Finding Courage

00:00:04 Speaker 1: Comeback Stories is a production of Inflection Network and iHeartRadio. Welcome back, everyone to another episode of Comeback Stories. I'm one of your co hosts, Darren Waller. I'm grateful that you guys are here to join us for another episode. And I'm Donnie Starkins mindfulness and mental health coach and meditation and yoga teacher. And today we got a guest, an amazing guest. His name is Albert Bastier. So. Albert's a father, a husband, a coach, a facilitator, and co founder of Sacred Sons. Albert illuminates the darkness of human suffering with the fire of love. Wow. I love that he holds space for individual and collective healing so that all men may open their hearts and awaken to their sacred masculinity. Albert, great to have you on, brother Welcome. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Brothers. Heard so many great things about you, and I'm glad that we haven't connected in the human but we're here to really drop in. This has come Backstories, and we usually get right into it, and we'd love to know for you what was life like growing up. That's a really big question. As I'm sure most of your guests can attest to. Yeah, life for me growing up was chaotic, confusing, heartbreaking. Yeah it was. It was all those things and more. But I think at the core of it, I felt very alone. Even within my family of origin. I felt like there wasn't the support and direction that I was seeking to feel like I had a firm foundation on this earth. And so I feel like I escaped into my imagination often and you know, I found my way. Of course here I am and childhood was tough. So it comes to mind you brought up the word confusing. So when Darren and I first started this podcast, we came up with this first question, and the very first episode I interview Darren, and then second episode Darren interviewed me, and that was the same thing that Darren said, confusing. My answer was easy. Yet we found ourselves and even you, because I'm familiar with your story, still in the same spots in the depth of an addiction. So I just wanted to point that out for some contexts and maybe Darren. I'll let Darren share a little bit. I know our listeners have heard, but he can give some contexts as to why it was confusing for him. Yeah, So the confusion for me lied in there was nothing externally wrong about the environment I grew up in. I grew up in a two pair household, great schools, great environments, I had good friends. So everything on the outside was like, this is great, Like I couldn't be blessed with a better childhood just from what I know. But the confusion lied on the inside for me because very early on, I just felt like the reality and somehow what I adopted as a truth very early on that I just wasn't enough, that something about me was inherently wrong. You know, there's people of my skin color telling me that I wasn't black enough because of the way that I acted in my personality. I was just different, man. I loved all different kinds of music. I was kind of nerdy. I was like all over the place. You couldn't put me in one box. But there's a bit of a limiting perspective around what it's like to be black, and I didn't fit in that box. And I just felt like the fact that I can't change my skin color, I'm stuck with this, and it's just a constant reminder that I'm not enough and so that's where the confusion lie for me. Yeah, I would say that I can resonate with some of that. You know, my father is American, He's white American. My mother is Taiwanese. I was born in Taipeid, Taiwan, grew up there until I was five, until he moved to California after my parents separated. And so I feel like that was at the root of the confusion for me was the disharmony between my mother and father. They were fighting a lot, They didn't see eye to eye. There wasn't a lot of affection and tenderness and kindness. My mother, of course, was very a very nurturing woman, cooked amazing food and was like very quick to you know, want to comfort us and sue us. My father was on the other side of it, pretty militant, cold, angry at times, and while he could come down to our level occasionally, it's always seemed off. He was off somewhere else, he was in his head. He was just somewhere else. So I didn't feel that grounded connection with him. Where we did connect was on an intellectual level. But you know, as young children, as the boy that I was, at least I longed for that deeper connection with my dad and he wasn't really able to meet me there. Wow, Darren and I were just talking. We recorded an episode previous to yours, and it was an episode we did together called anchoring in the present moment and the impact it can have when we're not there, when our body's there but our mind is elsewhere, especially when it comes to relationships father son, mother, daughter, parents, like or you know, your your romantic relationship, and just the impact you know, especially these days, but even back then it can have. And it sounds like it had a tremendous impact on you with your dad really not being there. Yeah, he was physically present most of the time between zero and five. However, you know, he was emotionally, I think, disconnected from himself. So how could he be emotionally connected with us if he was disconnected from his own inner world in that way? He was always you know, I think often his thoughts and ideations and and you know, his fantasies really and so I didn't reckon with that. And I feel like children they intrinsically attuned to the environment, right that children are so wise, but they're just like absorbing all the information in the environment, and so a part of me felt rejected, even though my dad was there and he you know, I don't even know if he actually said the words I love you or anything like that, but I've intrinsically picked up that there was a disconnect between us and I, you know, children myself included, took that as there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with me that my father is not taking the interest that I desire from him. He's not taking he's not seeing me right, he's not here with me. And so I interpreted that as there's something wrong with me. You know, there's something intrinsically wrong with me, and that's shame, right, there's a shame that there's something wrong with me. I'm bad or I'm wrong or something off or I would be loved by my dad. Can you can you think about and what comes up for you? And if I reask like what was an early memory of pain, Well, my father was you know also you know, a physical disciplinarian. So even at the age of three, you know, we things had to be a certain way and if they were not that way, or if maybe we broke a dish or spilt something, you know, you know, pick him. He picked me up and he just spanked me, you know, and that was I think a very shocking and startling realization that created a lot of fear in me as a boy. I'd be running through the house and he'd be chasing me, you know, to give me a good wallop. And for him, that in his paradigm, that just normal, right, that's good parenting, even but from for a little three year old boy, dad's scary. You know. I was afraid of my father and I equally loved him, and so there's just like dichotomy of like, I love this man who's my dad, and he's not loving me and seeing me as I longed to be loved and seen. So I think that that's definitely an early pain point. Another pain point for me was just the chaos and the dysfunction within their dynamic between my mother and father just always fighting. There was no harmony. It was always seemed like things were on edge and there was this tension in the air, and that it doesn't feel good to be around an environment where you I felt like I either kind of walk on eggshells or we kind of just adapted, you know, or I'd escape off into my imagination. So there wasn't a sense of full safety and security in my household, and I think as a young boy, as a young child, that's very painful to reckon with. And so yeah, that was really the early the early foundations as this, there's not a sense of safety and security, and that was very challenging to move through. I've heard you say this on another podcast when I was listening to you a while back, that you said my parents did not know how to communicate matters of the heart, and the way that you articulated that was like wow, that that awareness and that understanding to be able to see that and understand why they did what they did and also the impact that it had on us was really really powerful. Those words really hit me. Yeah, I mean communication is so key in all relationships. It's our capacity to communicate and translate our inner experience and perspective to convey that to others in a way that they can understand and received. That creates that reciprocity between us, That creates the foundation where we can really see eye to eye and heart to heart as human beings say like oh, you know, I see myself and you and you can see yourself and me, And it's that mutuality that creates that rapport, that resonance that we love like as humans, where you know, we love it when we vibe with another we're like, we just hit it off and we're just a vibe and it's just easeful. Whereas it is someone that we don't necessarily vibe with, you can just feel that tension. And the only way to breakthrough that tension, which I believe is like the unconscious, unresolved energetic of our past or somatic past. But to be able to bridge that through language and communication is powerful. And so yeah, I feel like not being understood in my household, seeing dysfunctional communication and really not being able to convey and communicate even with myself and to know my own needs and to be able to convey and communicate that to the world. And so it's been a long journey to be able to become fluent in communication, in emotional, in intra intra communication, the inner communication with my deeper self with God. You know, Ohbet, I'm in awe of your journey and to how you've gotten into the place where you are now, just the servant that you are, and just the wisdom that you radiate, and I feel like a fascinating part of your journey that I'd like to dive into a little bit. Is you grew up in an atheist household. Yes. I don't think I've ever had a conversation with somebody that is an atheist or that was a part of their lifestyle. Could you explain like what that was like? Yeah, for the first twenty something years of your life, I believe you said. What was that like? Yeah, yeah, it was bleak. That's that's a word that comes to mind. Because this is all there is, right, There's no magic, there's no spirit, there's no invisible world. This is what you get and and and it's just random, right, We're just all here like a consequence of you know, billions of years of evolution and we're kind of a fluke. We're just out here floating in space. And there's no higher order to things. Everything's just chaos. Everything just happens because it happens that way, because it's a dog eat dog world, right, and the strong survive and the weak parish. And uh, you know, having my father who was you know, he was raised in a his mother was very religious, his father wasn't, but his mother was like extremely Christian, and I think that dynamic created this repulsion for him. Again, it was like he was even against he was against religion. It wasn't just like there's no God. It was like anybody that's religious is suspect. They're they're they're like feeble minded, or they're afraid, or they're you know, believing in fairy tales. Here like we need to live in reality. And so there's a big judgment against spirituality, against any religion, against even like traditions, right, even like cultural traditions. And so it was very it was devoid of a deeper sense of meaning and purpose of life, like why are we all here? And so I really struggled with that of like why is life feel like it's just pain and just suffering? Like why am i here? I did not ask to be here, and I didn't have a deeper roadmap to understand myself in relationship to what all the all of this is, What is this reality that I'm a part of outside of like the scientific materialism that my father was very you know, knowledgeable of. You know, he was a mining engineer, He spoke five languages, he was very well versed in world history and war and all these things. But in the matters of the heart, he was, you know, an infant. He wasn't able to have healthy functioning relationships and really in very in any capacity, i'd say, across the board. So it was tough. It was tough. And I feel like in many ways, as I, you know, went through my awakening, uh I, I understood the perfection of it all, of having the father and mother that I did, and of feeling feeling the pain of having no higher power, no creator, no cosmic order to this and having to go without that and not being able to really makes sense of reality other than like we're all fucked. This is just it is what it is. You know. Everybody lives the way they want and that's it. And and I followed that dictate to my own demise, right seeking, pleasure, seeking, the status, seeking, you know, to be perceived as someone because on the inside I felt like nothing, I felt worthless. To what ends do you feel like you had to go to to to cope with that bleakness and that hopelessness and the futility, Like where did that take you? You know? It was fun at first, you know, it took me into I would say the rave scene, the party scene, which really did expand and open my world. You know, some of these antheagens, these these you know drugs as they were, uh they did, like MDMA for one, you know, ecstasy. It did kind of give me the sense of wow, like this feels amazing and I've never felt like this before, and it is this, This is possib this feeling is love, right, this is like something I've never felt before. And even being in that scene, you know, there's a camaraderie that forms with others. You know, there's a sense of belonging to these groups of people that you know, we share the interest of partying and maybe some other stuff. But like, I feel like it started out fun, you know, it was it was partying, It was good fun. But then it increasingly I declined or degraded, I would say, into like more of the you know, dependent upon the drugs. Right, there was more of a seeking of that of like going harder, of going deeper, of going further, and that brought me into addiction, the depths of addiction. And it was then that I realized that even though I knew it was harming me, I wasn't able to resist often. There was that time I believe that I had a strong mind and that I could make choices for myself. But it was addiction that really humbled me and had me doubting myself because before that, I really, you know, I think somewhere along the line, I did start to believe that I had something in me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I would. I was willing to take risks, you know. I felt a sense of deeper confidence that wasn't coming from the outer I didn't know how to articulate that that that was the soul that I am expressing itself and feeling like there's more underneath the surface that I'm still uncovering. But through that and being humbled by not being in control, basically of losing control of my own will and volition to make choices for myself that would either harm myself or better myself, that's really where where the where that worldview collided, right, because it was like now here, I am no God, no religious construct, no structure, really left my own devices right, like I can do whatever I want, and in that not having like an ethical true north, not having a path forward that I could say I'm starting here and this is where I want to go because you know, in my early twenties, a lot of my friends they went off into their four year schools, and I ended up, you know, going to jail, you know, and I was arrested for possession for sales and had my first experience in jail, in a county jail and men's Central Jail in LA which is a full experience in and of itself, just to be in that world, to be around, you know, people who are facing twenty five to life or murder, or being around gang members and experiencing their mindset, and you know, even having you know, people that are much older in in you know, and encountering them and it's like, wow, I'm seeing if I stay on this path, you know. And it seemed like that the people that were around me were progressively getting I would say, the outlook on life was getting more and more cut throat and more and more bleak. You know, there's a lot more of the you know, criminal element. As I started going deeper and deeper into my addiction, so you know, not having a creator at the core and running away from my traumas, which is ultimately what you know, addiction was for me, it was like I didn't want to feel the pain of disconnection that I felt. I felt this emptiness inside gnawing at me of why don't I feel connected to anything deeply? Why don't I feel connected and able to access what it seems like other people around me, my peers, are able to access in the in the emotional sphere, and in the sphere of even desiring greater things for themselves that were not like just fleeting boyhood fantasies of how having more power and more fame or more status in the depths of our addiction, I think both Darren and I did a lot of a lot of other drugs, but at its core it was pills for us. What was it for you? And just how bad did it get? Yeah? It was for me it was meth amphetamine crystal, and it got really bad. I think at my when I was arrested, I was on like a four day binger and I was I I'm six three and so at this time I was, I believe, one hundred and seventeen pounds. Yeah, yeah, And so in losing myself like in like having no I would say spiritual north star, having no connection or at least conscious connection of of myself with the Creator and and and that I'm a part of this magical, wondrous universe. I just I started destroying myself because I think at the core of that belief is I'm unworthy, I'm unlovable. There's these things that I interpreted as a boy from my environment that I carried over. And you know, it crossed a point where a lot of my friends that were around me, because I always was fortunate to have very good groups of people around me. However, at a certain point my friends started letting me know, like, I can't support where you're going. I can't You're not like who you were. Because I started losing I think pieces of maybe what made me me, and it's always all stripped away. I feel like that was necessary in a sense of this stripping away of identity, of sense of self so that I can come to the rock bottom and really like, that's really what initiated my awakening and my connection to God was a prayer. It was that prayer of sinking so low into my own self, hatred, into addiction. You know, I had so much shame that I couldn't break out out of the addiction because I was living I was really living a double life because I was still, you know, working full time and doing my best attend to my responsibilities to my family, my mother and my two sisters at the time, and I was the quote unquote man of the house. You know, I had left when I was nineteen, I had left home. But then when I was twenty three, my mother reached out and said, we need help. You know, we're still in this two bedroom apartment. You know, we grew up in from middle school, and they're still in this two bedroom department apartment not the best side of town, and they were struggling. And I had kind of gone off on my own to like live my life, and my mom reaches out and says, you know, we need your help. And I had a relatively decent I T job at the time, and so since I was doing pretty poorly at the time, I was like, you know what, maybe this is best. And so I said, okay, yeah, I'll come and we can move out and find a place together and we can help my sister who had schizo effective disorder, which is kind of like a cross between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and so she was hearing voices. She was like on six different meds. It was intense to witness her journey, but it was in moving back in with my family and saying, this is what's going to make me quit the addiction. I'm gonna I have my family that needs me, I'm going to be able to quit the drugs and help them. And in not being able to do that and breaking the promise to myself, I just felt so much shame. You know, I felt a lot of shame because I had already been to jail, I'd already been through all that, and I, you know, I climbed my way out just on my own accord. I you know, started going to the gym. I quit the addiction for a time, and I started working out, in eating right and running and doing all these things were good for me. I you know, built up my way to like two hundred pounds. I felt very strong, very fit, and then I fell back in. I relapsed, and it took me, took me down. It took me down. I was in a really bad headspace, and ultimately I came to the point of really thinking about ending my life a lot. I started at first, it started out as ideation, as kind of this like that's maybe what I need to do. You know. It started out from that point to like getting to a really dark place where one night it was like, that's what I need to do, that's the solution to everything. Like here I am being a burden to society, being a burden to my family, even though that wasn't the case because I was financially providing, I was helping out my family. But it's that distorted perspective of self and of life that you know, it really kind of twisted the knife into me, into my heart and into my soul, and so I just felt I felt the intensity of feeling just worthless, of feeling all that shame, of feeling like I didn't deserve to live, and that brought me the point of, you know what, let me do the world, and let me do my family a favor, let me just end my life. That was That was it. That was it, And being in that place and really resigning myself to death, resigning myself to non existence, because that's what I thought death would bring, just non existence. I don't exist anymore. I'm just gone, right. But it was in that experience where I was I set out to end my life. I was alone in my room, I had my knives, and I was ready to go, and I started grieving. I started grieving my life and what was and what could have been, and just started feeling devastated to have to leave, but even knowing that this is the only way, and then coming to a point where something deep within me cried out. It wasn't even like my voice. It wasn't even it didn't feel like me at the time, because I wasn't living in my heart and soul, and so I feel it was the deeper part of me cried out to God, cried out to the creator and said, God, if you're real, I need to know. And it was this prayer from the depths of me, because I was determined to end my life that night, and I feel like it was this last stitch effort from my soul to say, hey, we're going the wrong way. And in calling out and saying that prayer and making that prayer from my depths, God responded. God responded, and I was enveloped in a vibrating energy that I'd never experienced before. It was I've never experienced anything like this, and it was so foreign at first that I didn't even know what it was. It felt like this like really fast vibration that was just outside of me. At first that I perceived it as feeling my room this vibrating energy, and it kind of tripped me out at first because I was like, what is this? And then it came inside me and washed away in that instant all the grief, all the agony, all the pain, all the chaos that was swirling in me, and it was just like calm. It was just absolute peace. And I just started sobbing. I just started sobbing as I was held by the Creator. It felt like being held by an all loving mother and father. I describe it as it felt like I was I was now a little baby and I was just being cradled like I had never been cradled in my life. And I just wept. I wept in joy, I wept in gratitude, and I gave my life to God. I said, don't ever leave me. And it was communicating, wasn't I wasn't verbalizing this. It was just all internal and so being able to communicate and be heard and receive responses was it fundamentally transform my perception of the world, a perception of life, and perception of myself Because suddenly where I felt absolutely worth, worthless one moment about to end my life, and then to be saved and to be held and to be loved, and to be reminded that I'm not alone and that God loves me, that I am loved, and to feel that love, right, we hear it in words, but to feel it in this all consuming energy and to feel it in my heart. You know, that's really the powerful That was the most powerful part of it is that it gave me access to my heart because before, you know, maybe I'd feel what I thought was love on ecstasy or in certain infatuations relationally, but this was something different. There was something that my soul recognized, something deeper, and it left an indelible mark upon me and completely shifted my trajectory in life. I love, love, love how much you and we will probably continue to talk about God, and I know for some people that will be really inspired and some maybe triggered or uncomfortable. But that's even more reason to keep talking about it. But I'm just curious for you, this idea or as it commit came in, was not through any type of structured religion, right, So maybe you can talk a little bit about that and what or who God is to you today. Yeah, I feel like that was probably the only path into relationship with God for me in this life. It took me about to leave this earth to reach out and so maybe that speaks to something from the past, you know, past lives. Maybe I was really stubborn. I'm a Taurus in this life, so maybe there I do have that stubborn element and to experience that level of redemption for me in my own room and in this I've been experienced that I didn't tell anybody for so many years. It was just a part of my path and I was very alone as I left off the world of drugs and partying and just like recklessness and then started to write my life bit by bit. But it was really experiencing God, not only from that experience, but knowing that now now that I understood, and I started exploring the different world religions from that point of having a direct experience, now I was able to connect so many dots as I started exploring and praying with different houses of worship, you know, visiting the Christian churches, visiting different Hindu temples, going to the Buddhist sanctuaries, you know, just having having the desire, the genuine desire now to search and understand. Okay, now that I know that God is real, let me see what everybody's talking about and feel what they do like to connect with God. Because now that I've connected with God so deeply and I feel that God's a part of me forever, I want to continue to do my part to cultivate that relationship, to lean into the source of my existence and the source of all existence. There's nothing more important than for me to align with the source of all existence. And so that led me on a big quest and journey to study the different world religions and to practice them so that I could feel what it was like to pray with different peoples because there's so much religious divide still. You know, Christian see things very this way, Islam sees it very this way. But it's like, well, we're all talking about God, right, or it's all it's all coming back to the source of all of this, right, there's all There can only be one. And I think that in our humanness we missed the point. Sometimes we missed the mark. And so I think coming from a place where I was void of all of that religious programming and indoct nation. I was just kind of a slate. But then it came to life with that direct experience of God, of love, of the divine, Now things that resonate with the love that I experienced. It was like, boom, that's that's true. Yes, I know that's right. And then there was one stuff that like, I'm like, oh, that doesn't that doesn't resonate, that doesn't feel like the God that I experienced, That doesn't feel like the God that I experienced. Why would God say that or expect this? And so I kind of had a true north that was that was aligned by the Creator in my direct experience and through studying the different world religions. I think it gave me breadth because I had the depth of experience from that first mystical experience that changed me. But now I needed to cultivate the breadth of understanding of what was out there in the world and like kind of cross correlate, like is this resonate, does this feel true? Does this make sense? Is this a cohesive way that I can deepen my relationship with the Creator, or does it feel like there's like some kind of outer standard that is imposed that I feel like a lot of religions kind of do you know in how they've kind of degraded over thousands of years to like these outer expectations rather than the inner lived experience of what it is to be in union with God, to be in love with God. And since God exists within everybody, right, God is growing in everyone and everything in all life, how am I showing up in all of my relationships? And how am I showing up in my relationships with nature? And so what it really did was it forced me to make an inventory of how I had been up to that point and to do my best to begin to rectify these kind of character defects that came from not having that blueprint, not having the map to understand how to live a righteous life, to live in alignment. And so there began a period of deep, deep self exploration and honesty. Or I had to own take ownership for a lot of the ways I had been out of integrity and how I had hurt a lot of people because I really didn't have that ethical north star. I didn't have that handed to me, and the way that my parents modeled love to me was very dysfunctional, and so I hurt a lot of people along the way, and finding God for me helped me reconcile the mistakes I had made in my ignorance, in my own pain, and then to have the resolve to go out step by step, bit by bit and change that. And so a lot of the old people that I used to hang out with, and a lot of my friends from school when they met me after everything, like, you know, people don't really change. That's like I think a belief out there. People don't really change. But they're like, wow, you've really changed, You've really changed. And I took that as a big encouragement, you know, because now my inner world was starting to align with the outer world in a way which brought greater which brought greater harmony, and there was just greater flow. You know. It wasn't just like me getting my way and going after what I wanted or desired. It was looking for the high the highest outcome in every different situation. And sometimes it's like, you know, driving by someone and their cars broken down, and we have that split second to make a decision. Am I going to show up and help this person that looks like they could use some help. They're standing out there looking bewildered or am I just going to drive by and think someone else will get it? And so it gave me that the impetus to just take action and help in whatever way I could to really serve. And so that really started this like informal training of really practicing what I felt in my heart, of really having so many opportunities to just try my best to help people and sometimes you know, it didn't work out. I learned a lot of lessons and trying my best to help everyone I could, and realized through the process that I can't help everybody. I can do my best to help who At this point I cultivated wisdom to know who I can help and who I really can't help. Like life has to sometimes teach people before they're ready to learn, right before they're open enough to be guided. That's that's so powerful because I feel like a lot of I mean, I needed an experience that was you know, devastating in its own right, but ultimately led me to experience God. I had to go through addiction, I had to go through a transaction almost a transactional relationship with God earlier in my life to where I felt like if I did a certain amount of things I would get blessings in return or if I do something to be good enough in God's presence. But your story and your narrative is shattering that because you're freeing somebody from that and allowed him to say, like, at my most broken form, at my most shameful, at my most depressed, that's where God wants to meet me the most. That's where he wants to love me the most. And that's so powerful because even with me, I feel like I've cultivated relationship with God and I feel like we're in alignment, but it's almost like we just like do business together, and like I I've done so much, I've caused a lot of pain, I've acted so much in a way before that's like, I know God created me, and he placed these abilities and these gifts in me, and he knows he can do work through me, but he can't possibly like love me like through all that, and I'm still trying to find that out. And it's it's like it's in hearing you say that, it's just it's it's shattering my own conception of God too, because I still see him in this a bit of a punitive form, if that makes sense. That to completely make sense, because I think so much of the west from world was raised with you know, this Christian Old Testament God, and there's the New Testament God that Jesus really came to flip on its head, like to be like no, like love your neighbor as yourself, you know, do good unto others, and to really kind of flip the old paradigm on its head at the time. But that was also two thousand years ago, you know. And something's change, and something's never change. And the things that never change are the timeless principles of what it is to be a good human and to follow, what it is to follow Christ, right, what it is to awaken like the Buddha. You know, different teachers from around the world. You know, they came and they you know, religions form around them. But they didn't come to start a religion. They came to help humanity. Remember that that's our path that we're walking. That these are our older brothers and sisters, and we have to follow their example. And they come with these teachings and these ways of being that leave a mark on the earth, right thousands of years ago, and we're still going to churches, we're going still going to the temples. We're still talking about these divine expressions. You know that the Son of God, daughters of God. And what I found interesting in my search through all the different world religions is there's generally this point of revelation, be it a prophet or an avatar like Christ or the Buddha or Krishna and avatar being they came with a specific mission on earth to help humanity turn back towards God because things were becoming you know, dogmatic religion was going cold, right, it wasn't It was no longer serving humanity to continue our evolution. And so really having the foundation to understand that even at our worst, God loves us beyond our capacity to understand. God loves us unconditionally, and that unconditional love is it doesn't mean like unconal permission to do wherever the fuck we want, right, And that's why pain is a teacher. We experience pain, suffering, and disappointment to the degree that we need to be broken open. Our hearts need to be broken open, and we need to be humbled to understand that we're being called into a deeper alignment. We're being called to perhaps a higher station of life, and it might not necessarily look like what we think it's going to look like. Right, That's what I learned and I still continue to learn because we have it all all mapped out. At a certain point we're like, Okay, this is what I do. I'm going to get this. It's all going to work out. And sometimes we need to be humbled, and we need to be broken down so that we can be born anew so that we can recalibrate to the path that our soul is really here to live. And I know that for me, there was a lot of resistance, and there's still this occasional resistance that I'm unconscious of, you know. But it's through that yearning and that longing to know God more and to love God more that keeps me deepening my alignment because I know that when pain comes, I need to listen. If it comes and I'm not able to hear the whisper and then it comes in the shouts and I'm ignoring the shouts, then it might come with a you know, a swift kick knocking me off my feet that makes me freeze and go, Okay, I need to take stock of the situation because clearly I'm not a tune right now to God. I'm not listening to what God wants of me. You mentioned something earlier about semantic past, and I know the importance of really getting clear on the emotional intelligence and the destruction or the emotional inheritance and the destructive behavior that it can cause. So to maybe somebody that isn't aware of semantic past or what that means, or emotional dysfunction, generational dysfunction, can you just talk about that a little more. Yeah, you know, it's called different things. I call it, you know, generational cycle of trauma or generational curse, because that's what it really is. You know, epigenetically, it's handed down to us lifetime after lifetime through the generations, through our father and our mother and their parents and their parents and depending on what they went through. You know, that gets into the DNA, It gets into the literal Their nervous systems and our nervous systems wire based on our environment. Right, they sync up with our environment so that we can survive, So we can know, this is what I can expect, and this is how I need to navigate reality because this is the quality of life. It is. So if during a war. You know, things are scarce, there's famine. You know, people are on edge, and it's not you know, then that's the nervous system that we're getting so that we can have the best chance of survival, you know, And that doesn't just eliminate after one generation, and it carries on, It carries on. You know, we are I think we are all of us came we were already in our I think it was in our grandmother right and our grandmother's womb. We are in our in her eggs. I think it goes back at least three generations, but even beyond that of just the norms of our family of origin and beliefs and expectations and how that can carry on and potentially limit us and the expression that we want to have. And so you know, really trauma is any experience that was too much for us to integrate. It was overwhelming, and so we went into a state of fight flight or freeze. But think about being born into a family that's in state the state of fight flight or freeze. That's the nervous system we inherit. That's that was the nervous system I inherited. Like life is hard, things are scarce, people are mean, and yes, of course there's those those moments of light, of tenderness of love. It wasn't as there's a lot of others out there who have experienced way worse, but mine was at least intense enough where it felt like a burden from a very early age. And so children shouldn't be feeling a massive burden in life. Ideally, optimally, you know, for further optimal thriving, we should ideally live in a place of security, of calm, of peace. And we can look at a lot of other countries and they don't necessarily have a ton of wealth, but they can still have access to joy and togetherness and unity because a lot of them, you know, they might be connected to their culture. Right, there's these cultural blueprints that support us in our thriving. But in America, you know, there's a there's kind of a lot of different things going on, a lot of things that can be confusing. And so coming from a biracial household, my mother from the East, my father from the West, that was already a collision of world views, right, masculine and feminine, it's it's it's a coming together. And in my case, at least there was a kind of a dysfunctional relationship between the masculine and feminine. You know, My father was very patriarchal, very dominant, controlled my mother in various ways. And my mother, you know, and she was also very emotional, so she did have the storm aspect. But being in this environment where it's like the accumulation of generations of stuff, of gunk of hardship and it's just like kind of being on a pressure cooker, you know, it felt like just walking on eggshells, like a false step could result in pain. And so it was already like there in the ether, and it wasn't that hard for it to come through in a physical way. And so having to work through that kind of emotional burden or baggage was a big part of my work after having my awakening experience, because it didn't just go away. After my awakening with God and experiencing what unconditional love is, experiencing what true peace and calm is, I had the contrast to know, wow, I'm nowhere near that in my day to day. I could be in nature and still not fully at ease. And so it took me years of intensive meditation, of intensive prayer, of spending time in nature and disconnecting from like the media, the TV, the partying and all those things that kind of detox And then I came to a point of losing my younger sister to suicide, losing my sister Shanna to suicide, and that was It was devastating. That was a very devastating experience. And I believe that the only thing that kept me and helped me be the man that I was at the time was God, because now I had a place to turn to when it felt like it was too much. And I didn't question God's will. I didn't say this is wrong and the shouldn't have happened. I started from a place of acceptance, knowing that God is in control of all things and that nothing happens without divine sanction. And God even showed me a vision of it happening a year before it happened, and it was, you know, she jumped off a building in this vision that I had, and in the vision I jumped off after her because and I teleported after I died, quote unquote died. But then now suddenly I got teleported to this like kind of no man's land, like this in between where now I was like, oh no, I don't have a body anymore, and I'm just stuck here. And I was like this awful realization of like, oh no, I'm stuck here. And from that point the day that it happened, I was guided and this was all in retrospect. In the moment, I had no idea. I was just living in the moment. But I was sharing with my sister how much we loved her. I was saying all these things and letting her know that we're going to be here no matter what, We're not going to give up on her. And I'd just been fresh out of addiction. I had a year sober at that point, and I just put was putting all my energy into trying to help her because I was like, if God help me, God's gonna help her. And I like that was like where I was kind of like not seeing the creator and the Creator's will and how things unfold clearly, because it was really like, I need to save my sister. That's why God. Part of why God saved me so that I can save my sister. But in losing her, in you know, having to say goodbye, and in really being pulled down into the underworld, because that's really what it plunged us into in my family, because my mother was so hell bent on saving her of like we need to save her, we need to save her. And I feel like almost in some ways that like need to like try to save hers. Why in some ways, maybe God took her because it wasn't helping or serving any of us in our growth, because we are hyper focused on trying to save my sister, and and it was meant to be. And that brought us into healing that that tragedy was a tragedy of losing my younger sister ultimately is what pushed me really because they're so low, they lost their jobs. I was carrying the family on my shoulders and the finances and everything, and they were not functioning, and so I could pulled us. I pulled us into the briefment support groups, you know, I pulled us into family therapy and and found a space for them to cry and and for us to you know, feel the compassion of someone else that was just fair kind of as a rock. And through that process I got into my own therapy and then I started that really started deepening my healing journey of an acceleration of my self awareness. So it really came together with my spiritual beliefs and practices, but also really doing my work to clear out the somatic my somatic body right, to really do the work to break those generational cycles that were momentums that were like pushing me in a certain direction, and so really and like kind of putting a pause and beginning to do that work that's deeper self work. It inspired so much transformation not only within me, but within others because it really kind of said, oh wow, this is so powerful to heal and to feel love from another person, to feel compassion from another person, to feel their humanity. It's a it's a game changer. It's a game changer. It literally flipped everything and expanded my world even further. And that's really what gave me, like kind of the direct experience of God and others, of experiencing God within others as like the right words would come through and touch a deep places as I felt someone just being there listening, support, being selfless and holding that space for me and me being able to receive that. It change just a nervous system, right, because we begin internalizing these safe people, you know, these in these spaces where we feel safe and it helps us coregulate. Suddenly our nervous system is being regulated, and yeah, and and finding safety in another I feel like it's it's pretty crucial to be able to feel that first, and then we can find help other people find that safety once we can find it within ourselves. But how can we find it within ourselves if we don't have someone else that can model that for us or show us in a human in human form, what it is to be calm, to be loving. Wow, that word safety really in the last year, it's been about a year, has run very very deep for me. And you guys are talking about your paths and spirituality and path to God. My so ten years into my sobriety, I ended up doing a ceremonial buffo code medicine journey, and my intention and doing the journey was to get closer to God and really developed that that relationship because for ten years I was talking to talk and mean, I was praying and meditating, but it was lacking the depth and kind of some of that transactional stuff Darren was talking about. And as I entered into the medicine and left my body, I did not see God, but I felt the presence of God and as I dropped in, it was in a ceremony of about five people, and I started saying out loud, I'm safe, I'm safe, and I repeated it four or five times, and the shaman called me in to go first. It was five people that had never done it before, so they not only did they get to witness that and me verbalizing it, but I felt held. I felt safe. I felt, and my intention was to get closer and I felt and not necessarily saw, but felt everything that I needed to. And I was like, oh my god, Everything's going to be fine. Everything I've done my whole life was to feel safe, all about nation Karen, what other people think, and I'm like, I'm good. And as I came back and integrated, it just made me realize how many, how everybody is going through this world just trying to feel safe, and us as men don't have to worry about going out to our car at ten o'clock at night and worried about feeling safe. So then it gave me a whole another perspective around women and safety. And so it's just been a big thing for me about holding sacred space. And I know you're doing that, and I want to make sure we leave enough time to talk about the unbelievable work you're doing, the men's work with sacred sons. Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for presencing the importance of safety and our responsibility as men to create those safe, sacred spaces for transformation to happen. And so really have been immersed in men's work for the past seven years, I would say, And it happened kind of by happenstance, of course, as it would where I was invited to facilitate a men's prayer circle. It was there was a call putting out at the time of Standing Rock, where the Standing Rock sue, we're facing off with the Dakota Access Pipeline. They are wanting to build a pipeline, oil pipeline through the reservation, and the indigenous people's uh you know, from all over the world gathered at Standing Rock to say no, to say enough is enough, and there was a standoff between the police and between the indigenous peoples and who are all gathering, And so there was a call put out by the elders at Standing Rock that men's and women's prayer circles be created and that we pray for the water protectors, we pray for the ones who are standing up. And I was invited to co facilitate the ceremony from my brother mine at the time, and he he blessed me in that sense of really giving me a space where I could bring in some of these Western psychological perspectives and techniques and ways of facilitating that I had learned through my undergraduate experience in facilitating you know, these pretty much growth therapy groups, and I was on my way to become a therapist, but being able to weave in what I had learned through studying, you know, these different tools and techniques of helping people heal that we're not. You know, I was not of the psychiatric perspective after my sister and seeing what happened with my sister, but you know, really seeing that we are the medicine and that we can really hold a space and lead others into safety. We can lead others and create the context that they can feel safe enough to express the parts of themselves that they didn't get to express perhaps in their childhood or along the way to their their adulthood. And it's many of these I think failures of the environment I don't know. There's it's no one's to blame at the end of the day, no one's to blame. But there is a responsibility that we have as men to shift culture, to shift our environments by being that safe and grounded space. But how can we be that safe and grounded space when it wasn't modeled for us, or if we've never experienced one, And so unless we experienced it along the way through our family of origin or through a mentor, or through an uncle or an aunt or someone that could give us that blueprint of what it is to feel safe in another's presence, to feel protected, then we kind of go off piecing together, piecing life together in a way of like what we think we should do, what we want to do, but also the somatic embodiment of what we are energetically, like what is our ancestral inheritance? Is what kind of traumas are we carrying from this lifetime from birth to where we stand today? And are we effectively integrating all though that energy in such a way that we can radiate the peace, the calm, the safety, the inspiration to love, the compassion that really humanity, that that's our birthright, Like what God teaches us is that we are created in God's image, and this has said in many different ways around the world. You know, it's not only from the Christian faith, is from all faiths that we are created in God's image. And so what that means is we have the capacity to develop these qualities in us. And that's why there for me, there's no automatic salvation. It's our responsibility as men and as women and as humans to cultivate our higher faculties, to refine our consciousness so that we can support the evolutions, you know, whether that's our own children, whether that's in our purpose work, whether that's out on the field, you know, wherever that is, to be able to bring that cultivation and into the environment. That's what brings balance. And that's really our responsibility as anchors right as men, where we can anchor a certain energetic to an environment, and that could be a positive or a negative. Right we can bring we can bring anger, we can bring ankst we can bring fear, we can bring terror, We can bring a lot of things as men, and we just want to look at examples from throughout time, war right, genocide. We are capable of the darkest of things and we're also capable of the most beautiful of things, and so it really is our prerogative. I believe to find orientation around the core of life, which is the Creator, which is God, which is the source of all existence. And our closest example is simply nature, because nature is creation. It's God's creation, and it's it's just a continual giving, it's radiating its peace. And if we spend enough time in nature, it's one of the greatest teach as I'm sure you both can attest to, and anybody who's given it. It's due time we can connect to the Creator more readily through nature or through you know, or a baby. Right. Babies are great examples because they're straight, they're straight from source, and they're when they're well fed and well slept and we're holding them. You know, I have a newborn, my son, Zion, my number three. When I'm holding him and he's just smiling at me, I'm just looking in his eyes and it feels like I'm just being submerged into the depths of love and I'm just here. There's nothing else, just him and I and it's this sacred experience that it's like this is God. You are God, and I'm experiencing God through you, my son, and I'm just feeling that interconnectedness that like I'm my father's son, but I'm also the Great Father's son, as we all are as men. And so that's what really inspired the creation of Sacred Sons. Was my first son, Cairo. You know, two days after he was born, I was leading a group of sixty four men in exercises that I was creating on the fly because I had that intention and desire and I'd never facilitated that large of a group, but it was just coming through, I'm gonna do this. I'm going to lead them in this way. And by through the process, you know, I saw them and their walls were coming down. They were crying, they're seeing each other, they're bracing, they're feeling love, they're feeling safety, and they're feeling permission to bring all of them out rather than like how much as men we feel like we need to censor ourselves or show up in a certain way. But if that's not a true natural being and it's bravado or it's this like provisional personality, these adaptations we've learned to use to survive, to get cloud whatever it is, then that energetic is going to lead to suffering for ourselves or for another because it's not in true alignment with the Creator. And so I feel like as men are, first step is coming back to our hearts where the Creator dwells, coming back to our hearts, coming back to nature, coming back to love within ourselves. But the only way to do that is to reckon with the darkness, to face the shadows, to face the ways we've been out of alignment, the ways we've lied, stolen, hurted, cheat, like all the ways that we've been out of integrity and caused harm to life. To really do that fearless self inventory. You know, they do this in AA and a lot of twelve step programs. I had never gotten into AA, but it was a part of my spiritual path of There's a toll Tech tradition called recapitulation where you go through your whole life and find all the times where you had been out of integrity, and then you recreate the situation as you would now and you go through your whole life doing that, and it's they say it cleanses your luminosity, So you're cleansing your energy, You're cleansing your soul of all the misdeeds and replacing those misdeeds with the right deeds. So now you're clear about how to be in alignment. And so that's the first step as men and as I think humans in general, is coming into alignment with our source. Right, that's our that's our true north. And if we have a true north that's not rooted in the Creator, that's actually born of this world and born of the you know, the creations of man, then we're going to be off the mark. And that's what like, that's sinning, right, to miss the mark, that's what it really means to sin, like the etymology of the word right, that's what it what it meant originally, to miss the mark. And so if we want to be on mark, on our target, and for me, the target is to embody as much love, as much peace, as much wisdom, and to share it with as many as I can and to really kind of be that alchemy of spirit and matter, because I know I'm this soul on this energy that it resides in this body right now, and I know based on my sisters, how abruptly my sister's life was taken away, that my life could end just this suddenly, that I don't have a guarantee on tomorrow, and so I do my best to live each day as if it was it would be a good day to die. And of course I want to live a very long life. But the indigenous Native Americans that would have a saying, they say today is a good day to die, especially when they went off to war, you know, gave them that courage to move forward without thought of their own life so that they could be effective in war. And there's that understanding that in some ways I don't want to use that analogy of war for our life. But there are outer principalities which are not for God. And while the core of it, all there is is God, all there is is the Creator, because anything that's outside of the Creator isn't even real. But while we're in these bodies, while we're in this three D world and it feels very real, I want to show up in a way that demonstrates my three children, my sons, what it is to be a man and up with responsibility, to show up with love, to show up with courage, and to stand for freedom right our our human freedom. And that's really and a foundation of God. Is freedom, is feeling free, is feeling free, And I experience that more and more as I'm as I'm expanding, and I want I want that for my sons, I want that for humanity because I think so many of us, myself included, in the past, felt like I grew up in a prison. I felt like I grew up like with so much baggage and weight on my shoulders. And so to be able to help men lighten their load a little bit, because once we lighten our load and we work through some of that trauma, it opens up a space within our somatic body to now start perceiving and experiencing life in a whole new way. We're finding more joy, more levity. Right, there's so much joy simply in existence, and it can be very very serious and bleak and like, I don't know how much longer I want to be here kind of energy unless we make space in our somatic bodies that we can really play, so play doesn't feel like it's has to be forced, so we can actually genuinely play like little children and feel that freedom and wonder and joy just to simply be in these bodies on this beautiful earth. I could go on so man, you're really painting a beautiful picture, the ultimate comeback story. I feel like, I would say, from a hopeless life, oblique life to the most broken parts of your story, where that love and compassionate as deepest form came to meet you there and then propel you from there to be love and something that I feel like has inspired somebody today. That's something we can take away the fact that from their pain, from their suffering, that there is something great that can form from that when they feel like nothing is possible. So we appreciate you. I appreciate you for coming on here and sharing just the depths of your story. Man, thank you for the space, Thank you for the time. Brothers. Yeah, I'll better. This was so powerful, man, I knew this would go deep. And for anybody listening, even if you're maybe a female listening and you want to pass this along this episode to as many men as possible, it would help. But I think it also helps the female to understand also the importance of this work, whatever your race or your gender is so the way that you articulate things and just to attach the proper meaning to all of the struggle and the pain and the loss of your sister, the east and the west of Mom and Dad and how it's collided. It's like all brought you to this space of great wisdom and you're doing great things. Man, So thank you so much for showing up and sharing your heart and telling your story. Yeah, yeah, thank you so much. Brothers. It's time, you know that we can bring masculine and feminine together and the perfect yin yang, you know. And that's really the evolution of my work beyond Sacred Sons, is unifying the masculine and the feminine and creating the spaces for us men who have been in the path and for the women who are ready to be met, to come together in the sake of reunion as I call it, because it's a prayer, it's a prayer or collective, you know, from all the pain that we see out there, that we need spaces where we can come together and unify men and women from all backgrounds. It's time to unify. Where can our listeners track you down? Yeah, they can check out my instagram which is Albert Bostia and Albert Bostia dot com as well. I'm sure you guys can put in the show notes that we got these on these modern devices. Yeah, we'll get we'll get you dialed in and again, if you're listening, thank you for listening. Be sure to stay connected with us always. 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