I believe that potential unexpressed turns to pain. And when we are born, we’re born as children into awe and wonder. Adults are nothing more than deteriorated children. But as we leave the perfection of childhood where we’re intimate with our gifts and our talents and awe and wonder, our parents, doing their best, say, “You want to be an astronaut? Be practical.” Then we go to school and we say, “Oh, I want to be a rockstar. And I want to be an actor.” And they say, “Oh, no, no. He’s a different kind of…Cut from a different cloth.” And we get seduced by the beliefs of the people around us. And we go from this awe and wonder and intimacy with our glory, our primal glory, that’s just the human condition, and we start to forget who we truly are.
And as our dreams start to fall apart, and as we lose that connection with our best selves, and as we get sad and disappointed, and as we fail, that’s just part of life, a lot of us shut
down. And we don’t know how to process through that pain, so we repress it. Why don’t they teach us how to work through wounds? You don’t get invited to a birthday party in fifth grade, there is a wound there. You lose a love when you’re 16, there is a wound there. You start a business when you’re 22, there is trauma there. And I think that is in many ways, the missing link in leadership and personal mastery. Because everyone’s talking about psychology and people are talking about habits, but what about dealing with trauma? Carl Jung said, “We all have this shadow side.” I mean, we all have this well of repressed pain.
And anyone who’s listening who goes, “Well, that’s not me.” It’s subconscious. Unless you’ve
done the work, you don’t even know about it. But it’s that pain and self loathing and self hatred. We have a magic inside of us, the Saints call it the light or God or nature or illuminosity. And what happens is when you do the work to release your toxic beliefs and move through your pain. And how do you do it? You just feel it. And as you feel through all the toxicity and the hurt and the wounding and the disappointment, that’s called a human journey. What is left as you release it, you access your light. You access your primal genius. You access creativity. You are productive because you don’t have all this emotional baggage you’re carrying through the day. I believe that the real art, the real key to success is joy and inner peace. That’s why a lot of the billionaires, they have all the things and they’re not happy.
Our nature is joy, peace, bliss, love. And when you release that trauma, it just shows up because that’s who we truly are.