A Man on a Mission: The Breakthrough Experience with Dr. John Demartini

Amazing.

Welcome, doctor John Demartini. I'm so, so excited to chat to you today. How are you doing? I'm doing great. And thank you for your patience getting on today. Oh, it's okay. Well, now I know that you're actually on a boat in the middle of the water between China and Taiwan. I feel like it's a good excuse for being a little bit late. I feel like you're doing well in the middle of a typhoon as well. Yeah, we just.

We've been in a typhoon for the last two and a half days now, so it's been passed through here. Ah. Well, I'm so excited to chat to you because I actually. I followed your work for ages. I have your book. It's one of the first books that I properly.

Personal development books that I read and I read it years ago and I always hear your name pop up whenever I listen to any other people that I really respect and admire, they talk about their stories and they say, oh, you know, I stumbled across these Doctor John DeMartini books when I was younger and everyone. So many people's stories seem to start with things they learned from you. So I'm so.

I feel so honored that I get to speak to you today and to dive into that crazy brain of yours, which is just amazing. And, yeah, I'm excited to dive into it. So thank you. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to be on your show. Well, I had the privilege of getting access to your brand new documentary the other day. And I sat down with my partner and we watched it and I was literally about three minutes in, I was crying. It really moved me.

Just kind of the impact you'd had on so many people, but something that massively blew me away. When I look at you now, I would say you are probably one of the smartest people out there. You know, your brain and the way you've written over 40 self development books, you're just incredible. But I had no idea that as a kid, and actually for most of your not even childhood, up into your teens, you couldn't read and write. Is that right?

Yeah. I had dyslexia and learning challenges, for sure. I left school when I was young, 13. I made it through elementary school by asking smart kids questions enough to somehow get by. And then when I moved to a small town of about 9000 people, there wasn't a lot of smart kids. And I failed and I dropped out of school. So I went surfing instead. I became a long haired hippie surfer guy in the. In the sixties.

So do you feel like you not being able to read and write, and that was probably, like, quite a narrative that you were hearing all the time, right, from your teachers and people around you and saying, you know, you're not going to amount to anything. You don't. You just don't have what it takes to be successful. How was it? I imagine that's quite tough to get out of that narrative of what you've been told to be like, actually, no, I am going to. I can do this, you know, what was that?

How did you get to the point where today, you're so articulate, so, you know, you've written all these books, you're just excelling in that area. How do you shift from that place to here? Well, I did get, in first grade, I was told by my teacher, misses McLoughlin, that in front of my parents. Cause they asked my parents to come to the class because no matter what I was doing, it wasn't working. Reading and stuff. And I had to wear a dunce cap. They had dunce caps in those days.

The teacher said to my parents, I'm afraid your son's never going to be able to read, not be able to write, not be able to communicate. I was going to a speech pathologist when I was a year and a half old because I couldn't use my mouth properly. Not probably go very far, amount to much. And I believed that my parents understood that.

They realized I had learning problems, but I could stand on a surfboard and I could throw a baseball, so my parents pushed me into sports so I could do something with that. And I made it through elementary school by asking really smart kids questions and befriending them. And if I heard things and I didn't have to read it, some of it would go in and I could kind of make some sense out of things, but I just wasn't academic. I then left home at 13, hitchhiked to California at 14 to surf 15.

I made it to Hawaii. 15 to 18, I was surfing in the north shore, living on the north shore, living first under a bridge, then in a park, and then kept social climbing till I got into a tent. I almost died at 17. And then on the recovery of that, I was led to a yoga class, and a special speaker named Paul C. Bragg was speaking there. And one night, 1 hour, one man message shifted me. I mean, he.

That night made me believe that maybe, just maybe, I could become intelligent someday and learn how to read and speak properly. And that night, I really had this epiphany and this vision, which has been painted. It sits in my office. The vision I saw. And I started down a new journey trying to learn how to read. And the very first book I ever picked up to try to read was Chico's organic gardening and natural living. It had a picture of a hippie on the front that looked like me.

And I thought, if that guy could write the book, I bet I could read it. And I kind of scanned through that. It was mainly pictures of gardens. And then I went back to. I flew to LA and hitchhiked back to Texas, and I tried to go back to take a ged high school equivalency test. And I just guessed. I mean, literally just closed my eyes and guessed. And for some friggin reason, I passed. I have no idea. I had me a high school degree by guessing. And then I tried.

My parents tried to talk me into starting and try to go to a junior college. I couldn't get into a university. I had to go to a junior college. And when I went there, I thought I was going to guess and pass, like that magical test I took. And then I got a 27. You had to have a 72 to pass. I got a 27. And I literally was devastated by it because I thought, wow, I really guess that's true. I'll never be able to read or write, communicate, etcetera.

And I remember crying on the way home and driving home and curling up in a fetal position underneath this little Bible stand in the sunken living room at my parents house and really sulking and thinking maybe this dream about being a teacher and intelligence and all that is just crazy. And I better get. Go back to surfing. My mom came home from shopping and she saw me crying in the living room. She hadn't seen me cry since I was a kid. And she said, what is it, son? What happened?

I said, I guess I don't have what it takes. I guess I'll never read, write, communicate. I regurgitated what my first grade teacher said, and she paused and just looked at me.

And then she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, son, whether you become a teacher, great teacher, and travel the world like you dream of, whether you go back to Hawaii and ride giant waves that you've done or return to the streets and panhandle is a bum on the street, I just want to let you know that your father and I are going to be, no matter what. When she said that, I got tears in my eyes.

My hand went into a fist, and I looked up and I saw the vision of me speaking that I saw the night I met Paul Bragg. And I said to myself, I'm going to amass this thing called reading, studying and learning. I'm going to amass this thing called teaching and philosophy and healing, and I'm going to do whatever it takes and travel whatever distance and pay whatever price to give myself some love across the planet.

And I'm not going to let any human being on the face of theirs stop me, not even myself. And I had this no turning back kind of thing. It was like, no, I'm not going to let anything stop me now. I got up, I hugged my mom with tears in my eyes. I went into my room, I got a funk and wagnalls dictionary out. If you paid $20 for shopping, you got a volume of an encyclopedia or a dictionary those days.

And so my mom would send me to go shopping so she didn't have to do it, and she'd give me enough money to get one volume or a dictionary. So I took that dictionary and I made a commitment to memorizing 30 words a day in the dictionary until my vocabulary was strong enough to excel in school. And so I wrote the 30 words. I spelled them properly, 20 times each.

So I recited them 20 times, I spelled them 20 times, I put them in a sentence, wrote the whole sentence 20 times to get the meaning out of it. And I just practiced it and practiced 30 words a day. And my mom would test me on those 30 words. I wouldn't go to bed until they were done. And I did 30 words a day until 20,000 words were in my head and I was passing school. And that was the journey that started. Once I learned how to read.

I have not put books down, and I've been reading every single day pretty well every single day since. That's 52 years now in November. It's incredible. And just the fact that you've written 40 books as well, like, I'm struggling to write one. I've been saying for ages, I'm going to write my book, and it's been taking so long, and it's this. No small feet writing a book, is it? Do they all just kind of come out of you now? Do you feel like it just falls out of you?

No, actually, I've written more like 300 books, really, just about 46 self help books. But I've been writing textbooks also. I'm writing a textbook on the evolution of morality. I wrote a book on the, on about a 900 page text on the brain last year. Every year I write at least two books. And, yeah, I've done a lot of books because I'm constantly researching, and I learned that if I write it out, I tend to retain it and I can articulate it more effectively. So I do it.

For me, it's not all my books are out there in the general public, but they're for seminars or conferences or just my research. So I'm constantly reading and writing. It's just every single day. So amazing. So you have that feeling, you have that, like, premonition of. Right, I want to speak. I want to get out there. I want to teach. I want to. This is what I want to do with my life. How did you find the path that, you know, what it was that you wanted to talk about?

Because I have so many people that come to me, and they know that my podcast is called made for more. They know they're made for more. They know they have something that they want to give, but they can't figure out what that is. How did you find that this was your path? Like, how did you stumble across the breakthrough experience in all of that? Well, when I first started, a 375 pound afro american woman came up to me and asked me if I could teach her the yoga I was doing.

Now. When I first saw her, I thought, hey, no way, big giant. And I was like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? But she was so heartful and so inspiring. I'm trying to find a picture that I want to show you, so I'm trying to pull it. Here we go. So I'm going to show you this vision, this painting that's in my office. But I had this 375 pound woman, and she taught me. I taught her yoga, and I didn't. I wasn't a yoga instructor yet. I later did become sort of a yoga instructor.

People wanted to learn from me, but she was my first student. Right after that, I was meditating out in the sun at the junior college, and a guy came up to me and said, can you teach me how to meditate? And that was my second student. He is still with me. Oh, really? Wow. Still? Well, I don't see him every day, but, I mean, he still comes to seminars when I'm in Houston. Coming up. He's going to be there, I think.

Then 17 people came out when I was in the library and asked me to give them a review and tutor on algebra. I was having to start from the basic algebra, and I just started having people come up to me and ask me to do it because I was starting to now excel in school. I went from the bottom, and I went to the top in a short period of time, and people just started asking me.

When I went to the University of Houston, after I started the two years at this little junior college, I went to University of Houston, and I would do yoga under these trees, and people would gather around and start asking questions. And so I'd have 100, 125, 150, up to sometimes 400 people a day each day under the trees, unless it was raining. We'd go to the cafeteria, and they'd all gather, and we have dialogue and q and a and stuff.

And that made me thirsty to want to learn anything I could that might be useful. And I learned that whenever I was studying that somehow they would ask questions related to it, like a synchronicity. And I just started doing that. And then when I went on to professional, by the way, where I actually did it is now the Bauer school of entrepreneurship, where I used to teach. And the person that founded that, the two or three people that founded that were students of mine.

And so I went and they asked me to come and speak at the college there, and they told me they were inspired by me, and I told them they didn't know. I told myself, this building is sitting where I used to teach. That is so cool. It's like a full circle. Oh, man. It was inspiring. When I found that out, I was blown away. Here's the picture. See if I get that. Here's the picture of the vision I saw. Oh, wow. Wow. That's an incredible. How did you get that? How did you. That's what I saw the night.

Now, I wasn't in the picture that was added by the painter, but I was standing on the balcony looking out over a giant square with a thousand, a million people beneath. And in the background was an iconic building from every major city around the world. And the purpose of it was for me to reach a world. And the name of the painting is a man on a mission with a vision and a message. Oh, wow. I love that. So that sits in my office. It's five foot by four foot. It's a big painting.

That's incredible. So did you. I mean, did you ever think, I want to go more into, really, the impact that you've had? But on that note, did you feel like it would ever get as big as it is now? Like, you know, have you impacted as many as you want? Is it as more successful or less successful than you thought? How has that journey been?

Well, I knew when I was 17, in that vision that I wanted to step foot in every country on the face of the earth and share my research findings with people that I knew from 17. At 18, I was watching a show called Kung fu David Carradine, and I was sitting in the yoga position, the lotus position, and I was watching the show, and he talked about this Shaolin master, and the word master seemed cool. And so I said, I want to be a master. I want to master my life.

And so I said, what does that mean exactly? And I divided life into seven areas. Our intellectual pursuit, our business pursuit, our wealth pursuit, our family pursuit, our social pursuit, our physical health and well being, and our inspirational pursuit, spiritual pursuit. And I said, I'm going to learn everything I can on those seven topics, and I want to master those areas. And I wanted to create original ideas that serve human beings across the world. I want to create a global business.

I want to create financial independence. I want to have a global family where the whole world is my family. I want to create a social influence and hang out with amazing people and influence people. Wanted to have a vital body. I'm 70 almost in just a few months, and I'm still cranking. And I also wanted to be inspired and create an inspiring movement. So that was the dream I had at 18. And those are all come true today. Every one of those have been manifested.

And, yes, I. I've exceeded what I originally thought, and I feel blessed by the people and the opportunities and the stuff that's happening around the world. It's just mind blowing. And, yeah, if you stay with something long enough and neurotically work towards it, you get it. I would say if you do something long enough, everybody else dies out and you end up at the top. You just got to keep going until everybody dies. So true. So, so true.

And I think what's amazing about you is that you've been doing this. I mean, you've been doing this since before I was born. And I think, actually, you spoke about the breakthrough experience. You had that. Was it 1989 you had that or 1987 you had that? Yes, I saw that in the vision. Flying from Houston to Montreal to go to Quebec, speaking to some doctors there. And the original vision came in that flight, and it said, an idea whose time has come. Within the tiny seed lies the mighty oak.

And I knew whenever I get tears of inspiration and unknowing and clarity, I know to follow it. I don't question, I just act. And that was one of those actions. I've done that on the breaks 1215 times. Teaching it. The crazy thing is an amazing thing is that the world moves so fast now. Like, everything changes so fast. Technology, all of that stuff.

But the message that you were sharing back then, it's still the same message as today, and it's still, if not, it's even more relevant today probably than it was back then. So it's so incredible that it stayed true across all of that time. But I want to dive more into what the breakthrough experience actually is because I think when you look at what you do on the surface, people might be like, oh, he teaches, like, positive thinking.

You know, it's just about being positive or it's just about being grateful. But when I look into it more, you actually don't necessarily teach positive thinking. It's more so about that middle place, isn't it, that you want people to lie in? It's not really like, oh, just strive to be really happy. It's actually kind of bringing that into the middle place. So can you explain a little bit about what the breakthrough experience is and how, you know, how it kind of works?

Well, that's. There's a lot to it. There's a thing called hedonic adaptation, or hedonic paradox, which means that anytime you go above equilibrium and get a bit positive, elated, excited, nature has a homeostatic mechanism to bring you back into the set point and to balance you. And if you go below that, it also lifts you back up so it has a homeostat, a feedback, negative feedback loop that automatically brings you back in the center.

So I learned that about 40 something years ago, and I realized that one sidedness is futile. It was in Buddhism that they said, the desire for that which is unobtainable and the desire to avoid that which is unavoidable is a source of human suffering. So many people are striving for a fantasy and then attracting a nightmare to break their addiction to the fantasy, to get them into objectivity.

Instead of embracing the two sides of life, they're trying to get rid of half of themselves instead of embrace all of themselves. And I'm not interested in doing that because I found that futile. I'm interested in helping people love all parts of themselves.

And that's what the breakthrough experience is, to help them with a methodology to dissolve the baggage of all the subconsciously stored illusions that they've been carrying around, that are holding them back and trapping them into a monopole pursuit instead of embracing the fullness of life, the mindfulness of both sides. And I also teach people how to prioritize their life, dedicating to what's really meaningful and what's really priority and discerning what that is.

So they're inspired spontaneously and delegating the lower part of things and giving opportunities to other people to do what they love while the individual goes and does what they love. And by prioritizing your life, you liberate your life. And so I teach people practical tools and a science on how to transcend the illusions of things that are perceived in the way and show how they're actually on the way, and feedback mechanisms to do something extraordinary.

We all are here to do something extraordinary, make a difference. We all want to make a difference, but we sometimes subordinate to other people, compare ourselves to others instead of compare our daily actions to our own dreams, and get caught in judging and get into the imposter syndrome instead of loving and getting into an inspirational path. How do you that makes so much sense. And like, I'm listening to you and thinking, oh God, I've just seen myself in those places all the time.

And as a really ambitious person, I'm really goal driven. I'm hungry to grow and learn all the time. I really have that fire in me sometimes. I kind of battle with, I don't want to almost accept who I am right now because I feel like it's going to slow down my growth, you know, like, if I lose that hunger, if I lose that fight in me, am I going to become less than because I just can't become complacent. Is that a normal thought or is that a crazy thought?

If you're driven by external motivation, you will temporarily think that you're going to lose something. If you're driven intrinsically by spontaneous potentials in the brain, you won't lose it. I haven't been lost mine in 52 years. I'm as inspired today as I was when I started. But the word ambition comes from ambiness. Both sidedness, a condition of ambiness, ambidextrous, both sides, both handedness.

And so real ambition is when you integrate the pairs of opposites, the unity of opposites that are inside us instead of trying to polarize it. I always say that our mind tends to polarize the unpolarizable, divide the indivisible, name the ineffable, label the unlabable, and divide the indivisible instead of allowing it intuitively to be integrated, to be pursuing what's really meaningful, the mean between the pairs of options, the middle path.

And I certainly do not feel in any way slighted in drive. I mean, I put in the hours I put in good. You know, people think I'm a little crazy because I put in at least 100 hours a week into what I love doing. And I said, they go, why do you want to do that? Why don't you just chill out and relax? I said, the fulfillment I get out of what I do far exceeds idle time. Why would I have idle time? Why would I do something that's not as inspiring? Well, it doesn't make sense to me.

So I fill my day with very high priority inspiring actions every single day. Yeah, I can completely relate with that. And when you said that about the, the two sides of ambition, I just got a little shiver because it's so I can really be like, go, go, go. And I really think that there's only kind of one gear, and it's a really good reminder to just. What would you say then is the opposite of that?

So when you say, like, you know, at the moment, I would say I'm leaning far more towards that striving, wanting more, that kind of place. What would you say is the opposite, that I need to flex more? Well, I don't want to say that. You know, people say, you know, play and work, they have to be balanced, great, but they can be. At the same time, I mean, getting to do what I love doing is my play. When I'm doing the breakthrough experience, people may see it as work. I see it as play.

That's my play. Because I get to watch lives change, and frankly, I live on a beautiful, the largest yacht in the world, and I go to amazing places. If I have a choice of doing the teaching of the breakthrough experience or going sightseeing or whatever, I'll take the breakthrough experience any day, because there I get to change lives and transform lives and get to hear stories and watch that and get the fulfillment of making some sort of contribution. I liked doing it.

If I don't have a program, I may go do some sightseeing, but I would much rather do my program any day of the week. And that's why I've done it so many times. I still do. I hope to continue to do it. Well, on that note, then, of the people that you've impacted, it's thousands at this point. And we heard in the documentary, we heard some stories of people that have really impacted.

Has there ever been, can you give us any of one where you felt like, wow, this has blown me away, you know, where you even. It's exceeded your expectations of what you thought was possible with this, this process? Yeah, I mean, we have, there's always, I don't want to say anecdotal, but sort of occasionally you get really extraordinary things.

You know, a person has some sort of healing, or people, all of a sudden they meet their, their mate, you know, in the seminar that they, that they just had this major resentment to somebody, and then as a result of it, they now open themselves up for a new form of love or something. You hear these kind of things are big business transformations or wealth accumulations. I mean, I've had all of those and they've all been tear jerkers.

And I get thousands and thousands of letters that I get in almost every day of people that have transformation. So that's very inspiring to me. But, you know, I mean, today there's a research going on in North Carolina University on the method that I'm doing that I developed, and they've got an extraordinary result that they didn't expect so far in follow through on these, on these clients. That was a tear jerker today. That was just today.

And the other day I was speaking in Tokyo and a lady came up afterwards and said, I want you to come and speak again at the United nations in 2026 because I want you to bring your method to them for conflict resolution. That's an inspiration. So I've got little, you know, moments in my life that are really amazing. Movie opportunities, meeting people, opportunities that I wrote a book. You can have an amazing life in just 60 days if you follow 60 principles.

And people thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, you can do that. But they're real. I mean, we really have the capacity to do something extraordinary and have an amazing life in life, and. But most people are not willing to do the steps to give them that. And they're not something that, you know, there's no specialty about me. I mean, I was a street kid. I was told I would never read. All I did is I got to work.

And if a person gets to work and starts focusing on what's really meaningful, then they can change their life. And to me, that's, I want people to know that if you put the work into it and you focus on what it is you want, you can create it. There's no way you'll convince me that can't be done. I think when I was watching your documentary, one of the most interesting and kind of not controversial methods, but it's like, oh, it's such a different way of looking at it is around the idea of grief.

And I found that whole bit so interesting because grief is such, I mean, I'm fortunate enough to have not been through huge amounts of grief. I know that you have because you lost your wife, but a few years ago, didn't you and I, I'll share something with you in a minute, which will make more sense of why I find it so fascinating. But your approach to grief is really not thinking of, like, oh, just, you know, get over it or whatever.

You actually kind of look at a positive thing that's come out of them not being here anymore. Is that right? That's what I took from it.

And it's so, it's such a different way of looking at it. Well, I was fascinated by grief starting around age 21, because I was down in El Salvador surfing La Libertad, and I came in from surfing and I had something to eat. And I was walking through the street, and I saw this procession of about two to 300 people. And I walked up to one of the people there I thought might speak English, and I said, capassa, what's happening? And he said, we're celebrating the death of our mayor.

And I thought, they're all in white, they're all in color, and they're celebrating, and there's a funeral procession, but they're all celebrating and parting. And I, they go down to the cemetery, and it's a party, and everybody's gleeful. And the guy told me, he says, in our idea of the death, we are releasing a dove to be freed, and it's freed. And so what happens that we release dove, and that represents the spirit of the individual.

They're no longer constrained by physical mortality, and they're free. And that was an interesting metaphor. And I thought, wow, these people, when they see grief, where they see death, they didn't see grief. They saw relief. And that just kind of hit me there. And I go, wait a minute, now. Now, where I grew up, when somebody died, there was grief. Here. There's relief and there's spiritual awakening and celebration and parties and stuff.

I thought there's two different ways of looking at the same thing. That started me on the, on the search for how do I, what's actually going on with grief and relief and how do I make a science out of it? I also had an event when I was 14, living on the streets where everybody that represented my family member was showing up in new forms. A lady I was living with was like a mother and a girlfriend.

And I was just watching the people in my life morph through time as I was traveling and hitchhiking as a kid. And then I realized, I don't ever have to worry about losing something or missing something. It's always in a new form. And I would say the master lives in a world of transformation, not the illusions of gain and loss. So those two experiences were in my psyche. When I started to pursue the topic of grief. I studied the neurology of it. I studied the sociology of it.

I studied the philosophy of grief and life and death eschatology. I studied everything I could get on that. And by 1984, I developed a methodology that I've been using since and taken 5000 people who have had deaths through this process. And it's never taken more than 3 hours to dissolve their grief. And people, they're mind blown. But shouldn't you grieve? Isn't it normal? Well, it is an average thing that most people do.

They don't know that there's an option and how disrespectful it actually is. Most people think it's respectful to grieve, but I've never met anybody that could look me straight in the eye and say, when I die, I hope all my loved ones are grieving. They all want their life to live to the fullest. If I was to die, I want my kids to live to the fullest. Celebrate. So it's really kind of a paradox for most people to hit. We did at Keough University in Japan.

Well, when the Christchurch earthquake occurred, they asked me to come in and dissolve grief for people that lost their loved ones and their homes and their bank accounts and their businesses and all kinds of stuff. And so I got to work with them. Then when the Ishinomachi occurred in Japan after the tsunami in 2011, I got to work there and do demonstrations and show people the method.

And then in 2016, a big earthquake hit Japan, and they asked, the government asked me to come in and bring some of my facilitators and do the grief process there. So we did. And then Cael University asked if they could do a study on what you're doing because you're getting results. What are you doing? And then they followed these people for 18 months, and none of them had grief and none of the procedure that they had ever seen, ever had any results like that. So I'm certain about it.

People go, well, you can't be certain about that. I can be. I found a science of how it works. People never grieve. See, when you're with somebody and you're, let's say, married to somebody, there's things you like and things you dislike, things that you want to hug and things you want to slug and things you want to get close to and things you want to kind of push away.

Every human being's got things you like and dislike, the things that you like that you enamored with, that you're infatuated with. If they're gone or they depart or decease, you grieve the loss of those traits because they activate dopamine, oxytocin, encephalons, serotonin, estrogen. They activate a certain part of the brain, and the withdrawal of those drugs in the brain give us the grief. It's almost like a drug withdrawal.

But nobody ever says, when I make them list, what are they grieving, loss of, they never put down. I miss their farts. I miss their screaming. I miss their hair in the sink when they're shaving. I miss their arguments. They don't miss the things that challenge their values. They only miss the thing that supported them. So the parts that they're challenged by, they have a hidden relief.

They don't have to deal with that anymore, but they don't want to publicly describe that because of the social stigma. So they just repress that and express the grief as a public display. So I go in there and I find out, what are they perceiving as lost? What exactly is the new form that it's in? Because it's transformed. And they don't know that until I bring it to their attention and make them look. And they go, my God, it's not missing. It's showing up in other people in my life around me.

And then what's the drawback of when they were doing it? To break the infatuation with the forms that you're attracted to. And what's the benefit of the new people doing it? And once those are brought into balance, the brain cannot have grief. And I've done that over and over again. I just got through doing it in Tokyo this week, and the lady has said, that's the first time I've slept.

Her son committed suicide three and a half years ago, and she has had difficulty sleeping ever since she slept that night, and she had a smile on her face, and she couldn't believe that it was her grief was gone. And that's extremely rewarding to know I got the simple tool that can make that happen. Why I do it every day, it's so powerful.

Cause I can't even imagine, like, you know, the idea of I've got two kids, so that ever happening to any of my kids, and then getting to a place where it's okay. And there's peace with that. That, I mean, that is huge. But the reason I'm so fascinated in it is I haven't really told anyone this, but I've got, like, a fear of death, so not my own death. I have a real fear of those around me dying. I think about it all the day. Like, every day.

It consumes me almost, because it will be like, I'll see something. I'll see my parents with my kids, and I'll be like, oh, God, this. That's such a beautiful moment. You know, they're having so much fun. My kids love them so much. And then instantly I think of one of them not being here. And it really, like, just shatters my joy of that moment all the time. And I. Whenever I hear an ambulance, I think, oh, God, is that my parents live nearby. I'm like, is that. Is that for one of my parents?

And it consumes me. And I. The reason I was fascinated, because I was looking at anything, and I wonder if I could take his teachings to help me get out of that fear. And then my own thought was like, yeah, but if I start focusing on the things that I not don't like about them, that, but will be better when they're not here. I'm gonna manifest them not being here. And then I kind of went in. This circle, no, you're not gonna do that.

What happens is we create fantasies about who people are, and many people in relationships create a fantasy and then punish the person when they're not living up to the fantasy. And we infatuate with the fantasy instead of actually honor who they are. And your parents are lovely people. I'm sure there's no doubt you have love for them.

But we sometimes confuse infatuation with fantasies with love, and that then we have withdrawal symptoms from the loss of our fantasy about what they're going to do and et cetera. And our own fear of death is nothing to do with anything but our own pride in our own infatuations with what we imagined is going to happen. When Soleimani was killed by Trump in the Trump era, four years ago, 5 million people came out in Iran mourning his death because he was the great general in America.

We labeled him the terrorist, and we were celebrating his death. We killed the big terrorist over there. They're mourning his death. We saw more drawbacks and benefits we were celebrating his death. They saw more benefits and drawbacks than they were mourning his death. That's a classical example. So if you were highly resentful to your parents, you would have a different feeling, but you're not. You have joy, as you called it. So as long as there's joy, there's certain chemistry in the brain.

And so the withdrawal from that joy is what gives us that sensation, the fear of loss. When you're. When you first. When I'm assuming you're married and you have a beautiful husband and everything else, but when you first met him, you were probably a little enamored with him. And then you thought, oh my God, if another girl comes along and I was losing, that would be devastating and jealous. But then there may be days when you think, I hope somebody comes and takes him for a couple hours.

When he eats his dinner really loudly in my ear, that's when I feel. Like you're not going to grieve the loss of that when he dies. No, that one's going to be gone but the hugs and the smiles and the gentle conversations or whatever you're going to miss. So it's only because of our perceptions and our perceptions. We have governance so we can control our perceptions and change our perceptions. So until somebody sees it live and sees me actually do it, they think what's going on.

But when they're done, there's a presence, there's love, there's gratitude. And they feel the presence of the new form and they honor the form and they have this incredible dialogue with the individual that they felt has lost. And it's tear jerking. There's not one person in the room that doesn't open their heart and just have tears with them. And it's not a great grief, it's not a sorrow. It's a gratitude for the magnificent order that's happened.

Because nobody really knows when somebody's going to die, how they're supposed to die, how they're going to die. These are artificial things we make up in our minds. If we know, well, they should have lived longer, well, who's to say we don't know that? These are just assumptions. The way it is is the way it is. Anytime you compare the way it is to a fantasy, you won't appreciate the way it is and you'll be addicted to the fantasy.

So I'm a firm believer in bringing those back into balance and honoring what's actual, not creating a fantasy and hiding and repressing the other side because of social ideals. Yeah, it was. It was interesting, the questions you were asking, because it's questions that I feel like most people would never dare to ask themselves. You're saying, you know what's the. What are you able to do now with them not here, that you, you know, you couldn't have done before?

And this guy was like, oh, well, you know, I still would have been in that job because that's what they wanted me to do. And. But now I'm doing this, and I'm so much more happy doing this. And it's a. It's just the questions. The questions is what I find fascinating. And you said in your documentary, the quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask.

And. And I think so much of that, definitely the whole grief piece, but just in growth, you know, in general, is just having the courage to ask yourself those difficult questions, isn't it? Well, it is, because we have social idealisms. The social idealism says, no, be nice, don't be mean, be kind, don't be cruel, be generous, don't be stingy, be positive, don't be negative, be peaceful, don't be wrathful, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. These are morally progresses that nobody lives.

They're one sided. And, you know, if you look really honestly at yourself. And I had to go to the Oxford English dictionary and find out the 4628 different traits that I had in the dictionary. I had every one of them, positive, negative. I had kind, cruel, nice, mean, honest, dishonest. I had every trait in my life that I was displaying. When I looked honestly, I had it all. There was nothing missing, and there was nothing I needed to get rid of or something to gain. It was already there.

That awareness is more fulfilling than living in the fantasy that you're going to get rid of some part of yourself, and someday you're going to get the other part of yourself. And that pursuit, you know, is what blocks a lot of people from a lot of fulfillment. Life. So when I finally realized that nothing's missing, I've got. I'm nice as a pussycat if you support my values. I can be mean as a tiger if you don't.

When I was flying to Ho Chi Minh from London recently, they said, well, somehow your visa is not working. You can't get on the plane to get a new visa. I said my visa was perfectly fine in Ho Chi Minh. When I left there two days ago or three days ago, I'm absolutely certain that fine. Can you just please get me a ticket? No, we can't do that. And I was polite for a few moments, and I got tougher and tougher and tougher, as you imagine, right?

I learned it from Eddie Murphy in 48 hours at the Wilshire Hotel. So I finally said, listen, I got authorization. I sent an email off and I that I got an authorization from the immigration. This is perfectly fine. They still wouldn't let me get a flight, so they end up having to make me buy a ticket to Hong Kong and then lie to the customs that I was going to Hong Kong and passing through. That's what they told me to do, which I thought was ridiculous. So I was not om peace beyond you.

I was like, this is ridiculous, and this is an inconvenience, and it's delaying. I'm almost missing my flight. And I gave him a hiccup, and I wrote up our thing, and I sent it to the airline that this guy was just out of line, and he was, I don't know if he got fired, but he was out of line. So in the process of doing it, I was firm and tough on the guy. So I'm not here to be one sided. I don't find that productive in life.

I'm here to be whatever is needed in order to fulfill my mission in life. And I don't mean to be more mean than nice or more nice and mean. But if I look honestly my life, and I do a video of me on it with a drone looking over me 24 hours a day, I got both sides. It's so good to get to that acceptance, isn't it?

Because I even found myself, my partner was saying to me once, oh, would you ever go on one of those programs like Love island or, you know, big brother or something like that, and celebrity in the jungle, whatever. And the first thought that came to my head was, no, because this was a full subconscious thought. I was like, no, because then people would figure out that I'm not actually as nice as they think I am.

And I had this, like, internal thing of like, oh, people think I'm a really nice person, but I think I'm actually not that nice because I know the thoughts or the little moments where I'm not that nice. Or maybe I'm a bit spiky and I'm a bit, you know, when I snap at Kirk. Cause he's just eating a packet of crisp next to me. That's not my nicest side.

And I think it's getting to the, but I know I am a nice person, but it's getting to the point of accepting and letting go of the shame of the times when you don't have it all. You know, you're not. The only reason you're shamed is because you bought into the moral hypocrisy that you're supposed to be one sided. And that's exactly what some religions actually do in order to keep control over people. There's a great little video that you can go online and it says, priest says no hell.

Just type that in and go, priest says no hell. And bring up this little video and just watch two minutes of it. And it basically says that it was in a guilt controlling, guilt producing, control business. And the best way to do that is to create an idealism, a moral hypocrisy that nobody can live, that they'll feel shame and guilty about the second they have the other side show up. And then they'll subordinate to the authority and their easy control.

And when you're highly infatuated or highly resentful, whatever your perception is, is controlling you by occupying space and time of your mind and distracting you. So I've been studying the brain and studying all the psychology of this for decades and all the above. When I went through 4628 traits and found them all in me, if I thought it was a positive trait, I looked for the downsides. And if I thought it was a negative trait, I looked for the upsides.

And I found out that all of them are necessary for me to fulfill my mission. And I feel I accomplish more by honoring both sides instead of trying to get rid of half of me. I don't have to get rid of half of me to love me. And I want people to be able to love themselves for all parts, not try to get rid of half of themselves all the time and edit themselves. Oh, I love that. And that's so powerful, especially today in the world of social media.

And, you know, if you are, what if you're wanting to do what you do today, so much of it is about, you know, creating content and putting all these videos out of and being public online and stuff like that. And it's so hard when you're doing that to have, you know, there's so much chat that goes through your head of like, am I enough? Is this how are people going to perceive me? But actually getting to that point where you can just say, who cares? This is not all of me.

The thing is, as long as we compare ourselves to others and put people on pedestals or pits and live in their shadows and not live on their shoulders, we're going to end up subordinating to outer authorities and influence. And that's great if you want to fit in and you want to be, you know, kind of lost in the sea of society.

But if you want to make a difference, you have to be an unborrowed visionary and know that you're going to be liked and disliked and you're going to be supported and challenged and you're going to be, you know, having moments of calm and turmoil and all those are part of the equation called life. And to try to get rid of half of life and try to be one sided, it's futile, it's not going to occur. It's like a magnet.

It's like if you see a magnet, you think you're going to get a positive pull, the magnet without the negative pull, you're just futile. It's a waste of time. Oh, I like that magnet. That makes a lot of sense. So coin, imagine you got a head and tail coin, and I want the heads, I don't want the tails. And you get accumulated coins according to how many heads and tails you can accumulate. But if you say I don't want the tails, I only want to hit one sided, a headed coin and I won't accumulate.

You'll never accumulate in it. You'll never grow in worth if you're trying to get only a one sided coin. Same thing. And I guess it's like if you refer it back to the entrepreneurial journey and being in business and things, if you don't have the failures, the successes, never feel that high. The highs don't feel high. If you haven't had the lows, you can't just go high, high, high, because then it's got no impact. You don't actually feel any of that. I quit success 40 years ago.

I don't waste my time on success personally. When people ask me, oh, you're a success. I go, I am not a success. I'm a man on a mission. I use the illusions of pride and shame and success and failure as feedback systems to get me back into the center. Because the moral licensing effect, if anybody studies that, just look at moral licensing or licensing effect.

The second you do something you're proud of, you automatically give yourself permission to do something you're ashamed of in order to bring you back into the authentic self. Because the pride you isn't exaggerating you, the shame you is to minimize you. Those aren't you? So I'm not interested. I gave up success a long time ago. It interfered with my. It was a distraction. It means that I had a shallow vision and I was now puffed up pride, thinking I've accomplished something.

I'm a man on a mission. I just keep focusing and doing what I love doing every day, and I'm inspired by that. Whatever people label me out there, and I got labels on both sides. That's not what matters. It's what if you compare yourself to your own objectives and how prioritized you are in fulfilling your objectives, and not compare yourself to others and label yourself with those labels, you go farther in life. Otherwise, you're going to be pleasured by success and frightened by failure. I see.

Both of them are feedback systems. Elon Musk is a great example. You know, when that thing goes off, a billion dollar unit goes off and explodes in it. But he got one step closer to his objective. He doesn't think of that. He was celebrating when it blew up. If you saw a Tesla or not Tesla, but a star, whatever it is. SpaceX. Yeah, SpaceX. If you saw what they were doing when it blew up, they were cheering.

And that's because they got one step closer than the last blow up towards their objective. And so they saw, even though it explosion, they saw that as one step closer to our mission. And I like to think of it that I'm a man on a mission. I'm not dedicated to success or fear failure. I'm not infatuated with success. I'm not frightened by failure. I don't think of those terms. I just focus on the mission. Oh, that is good. I feel like I needed to hear that message.

I feel like that's just hit, you know, when you hear something right at the right. Right point. That's. That's what I needed to hear today. Thank you for that. So, lastly, I just want to. I always like to give my audience, like, practical things. So if there is someone, for example, a friend of mine at the moment, is going through a really tough divorce, and he's in the thick of it, you know, like, really, really in the thick of it.

And every time we speak on the phone, it's the same things that he's talking about all the time. You know, he's just obsessed with what his wife's doing and so much stuff like this, and he really is just going around in a loop. And I'm finding it hard to get him out of that loop to get into a more positive place.

Someone who is listening to this, whether it's maybe in their business, whether it's their personal life, whether it's their health, something like that, where they're just in that loop and stuck. What is either a question, a powerful question they can ask themselves to start switching them or an exercise they could do to just shift out of the loop a little bit.

There's a number of things. The first thing to do is to ask this question. What specific action or inaction or trait is my former wife displaying or demonstrating that I'm despising, disliking and hating most? And define it, because otherwise they'll just run a story and ramble and it's boring. And I just want to ramble their story and run their victimhood. They're victims of their history. What are they judging?

Because you don't judge things on the outside unless it represents a part of you that you feel ashamed of on the inside. That has been proven true for thousands of years. That is written about in the New Testament. It was written about in Samaria. It was written about by the Egyptians. I've proven it with 125,000 cases. So first identify what are you judging. Then once you identify what it is, you judge and make a list of it and really identify what are the actions that are doing it.

Don't say I don't know, just what are the actions that they're doing that you're displaying. Then you go and ask. Now go to a moment, John, where and when you perceive yourself displaying or demonstrating that same behavior, same action or inaction or trade and be honest and quit lying to yourself with pride that I don't do that. They're this bad person. Cause you married them. You were once married to them, so they're not a bad person. You wouldn't have married them.

You'd be pretty foolish to that. They were terrible people. Then go in and find out where you do the same thing. And the moment you start honestly looking and reflecting and self inspecting, you immediately stop. And you realize they're reminding me of things that I'm feeling ashamed of. And I'm willing to avoid it with pride. And I'm too proud to admit what I see in them is inside me.

And I'm judging them because they're reminding me of what I feel ashamed about, that I don't want to face because of the moral hypocrisies I've indoctrinated myself with. Once you do, you go the next place you did it and the next place you didn't do it until the quantity of where they're doing it is what you've done. I've done this on a lot of cases of divorce, and I've got them through. Once they do that exercise, I go to the next step.

Now go to a moment where and when your former wife is actually displaying and demonstrating that trait you despise. Okay. In that moment, how does that serve you? What's it doing for you? Okay. It's breaking my fantasy about how she was supposed to be in my life, which means that I had a fantasy, and I was having an affair with a fantasy person, and I wasn't loving her. I was loving the fantasy and wanting her to be the fantasy, and she was probably doing the same back.

So that's the lesson I got about relationships. What's another benefit came out of it? It made me stand up and believe in myself and value what I'm doing. Great. That's something that she probably wanted for you, and yet she's accomplishing it, and we start looking at the benefits of that. It got me closer to my family. I'm now talking to my sister. I'm talking to my mom and dad and my friends.

The real friends are in my life, supporting me, and I'm now focusing back on my business or whatever it may be. You stack up the benefits into the benefits, equal the drawbacks, and people want to run the story. Well, there is no benefits to this. Yes, there is. You're just choosing with your subjective bias not to look, and that's your creation. It's not hers. It's your creation. Then you ask a question. If she was the way you hoped she would be, what been the drawback?

You asked what would be the drawback if she was acting the way you hoped right now, because that's your fantasy that you're comparing her to. And that fantasy, if you don't crack the fantasy, you're going to be resentful to what's happening, because you keep wanting to be with this fantasy person. And then when you finally get to that, you start to realize that she's a human being, and she's.

Her values are being challenged, and she's labeling you a narcissist because your values are being challenged. Whenever your values are challenged, you go narcissistically, and you try to stand up for what you want and tell them no. And so. And both of you are growing from that, and you're breaking the fantasy about how your relationship once was and growing. So if you start doing that. I've had people that were really. I mean, I had a guy that was $2 million into a lawsuit for three years.

Yeah. Going on the third year, $2 million in a lawsuit. I had him do this exercise. It took about 4 hours, and when he got through, he drove over there. His attorneys and their attorneys were saying, you can't talk to each other, stay away from each other so they can make more money. Right, current attorneys. And he finished, and he was just calm, and he said, I still have love for my wife. That's not going away.

And I realized that she did a lot for me that I hadn't overlooked and I wasn't honoring. He drove over to her house, knocked on the door. She came to the door surprised. He was humble. And when you're humble and you start to appreciate people who they are, they turn into who you appreciate. He said, can I come in? She said, yes. She said, what do you want? She started saying, and it was less than he was willing to give. And he said, consider it done. And they negotiated it right on the time.

When they got through, they hugged each other. They both told their attorneys, we've made our decision. Just take care of the paperwork. This thing is over. And they became close friends again. Wow. So that's what's possible. That's what's possible. But they don't. We won't. We want to run our story. We want to be a victim of history. We want to age ourselves, make some gray hair. We want to be right. And the addiction of being right blocks the openingness to love.

And that's why I put the Demartini method. That's what the movie's about. That's what the breakthrough is about. To try to teach people that there's an alternative way for people. And if they want it, it's there. They don't want it. That's fine. If you want to just be fighting it out and get that extra few dollars or whatever you think you're going to get and fight over this possession or whatever, you'll find out. It's trivia, because you never win with judgment.

You feel empty inside, but you feel fulfilled when you open your heart and love again. And I've seen people, even though they're in the middle of a divorce, 4 hours later, hugging each other and negotiating and mediating what they wanted, and it's dissolved. I've seen that many, many times. It's actually inspiring to watch. Wow. I bet even listening to that, just like him driving over and then hugging, that feels so. That's so moving to know that it can have that impact. Like how amazing.

Just let go of all that hate. He was. The attorneys were keeping it going. It's an attorney business. They were just keeping it going. Stay away from each other. We'll take care of everything else and rack up the bills and some people are too immature to actually confront their own reflections. We'll pay thousands and millions of dollars off to these attorneys just to be right and they just feed off that. But I think that to love is way, way more profound than to be right.

And many people get trapped in being right. Instead of loving, the amygdala wants to be right with pride and it wants the fantasy. And we project our fantasies onto our mates and destroy our relationship because we're not loving for who they are. We're trying to make them into our fantasy. And many people have an affair with a fantasy person and wonder why the relationship is so stressful. I feel like you just had, like, things pop off in like, just in one sentence.

I feel like I've had just about three light bulbs go off there, by the way. I bet those attorneys absolutely hate you. I'm sure they're like, dammit, no one talk to Doctor D want. Here's the interesting thing. In that particular case, he was a famous, the guy that was going through a divorce and why it was so expensive is because he was a famous oil man in Houston. And the attorney, we were in a mastermind group together and the attorney was in the mastermind group that he had to come to.

Oh, really? Yeah. His name was Earl. And what's interesting is the attorney was there when he mediated it and he smiled. He knew exactly what happened. He knew I helped him solve it. He didn't, he wasn't upset. He said, people who want to be right take care of my bank account. But there's never a shortage of those people that want to be right. He's a celebrity lawyer. He does with celebrities. This guy was sort of a celebrity. So he wasn't upset. He wasn't angry at me.

He knew I did that because somebody had told him to talk to me. But he didn't understand because I was practicing as a healing health professional at the time, and they did. Why are you talking to a health professional about your divorce? But I had a tool that I developed, and that tool is eye opening to him, to say the least. But we want to be right and we don't want to give up our pride. And it's our pride that's really the thing that erodes us over time and breaks down our physiology.

We'll create signs and symptoms until we break our pride. Wow. So if someone is listening to this and someone is, I'm sure so many people listen to this and they're like, I want this. Give me, give me it. Give me the breakthrough experience. How can they go through it? Obviously you've got the book, which is amazing, but you teach this. You also have facilitators all over the world that teach this, don't you? So how could someone go through this experience?

Just go to drdemartini.com dot, look up the breakthrough experience and see where it is. That's the easiest way. Or maybe go online. I mean, I'm doing teachings of all different sorts online. You could spend the rest of your life and probably multiple lives, I think, if there was such a thing, because I've got so much material on my website that you could just start reading and learning. But if they come to the breakthrough experience, it's life changing. It's a trajectory change.

There's no, I don't know anybody that comes to breakthrough experience that doesn't have a shift in the way they perceive life and tools that they can use the rest of their life, too. I love it. Well, thank you so much. It's so hard to get everything into like a 60 minutes podcast, but I'm so, so grateful for what you've shared, even just my own stuff. I was a little bit selfish there and asked some things for myself, a little bit therapy session myself.

But I so appreciate you and everything you're doing. I'm so glad that you had that vision and you've been a man on a mission ever since because it's impacted so many people. And yeah, I'm just so, so grateful for everything you're doing. Well, thank you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be on your show. And anytime I'll be glad to, we'll have another dialogue. So thank you.

Thank you.