month after month, a year after year. And when I met Paul, he was the first person who could actually sit down with me and explain to me from his own experiences what he had learned and how I could apply to my life. And it was a very simple approach and it was fun. We just had a really good time together. We hit it off. And then I just went at that with the same intensity that I’ve done everything else in my life. Yeah, right. Makes sense. When I met him, I was thinking of I just spent two years working out nine times a week eating lean turkey breast and broccoli and not enjoying myself just completely dry. Paul said I went from soggy white bread to a burnt piece of toast. I was totally burnt out. And when I went to see him and we’re just stacking rocks and we’re doing art and we’re drumming and we’re singing and we’re learning and we’re lifting and we’re resting and we’re meditating, I’m like, oh my God, this is not what I thought a healthy life was. I thought it was like no pain, no gain. And it’s actually, it was quite the opposite. It’s a total immersion, isn’t it? So I’m guessing you went and spent time with Paul at his place and really submerged yourself into being entoed. Yeah. I’ve been spending time with him for the last 14 years. I first went to see him after that weight loss in 2009. We spent about five days together in a private immersion and I haven’t stopped doing that since then, at least a couple of times a year. And we still coach regularly on Skype every other week. And for a while at the beginning, it was even more regular than that. So we’ve had a constant communication, constant flow of information and teaching and now a deep friendship for the last approximately, I don’t know, 14 years.

Guy (18:12):
Yeah, incredible. Yeah. So Lee, I’m interested on the spiritual aspects of your journey as well, because just relating back to, I’m a guy who grew up in Wales, played rugby, completely removed from any kind of spiritual growth. I didn’t even have any religion growing up really either. And for me, it was kind of like mind blowing when I started to realise there’s true context to this work and as we lean inward, that’s where the growth is. So I’m interested to know, can you remember your kind of first experiences leaning into this work? Is this something, just looking at you and your setup and your studio and everything there, it’s pretty amazing, mate. There’s a lot of culture hanging on your back wall right there.

Jason (19:08):
Yeah, I’ve had many experiences over the years, studied many different spiritual practices, immersed myself in many different mystical religious groups from all sorts of sects around the world. But ultimately, I have to probably give it, if I was going to give one thing to my first plant medicine ceremony, really opened my eyes to a whole other way of thinking. That was the first time that I felt like there was something more than this physical body. I felt the first time I felt like this 800 pound gorilla fell off my back. The first time I could sense and feel energy and connect with my soul and see that from what I thought was true, all of a sudden, the world was more like 99% unknown and 1% known versus 99% known and 1% unknown, which is what I had been walking around thinking up until that point. For me, that was a direct experience that I had and that just opened the floodgates. From then on, I wanted to just read and study and learn and practice everything I could. What medicine was it, don’t mind me asking? The first time I did a medicine journey was DMT. Okay. Yeah. Then I’ve explored a whole tool chest of medicine since then at appropriate times.

Guy (20:29):
Yeah. I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it at all. Yeah, it’s quite incredible. From all those lessons, people come to you because you obviously mentor and coach others that want to come through. I’m always fascinated to speak to people like yourself that truly understand what money is and truly understand what wealth is, but in the definition of financial wealth. I’ve certainly never experienced that to the levels that you have, but then also what actually true wealth is beyond that. We tend to get conditioned to really buy into the materialistic aspects of finance and they are the allures for our growths, but obviously does the true growth come from there? I’m interested for you to speak to what are the lessons being around wealth in general?

Jason (21:39):
Yeah. One of the ways I like to explain this is I like to look at the etymology of words. I’ve spoken about this a little bit, but what I find is that words, when you go to the etymology, when you go to the roots of the words, you see where the words really come from and not the definitions we have for them today. This can be an incredibly interesting practice for anyone interested to look up words like God and spirituality and really get down to what are these words that we just throw around actually mean. We all say, oh, we’re spiritual, but how would you define that? Everyone’s going to define that differently. Really getting down to the roots of words can be very helpful. When I started this course and I’m calling it the abundance archetype, that’s where I started. What is abundance? What does that mean to me? What does archetype mean? What does money mean? What do these words mean? I want to throw out what I thought they meant and really get down to a completely open stance and see maybe there’s something that I misunderstood about these terms that I thought I knew. What’s interesting about wealth is that wealth comes from well-being and well-being comes from the wheel and wheel comes from chakras. The wheels are the energy centers in our body. So if you’re looking at that, what is real wealth? Well, it starts from being embodied, from having your energy centers turned on, which you experience with your Kundalini awakening. That’s wealth. Knowing who you truly are, knowing that you’re a spiritual being, a divine being having a human experience and not the other way around. Being in your body, taking care of your body, understanding that what you are is the one that’s looking through your eyes, knowing what you stand for, knowing that no matter what happens in life, it won’t affect who you really are, why you’re here and what’s important to you. And being fully embodied and having access to not only your body, but also your non-sensory perceptions, your chakras, your intuition, your heart, your throat, et cetera. And then from there, we go back to the wheel and we recognize that real wealth is not about net worth. It’s about net impact. How are we circulating our wealth in society? What are we doing with it? Not how much is it possessed, not how much do we have in a Swiss bank account, but how is it performing? How is it impacting the next seven generations? And are we participating in the wheel of life? Are we giving and receiving equally? Are we just extracting from the earth or are we also acting in balance? And then that gives us wellbeing and ultimately that’s true wealth. That’s true wealth. And so on my experience of all of this, what I found is that when I was on Wall Street, people had financial wealth, but many of them did not have health. I saw people have heart attacks on the trading floor. I had friends of mine that had strokes on the trading floor. People commit suicide, broken relationships, abuse, alcohol, drugs, the whole thing. But on the other side, you have a lot of people that I’ve met in the holistic communities, the trainers, the coaches, the healers, the therapists, the gurus that don’t have any money. And then I ask, are you able to really impact the world in the most amplified or maximum way possible if you don’t have the means to get your message out and to actually share your knowledge? And so that’s why I created this course is that I realized through my own experiences that being a bridge, kind of being in the world, but not of it, kind of having one foot in wealth and one foot in well-being and having the two was essential. And I think it’s another fascinating thing to think about where we got these ideas that these things had to be divorced. You know, if I take a sidestep, science and religion have had a really bad divorce. I’ve had a really bad divorce. Science will tell you how many times a second a hummingbird can flap its wings. But they won’t even think about, they won’t ask the question, what is the intelligence that created this beauty? That’s what I want to know who created the hummingbird, not how many times it can flap its wings. And then on the other side, religion will give everything to the intelligence. But you have religions who think the world was created 6,000 years ago based on blind faith when science can without a question of a doubt, tell you that’s not true. A million facts, right? So like fossils and million other things. But anyway, so I think wealth and spirituality have also been through a bad divorce, where we get this idea that wealth is evil if you’re in this kind of space of trying to help people. But if we look back at all of the early religions, you know, some research shows that Jesus was given today’s equivalent of $4 million worth of gifts at birth. Buddha was a prince. Now he gave it all up, but he came from extreme wealth. Arjuna was a prince. He was a prince warrior. Moses was living with the Pharaoh of Egypt. And Muhammad was married to a very wealthy businesswoman and became a very wealthy merchant himself. So all of the great change, all of the great spiritual movements that we look up to today and we rely on as this like integral approach to our worldviews, were all founded on money. And somewhere along the way, we separated the two. I think they need to support and guide each other. Money without spirituality is just lost, and spirituality without wealth doesn’t have a potential to have a meaningful impact.

Guy (29:01):
Yeah, beautiful. I love your explanation. That is like, wow, thank you. And I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you. We see it, we, you know, we get momentum with our company here. We’ve come out of COVID because obviously running retreats and events wasn’t conducive to lockdowns, as you can imagine. Yeah, terrible. So, you know, we weathered that storm and utilized that for the online component and developed an app and they’re out there. And now we’re actually probably in front of 300 people a month, if not more in person. And it’s been able to grow an ecosystem like you say, and financially support yourself from the momentum, but have a cause that is so driven from your heart and passion and impact. It’s a different fuel.

Jason (29:59):
Carl Jung said the creative fire needs no wood. Exactly. So true, right?

Guy (30:07):
It’s like it’s Monday morning and I love the fact that I’m having a podcast on a Monday morning. You know, it’s like, it’s a perfect start to the week for me. There was a time, Jason, you know, I remember getting out of my car in the freezing snow in my 20s in rush hour, just having to get on the M25 in London. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on that ring road, but Chris Ray, I wrote a song, The Road to Hell, I brought it. It’s a car park. I could imagine. I’ve been on the subways in New York City. Jesus Christ. And I remember crying, scraping off the frost of my beaten up old car, about to go and do some plumbing in the city on a Monday morning thinking, how the hell do I get out of this? Like, this is not me. You know what I mean? And having those moments. Yeah. When you experience both sides of the coin.

Jason (31:02):
You know, it’s interesting about this not me thing because one thing I’m interested to hear if this is somewhat similar for you. When I retired from Wall Street in 2019 to explore this whole inner life professionally, you know, I had after I met Paul in 2009, I brought the two together and I worked on Wall Street in kind of a Zen trader type way to the best of my ability for 10 years. I integrated ergonomics and meditation and creativity and eating organic food and bringing my own water to work and all these different things. And I became very sustainably successful and really highly optimized doing the two. But in 2019, I wanted a new challenge. I just didn’t have the real passion anymore for just the Wall Street gig. And so I retired and I said, I want to only pursue all of these sort of holistic pursuits for lack of a better word. I wanted to get certified in all of these things that I had been doing in an intense way, but more for my own personal growth than to work with others in these various fields. And I said, I don’t want to be that trader guy anymore. I don’t want to be him. He’s crazy. You know, he’s stressed out. He’s working like crazy. He only cares about his money. Let’s just like put him away. And paradoxically, what was primary for me in terms of my identity for my whole life, if I walked into a cocktail party and someone said, who are you? I’m like, I’m Jason. I’m a trader. And this whole holistic side was more secondary to me. It was less known. If they started prying, I might say, yeah, I dabble in creativity and music and shamanism and these things. My primary identity that was like, this is me, my business card, trader. And then I went the other way and I wanted to explore only this. I’m a healer. I’m a therapist. I’m a life coach, whatever. And the trader became very secondary. But what I found is that any time we marginalize any part of ourself, it starts to work against us. It almost becomes like an inner terrorist and it’ll show up in our dreams and in body symptoms and sicknesses and synchronicities and things until we realize that we are only at our best and we can only be whole when we integrate all parts of ourself, when all parts of ourself have a seat at the table and all voices can be heard. And that’s when I realized that in order for me to actually feel at my best, perform at my best and do my life’s work, I had to integrate both parts of myself, which was bringing back the trader and marrying him with the healer and bringing that out into the world, which is what I’m doing now. But I’m curious if that is the case for you when you left that primary identity of the business that you’re in and moved into this podcasting and mentorships and groups and all of your new amazing work. If you found that that other part actually needed to be included as well.

Guy (34:32):
Reflecting back, it definitely needed to be loved and healed. That’s probably the only way I can put it. I remember feeling so free in some respects because it had gotten, toxic is not the right word, but it was going that way in the partnerships and the commitments and everything else. And I remember setting up my Instagram account from having a brand Instagram account that I didn’t care for that had tens and tens of thousands of followers and to go in zero, zero, zero and putting the photograph happening again. Oh my God, that felt so good because it could just be me and it was a photograph of me. Just being me on there. And it almost gave myself permission because I felt like I was hiding behind this other aspect of myself. I couldn’t talk about my shamanic journeys too much. I couldn’t talk about my mystical experiences. I was having a three o’clock in the morning, just laying in bed, these foreign concepts to most people, especially in the world I was in, to be able to go, wow, I can speak about all this and it’s up to how others now respond to me as opposed to hiding behind this brand and having to be seen in a certain light. So once I honored that aspect of myself, the other aspect then started to heal. And then I could then look back and think of all of the gifts and the fond memories and everything that my company had given to me. And like I was saying about that apprenticeship. So I think in some respects then I found myself and when people asked me to this day, I still don’t know how to respond in all honesty. What do you do? I try not to pigeon myself in any way because there’s so many facets to it and I love it all.

Jason (36:44):
Yeah, to the extent that we say we’re one thing, it’s at the exclusion of everything else. And it actually takes a lot of energy, believe it or not, to maintain these very rigid identities because we have to exclude so much instead of just allowing it to come into us and be open about it. To the extent we see ourselves in a particular light, it’s at the exclusion of 99% of what’s possible for us.

Guy (37:11):
How was it for you stepping off Wall Street? I mean, you must surely, like you’re saying, because I mean, you’ve touched on it anyway, you would have brought the truer aspect of you to Wall Street, if you like. And I have no doubt you’d have influenced many people that have seen your own journey and transformation from that. And then when it was time to step down, was it a smooth transition? Was there still part of you terrified or was it perfect?

Jason (37:48):
No, no, it’s not perfect. No, you know, some of my life circumstances also influenced the timing. I had just gone through a very difficult divorce. I was having majority custody of my two young kids. I had a two-year-old and a three-year-old girl. They’re older now, of course, but I was having them the majority of the time in my care as a single dad at the time. I had moved, I decided to leave New York City and move up to the mountains like two and a half hours away from the office. So, you know, you could work remotely and things like that. But just like all of my life, it’s almost like the universe was really there guiding me as well. And all the kind of the ducks came into a row in terms of me also having other interests. And I have to say, my work also wasn’t really, I could see the writing on the wall for some reason. I just felt like I had the momentum for such a long time. And I just felt like, I always felt like the wind was at my back in that career. Like always, I just, I couldn’t be wrong. And then all of a sudden, I just started feeling like I couldn’t be right. And it was just, I just was paying attention to it and feeling it. And I thought to myself, all right, I could stick around in this career at the expense of my kids who need me to try to grind it out, try to make a few more bucks. Maybe I could have some a few more successful years. Maybe not. I don’t know, because honestly, it wasn’t feeling very abundant at that moment, like it had been for so long. And I thought to myself, well, what’s the max amount of time you could see yourself doing this career? I was like, I don’t know, a couple years. Why don’t you start now investing in something that you can do for the rest of your life? What’s a career that you could do? Maybe you’re giving up money in the next five years or even 10 years, but what if you looked at the 50 year probability or the 50 year value of this decision? Which I thought was very interesting. And I thought to myself, wow, well, if I’m looking that way, I better leave now and start investing in my future, something I can do from when I’m 40 till I’m 90. And now a couple years in, I’ve created a career and a course and a whole movement that I plan on teaching till the day I die. That maybe in year one is less revenue, even though I don’t really look at it like that anymore, because it’s a hell of a lot more impact. But even though it could be less revenue now in year one versus what I could have done on Wall Street maybe in year one, what if I looked at it over 50 years and I have a really good feeling that actually this career is going to be even financially more beneficial for me by taking that long view. And I have probably a lot of my friends who stayed in Wall Street who might wake up at 45 or 50 and that might be over for them. And they’ll say, now what am I going to do? And I’m going to be cruising on in this already developed 10 years in the running business in terms of how I’m visualizing it. So that really helped me make the change. And the other thing that I want to say that I think is really fascinating and I may have talked about this on Paul’s podcast, but for your audience, I think it’s really cool to hear it again is when I left Wall Street, I felt like I didn’t know who I was momentarily. I was just like super important guy. I was getting a thousand emails a day. I was managing a billion dollar portfolio. I had clients. A billion dollars. A billion US. Yeah. And then it’s like, I had all of these meetings and emails and text messages and brokers and clients and customers and partnerships. And then it all just goes fade to black. It’s like gone. It’s like my mom saying, what’s up? Or stuff like that. Or like everything goes dark. It’s just like the whole thing shuts down. And I’m just like sitting there like, what did I just do? And I went through this whole cycle of real disbelief and shock and grief and regret. And did I make the wrong choice, the right choice, all of these different things. And what I ultimately connected with that was really fascinating for me is that when I was a child, I loved drumming and I still am a drummer. And I loved drumming. It was my first love. And I would encourage everybody who’s listening to this to think of what they loved to do when they were a kid before anyone told them what they had to do. Oh, I wanted to be a painter, but then my parents told me that you can never make money being a painter. Or I always wanted to be a fireman, but then my parents told me that that was too dangerous or something. Whatever your first love is, what you wanted to be when you grew up or something that just really called to you that wasn’t pushed onto you. And for me, it was drumming. Nobody in my family drummed. I don’t know how I even got into it. It’s all of a sudden I’m drumming in second grade, early on. And what I realized looking back at it is that what made me a great trader was being able to tap into the rhythm of the market. I could feel the pulse of the market. I could feel the rhythm of the market. I could keep the beat with the market. I knew which way the market was going and it was inside of me in that same way. And when I became a therapist and a life coach and I was working with my clients, I could tap into them in the same way. I could feel their rhythm. I could pace them and I could offer them advice. And now in my course, it’s all about creating rhythm and ritual in your day to develop flow states and mastery. And I even have drumming meditations in my course. And so ultimately what I realized was that underneath the consensus reality, identity of trader, of life coach, of course creator, there was something underneath it all. We can call it rhythm. Or the drum, the beat. There was something that was expressing itself through all of those roles. It wasn’t me, the trader. It was me expressing the rhythm through trading. It wasn’t me, the therapist. It was me expressing the rhythm through therapy. It’s not me, the course creator. It’s me expressing that same heartbeat, the heartbeat of mother earth, the heartbeat of connection, our own heartbeat, expressing that beat through my course. And so what I realized is that I didn’t actually leave anything. The thing that I was all along was always with me from when I was born until when I die and very likely before and after. And it’s to the extent that I can lock into that, I know I’m on my life’s path and I’m going to be successful. And so once I realized that all I really gave up was the name, but not actually the skill or the essence of it, I got over that crisis of ego.

Guy (46:06):
Yeah, beautiful. Well said. I can completely relate to everything you just said. How would you then, for listeners just listening today or supporting this, suggest people find that within themselves? Because from what I witnessed, we are so disconnected from our bodies. Generally, people come and interact even though we think we’re there and be able to navigate our way back. It almost feels like from where we started the conversation, from your journey, from your head to the heart.

Jason (47:07):
Yeah. So how do people get in touch with their rhythm? Yeah. Well, like I said, there’s two ways that I like to work with it. One is from the beginning and one is from the end. You can ask yourself, what did you love to do when you were a child? What was it about that that you loved? What was the essence of that? What was the thing that you liked the most about it? Oh, I wanted to be a baseball player. Well, what was it that you liked about baseball? What really got you? Was it working on a team? Was it the competitiveness of it? Was it a particular strategy or skill set or feeling or emotion? And then doing your best to even in your current job and role, finding a way to cultivate and bring that in more. The other way to do it is to put yourself on your deathbed, which is a challenging one for many of us in our culture because we really marginalized death. It’s the one thing that’s coming for all of us, but no one wants to talk about it. It’s the one thing we share in common. It’s inevitable. And we spend all this money. I mean, a lot of people that have a lot of money spend a lot of money on trying to avoid death. They try to, oh, I don’t even know all these life extension supplements and various technologies that everyone’s trying to come up with to try to live forever. But the reality is that when we actually look at death and when we work with death, we can begin to truly live now because we understand that life doesn’t go on forever, at least in this body. We can start to make really good choices now, first off on our health, because we realized, wow, we’re going to die at some point. We better take care of this vehicle we’re driving around in. Two, we start to get our priorities in order. And so when we ask ourselves, if I had one week to live, what would I want to do with my time? If I had to work, what would I do? What kind of legacy would I want to leave? What would be most meaningful for me? What do I enjoy the most and how would I do it? And that’s a very interesting way to take it as well. Because ultimately, like I said, this purpose stream that I can say is a continuum that extends to the next life. Almost like a quantum wave throughout our whole life. And so you can approach it from birth, you can approach it from death. But if you just ask yourself, if I only had a week to live, what would I do? And it might not be a job that you hate. It would be something that you really are passionate about. Like, oh, I always wanted to do this. Well, that’s a clue, at least, on maybe what you should do now, or how you can incorporate at least some of that into what you do now.

Guy (50:31):
Yeah, I feel one of the challenges for me that held me back for a long time was I didn’t believe it. You know, that I understood it. But when I went to move into it, I would always feel like there’s something greater holding me back. Whatever that might look like. How do you address that when working with people? In terms of sort of their belief systems? Yeah, unconscious belief systems, you know, because it’s been remarkable. Like, I don’t really remember how I used to think, to be honest. In some ways.

Jason (51:21):
Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s many tools to look at belief systems and work with the unconscious, but it’s pretty much the first place to start. You know, much of what we believe has been given to us. If you really think about how much of what you think to be you is actually your own unique idea versus something that you read or were told or watched on TV or whatever, right? I mean, like, I don’t even know. What would you say? It’s a very small percentage, I think. And so many of us have, if we’re lucky, we might get a monetary inheritance. Maybe our parents leave us a few bucks or something or not, but you know, that’s a possibility for some people. But we all have a psychological inheritance. We’re all inheriting the belief systems of our parents and their parents and their parents. And sometimes it can go back hundreds of generations back. We all have the belief systems of our particular culture, our nation, our religion, our society, our group, about what a man should be like, what it is about, you know, how we should believe about what work looks like or success looks like or money or abundance or relationally or spiritually, all of these things. And we must realize that it’s up to us to break the chain. Like, you know, we must be courageous. We must first want this and say, you know what, the buck stops here with me. We were talking about that earlier, but ultimately I realized that, you know, Carl Jung says that each child is met with the unmet tasks of their parents. And that’s what really inspires me is to say, I don’t want this to perpetuate anything that I have that’s unresolved. I know my children are going to have to do in their life. And so for me, my motivation is to get off the wheel and start a new one, a new one of positivity for them. And to do that, you have to look backwards at where did I get these belief systems and really be willing to challenge them? Paul Chek says any belief system worth living is worth questioning. I mean, think about that. How many of us are going through our life each day and are believing things that we won’t question? I’m a Democrat. For life? What about who’s the candidate? I’m a Republican. I’m this, I’m that. We’re so rigid. We have to use questioning as a meta skill. Look at all parts of our life. Really dig in with a deep curiosity. Curiosity, childlike mind, looking at the world like it’s unknown, an explorer’s mindset, adventuring into our life. In the Castaneda books, they talk about doing a deep recapitulation of your life, even down to the most meaningless, seemingly small details. Everything matters. That’s the warrior’s mindset. I’m going to look at everything in my life, every belief system. It’s unbelievable how much of our ancestors we still carry. We’re not that far removed. Many of us are still living in very difficult times, but some of us that are living maybe in more westernized countries in some levels have, at least our survival needs met. We have shelter and food and clean water and support on some level, but you go a few generations back, not that many of us had that. We’re living in times of depression, times of war, and that’s still in us. That’s still in our great grandparents and our grandparents, and that’s still in our body and our DNA. But the good news is that we can change that. We have to be willing to wake up each day and be willing to experience something new. Ask new questions. Explore our life. Get out of this groundhog day that yesterday equals today and today equals tomorrow. To me, that is one of the biggest driving impetuses in my life is to really explore that and to be curious about who I am and why I’m here, what I think, and is it serving me. One of the good practices about this death subject that we talked about is see if you can learn to die to something little each day. What’s one belief system you have today that’s not really serving you that you can die to? You can let go of. What’s a challenge you can let go of? What’s a relationship conflict you can let go of? Letting go of little things can really help you live more fully and being present to the moment.

Guy (56:21):
Thousand percent. I mentioned this book a few times on the podcast, but there’s a book called The Secrets to Aboriginal Healing. It’s a beautiful book. I’ve had the author on Robbie Holtz. The first step within that book is willingness. If somebody is not willing, they will not work with them in any way. It just rings true in everything that you just said. Yeah. Yeah. That’s beautiful. Before we wrap up the podcast, I want to touch on a topic which I haven’t got to, but the Namibian Bushmen. Didn’t you know what you meant? I was like, oh, that sounds very interesting. Please just talk to that topic a little bit.

Jason (57:02):
You know, it was taking ourselves back. It was in the time of my life after I had lost the weight while I was still kind of finding myself. It was before I had children. I was still in this kind of young man warrior, got to go prove myself stage as I was not really that entrenched in my spiritual journey. I decided to go with that trainer that I had mentioned earlier, who was a Czech professional. His name is Chaba Lucas. The two of us went to Namibia. We trained for about a year to do a persistence hunt with the Namibian Bushmen, the San Bushmen. A persistence hunt is essentially hunting by running after the animals. This is the way that for thousands or tens of thousands or God knows how many years, Bushmen hunted because what they recognized was they recognized what their competitive edge was over animals. They couldn’t beat an animal in a sprint. In history, they probably did not have superior weapons that we do now like crazy scopes and automatic rifles and things like that. Bone arrows and whatever they hunt with. They realized that they could run after an animal for very, very long distances. An animal has to stop to pant to cool off because animals can’t sweat like humans can. They recognized if they ran 20 miles, 30 miles, 40 miles after an animal nonstop and just constantly ran and ran and tracked and ran and tracked and ran, not fast but slow and steady, that they could eventually, the animal would fall down and die and they would be able to feed their tribe in that particular way. It’s the most ancient style of hunting. I went down and I lived with them for about a week and a half. I participated in that. I learned some of the most amazing lessons in my life. First of all, it was entirely extreme. After training for a year, I realized how out of shape I was. They looked at me and said, you think you’re going to run with us? Maybe you can carry the animal back home on your back. I remember the first time I saw them take off, it was like, okay, let’s go. Then I’m running and then by the time I picked my head up to just to see where I’m going, they were gone. They ran like the wind. It was unbelievable. It was really beautiful men and women and just a beautiful time. It was very physically challenging for me out all day in the Kalahari Desert, in extreme heat, running and running and running and then coming back home and living on a small little cot type thing in a little tent with the tribe and showering with the one hose they had between them. They live like that year in and year out. They’re just completely amazing, but just coming from the West and not being conditioned for that. It was a very extreme time. Many times throughout, I wanted to quit, I remember, but it was also some of the most beautiful times I had. It was when we would sit around the fire at night and sing songs and do dances. They had this incredible thing where the women would sit around the fire with the children and they each sang their own particular part to a song that was handed down to them from their mother. Their particular part of the song fit in polyrhythmically with every other woman and their children in the tribe so that everyone had their own part passed down, but that somehow made this whole song complete. That was some of the most moving things I’ve ever seen. Then the men would get into these trances and dance around the fire. What they would do, they were always singing songs to the animals. That was their way of spiritually or energetically being in this reciprocity. That if they were going to take an animal’s life, not only were they going to give thanks, but they were essentially energetically calling it back in, calling the deer in, calling the animals that were there, calling these animals back in because they believe that by having that connection to almost like the personified laws of nature or the intelligence of nature, almost like a rain dance, they could replenish the population because they knew that they had to live in reciprocity with these animals. If they took the population down, it meant their own demise. It was just a really beautiful experience on many levels of interaction. Very meaningful to me today. At the time, I was a young man and I was in a lot of pain being there physically, but I survived it.

Guy (01:02:55):
Incredible. Interestingly, you shared that because as you were sharing, I had a documentary maker on a couple of years ago. I forget his name, but he made a film called Run and Become. I think it’s called 3200 Run and Become. Yeah, I think I saw that. Yeah, it just took me back to that moment. Fascinating stuff.

Jason (01:03:16):
I’m not an ultramarathoner. In fact, my body type is more like they were right. I’m more for carrying the heavy load than doing the long sprinting, but I did it anyway. Yeah, it’s incredible. Yeah, good on you. One of the things that was just, I’ll just say this, I was really sad about it is that I really think that there was probably one, if not the last, Bushman tribes who were living in that particular way because the West had been pushed in on the tribe. They had been supplemented now with the worst quality food you can imagine. The stuff in America that we won’t even eat here, which is saying a lot because the food here is generally terrible in terms of the masses, but the food that the West doesn’t even want to eat, they send to Africa. Then that crap was then given to the Bushman in terms of the crappiest clothes we don’t want to wear. They were even being supplemented with tobacco because they had a really big tobacco ritual that was very fun to be with them and participate in that regularly. Instead of now growing their own tobacco, they were being given tobacco and they were showing me how there was shreds of plastic in their tobacco. Their children, because of this influence, force on them from outside that was forcing them to convert to more modern ways of, okay, now you’ve got to attend a school and you’ve got to do this. They were no longer able to pass down that lineage and survive in that isolated way where they were totally self-sustainable, growing their own tobacco, growing their own food, hunting, sharing, bartering. I don’t even know how long, longer than we probably have record of it. It was an interesting thing for me to see this, some of the last Bushman tribes, but at the same time, it was very sad to know that 100 years from now that might not exist anymore. Yeah. I can only imagine. Yeah, we see it out here within Australia with the Aboriginal communities as well. It’s one of the most important things we need to do is we need to make sure that all of these indigenous cultures, that these ways of life are not lost, that if anything, they’re raised up and supported and nourished, but at a minimum, make sure that we don’t lose this wisdom because if we lose that, we’re going to even be in worse shape than we are now.

Guy (01:06:12):
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I feel that’s why the work we do here in Australia is so important because I feel like we’re de-hypnotizing people and allowing to finally become more conscious and connect back to their hearts and not only see with their eyes, but see with their heart as well. Yeah. Thank you for all that work. Yeah. Yeah. It’s beautiful. Just wrapping up the podcast, I ask everyone on the show a question, but before I do, where can people… I’ll make sure there’s links in the show notes for you, Jason, if people want to find out more about your work.

Jason (01:06:48):
Yeah, if you want to find out more about my course and what I’m offering, you can go to my website, jasonpicard.org, J-A-S-O-N, jasonpickard, P-I-C-K-A-R-D.org, and you can also check me out on Instagram at jasonpicardofficial, where I’m putting out a lot of really fun content and I’m getting better each day. I put a lot of time and energy into it. Yeah, if you’re interested, you can just jump on my website and you can book a discovery call with me. When you sign up, just write in that you heard about this podcast from Let It In or from Guy. Yeah, I’d love to connect with you and support you in any way I can.

Guy (01:07:31):
Beautiful. Beautiful. Last question, mate. With everything we’ve covered today, which has been a lot, we’ve been over an hour, what would you like to leave the listeners to ponder on?

Jason (01:07:48):
Well, I think the most important thing is to ponder on how you can be more of yourself. I honestly think that the way out of the world trouble, the way out of scarcity mindset and into abundance and into abundance is to recognize that you are one of a kind. There’s only one of you ever in this world. There’s only one of you that has your fingerprints. There’s no two snowflakes that ever are alike. The universe is a novelty generator. It’s completely unique and you are that uniqueness. And to the extent that you can bring out your gifts, your skills, your talents, what you love to do to express yourself fully, to sing your song, dance your dance, tell your story, receive and give your inspirations and your visions, that not only will you be more successful because you will become indispensable to the world because you’ll have brought out something that nobody else has, but in addition, the world will become better for it. And so I challenge everybody and support everybody to find out what makes you tick. What do you love to do? What would you want to do for the rest of your life? What’s unique about you? What did you love to do as a child? If you died tomorrow, what would you want to do? What kind of legacy would you want to live? And to not wait to this idea that someday when I’m 60, I’ll have this retirement fund, but I’m going to do a job I hate for the next 30 years with the idea that with a life expectancy in the United States for men at 70 years old, that’s declining by the year, that maybe I’ll have a few good years left to enjoy myself. To me, that’s a prison. So ask yourself, how can you express yourself more fully today and recognizing that that’s what the world needs of you and that’s how you can be the most abundant.

Guy (01:10:14):
Amen to that. Jason, thank you so much. It’s been truly a pleasure connecting with you, mate, and being able to share your journey on my podcast. Thank you for all that you do. I have no doubt this won’t be the last time.

Jason (01:10:27):
Thanks for having me. It was a beautiful, beautiful opportunity. I really loved it. Thank you. You’re welcome.