036 - Live from Love, Not for Love
This week on On This Walk, we cover a lot of ground — leadership, love, culture, and our walks towards deeper Truth.
My walking partner for today is Ryan Hartley, father of two and host of the globally popular podcast, Always Better Than Yesterday. Ryan has been a featured guest on over 30 podcasts and is regularly invited to speak at events internationally. His podcast is currently listened to in over 140 countries.
Listen as Ryan and I really get into it. We talk about what it means to live from love as opposed to for love. We discuss the influence of society and how it actually makes us feel incomplete and inadequate. We even touch on faith, religion, Christ consciousness, and spirituality. It’s all happening right here On This Walk.
In This Episode
(04:01) – Evolving into the heart-centered leadership style.
(11:40) – Changing course and steering into leadership.
(16:22) – Living from love, not for love.
(22:39) – Why culture is not our friend.
(25:50) – What are our desires based on?
(31:00) – Ryan describes the challenge with the pursuit of happiness.
(34:12) – Talking about faith and seeing through a Christian lens.
(41:23) – On relating to the energy that is God.
(46:12) – Luke on the feeling of being separate.
(52:39) – Heartset - Loving with all of your minds.
(58:51) – Reflecting on what it means to be human.
(1:02:33) – The masculine and feminine views of heart-centeredness.
(1:04:44) – How the journey has changed Ryan as a father.
Notable Quotes
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“The reason I say culture is not our friend is because sometimes we have to take a step back and go, where are my desires coming from? Because you might say from a heart-centered perspective, should we follow our heart's desire? And I've had to get my head around this. I try every single day to get to Psalm 23, which starts with ‘The Lord is my shepherd. I have all that I need’. And I think that is the perfect scripture to remind myself every single day that in this moment I have all that I need. I do not lack anything. And when I do that, when I truly feel blessed, grateful, appreciative, that I can look around and choose my life, then whatever I do becomes an expression of that love and gratitude.”
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“Anytime you feel lost, separate or lacking, close your eyes. Breathe, slow down and feel. Feel for that breath that runs through you and runs through all things, all of life. You're a part of that great mystery. Source yourself from that knowing, from that love and connect to that playful, creative, rambunctious, curious, loving, generous, even weird little inner child that you are. And this again, is a practice. This remembering doesn't always happen overnight, but taking the time to feel it, to breathe with it, to touch it within us and around us. Doing this as a practice allows us to remember, it's always been there. It will always be there, and we always have access to it. No need to think your way there. Just feel for it.”
Our Guest
Ryan Hartley is the Chief Heart Officer of Always Better Than Yesterday, a company that develops heart-centered leaders through coaching, consulting, community building, and podcasting. Before that, he served as a local police force for 12 years in a variety of leadership roles. Founded in 2017, Always Better Than Yesterday survived the global pandemic and thrived by helping many leaders and businesses to do the same. He's the host of the podcast with the same name that's listened to in over 140 countries.
Resources & Links
On This Walk
Mentions
Letting Go by David Hawkins - https://www.amazon.com/Letting-David-Hawkins-M-D-Ph-D/dp/1401945015
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[00:00:00] Ryan: And I don't think our heart does have desires. Our heart only has desire if it first made to feel like it lacks in some way.
[00:00:11] Luke: Welcome to On This Walk, a show about the winding journey of life in all its realness. I'm Luke Iorio. Please join me and my brilliant heart-centered guests each week as we look to navigate this journey more consciously and authentically. Uncovering how to tap back into that sense of connection with self, with soul, and with something bigger than ourselves.
[00:00:32] Now let's go on this walk. I'm excited to share this conversation with you today. Ryan and I recently connected through our mutual friend, connector, actually recent guest here, even on On This Walk, David Bryan. Within only a few minutes, Ryan and I were already talking about our walks with various spiritual and wisdom traditions, the influence of culture and religion on our egos and our desires.
[00:00:56] The need for us as men to move forward from our hearts as opposed to just living in our heads as well as the joy that we each have for our families, which drives both of us to want to be better fathers. I just recently actually appeared on Ryan's podcast Always Better than Yesterday, and I encourage you, whatever app you're listening to this right now, go ahead and look up Always Better than Yesterday, and you'll catch really the other half of this conversation when Ryan got to put me on the hot seat.
[00:01:25] Now, today we're gonna talk about what it truly means to be of service as a leader instead of just how leadership hierarchies usually are serving the leaders as opposed to the other way around. We talk about what does it mean to live from love as opposed to for love. We talk about the influence of society and how it can actually make us feel incomplete and even inadequate.
[00:01:49] We talk about turning towards our struggles, our pains, and yes, we even touch a bit on religion, on Christ consciousness, on spirituality. We even get into how while we may be one of 8 billion people on this planet, every single one of us holds a unique place and part to play within this existence. And so we're gonna get into all of it and I encourage you to kind of strap in as we get there.
[00:02:13] So let me formally introduce Ryan Hartley. He is the Chief Heart Officer of Always Better Than Yesterday, a company which develops heart-centered leaders through coaching, consulting, community building, and podcasting. After serving his local police force for 12 years in a variety of leadership roles, Ryan left to run his company full-time in February of 2020.
[00:02:34] Founded in 2017, always better than yesterday. Not only survived the Global Pandemic, but thrived by helping many leaders and businesses to do the same. He's the host of the Always Better Than Yesterday podcast, which I just mentioned, and that's been listened to in over 140 countries. It's made it to the top 200 in 52 countries, and he has also been a featured guest on over 30 podcasts and is regularly invited to speak at events internationally.
[00:03:00] Now you know the deal. If you are not already subscribed to On This Walk, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button, like it, share it. Let us know what's working for you. Uh, and now let's jump in with Ryan Hartley and let's go on this walk. Ryan, I want to thank you so much for coming on this walk to sitting down with us.
[00:03:18] I've been looking forward to this conversation.
[00:03:20] Ryan: No, me too, my friend. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:03:23] Luke: Absolutely. One of the questions when we first connected that I had for you, and I think it's a great way to just kind of set the stage that people get to know a little bit of, you know, who you are in your journey was that you went from being a police officer, being in law enforcement and moving into this space that you focus on the heartset, you know, the heart, heart-centered leadership style.
[00:03:43] Those two things don't normally go together in our society, at least not in our minds. Maybe they should go together, but for some reason they do not. And so I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about that journey of, of being on this path and moving into law enforcement. Maybe even what drew you there?
[00:03:58] Yeah. But how did it lead to the work that you're doing today?
[00:04:00] Ryan: Oh, thank you, man. Well, uh, I was a curious human being. I still am, you know, as, as a kid, I used to watch all the crime documentaries and. I guess 15 year old Ryan Hartley just wanted to know why people did what they did. Fascinated with this idea of why do people do what they do?
[00:04:18] So naturally when the topic of psychology becomes available to study it, like school, college, and even university. Well, well that was a topic specifically for me, being able to understand, you know, I think psychology is like the science of people, science of the mind. Mm-hmm. And I was like, this is it for me.
[00:04:36] And then as I progress, I guess I refined that to wanting to know why naughty people did naughty things. Mm-hmm. Which obviously then led me to kind of the law enforcement side of things. So my wife and I have been together since we were 15. Her father used to run the workshops like on the fleet, on the, on the vehicles.
[00:04:55] Hmm. And so she had joined the, the local police force in a civilian role and was already working there whilst I was at university. When I finished uni, she was like, right time to get a job. We need to move out. We need to get a place. So I, I got a entry level job within the police and, and I ended up taking 9, 9, 9 calls and dispatching officers on the radio in our emergency control center.
[00:05:18] Incredible job. Yeah. Feels so privileged to be able to have done that at such a young age. I was 21, I did it for three and a half years and I was, I had to grow up very quickly because I was dealing with people in their moments of need, shall we say, and then, Shift work wasn't really aligned with family life.
[00:05:38] I had applied to be a police officer, but my intake was the first one canceled under the 2008 spending review. So, well, obviously with the 2008 bank crashes, the police force then stopped recruiting, so they couldn't take me on. And two and a half years later, at the time they wanted to bring me in, I had to be re-interviewed and I had a really bad day interview and I failed.
[00:05:59] It felt like the end of my life at that point, you know, I was mid twenties, I was supposed to have a 30 year career in the police. And I was like, well, what am I gonna do in my life now? You know, 24. But I describe it now as the best thing that never happened to me. Because six months after that door closing, I move into a, a different role in terms of the corporate development space within the police.
[00:06:21] So doing a lot of analytical work analysis, crime analysis, performance analysis, and I got very, very good. And I got promoted quite quickly, twice At the same time, my wife and I were expecting our first child. And I think having that first child at the same time was becoming a leader or a manager.
[00:06:41] I was having some revelations that, you know, as I sat there at the 3:00 AM night feed, you know, no one really wants to get up in the night, sacrifice their time, their energy, but we do it for the love of our children. Right. And so I was drawn through love to be there for this little child, knowing full well that I was gonna go to work the next day.
[00:06:59] Tired, less patient. Yeah. But then something strange happened when I was going to work and, and I started to have similar feelings about my teammates. I wanted them to come and, and feel like, They enjoyed being at work. Mm-hmm. That they were able to do their best work. I felt like my role within that process was to equip them with the, the skills and the clarity that they needed to do their best work.
[00:07:21] And I used to have, you know, a couple of single parent moms within my team and, you know, one of the, the ladies incredible work ethic. Had like four children and would often get like to this time around tea time, dinner time and, and be like, oh, I've not got anything prepared. And yeah. And I was like, just go.
[00:07:38] The work will still be here tomorrow. Yeah. Just, just go. And I knew the inverse to be true. I knew that I was going home too late. I was coming home to my kids physically present, but not mentally present. I was missing some bedtimes, which was a breach of my values at that point. And I knew that I was being sent home worse.
[00:07:58] And I guess just to wrap it back to the final thing that you said is why do I now talk about a style of heart-centered leadership? Well, The irony is that service is at the heart of police service, right? Yeah. Yeah. And yet, something happens along the way when you ascend the rank structure that you seem to, or the leaders that I was surrounded with seem to want to be served rather than to serve.
[00:08:24] And, and that's the real kind of sadness, is that the police at its core are the most incredible servants. Just something doesn't translate because there's this competitive hierarchy that in some way people feel like they've earned the right to be served and sure more willing to sacrifice others. And it's not only until a couple of years ago that I became a man of faith, and I have a visual example of what it means to truly lead from the heart and truly lead would love, and that is to serve other people and sacrifice should I be required to.
[00:08:57] But in, in the world of business, in the world of policing, People had it the opposite way round. They felt like the higher that they got, the more that they earned the right to be served and were prepared to sacrifice others as a result.
[00:09:13] Luke: Brings up a lot of different questions and, and thoughts I wanna get into and, and I know we're also gonna chat a little bit about this notion of culture as well.
[00:09:20] We're gonna come around to that, cause I think those factors in to where you're headed here. Sure. But the notion of, you know, being able to. Send those individuals that work with us, work for us home in a better position, in a better space than when they began the day. Speaks a lot to that idea of being heart-centered.
[00:09:43] It also speaks to a recognition that, you know, whatever it is that we do for for work, is that we are spending inordinate amount of time giving that energy to an organization, a department, a nonprofit, whatever, a school, whatever happens to be. We would love for them to give to us, meaning to care for us with the same degree of energy that we're putting in to be able to produce for our jobs.
[00:10:08] And that seems like an exchange that has gotten outta balance over the course of these years. Right? And then you tie that into this idea of hierarchy into ascending, into different levels of authority and what comes with that. And it's a competition, right? Because right now it's structured as a pyramid, so there's only so many spots to keep on that ascension path.
[00:10:26] And you feel more special when you get to, to get, to get up that, that ladder as well. And it just continues breaking down this almost like social contract that we were meant to have and the way that we show up. And so I, it's, it's interesting to hear you describe it that way because I do, I see that so often with the people that I, I connect with, right?
[00:10:46] And, and whether they be clients or friends or colleagues, and they struggle with the same thing. They're just, they're burnt out. At the end of the day, they've gotten nothing left. And so I think the. We're gonna get into some of that, but one of the questions that just stops with me now is that a lot of those individuals that I speak to, and I can think of some friends and colleagues just directly in mind right now, they still go and do that.
[00:11:11] They don't change course. Mm-hmm. You changed course. What was it that you needed to arrive at or even tap into yourself to say, I'm gonna walk away from what has been and can be a very secure career for a very, very long time. But you, you ultimately tapped into something that allowed you to make a, a shift and into entrepreneurship.
[00:11:34] We're not talking about something that brings a, a high degree of stability with it, at least not in the early, early years.
[00:11:40] Ryan: I guess Ryan Hartley in his mid twenties was self-aware to a degree, but he had some healing to do. And I think when he found a passion for leadership, I dunno what I'm talking about myself in the third person I'm talking about young version of me.
[00:11:53] I found this passion, I found a love for, for leadership, and, and I started to share that on my social media, started to share it via Instagram, sharing different books. I was reading different quotes. Mm-hmm. And a love for it. I, I really genuinely believe I found a master key to help leaving people better.
[00:12:08] It was this power, this wonderful thing called leadership. So I became a little bit evangelical about it starts sharing it, and then something happened that I didn't expect, which is that the senior leaders sat around with my social media profile and it got fed back to me that there were comments like, what the fuck does Ryan Hartley know about leadership?
[00:12:25] Hmm. And for me, With a bit of context is that in re Hartley as a child, his dad left when he was six months old and his stepdad when he was 12. So the, the story that I've always played Yeah. Up until this point was that you, you're not loved, you're not, people don't stick around for you. Yeah. You don't really belong.
[00:12:52] Like, there, there was this undertone, which I didn't realize I was carrying. Yeah. Um, I knew enough about my upbringing that it shaped a lot of good in my heart and it shaped a lot of good in my parenting. I just didn't realize how it manifested in terms of my triggers and my stress. So this was a wonderful gift.
[00:13:12] It didn't feel like it at the time. Sure. I'm incredibly sure. Grateful for it now, but at the time I got to a point where I felt like I didn't belong and I wanted nothing more than to belong somewhere. Yeah. But it was a competing value with my desire to be authentic, my desire to be an expression of who I truly am.
[00:13:38] And I guess I got to one point where one of those had to win because I didn't feel like I could have both. I didn't feel like I could be my truest authentic self and fit in and belong because it felt very much conditional. It felt like, Hey, you bring your best version of you and you do things the way that we do things around here, then we'll then we'll accept you.
[00:13:59] Mm-hmm. But that's not belonging. If it's only 40, 50% of me. I interviewed Dr. John Demartini and he said that love is the synthesis of thesis and antithesis. I'm like, what the hell does that mean? What it means is love is accepting all of it. Yeah. The good and the bad, the shadow, the light and the shadow.
[00:14:19] And yet a hero was at a workplace that was saying, Hey, we only accept you if you behave and act and look like and sound like this. Yeah. So that caused a lot of stress and a lot of pain, and, and I wish I could say that that was the revelation and I, and I made the decision to leave. In reality, I went on another 18 months torturing myself.
[00:14:37] Yep. Trying to show up, trying to prove them otherwise, trying to get validated. I worked even harder. I, I did longer days, I was coming home and, and ultimately it was worse for those who needed me. So 2019 broke me down, you know, my, my marriage suffered. I wasn't being who I needed to be in the home. And so we had some real reparation to do and some healing to do.
[00:15:00] My health suffered. I had a, had a scare. Fortunately, I was okay and obviously my, my work life. So my entire life just meant that I was waking up not feeling safe. Heart was blasting outta my chest. Like with an, I don't class myself as being anxious, but I certainly felt all of the time, felt paranoid, felt suspicious, my heart, I just didn't feel safe wherever I went.
[00:15:22] There was no safe ground other than my business. I was building this community always better than yesterday on the side of my day job. And they were absolutely loving Ryan Hartley, and I interviewed a wonderful man called Dr. Gary Chapman. He's the author of The Five Love Languages, and on the very last page of that book, it says, for all the love we do not receive as children, we go into the world seeking that as adults.
[00:15:46] Yeah. And that is what I did. Yeah, I call that leading for love rather than from love. I went to the spaces and places where Ryan Hartley felt loved. And validated. He did not go and fix the areas of his life that were causing problems in 2019. Said that that can't go on anymore. You need to pay attention to the things that really matter that are really important, and learn how to appreciate it before you lose it.
[00:16:22] Luke: Consider this for a moment. What difference would it make to your life, to your relationships, to your interactions, to your work, even if you were living from love and not for love? Really sit with that just for a moment and breathe into it first. Feel what it's been like for you to live for love, meaning, feel the parts of you that have wanted that affirmation, that external validation, that approval.
[00:16:51] It's felt, perhaps like the need to prove yourself, to prove your worth and worthiness. It has felt even like a transaction. I need to do this in order to get love. You start to feel like you're living or operating from a deficit when you're in this type of an energy because for love assumes that it's not already held within you.
[00:17:15] Now feel little apart that already. Know what it's like to live from love. Feel that in your heart and your chest, maybe even your core. Feel where love already resides within you. Let those parts speak and connect you to the gratitude, the generosity, kindness, compassion, strength, passion, all the ways that love resides and swells up from within you.
[00:17:41] If you're having a little challenge connecting to this to live from love, just pause for a moment and recall a time and experience where you felt completely embraced, you felt held by something bigger than yourself. Maybe it was the way that your partner or even a parent was fully present with you, or even consider those moments of pure awe of looking down as your child breathes in your arms for the first time, perhaps when you can feel their heartbeat on your chest.
[00:18:15] Feel for those moments of pure bliss. Let those feelings and sensations flood your body. Let your heart fall into rhythm with that memory. Breathe as you did in that moment in time, and let your body remember that pervading love from this place. What would you like to share with yourself, with others, through your words, deeds and interactions?
[00:18:43] What would be different in all, or even any of those? How might you walk into a room differently? How might you speak to a loved one differently? How might you speak even to a stranger or someone that's even been challenging to you differently? What would come through from this space? From this energy of love?
[00:19:05] That's living from love? For me, it's an intentional practice. It begins sometime in the morning. It's meditation, it's blessings, it's invocations. Its feeling, feeling in the energy that is already alive within me. The energy that knows its benevolent power, the energy that deeply cares for others as well as deeply cares, even for myself.
[00:19:30] And allowing the energy of all of this, which to me are all different aspects of love to be felt. And that's the thing, to live from love. This is a felt experience that you live. You can't really think, love and live from that thought. It's a feeling that overwhelms your mind and begins to lead you.
[00:19:53] That's the way that it was always meant to be our soul, connecting and communicating through our hearts and bodies consciously, and then the mind creating aligned actions that serve this, that's living from love. Try this for just one week. Start your days with the questions and frame that I've given you here to tap into this overwhelming love that already resides within you, and just see how different your experience of life becomes.
[00:20:23] Now let's rejoin Ryan and take a slight pivot as we talk a little bit about how this is all playing out in society for a moment.
[00:20:34] Such a big piece of what's screaming out right now. We had a chat just for, for everybody. We were chatting just before we started recording, and I, I had asked Ryan, as I do many, many guests that are coming on, what's the biggest conversation that you wanna have with the world right now? And you brought up this notion that culture is not our friend.
[00:20:52] Well, I bring that back up here because as you talked about leadership and what is very, very often the case is that as we ascend those ranks, we want to be served as opposed to recognizing we are now in a position to serve more. And that that's part of the responsibility that we have taken on by, by ascending in certain leadership positions.
[00:21:10] And now what you have brought up in the way of belonging is that belonging is more this contract of conformity, right? So that if we fit into this nice pretty little box with these type of labels, well then now we get to belong, right? We get access into the club and culture has so much to do with the way this operates and.
[00:21:34] Culture forms almost like this surface tension that keeps us locked into a certain form at any given moment. And we need to find ways of when we really want to step in to be the true, you know, the true essence of who each of us really is. That doesn't fit into any social conformity. It means that we're gonna break from that mold because we want to actually be seen for who it is that we are.
[00:21:59] And previously, right, when we were a developing species, the idea of being apart from the tribe and doing anything that potentially could get you cast out, well that was death. That was it. You really, you can't, can't survive on your own if you're out there. Right? And so we, we created all these, these, this, this culture to bring community together because we did that from survival reasons and growth reasons and all the things.
[00:22:22] Right. And now I'd love to, to, to get into this notion. Of how culture is actually no longer our friend. That in many ways it is perpetuating so many of the challenges that we're trying to break free from right now. Yeah.
[00:22:41] Ryan: I'll phrase it in this way. Sometimes we have to step back from the west, and I think this is a western thing, and I've taken some influences from the east and there's this speaker called Sad Guru, and he says that America will never be the happiest country on the planet.
[00:22:55] Why? Because they are in the pursuit of happiness. Exactly. And the pursuit does one thing. It first has to reveal its absence. Mm-hmm. So if we're constantly in the pursuit of something, it first has to make us feel like we lack it in some way. And, and I think that the Western culture kind of understands that from a commercial point of view and uses that over us in a, in a way that we are hypnotized from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to bed that, hey, Come and get these products cuz if you don't, you are inadequate and you lack in some way.
[00:23:33] I think Joe Johan Hari in his book Lost Connections. Mm-hmm. It's Incredibles, one of my top five books of all time. Yeah. And in it he interviewed a marketing executive that said, our marketing is at its most effective when you are left to feel inadequate without the product. Yep. Now you imagine like all of the big companies out there using those tactics to market two people.
[00:23:55] That is a lot of subtle subliminal messages saying, Hey, you're inadequate. Yeah. Let alone our children. Now, for me, the reason I say culture is not our friend is because sometimes we have to take a step back and go, where are my desires coming from? Because you might say from a heart center perspective, should we follow our heart's desire?
[00:24:17] And I've had to get my head around this. I try every single day to get to. And it's um, Psalm 23. Which starts with the Lord is my shepherd. I have all that I need, and I think that is the perfect scripture to remind myself every single day that in this moment I have all that I need. I do not lack anything.
[00:24:41] And when I do that, when I truly feel blessed, grateful, appreciative, that I can look around and choose my life, then whatever I do becomes an expression of that love and gratitude. What I do in the world doesn't have to differ. It's motivation has to differ because many people are motivated for that love, for that validation, for ultimately self, whereas those who can connect with the heart and fill that heart with love and gratitude and appreciation, they will come to the world as an incredible expression of that.
[00:25:21] Yeah.
[00:25:22] Luke: So. What, what, one of the things, if I, I want to kind of dive further into this, is this recognition that part of that desire that is stoked by culture or otherwise, but even leaving that part of the conversation out outside of this is that we need to, we need to recognize that a lot of our desire is stoked from the idea that we are incomplete.
[00:25:44] 100%.
[00:25:44] Ryan: Right? So, well, it, it's based on that idea, not stoked. It's fundamentally, fundamentally based on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
[00:25:51] Luke: And so if we feel incomplete, then we are going to consistently try to fill ourselves back up with some form of substitute. And most of the way that we pursue that substitute is through some form of external property, material item, experience or otherwise.
[00:26:07] Because we believe that if we only have. Then that feeling will go away and it creates this, just this, this kind of dopamine fix. Yeah. Where we're constantly chasing it. Right. We're constantly trying to be able to get from that. The other piece of this though, that was fundamental to your journey, which I'd love to hear you speak on because you described it as you, you referenced, where is that desire coming from?
[00:26:29] And I think you answered part of it, but I'd love for you to speak to this other piece, which is part of that desire is also the recognition of the love that we didn't receive. Mm. In whatever way we felt like we needed to receive it. Mm-hmm. As we were growing up. And so if we have those experiences in life where it feels like we've been abandoned, where if we feel like we've been betrayed, we feel like we have been violated in some manner, then that is also going to be part of what informs what we're trying to get that right?
[00:27:00] Mm-hmm. We're trying to find the, the answer to that healing, but we end up pursuing it outside of ourselves as opposed to inside of ourselves. I'd love for you to speak about maybe that part of, cuz I, I know you described it before, right? It's embracing all of it. We've gotta embrace both the light and the shadow.
[00:27:14] Mm-hmm. And so for us to recognize where some of our desires are coming from, it's not only from the external influences and the way we're conditioned and media and consumerism and all that, but it's also from the healing work we have yet to do.
[00:27:28] Ryan: Yeah. And, and you know, so I built a wonderful community could always better than yesterday and, and I'm fortunate enough that there was a huge degree of purpose rooted in that.
[00:27:36] My expression of that purpose was certainly a, I guess you could describe it as a win-win, that it helped other people and it helped me on a bad day. I used to go to that place because I had gaps to fill Right. On a really, really good day on an average day. Now that is an express. Of my purpose is, you know, and, and I think if we were to look at ourselves with arrows going in, arrows going out, there's this old phrase of be, do and have.
[00:28:07] And I think what culture has done is it, it's worked really well to say, Hey, if you just have more and do more, then you are gonna feel like you can be more. Yeah. Whereas I, it's the opposite's true. If I'm, if I be who I was made to be and then come to the world doing what I was born to do, then I'll have whatever is meant for me.
[00:28:27] Yeah. But I don't, I think we've already been drawn far down that road and we end up creating lives that feel like the penguins of Madagascar moment, which is where we look around and go, well this sucks. You know, I've got, I've got the house, I've got the wife, I've got the kids, I've got the, I've got the debts.
[00:28:42] I've got all these things that life told me I should go pursue. And yet it's not the fullest expression of my friendship circle aren't really my friends, they're just people I fit in with my, I'm not doing my, my. I'm not doing my form of creation or hobby or sport. I'm not doing those things. So where's that gone?
[00:29:00] My life doesn't feel like an expression of who I truly am. I feel entrapped by this definition of what I've built. And I guess the saving grace for me is I have been so purpose driven. The real thing that really helped me was understanding why am I passionate about it? Why do I love this so much? And, and I'd been following all the work of Simon Sinek.
[00:29:22] I'd started to get clear on my own why, and in the early days I, I found it very quickly because things were going well. I, I used to like to make things better, but it's not until I had those tough days that I really deepened my purpose of understanding actually, where is this coming from? Why am I so passionate about making people feel like they matter, like they belong, like they've got people that care about them, that they can go and do their best work and make wonderful things possible.
[00:29:50] Well, that, that comes from my suffering. The root of the word passion in olden times is suffering. Mm-hmm. And there's this incredible scripture that I read last year for the first time in a completely different way. Everybody usually knows it is the, it's the thorns in our flesh. Paul pleads to God, please remove these thorns from my flesh.
[00:30:10] And he does it three times. And in the passion translation of the Bible, God responds, in your weakness, you will find my full expression. In your weakness, you will find my full expression. And that for me is one line that absolutely blew my mind because it was like, well, this is my heart work. This is God's work.
[00:30:29] This is God working through me for the benefit of his people. And I, and I, and I, and I love that because it makes my pain worth it. Like I can't live a life I love and get to help other people if I hate what got me here. As much as that was hard to look at. But there was so much healing in knowing that I could take all that and use it for good.
[00:31:00] Luke: You know, it's interesting cuz. I wanna go back to and, and kind of thread this together as, as, as best I can here is what you described before about the pursuit of happiness. Hmm. Is that recognition. Well, if we're gonna pursue happiness, that also means that we, we are isolating what it's not. Right? Right.
[00:31:17] We're looking at the gap, we're looking what it is that is missing from this equation. And at the same time with that also viewed from a very different lens that you just brought up, is how do we embrace all of it so that when we begin to recognize that some of the things that we may have this beautiful passion about and the things that we would love to evolve and, and change, make a difference in, in this world very often stem from the thorns.
[00:31:45] They stem from the hurts and the pain that we have gone through. But if we can hold all of that together and be able to recognize that, and let me say part of this from, from this perspective, having taught meditation and, and mindfulness work among many different things that I do. Very often what people begin to recognize is that as they deepen into being able to feel their pain, meaning to truly turn towards it, to actually face and feel it, their capacity for feeling and holding joy and peace and love grow exponentially.
[00:32:20] Because we're, we're covering more and more of the spectrum of, of, of what it is that we can hold and the capacity that we have to hold it. Mm-hmm. And so if we have that ability to turn towards what has been pain in our lives, where the hurts have come from the wounds, and yes th of the traumas mm-hmm.
[00:32:35] And turn towards them, but find a way to actually hold them as something that, that does hold a gift in some way that holds something sacred might be a different way of saying it. We then open up this possibility on the, on the other extreme of this, cause it's part of the human life, right? Is we're, we are in a world that has duality, right?
[00:32:56] Mm-hmm. That's part of the paradigm, that's part of the structure that we're in from a consciousness standpoint. And so that we can, if we can recognize more of the wholeness, we open up so many more gifts.
[00:33:05] Ryan: I'm listening to a book by David Hawkins called Letting Go. Yeah. Good book. You know? Yeah. And, you know, surrender has never been my fr like my, well, it's always been my friend, but it's never been a topic I, I've enjoyed, you know, as a, yeah.
[00:33:19] Even as far as three and a half, four years ago, as a man of science, I wanted to break things down. I wanna understand why they were, they were, and I, and, and obviously because I didn't have those role models, but I guess one of my flaws is that I'm not very good at asking for help. Hmm. I'll do it myself.
[00:33:36] So surrender is, has always been this like, ironic kind of topic because I, I've had to learn how to do that, not my will be done sort of thing. Yeah. And I think in that book, letting Go, it says that we will repeat what we resist, you know, whatever we resist, we will repeat. And it's like, it's just what, what a, what I write punchline that is, is that we have to turn and face it.
[00:33:57] We have to, you know, bring it to the light to release its power. And for me, my wife and I, we've been together 20 years and with the pressure of businesses, with the pressure of two children, we got to the point where we're only seeing each other's shadow. Yeah. You know, we'd lost the light. We weren't looking at each other as the best versions.
[00:34:17] We probably weren't showing each other the best versions of ourselves. So we become the caricatures of our, of our flaws, and we, and we, we lost grace for each other. We, we, we re we will replace grace with resentment Now. In our struggles, in the midst of our struggles. My wife found faith and it made me angry because it felt passive.
[00:34:42] It didn't feel like sh that she was given a relationship, goes, felt, I'm gonna hand this all over to God and I'm gonna pray. I'm like, that's not gonna fix things. It does. And I thought, this is me being insecure. I felt like I'd gone further down. The prioritization list is somewhere that, that God and the kids were, you know, I was, I was another further step down to this kind of bearded guy on a throne.
[00:35:04] Like, what's that gonna help? And I guess I, I had this moment in church, so my wife and I, we came back together. We really made a commitment to go for it. And I ended up going to church to support her and the pastor, he said. And I didn't want anything to do with faith though. Let me be clear. I did not want to join something and surround myself with like Ned Flanders.
[00:35:26] Like I did not like that path was not for me. And I certainly wasn't gonna surrender to a, a father figure. Like, you know, the, the two that I've had, you know, that I haven't been able to rely on. Right. And yet something happened as, as, as I went up the front. It was a Father's Day commissioning. And the pastor said, that's it.
[00:35:46] Women, if you wanna put your hands out towards these men, you do that. And it's like, she a DN to me in the back. My whole body caught fire, my eyes streamed and I just walked back to her and I said, I don't wanna talk about this ever again. But I feel like a child of God. And for me, the point I'm trying to get to here is that was the first time I felt like all of it was accepted.
[00:36:15] Mm-hmm. And I think this whole self-love narrative that the world is going through. Yeah. I'm. I'm a bit at a loss with it because what people don't understand is if they've only ever known an earthly form of conditional love from another human being, why do they think that they wouldn't do the same with themselves?
[00:36:35] Yeah. The only way of truly receiving that self-love is from a higher power. I mean, I'm talking at things from a Christian Lynch, but I learned through Dr. Bruce Lipton, who's been on the show, Joe Dispenza, I learned from the Eastern traditions because I think it's all talking about the same thing. Yeah.
[00:36:53] Which is love, which is light, which is the most healing universal power in the entire universe. Yeah. Which just happens to call it God. And as I continue to find moments with that presence, There is nothing of this earth that can make me feel so unconditionally loved, which then helps me come to the world needing nothing from other human beings.
[00:37:18] If I am coming to the world in absence of that love, I need something from other people, which means I'm vulnerable to not getting my needs met. Yeah. It means I'm conditional with the way that I love other people, which is why people, and this is the whole thing with culture. A culture without Gods make gods of their culture.
[00:37:38] Mm-hmm. And, and that doesn't sustain, that will never satisfy because again, it's just a never ending reel of, Hey, come get some more, bigger, better, more.
[00:37:51] Luke: I, I recognize a lot of my own experiences in what you just shared and, and, you know, especially in that walk towards faith. And this conversation is probably a pretty frequent conversation both on the show as well as off the show in, in private conversation.
[00:38:06] And it has been, I think, you know, entering into that conversation through this lens of surrender is a huge component of it, right? And kicking and screaming, kicking and screaming. Absolutely. Grabbing, I mean, nail marks, right? Dragging me towards right. Whole process. And it's because we, we, you know, have this desire right?
[00:38:28] To perceive that we are in. To perceive that we are the masters of our own destiny, as it were. And it's not to say that we don't have choice. It's not to say that we don't have this, this huge, unbelievable, co-creative abilities with, with the universe, the power by whatever name you choose to call it.
[00:38:43] Right. And yet we get stuck because of exactly what you said, which is we have only known because we've known in human form, we have only known that conditional love. Yeah. And so even in the most loving of circumstances, there is still something, and maybe it's outside of our parents, maybe it was from society or from friends or from whatever, that ultimately introduced us to this world of being conditioned and having conditional love.
[00:39:07] And so we start to treat ourselves the very same way. And then all of a sudden it's like, what do you mean I'm supposed to surrender to this higher will? What do you mean this higher will? Right. And you know, I, I'm curious to see the way that you, you feel for those. But this was one of those understandings that for me, Opened the door to maybe a different way of relating to faith into this whole concept was that we tend to speak of God as a being because it's our lens of being able to understand something.
[00:39:40] Right? We, it's the, it's the old man, the beard on the hill, right? Or on the cloud or through whatever faith that we view it. Except the way that I have begun to understand it and relate to it is to think of God as not only energy, but to think of it as a constant unfolding, right? It's this beautiful just presence, this source that is ever flowing, ever unfolding, and is also experiencing with us.
[00:40:06] We're, we're part of that whole unfolding process. And the more that we experience, the more that we pull in, the more that we turn towards our hurts, as well as celebrate our joys, the more of that energy that goes into that collective source. And when I think of it more as that unfolding this process, All of a sudden, I mean, I can feel the life force that that connects me to.
[00:40:30] I can feel the presence that that connects me to, and it, it changes my relationship. Now, I will also say I do have a relationship through Christ Consciousness. It's not specifically through one of the, you know, like Christian faith as it were. It's more of a Christ consciousness view of things. So there is a lens there that does help me relate, like something that is personified that helps me relate to that source.
[00:40:52] Mm-hmm. So it's kind of like this, again, another dual notion of it's not a being, but sometimes there's some relational aspects that can really help you gain access. Yeah. So I'm just kinda curious if I frame that back to you, how that sits with you. And, sorry, one other piece I wanted to mention, because I know from from our past conversation was that you didn't have a religious up.
[00:41:10] And so that, that created certain freedoms, as it were, as to how you chose to enter this. So I just wanted to frame that for everybody because I'm curious how all of this is unfolding and how you relate to, to this energy that is God. Well, thank
[00:41:23] Ryan: you for giving me the opportunity to try and find words to something that will transcend Yeah.
[00:41:28] Internet. But it starts there, doesn't it? It it starts with surrendering the fact that our intellect will never know. And I th I think that's the biggest punchline, I think, is that in this lifetime, we will never know. So that's why it's called faith, because it's choosing to believe in something unseen.
[00:41:44] And I know that whenever I've tried to walk this path of, of faith, I've become a better human being, or I've certainly got back to being a better human being quicker. And I know that my wife has two, and I know that my family. So there's something in it in our fruits of our spirit that are better when we choose to live by some of these virtues and principles of love.
[00:42:06] Thyself love thy neighbor, but you're right for me. The world is intellect drunk, the world prizes, intellect on a pedestal when it really, really shouldn't do. It's just one element of intelligence, shall we say. And I think once we accept that and surrender that we can open our hearts to the heart intelligence.
[00:42:27] And so you and I had a conversation about HeartMath. Yep. You know, some of the revelations around that work around connecting with a quantum field. And, and that for me, if, if I was to put words to it, you know, I think, I think quantum physics is revealing the science of God. Yeah. Work. How does it operate?
[00:42:44] Fractal geometry, these conversations around seemingly order within the chaos, like that ain't an accident. You know, and, and I think, wow. Like that perfect order, even within the chaos, the way. You know, sometimes you go down this path, and I remember like having a real kind of awakening moment where I was driving down the motorway freeway and I saw a bird just fly over my car and, and like time slowed down and I zoomed in and I could, I could almost like sense this ribcage and this beating heart and is the most bizarre conversation to have with someone that's not been on this path.
[00:43:20] But I felt in that moment, deeply connected to a bird. If Ryan Artley from five years ago looked at me now we'd be like, you, Kate,
[00:43:29] Luke: you guys, you, you
[00:43:30] Ryan: and I have some similarities. I interviewed a guy called David Ditchfield. David is, is a guy from Britain. He had a near-death experience after being dragged under a train.
[00:43:38] And in his near-death experience, he said that he saw, you know, he was being prepared on this slab in the middle of space. He had his three guides around him that he intuitively just knew. And then he looked over his shoulder and just saw a waterfall of stars, galaxies. And then he just says what he only he can describe was like the center of the universe.
[00:44:00] This bright light like you've never believed. And he says, I just intuitively knew that that's where I came from. And then that's where I was going. And then two days later I watched Disney Soul, which literally yeah. Depicts that very scene. Yep. And I'm like, wow. Either these two messages have come to me in this moment, just our pure coincidence.
[00:44:20] Or there's something in this that there's a, there's a source that we've come from and there's this place that we will return to. And I think Jordan Peterson said it wonderfully recently when he says that God is an animating spirit. And I think with you and I being life with nature being alive and life, I think God is in all, and through all that God is nature.
[00:44:45] We are simply, but fractals of God. And when I can realize that, it's like taking a cup and scooping a cup out of the ocean. And you can take your cup and your cup looks a slightly different shape and color and speaks in a different accent to mine. You know, and I, mine's over here and it's terribly British, but we're of the same source.
[00:45:05] Yeah. And when I start to understand things like that, then I can experience life in a very, very different way that is in more harmony with I think, who we always were supposed to be. I think the, the wonderful thing about the the power versus force map of consciousness is that when David says that, when we let go of fear, guilt, shame, anger, desire, pride, when we let go of those lower state energies, our natural state is human beings, is love, is gratitude, is peace, joy, and acceptance.
[00:45:40] So that's our natural state as human beings. And this is again, a call to why culture is not our friend. Because culture puts us in a state of fear, in a state of lack, in a state of competition. If only we knew who we truly were, then we would have an environment, communities full of people who were the living embodiment, the fractal of God.
[00:46:12] Luke: Well, we're not quite having a house. The soup conversation today, huh? Let me start here for a second. I think one of the biggest struggles that I have faced in life is the feeling of being separate. I have felt separate from others in a way that has been very lonely at times, even in a crowded room, I felt separate from the flow of life that seemed to be animating beauty and creativity, artistry, innovation, as well as love, connection, joy, and play.
[00:46:40] I have felt separate from life. I have felt separate from parts of myself. I haven't felt connection, but the truth is this. I simply forgot, as you've heard on this show and on different clips, I entered the forgetting pretty deeply actually, when I was about five and a half years old, and we lost our family home to a fire.
[00:47:05] I became very serious overnight. I forgot the wild stories that I used to tell my family of the good old days. I forgot that I had, uh, when my Italian grandmother asked me if I'd ever been reincarnated as a four-year-old, I qued, oh yeah, I've been here before. Without even skipping a beat. I forgot that I had this wellspring of joy and curiosity and play this vigor and passion and creativity and weirdness that just flowed from me.
[00:47:35] I forgot it all. I forgot just how much life was animating in and through me, I carried that forgetting into the world. I focused on the illusions of achievement and reward of pleasure for pleasure's sake. And more often than not, it was really for distraction in that forgetting I took on my individuated identity.
[00:47:55] I needed to show this world just who I was. And by doing so, by creating that identity, I pushed the world even further away as something that was other than me, separate from me. Well, culture reinforces all of this in separation and lack and fear and needing approval. It makes it easier to maintain the status quo.
[00:48:15] It makes us easier to drive the economic and political engines that are out there. Yet in truth, we are not separate, nor are we lacking in any single way. It took decades to find myself eyeball to eyeball in my bathroom mirror with that five year old self and that animating life force that we are all gifted with.
[00:48:36] And now thanks to the walk that I've been on and all sorts of amazing experiences and teachers, I feel that animating force whenever it is that I'm alone in nature. I feel it when my heart beats a bit faster. When I see my kids smile, especially when they're overjoyed with themselves. I smell it as spring is breaking here in the northeast of the United States.
[00:48:59] It touches me with the wind reminding me of the breath that we have all been given, the breath that we all share. It's easy to forget. It's easy to get lost in it. It's easy to feel small and insignificant so that we think we need to build ourselves up in some way. It's easy to separate. The funny thing is, is it's actually easy to remember that animating energy as well.
[00:49:25] It's all around us and within us, but it's something that we feel it's unseen. So anytime you feel lost, separate or lacking, close your eyes. Breathe slow down and feel. Feel for that breath that runs through you and runs through all things, all of life. You're a part of that great mystery. Source yourself from that knowing, from that love and connect to that playful, creative, rambunctious, curious, lovering, generous, even weird little inner child that you are.
[00:50:04] And this again, is a practice. This remembering doesn't always happen overnight, but taking the time to feel it, to breathe with it, to touch it within us and around us. Doing this as a practice allows us to remember. It's always been there. It will always be there, and we always have access to it. No need to think your way there.
[00:50:29] Just feel for it.
[00:50:35] If I come back to the reference you made to heart intelligence and heart math for a moment mm-hmm. Because of what you just brought up Yep. Is that the more that we have the ability to tap into those understandings, but more importantly the actual practices and embodiment of certain practices Yeah.
[00:50:53] That allow us to bring our own field into that higher level of vibration. Mm-hmm. So that we can literally feel like we are more at peace, we can mm-hmm. Literally achieve more coherence if we talk from the, the actual science of this, from a heart math perspective. Mm-hmm. When we do those things, we are now in a state that is less impacted.
[00:51:17] By the, the, the lower energies as it were of culture, social media, news, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Of all of that. Mm-hmm. And it allows us to see more cleanly, so to speak, more accurately, more consciously for a period of time. Mm-hmm. And that's sort of the, one of the pieces I wanted to tie back into the core of your work around heart Set is I wanted to, to come back because we've, we've had this huge, big conversation, but there's two things I wanted to get back into is now how do we ground this?
[00:51:49] And specifically when we talk about being able to release these lower energies of, of shame, of guilt, of rage, of anger that may exist, all energies that do have an important role to play in our human evolution. They're part of this experience for a reason. And yet we're not meant to dwell there. We're not meant to stay there, we're meant to experience it and move.
[00:52:15] And so I'm curious from that standpoint of, of the way in which you work from even just your journey of how it is that, you know, what's kind of your approach been? What has your experience been of using that heart set to be able to release a lot of the, kind of the lower vibrational stuff that tends to either get us stuck or keep us stuck?
[00:52:39] Ryan: Yeah, I mean, just to first set the context, heartset is a word that I use because I got to a point where I was working with values and purpose and I just felt that it was deeper, the mindset. You know, I was a mindset psychologist, so. But it just felt like these words were deeper. You know, if an organization defines their values, if it was an, if values were a product of the intellect, then surely we would live them all day.
[00:53:04] Right? We would simply, intellectually, if we intellectually loved people, then we would just be able to choose to ReLove our wives at any point in time, and there'll be no such thing as divorce, right? But Dr. Deborah Rosman, our, our friendly woman from the HeartMath, she said, isn't it funny how we don't say I love you with all of my mind?
[00:53:24] So that's what heartset is. Heartset is that deeper sense of who we are. It's about what do we stand for? What do we care about? What's our pain? What's our passion? What's our purpose? What's our gifts and our skills and our talents? That's heart and for me. How has that helped? Well, the words compassion.
[00:53:42] And compassion simply means to be with in your suffering. Yeah. And I first had to walk alongside myself and be with myself in my suffering. Not my present self, but my past self. And be alongside that version of me in that suffering and understand who I am in this very moment is a printout of all that has happened in the past.
[00:54:05] Mm-hmm. I am a product of my past in terms of the way that I think, the way that they act, the way that I've programmed the stories I tell myself. And when I start to do that, the first thing I, I think first and foremost, I think having that compassion gave me a bubble of grace. And I think that's how we start to transcend shame and guilt, is that we have grace for ourselves.
[00:54:34] We understand that whatever situation happened, happened can't change it. It wasn't meant to be anything other than the way it was. I think Peter Kron says a wonderful thing is something happened and it happened because it happened that way, and it only happened that way because it did like, yeah. He says it far more eloquently than I, but that again comes back to learning how to surrender to the universe.
[00:55:01] Like I think when we truly get to those higher levels, we learn a, an eastern philosophy called wwe, which is the art of not meddling with stuff. You know, this, it, it feels passive and it feels so paradoxical to WWE is the art of inaction to do nothing. And that is one of the hardest paradoxes I've had to continue to walk.
[00:55:26] Yeah. It's like how do I allow that to be true, but also honor the fact that you've given me something that I need to be able to bring to the world? Because in one piece of four 10 it says the gifts that you've been given, therefore those in the world who need them. Mm-hmm. So it's balancing that paradox between having the humility to say, I am, but one in 8 billion people.
[00:55:49] Don't get too big for your boots. You are just hand me down stardust in this kind of mosaic of 8 billion people, but there isn't another like you. Yeah. And if you don't place yourself where you are meant to be, the puzzle remains incomplete. And I struggle to walk that paradox all of the time, the humility to know that I am but one of 8 billion.
[00:56:12] And yet the responsibility to know that if I don't bring what I've been given as a gift to. Then things remain incomplete.
[00:56:20] Luke: Part of what you then described as, as this path is compassion gives us that art of being with Yes. Right. And so that one of, you know, one of these elements is that we can't allow something to move through us.
[00:56:34] Meaning to again, quote from from what you were saying before, what we resist repeats or what we resist persists. Yep. If we can't be with it, it's gonna keep coming back around. Yep. And part of that societal cultural influence has also been, cause we didn't specifically name this, all the people who've certainly heard me say this before is that we believe there's something wrong with discomfort.
[00:56:57] Hmm. No. We're we, we we gotta stop distracting ourselves and running from that discomfort. Yeah. And instead really learn how to face and feel whatever it is that we are experiencing and meant to be connecting through. Because that's how it's gonna work through. And so even when you describe something like wwe, Yeah.
[00:57:15] And don't meddle with what's there. Well meaning don't meddle with it means don't allow your mind to take you away from the experience that you were actually in at this moment. Yeah, yeah. Right. You've gotta actually allow yourself to experience it, because that's part of what's here. And it's also the irony of where you were going.
[00:57:31] Of, we've each got these gifts that we, it's the art of inaction, and yet all of a sudden we're supposed to bring these gifts at the same time. Right. How do we do both? Yeah. Yeah. And yet, the more that I have relaxed into that feeling of where is life trying to flow at this moment? Yeah. The more that I am continually introduced to exactly where I'm supposed to be with the people I'm supposed to be with, to offer what I am meant to offer and to receive what it is that I am meant to receive.
[00:58:01] And you, you, you know, you described the way in which we each, even as one of 8 billion, have this role to play. And it reminded me of indra's net from the Hindu tradition, which is that idea of indra's net was, you know, kind of like, think of it as, as a net or a spider web that was spread all the way across this globe.
[00:58:19] And at every single intersection point of this universe, there's a diamond. And we are that diamond. We have that role to play because the universe doesn't connect. The universe does not remain flowing the way that it's meant to unless we claim that space that we belong in. And so while we may be one of 8 billion.
[00:58:36] We do have a part to play. Yeah. We have a space that's there. Mm-hmm. And the more that I surrender to what's actually going on in my life and watch where that river is trying to flow. Mm-hmm. More often than not, I find my space on the net.
[00:58:50] Ryan: Yeah, I love that. You know, I think one of the things when we talked about conditional self-love, one of the things that our culture has done is it's made an enemy of the low vibes.
[00:58:59] It's like positivity only high vibes only. Yeah. And it has made an enemy of the low vibe state. So has, you know, we've been conditioned to reject that both in ourselves and of other people. That's a tragedy because it doesn't, like you say, it's just then actually going to be submerged and, and repeated. I have two dogs.
[00:59:17] They're wonderful little creatures and you can probably tell I'm quite contemplative of life and I look at these dogs, I think, ah, they're just so in this moment, they're so present. They're not thinking about the past, they're not thinking about the future. Then I start to think like, what does it mean to be human?
[00:59:35] You know, they're not sat around going, oh, well, am I gonna get the next promotion? Am I gonna do these? They, they, they are not blessed or cursed with the prefrontal cortex. Yeah. Which is his ability to think about our thinking. And then I start to think, well, why do we have that? Like I, if it's causing so much pain, too many people, what is its true purpose?
[00:59:55] And I think for me, what it means to be human is to have this consciousness, this ability to choose. Because I think that ability to choose is self-leadership. It's the gap between my chimp response Yeah. And my chosen response. So we talked earlier about how do we transcend some of the, the lower vibe states?
[01:00:19] Well, the awareness is the first place to start. The second part is then we have to start making some conscious choices. Now that I know certain things, how might I choose? Because you can still have the awareness and yet still go to the, the relationship that's not serving. You can still go to the, the alcohol war, sit on the sofa watching the tv, you know, heaven forbid like gone, various different websites that are freely available to very many people.
[01:00:45] Gaming, whatever, anything that's keeping you in that state. It's one thing to have an awareness. The next step is, okay, how do I choose things? And I call this game plus one minus one. Mm-hmm. How can I do one more thing that helps and one less thing that hurts? And that for me helps cuz it's, it is very practical.
[01:01:04] Yeah. You know, for me, that's where the wheels hit the ground. We can talk consciousness, we can talk all these things. What am I gonna do differently And what am I gonna stop doing? And I think if we do that enough, you know, particularly as men, yeah. Learning how culture's not our friend, like having a beer ev after work every day.
[01:01:21] That might feel like the American dream. But when you start to take a step back and go, this is weakening me, I'm becoming more irrational and becoming less patient. I'm becoming more self-centered cuz I think I've earned my beer. Yeah. I'm, I'm less doing things for my wife when I get home because in some way I feel like I've entitled myself to be king for the day.
[01:01:42] And I think, you know, us particularly as men, we have to get out of what culture is saying around we have to be, you know, more feminine, more heart, not heart. I think the expression of heart looks and sounds different for men compared to women. Absolutely. And I think when we equip men with a heart set, they become honorable.
[01:02:01] They become noble, they become willing to sacrifice because it says no greater gift as men than to lay down his life for the wo those that he loves. That is the power of a man feeling loved and purposeful. He will literally lay down his life. Whereas we've got a generation of men at the moment that would rather lay down others' lives so that they don't have to.
[01:02:24] And I think it just starts with. Learning how to come away from current culture and get back to some basics and start doing what's difficult.
[01:02:33] Luke: So I just wanna acknowledge that, cuz that is gonna, that would take us into a whole other hour conversation, but it's a very important one. So maybe, we'll, we'll put a pin in that one for a future, uh, chat here because what, what you're bringing up, which I think is very fundamentally important, is to recognize that.
[01:02:51] Love heartset. Heart bases, heart centeredness. It's going to look one way when we come at it from the masculine. Yes. It's gonna look another way when we come at it from the feminine. And how is it that we maintain the essence of that? Yes. So that we can bring the balanced form that we happen to be into the world.
[01:03:08] Yes. And recognize that's That's our path.
[01:03:10] Ryan: And serve. Serve from that P place. Yes. Like it's one thing connecting with it. And I think this is where like the yin yang is a beautiful Yeah. Image that says, Hey, we both bring what we have in the service of each. Yeah.
[01:03:22] Luke: And what you also described is, is you know, with that plus one, minus one, you describe a very, you know, kind of practical way to think about how do we, as Abraham Lincoln said, how do we live into be the better angels right?
[01:03:34] Of, of, of ourselves. And that's what we're looking for, right? Is that life is gonna bring you to any number of these different experiences that will initially hopefully create the awareness for you. But then what are you going to choose? Are you gonna choose to live out in the, in the pain? Are you gonna choose to live out in shadow?
[01:03:50] Are you gonna live out in unconscious or are you gonna use those types of moments to say, ah, I see more of who I actually am. Am I gonna make a choice that aligns with that and moves me in that direction? It's easier not to this,
[01:04:03] Ryan: it's really easy not to. There's a reason why it says ignorance is bliss.
[01:04:06] Absolutely. Because once you get faced with that proposition of consciousness, well I now have to take responsibility for that. Yeah.
[01:04:15] Luke: Yeah. So with this huge far ranging conversation that we have been in, The last question I've got for you is, with all of this contemplation we've chatted God and faith, we've talked about culture and suffering and compassion and our higher angels, all of it.
[01:04:34] How has your journey changed you as a father?
[01:04:38] Ryan: Well, I think my journey shaped me first and foremost as a, as a father, I, I have a real heart for being the best dad I can be, you know, part, you know, shaped by the, the absence of that. And there's a huge amount of, I guess, vulnerability I feel, cuz there's, I, I wanna do a good job, but I also feel massively unequipped.
[01:05:02] It's like, I know I have all that I need to be the best l I can be. I know that these are my kids and they're my kids for a reason. Man, it'd be nice if I had a guide. It'd be nice if I had a playbook. Right? So I feel a little bit vulnerable because that's what happens when you try and lead with heart and values.
[01:05:18] Yeah, I really want to, this journey has made me double down on my family. You know, I want to be leading my family with values, with a set of principles, with a set of clear identity. Um, you know, my kids come and jump in the river with me. They see the workouts that I do. They see me do the ice baths in the back garden.
[01:05:39] I'm really trying to create a sense of who we are as a family. So we are Team Hartley. We're quite a little mantra, you know, we're team Hartley. We help people. We're kind and we share our gifts with the world. So the one thing I'm trying to do with my wife, cuz my wife's incredible, is we're trying to provide opportunities to, um, nurture their nature.
[01:05:59] Yeah. Having two kids that on the surface are very, very different in terms of what they find naturally. Interesting and what they're naturally good at. Our role then is to nurture that, find opportunities for them to nurture that greatness that that they've been given. Yeah. Accountability. Huge. You know, particularly trying to keep, and the vulnerability of being a dad is that they keep me accountable too.
[01:06:25] Yeah. You know, they keep me accountable. That's not very heart centered dad. It's not very kind Dad. You know, there are moments because this is what happens in relationship. Totally. We reveal all of ourselves. We can't hide. So how has my journey changed? Well, it first and foremost shaped my desire to be a good dad and it's changed in ways where I'd never imagined I would be talking about faith within my home.
[01:06:50] I never imagined that that would even be a thing, but it's something I'm committed to. It's something that I believe is counter the world and that I need to take full responsibility with my wife to. Educate my children in ways that I'm not outsourcing that to YouTube, TikTok, or their school. Yeah, school can teach them some intellectual things.
[01:07:11] I will teach them about love, values, purpose, courage, you know, vulnerability, whatever that, that might be, I think no greater gift that I can provide this world than two children who are deeply loved.
[01:07:25] Luke: Ryan, I wanna thank you for being on this walk with me and with us and with, with Sharon. Just all of the, the contemplation, all the wisdom, all the experience that you have.
[01:07:35] And I, I just deeply
[01:07:36] Ryan: appreciate it. We get to do all again on, on my podcast, Nick, first time
[01:07:39] Luke: we do for you, everybody. That's everybody that's enjoying this. Make sure you check out Ryan's podcast, hop us over there cause we get to do it all over again.
[01:07:46] Ryan: Yeah, I get to put you in the hot seat. Ryan,
[01:07:50] Luke: thank you so
[01:07:51] Ryan: much for being here.
[01:07:51] I appreciate.
[01:07:54] Luke: Thank you for joining me for this episode of On This Walk. Before signing off, please subscribe to the show and don't miss a single episode. Also, please rate and review us. This helps me greatly in getting the word out about this show. And remember, this is just the start of our conversation.
[01:08:11] To keep it going, ask questions, add your own thoughts, join the ongoing conversation by just heading over to on this walk.com, and click on community in the upper right hand corner. It's free to join until we go on this walk again on Luke Iorio. Be well.