I hope you enjoy this episode. Marty and I just began talking and, uh, fortunately we'd hit record. We hadn't decided yet whether or not we were going to record an episode, but we normally meet on Wednesday afternoons and, and we'll start out by just saying, how, how are you? How's your week been going? And it'll eventually work into a conversation that then, then we hit record and say, Hey, we should be recording this. And it ends up being one of the episodes of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching. So I hope you enjoy this. We're going to be talking about the five or the we're going to be talking about stages of personal development that I've identified in a book that I'm writing, and it was really fun to have Marty follow along with these different stages in the way that I'd named them to find how in his life they correlated. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching.

Bill: So how am I doing?

Bill: I'm doing well. I'm I'm making six monthly payments of 1, 100 to my publisher and I want to make sure that I get this book ready to be published. Within that six months.

Marty: Uh huh.

Bill: and so I want, I want as much time as I can get to, to be working on my book

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: books, pretty much written already. In fact, I've got at least 50 percent more content than I need for the book already.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: what I'm doing now is I'm just going through. And organizing the work, determining what content I want to keep and what, what content I don't, you know, one of the things that we might hit record on and begin to talk about, and this would be very helpful to me around writing my book, is the organization of a chronological timeline around the stages and events of my own personal development, because I think they might be universal. And so that was interesting, and I had written a piece about the work of Byron Katie and IFS, and as I'm writing about it, it becomes pretty clear to me, oh, Byron Katie came in at a particular stage.

Bill: That I'm calling awakening.

Marty: Okay. Mm hmm.

Bill: Getting sober came in at a stage that I'm calling stabilization.

Bill: IFS came in at a stage that I'm calling healing.

Marty: Can I write these down? Awakening.

Bill: The first stage is, um, what I've been calling loss of self.

Marty: Law. Okay, that comes before awakening.

Bill: Yes.

Marty: Okay.

Bill: Loss of self, and then stabilization actually comes next.

Bill: And then awakening.

Marty: Okay.

Bill: And then healing.

Bill: That's how I'm identifying it now.

Bill: And, and I'm thinking that I might want to organize my book accordingly.

Marty: Mm. I like that.

Bill: It makes sense, doesn't it?

Marty: I wonder if like reading or, or paging through, um, Michael Singer, his first book to the end of the third book, if you would find this pattern or maybe reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, if you'd find this same, you know, he loses himself. And, and, and then gets stabilized and then awakens and heals and grows.

Marty: I wonder where, where else could you look for this pattern? I, I'm, and now I'm looking for just for myself, like, okay. Loss of self. I can see that as I'm finishing my graduate degree and going, Oh my God, I'm not doing this. What am I doing? Stabilization I got a part time job in New York city. I had friends there. Things were stabling out, putting money in the bank.

Marty: And then I met Guru Mai, Awaken. Right. Then the healing began and how do you mark off when the healing is done and growth starts?

Bill: Well, I think it's different for everybody. Um, I don't think I was capable of growing until I'd healed enough.

Marty: That makes sense.

Marty: You know, like if you're, you just came off the battlefield and you're, you know, shocked holes through, you had to heal first before you can get up and start growing.

Bill: hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, you're not going to learn anything new. You're not going to be able to exercise and

Marty: Right,

Bill: get, get, get under a four minute mile until you've healed enough.

Marty: right,

Marty: Right.

Marty: Mm

Bill: So it might be growth and development or growth and expansion. I was trying to keep the names of the stages really brief, but for me, the ages were from age 1 to through 27.

Bill: Was, um, losing self, identifying with the shame that I thought I was, and then building up, uh, defenses and facades to hide and improve and change what I had determined was wrong with me. So, first 27 years, I'm in loss of self,

Bill: and that, that probably could be broken down into stages as well, like loss of self, identification with shame, identification with, with a false facade. False identity, um, development of strategies to hide, development of strategies to improve, development of strategies to escape.

Marty: hmm.

Bill: Those were all involved in my loss of self stage, first 27 years of my life.

Bill: Unfortunately, when I look around the world, I believe that the vast majority of people are stuck in loss of self, that they never get out of that stage.

Marty: I agree.

Bill: It is a personal development. It's developing myself personally, but it's completely off, off course and off base.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: I'm developing a false identity. I'm developing a false shame identity.

Bill: I'm developing strategies to cope in a world where I see myself as less than whole, perfectly incomplete, and then have found strategies so that I can convince the world that I'm otherwise.

Marty: You know what else just kicked in, and this is just a side comment, but the story of Hans Knecht in Hesse's The Glass Bead Game fits this pattern,

Bill: Okay.

Marty: and he uses that word awaken for that same thing. And he, he talks, he tries to talk to people, but they don't understand him about transcending. It's going from loss of self to stabilization is a transcendence. And from transcendence to awakening is the transcendence from awakening to healing. You try, he talks about moving, transcending, like almost like rooms you walk through of your life.

Bill: Yes.

Marty: Right. So there's an, there's, I'm just trying to bring other, you know, sources to bear here.

Bill: Mm hmm.

Marty: I'm still not totally clear, and I'm not in doubt or disbelief, but I'm just trying to dis mind, awakening, healing growth. So I guess, I guess like once I met Guru Mai, then I went to work on myself and healing, healing the past and bringing my parents to landmark to do events and that healing process. Right. And growth, I guess, would be once I put down roots, established a business, right. Started to grow and write books and like, I, okay.

Marty: I'm starting to get it now. Okay.

Bill: And by the way, I'm just bouncing this off of you and. Who knows this might end up being an episode that people will listen to. Not because I'm convinced that, that, I've nailed down the best way to identify my personal development journey. I'm certainly not convinced that I, that I've identified anybody's way to, you know, this is my own personal journey.

Bill: There may be other stages and elements of that that people have experienced either that I'm missing or that I experienced and just don't realize how significant they are. But this has come, this is something that's been kind of a seed that was planted. I probably three, four months ago in my mind, like there have been such significant shifts in my life marked by.

Bill: I would say the first one was becoming a father, the day my daughter was born,

Bill: Sarah. Maybe even before that, a significant shift was at the age of 15 years old, my family moved away from the matriarchal center of our family. On dad's side at that time, and when we did, so we moved away from the oppressive influence to be involved in the church, the Catholic church.

Bill: So at 15 years old, becoming detached from the influence of that family and, and having for the first time choice about whether or not I would participate in the Catholic church was huge for me.

Marty: see.

Bill: Getting married to Lori, my first wife, falling in love with her, that was all significant, but I wouldn't say that it marked a shift in my trajectory.

Marty: Yep. I hear you.

Bill: Having my daughter did, because I, who I had, I had been identifying as, my false identity that had been forming, took a huge hit. When my daughter was born because I felt all this love and tenderness for her and I had been around, for me, love had been equal to suffering and pain, both in my marriage and in my childhood with my parents.

Bill: And here's this innocent babe that I can see needs me and exudes this unconditional energy of love that just brought me to tears. And I'm basically, I know I'm a scrawny little guy, but I was this tough guy. My facade at that time was tough guy. And I, I was hard as a rock. I was wiry. I was working in the grocery business 40 plus hours a week.

Bill: So there, I had not an ounce of fat on me and, uh, hanging out at the bars and drinking and chasing women and hunting and doing all this, all the Montana boy stuff. And I have this baby girl with my wife, Lori, and I could, it was almost as if I could, I mean, it was like, I can feel it. I can feel something shifting and shifting internally.

Marty: Hmm.

Bill: This is who I am. This is who I, you know, I started, I kind of got in touch with who I'd always been. I've always loved babies. And here's, I've got my own for the first time. It was an amazing experience.

Marty: And where does that, where, where, where does that fit in this, in this five part development,

Bill: Well, it's probably still within loss of self. However, it was maybe one of my first glimpses.

Bill: Of who, uh, of recovery of self, it, I didn't really leverage it yet. Sarah was, uh, three years old before I got sober. So three years later, after she was born, I got sober. And pretty good chance that what began on her birthday, March 14th, 1979, had, had been brewing and growing roots for three years before I went to my first AA meeting and gotten stayed sober

Bill: Yeah. November 15th, 1982 is the day I got sober. It marks the first day of stabilization stage for me.

Marty: stabilization. Okay.

Bill: Now I didn't,

Marty: I can relate to that because I declared that I was a philosopher of the marketplace before things stabilized, like there was a glimpse. That's like that glimpse that started things brewing. I wasn't stable yet, but I did have that experience. Like, this is me. This is who I am. And then, you know, there was a whole bunch of other subterfuge before I could get around to doing it and being it. But so that I'm fitting your pattern.

Bill: you got a glimpse of who you really were, because it didn't fit into the. framework that you were building around your false identity.

Marty: Right. That's it. Exactly. That was out. It was like the recognition was here, but the outside world had not aligned with that yet.

Bill: Well, and the other level that had to be, at least on an unconscious levels considered or impacted by this glimpse of who you really were was that you had to go rushing right by your fear of who you thought you were.

Marty: What do you mean? I don't, I don't, I don't exactly know what that means.

Bill: So let's see how it applies to you. But my, my theory around this based on my own Personal life and experience is that who I was born as is who I still am and who I am and always have been and always will be as a spiritual being and I'm and I've got this physical experience that I'm having now.

Bill: I mean this body as an infant up to some point. There was never a question in my mind that I was who I was. I wasn't saying, oh wow, look at this body that I've got now. I used to have, I used to just be spirit. Or I used to have a different body than this one. I wasn't aware, in other words, of any transformation at all.

Bill: This was just an experience that I was having. My, I suppose cognitively I hadn't developed to the point where I would question who I was at all, or nor nor would I even be aware that I was, I was anything different than the environment and the people around me.

Marty: Right.

Bill: But at some point as my brain developed, I began to think of myself as separate.

Bill: And when that happened, thinking my of myself as separate from everything and everybody else, that was maybe the first glimpse into the possibility that maybe things were amiss. Maybe I wasn't whole perfectly complete. And once that, I believe, once that settled in as what felt like the truth, in other words, a belief that I am less than whole, perfect, and complete in some way, like I'm stupid, I'm not enough, I'm too much, I'm too demanding, I'm too much trouble, I'm not lovable, whatever, whatever version of that might have been for me at that time, whatever version it would be for anybody else considering this for themselves, that is the moment shame is born. And not just shame, not just a feeling or experience of shame, but an identity of shame. Who I am is too much, not enough. And the moment, and the reason I understand that, I think that makes perfectly good sense to me because, um, and, and Martha Sweezy and Cease Sykes and Richard Swartz in their recent IFS book said it really, really well.

Bill: I'm just looking to see if I still have this up cause I just had it and I was referring to it earlier today. Transcribed It says, Since here it is, since young children read their emotions as important information about themselves, not about others in their environment. Those who experienced neglect or abuse are especially likely to feel responsible for their caretaker's behavior.

Bill: All of that is basically saying the same thing that I'm saying here is that something happens, there's abuse, there's neglect, there's hurt, there's scare. There's something scary that happens. It's uncomfortable. It's painful. I don't want it to happen again. I can't say that there's something wrong with my caretakers, because if I do, then I have to acknowledge that the people that are caring for me and that I'm relying on for my very survival are flawed.

Bill: And I, and then I'm going to be in constant state of anxiety and insecurity, wondering if I'm going to, if they're going to leave me at the, at the train station or something, or if I'm going to be cared for or fed.

Marty: Mm

Bill: So I have to make it about me. And the moment I make it about me, oh, there must be something about me that deserve that thing that scared me or hurt me to happen.

Bill: Therefore, now I've got some hope and power. If it's me, I can hide me. I can change me. I can improve me. I can pretend to be some other me. And that's the false identity. That's just the way that I think about it. So as I explain that to you, does that make more sense? Is that more relatable to you in your life?

Marty: It takes it back further though. The books that I quote and listen on this moment where we have a shame and parts are born. Part of The actual brain development, like there's a, there is a moment in every human being's life around five, six years old, where the two chambers of the brain start to function separately.

Marty: It's called the breakdown of the bicameral mind. That's when we can, and Freud noticed this back in the 19th century. He was like, that's where the child first recognizes thought. He calls it the Fort Dodd distinction over there. I'm not mom anymore. I'm not just one with everything anymore. Now I'm separate. Something happened that showed me I'm different. And so that, you know, that loss of self. If that's the loss of self we're talking about. And I guess it is. It goes all the way back to about five years old.

Bill: Yep.

Marty: And then it takes a while. There are other developmental stages of the physical brain and they go faster for women. It takes men longer, by the way. Just, I mean, that's just the way it is. Um, it's a biological difference. That's why it's always around the age of 21 that men who have it in their genes. Become schizophrenic because that's that last stage of development. And it kicks, it kicks off the difference between those who are going to be psychotic and those who are not. And so that, and that's why we have the driver's age and the drinking age and the voting age. It's not just discrimination, so to speak.

Marty: It's because their brains aren't, our brains are not developed. So stabilization, I would probably say from a, Medical point of view, if I could proffer one. Stabilization can't begin until you're 21 at the earliest ' cause you don't have the fully developed brain yet.

Bill: Yeah. And when I think about my kids, all adult children, they too, like me started showing signs of stabilization in their twenties. All of them.

Marty: Uhhuh.

Bill: Yeah. I'd say my son probably amazingly started much sooner than that. He was in his mid teens when, when it happened for him.

Marty: Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm.

Bill: how that happened, but it did. And, uh, okay. So, so stabilization began for me when I stopped drinking alcohol.

Bill: And what facilitated that and supported that was a shift for me in, in. Addiction process focused on the consumption of alcohol to an addiction process focused on the attendance of meetings. I went from drinking alcohol to going to 2 or 3 meetings a day. It was like a social, I got that hit, that fix, met by, Connecting again, connecting with all these new people

Bill: and the meetings and now my false identity took a different, change and it changed again from the drinker to the sober guy and, and

Bill: that happened pretty quickly.

Bill: I, I just thought of myself as a sober man by the time I was 30 days sober

Bill: and, and, and just getting sober. Was enough to begin to stabilize my life. My life became very predictable in a much different way than it had been predictable before. Now, what was predictable was Bill was going to be in stay sober. And then depending on whose perspective it was around me, people could view me as more or less stable. But as I look back on it, I recognize that that's, that was really the beginning of a stability that I could begin at that point to normalize for my, I could recover from the physical damage that I'd done with my alcoholism.

Bill: I could recover from the mental programming that I had, that I'd had in the drinking world and in the world of, you know, of trauma and violence that I'd come from. I was departed from that, and I was more exposed and oriented now around people who are trying to live by concepts, moral concepts.

Bill: Uh, and then who, who really just celebrated the, uh, successful. Sobriety, successful, moral concepts, turning your will and life over to the care of God, recognizing, acknowledging that I'm only powerful over so many things. And there's things I don't have power over like alcohol and so on and so forth.

Bill: Attempts to actually clean up my mess, make amends in the world where I'd made so much done so much damage, thinking of other people

Bill: and actually having, having that applauded and celebrated that when I would help other people that I would get approval. Whereas in the, in the past, in my old life, I was getting approval for breaking the law and for excessive drinking and for staying out until two or three o'clock in the morning, you know, I'm hanging around with people where we're all kind of bragging about these things that.

Bill: That later in, in, uh, AA and other 12 step meetings, we're, we're laughing about,

Bill: there's still some, some bragging going on there, but, but now it's, it's in the past and we're laughing kind of at ourselves at the same time that we're bragging,

Bill: it's different, but we're stabilized.

Marty: Yeah. I think for me, stabilization began when Robert Durso asked me if I wanted to go to an introduction to the landmark forum.

Bill: Hmm. Mm

Marty: I think that's when it began. It was, it was

Marty: Like 95, 96, somewhere in there. John was there. But he had to go back to Germany. He still had a job there and we'd gotten together with Robert in Philadelphia and his lover was there, um, Stuart. Stuart had already become a seminar leader and they invited us to the Landmark Forum and John was just like, hell no, I'm not doing that. And I, I had that same reaction, but then I called him up later and I said, you know what, I don't know what, where my life is going. I don't know exactly what, you know, I think it would be good for me to do this and to inquire into who I am and what I'm about, and so I went to an intro and it was just like, Oh God, these people, is this really where I'm going? Awakening and healing in this environment. And, um, so that when it came to the moment where you're supposed to, you know, have your, have a conversation to sign, sign the piece of paper. And I was kind of sitting alone. And so this, this landmark person came and sat right next to me and said, what do you think, that kind of thing? And I said, You know what? Don't break the magic. I'm, I'm going to sign up. But if you talk to me, I might not. And so he went away and I went and signed up and but seriously, I shouldn't have told all those details. Uh, that was the, that really was a moment where I, I can, that was such a shift, you know, from being an arrogant academic. To, I need to work on myself. And I really, I opened up, I, I sat there, you know, and just kept opening like, okay, that was stupid, but open up, okay, that's corny, but open up, you know? And I just kept doing that. And on day three, I totally had an awakening.

Bill: Mm

Marty: Like I was, I hadn't, I don't remember being so present. I was like vibrating with, Oh my God, this is the only moment there is this one right here, right now. I was so speechless and, and excited and engaged in life. Like I had never been before. That three day program really It did its job on me for sure.

Bill: Landmark forum.

Marty: Right. And then I spent, and I spent a couple of years stabilizing through the, you know, the, the other programs and, and learning like, okay, what was that big blast on Sunday afternoon in the form?

Marty: What was that really about?

Bill: Mm hmm.

Marty: And, and it was in that period of those years that then a couple of those landmark people said, why don't you come up to the ashram with us? I'm like, what's an ashram and bamo? Then I really got hit, you know, with the full force of the lightning of an in, in, and enlightened being, you know, it. Shook me to the core. So that I, I think that's really where my stabilization, because I can see up till then I was just sort of an errant smart ass

Bill: Hmm.

Marty: and this thing with landmark. That was where stabilization started.

Bill: Well, it sounds like right on the heels of stabilization for you came awakening.

Marty: Yeah. Right.

Bill: But I gotta tell you that woke up a lot like I do now in my actual physical sleep. Being 69 years old, often I'll get up once or twice in the middle of the night. And then I'll go back to sleep if I'm having a really good night.

Bill: And my personal development was that way, where I had experiences of awakening. For example, two and a half years after I got sober, I was introduced to bioenergetics therapy. While looking for a primal therapist, I found somebody that did something similar and close called bioenergetics. And if anybody's interested in that, they can look it up.

Bill: It's Alexander Lowen, wrote a book by that name, Bioenergetics. Where we, uh, threw tantrums and beat pillows with tennis rackets and, and, uh, twisted towels and screamed and raged and, and, let energy vibrate through our body. And I had this profound breakthrough. Where in my relationship with my wife, every single day since the first date, I'd had this unbearable fear that she was going to abandon me, hurt me, leave me, betray me.

Bill: And through this therapy, that was eliminated. It was gone. And I was, I just was shocked. I could not believe that it was gone, and yet I knew that it was. So I had this experience without really cognitively understanding how and why did that happen. All I know,

Marty: It doesn't fit in the old world. You have there, there's a whole future in which to come to understand it. When it happens, it's like.

Bill: yeah, and I knew that it was different, and somehow I also knew that it was permanently different.

Marty: Yes, yes,

Bill: I said that out loud

Bill: one day.

Marty: permanently different. That's great. Yeah, it's so true.

Bill: How

Bill: did I know that?

Marty: it's not like, Oh, this cereal tastes a little bit better, but I don't know if I'd get it again. It's like. This is the way it's going to be from here on out. I know it.

Bill: And it was. That was, you know, so 1984, 1985, I'm 30 years old roughly at that time. And, and I'm 69 years old today. I've never, ever once,

Bill: not, not with my first wife, not ever. And I've had a lot of relationships since then. Never have I felt that insecurity and that fear that I was going to be hurt, betrayed, abandoned, and destroyed by somebody leaving.

Marty: that's right. Yeah,

Bill: Uh, so that was a waking up. But then I went back, kind of went back to sleep again.

Marty: Yeah. I mean, I, I hear you. Like it was also, you know, I was still going to raves during this time. I mean, that is an exact, well, there is a kind of awakening in there. I mean, you just, though that was an amazing time. Um, because you know, when you take the ecstasy or MDMA, whatever you want to call it, it has an effect on you such that you, you don't, you don't, all of those fears and, um, Loss of self and barriers and, you know, intervening conversations that you have in your head between you and other people, they just go away.

Marty: And you're just like open and caring and, and interested. And there's this, it was an amazing, that's why it's used in therapy, you know, cause it, it really drops all those barriers. So,

Bill: like it bypasses the false and shame identities.

Marty: You can tell because I was up on the dance floor with my shirt off dancing. Now that's not me with no shame. That's,

Marty: I mean, that is me with no shame. Uh, but, but I'm just saying like, I get that, you know, there are, and to this day, I'm not like, there is a permanent shift that is in place and will always be, but it still goes up and down. You know, my, my awareness and my connection to God and all of that. It goes in and out. It's not like a permanent, it's not like permanent enlightenment.

Bill: Awakening happened for me. There's another big significant mark. So November 19th, November 15th, 1982, November 15th, 1982. That's sobriety date. Bioenergetics happens two and a half years later. That's more of stabilization and just a blip of awakening within stabilization.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: Um, but I think I went into a deep sleep, especially after my wife got diagnosed with a brain tumor and then died 14 months later, went real deep, went into a very deep sleep after that.

Bill: And, um, my addiction, my addictive process went, remember it had gone from alcohol consumption to, meeting consumption, meeting attendance. Now it went from meeting attendance and add another layer to that, went to, to, um, sexual acting out with women for two years after my first wife died.

Bill: And then I, that, that whole, all of that led me into getting locked into a marriage that was really unworkable and barely survivable.

Bill: Kind of just threw me right back into the old trauma again and coming out of that. My, believe it or not, that was still stable, at least on the surface, but it inspired, it was so painful that it inspired and motivated me to find a way to wake up. It's like I was fighting my way out of a nightmare,

Bill: trying to wake up and, and, and I just didn't know how to, until I was introduced to the work of Byron Katie.

Bill: And that very day at a four hour event in Seattle, Washington at the Unity Church, within, within that four hour presentation. I had my mind blown and it was the, in that awakening, what had happened was my, my focus, which had always been external. And people could had talked to me about this in the past and said, Bill, you need to take your focus from the external to the internal

Marty: hmm. Mm

Bill: They might as well have said, Bill, you need to walk on the moon this afternoon.

Marty: hmm.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: How do you do that? How do you, how do you take the, your attention from the X? What the hell does that even mean? It's so frustrating. Byron Katie actually gave me a method for doing that without saying, what we're going to do is show you how to go inside. She just

Bill: said, look at your thinking. If you're suffering, it's because your thoughts argue with reality.

Bill: So are you suffering? Yeah, I don't know anything but suffering. Yes, I'm suffering. What are your thoughts?

Bill: And that woke me up.

Marty: I would be willing to bet that there are hundreds of people in the world for whom, you know, they've had some sort of awakening and they're still going up and down and then they meet you and the healing begins. Like you're there Byron Katie.

Bill: I would say that's probably true. I hope that that's true that that when they meet me they they're they're a good fit for me if they're they've been stable for a while.

Bill: Even if that stability still looks like a lot of chaos. Because like me they might be so committed because of the chaos to a change that they're willing to do things that they wouldn't otherwise be willing to do.

Bill: They're willing to look at things differently than they'd be willing to look at them. And I would call that not Not healing but awakening

Bill: but very very soon for these people and this is what I tell my clients is that because it took me 27 years before I began to get stabilized because it took me another 20 years before I could Um get to awakening It does, you don't have to take that long.

Bill: You don't have to take 20 years from stable to awakening.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: You can have it. You can have awakening now, like in a matter of weeks,

Bill: and you can have, you can have healing now also within a matter of days or weeks,

Bill: it can happen simultaneously. For me, awakening happened for a long time and then healing. Pointed pointed straight up starting in 2016 with with the introduction of IFS and I've been on that trajectory ever since healing, healing, healing, and now I would say in the last four or five years, Marty growth because I've healed enough because I'm probably 51 percent or more healed.

Bill: I have now the capacity for growth and expansion.

Marty: I think you're right about for me there was like this cluster of Stabilizing awakening and healing I would throw in there too because I think one of the biggest factors in my healing process has been Meditating I have spent at least an hour every single day since April 24th 1994

Bill: Wow. That's very impressive. 30 years.

Marty: And sometimes more than that, you know, like on days when we have intensives, it's like six, seven hours, you know,

Bill: That's impressive.

Marty: but, um, that has, you know, a lot, a lot has gotten healed in those hours that I'm sitting, not trying to get the world to behave the way I want it to,

Bill: Well said. Yeah.

Marty: you know, I think, I think that has been a major, and I learned to meditate by Right there in that same time period as I took the Landmark Forum and I met Gurumai. It would be, it was before I met Gurumai that I started going to classes at the School of Practical Philosophy and learned how to meditate.

Marty: And I, I don't know why it's, I'm not bragging at all, but for some reason I took to it. Other students were struggling with it and I was just like, Oh my God, this is the best thing in the world. I won, we had little games, you know, see who was to keep us practicing. Could you do once a day this first week, you know, and I won all those awards, you know, and then we had tutor sessions with the, with the meditation teacher where you went in a small room and the teacher watched you go into meditation. And I passed that with flying colors. I was so into it because I felt it was healing me. I could tell it was, it was healing me.

Bill: That's great. It just strikes me, Marty, how different our stories are to this day. While I benefit from meditating, I rarely think of doing it. I've tried many, many times to embrace meditation.

Marty: You know, it might be that I, I have a busier mind and I need it.

Bill: I don't know about that. I got a pretty busy mind. I got a really busy mind. Uh, I'm just doing different things than meditation with it.

Marty: I mean, I wonder about that. Maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to assess oneself, but like I had to get my wiggles out every day. You know,

Bill: rigged.

Marty: Extra energy that keeps you awake at night if you don't wiggle it out during the

Bill: Yeah. Yeah.

Marty: and it's mental as well as physical So I I'm that's why I'm I'm offering up the maybe I'm just you know, I have this Nervier body than you and I need it.

Bill: That, that's the nicest thing anybody ever said to me.

Bill: All right, let's begin to wrap up. This has been fun.

Marty: I Had forgotten until you said something about 30 minutes ago About people listening. I was like, I totally forgot we were recording this

Bill: Let's kind of review. And then, you know, often when we have a guest on the show, we'll ask, you know, if somebody wants to get ahold of you and, and further this conversation with you, how would they do? So let's do that in this episode. I want to encourage people also, if you've enjoyed this conversation, to like us and to share us and follow us so we can get more listenership up.

Bill: And if other people can listen to these conversations and benefit as you have, that's the way to help us. Um, in review, I'm currently writing a book. I think it's going to be called Practical Application of Parts Work. Marty, you just finished writing a book on leadership and it's called Relationship as Relationship.

Marty: as relation and you can buy it on, on Amazon, go either. Look it up under my name, kettle hut, K E T T E L H U T, or under the name of the book, real leadership as relation. It's it's out there. Go get a copy. I

Bill: as relation. Earlier you referenced the earlier book that you wrote, the first book

Bill: that you wrote called Listen Till You Disappear, also available on on Amazon. I understand. Yep. I'm writing this book and the reason I referenced that is because it's not, I don't know when when it's going to be available.

Bill: I do have a publisher. I'm still working on it. I've got about 150 percent of the of the book written and now the challenge is to get it down to the 100 percent that it will end up being published as. That's still a journey. Um, but in the meantime, as I'm writing the book, I'm basically getting down in, into words, concepts and ideas that have grown, um, and expanded it over the years, since I first wrote a lot of this content that's going into the book.

Bill: And that has me doing a lot of rewriting. And, and, and part of that process was to discover and recognize it. I should say that my personal development began at day one. Day one, the day I was born, March 26, 1955, and has continued through this current date. I'm 69 years old. And because my person has developed, I, who I see myself as has developed and, and how much access I have to who I really am has developed over these years.

Bill: And I, and I formalized, it's not, I don't think it's finalized, but I formalized a way to identify different stages. In my personal development. And I wonder how relevant it is to other people. It sounds like Marty, it's very relevant to your life. You are as different as you and I have, the paths that we've traveled are so different.

Bill: And yet here we are having a conversation where we get each other so much, where, where we relate to each other as partners in this podcast, where we're fellow coaches and support each other in that way. And yet we've come from completely different sides of the mountain. So those stages. So far, as of today, I'm calling stage one loss of self, which includes development of the shame identity and development of the false identity and development of all the strategies needed in order to improve and hide and cope.

Bill: That's stage one. Stage two, stabilization. Stabilization, life gets stable because of all of the, because of the impact of all of those strategies that I just defined, because of the confusion about who I really am, there's, that created a ton of chaos for me in my, in my first loss of self stage. Uh, so stage two stabilization and then stage three, once life has become stable enough.

Bill: And for me personally, the stability of life with the ongoing chaos, despite the stability drove me and motivated and inspired me to reach for and find awakening. And I began to wake up. By the way, that reminds me of a book by Anthony DeMello, a Jesuit priest who wrote a book, yeah, called Awakening. Uh, and that, by the way, was part of my awakening,

Bill: reading, of mine too, by the way.

Bill: yeah, Anthony DeMello, Awakening.

Bill: Or is the name of the book Awareness? It might be Awareness.

Marty: Awareness.

Bill: Yes. And then, um, so that's stage three is awakening. Stage four is healing. And healing for me began in earnest, uh, in 2016 when I discovered the internal family systems in a therapy session. and once enough healing had occurred for me, probably about four or five years into using IFS for, for healing.

Bill: Uh, now this takes me into the last five years, and that would be growth. Healing and Healing continues and growth growth has begun

Bill: in a much different way than I ever would have thought possible

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: So there are the stages we'll put those in show notes. Um, not sure where we'll begin this this uh episode i'll have I'll have to take a look at it and see where's a good starting point.

Bill: Maybe you could do that, too Thanks for joining us marty great conversation as usual