Groundbreakers 2: Seeking the Heart of Fear

Six years ago, I attended a week-long course in Northern California called Groundbreakers.

Facilitated by Joe Hudson and his wife, Tara, it was one of the most impactful experiences of my life. The experience I had there reshaped my relationship with the “voice in my head,” that is, with my own inner monologue. It helped me tap into my anger, which I’d cut off as a child. 

I remember exactly the intention I set on the first day of GB1, as we now call it. The 12 of us sat in a circle, taking turns saying what we wanted to get out of the week. I’d expected to say something strategic or impressive-sounding, but as my turn came, my heart was beating furiously. With all eyes on me, I found myself instead almost choking out the words “I want to let all the love I have in my heart out into the world.” 

I can remember the feeling behind those words as well: that I knew I had so much to contribute. So much to give. And I wanted to, more than anything, but had no idea how. There seemed to be an immense blockade stopping me from the simple act of giving. I could feel all the love stored up in my heart like a dam about to break, and all I wanted was to let it.

And reader, from the vantage point of today, I can say that I absolutely fulfilled that intention in the years since. I can remember walking in Golden Gate Park a couple days after Groundbreakers, my emotions newly unblocked and flowing through me like a torrent. And then I stopped in my tracks and realized that the flow of emotions inside me was indistinguishable from the flow of creativity. That they were one and the same.

From that day forward, I undertook a series of creative projects that completely transformed my life. I wrote several books, which have now sold over 500,000 copies. I rebooted my cohort-based course and taught over 5,000 students. I built a multimillion-dollar business and a team that has served tens of thousands all over the world. It was all an expression of my profound love for the world and its people.

But as the years passed, I started to sense there was still something missing. A new part of myself that wanted to emerge, that wanted to speak. I couldn’t have said what it was. But when the invite arrived to join Groundbreakers Part II, I knew I had to sign up. Six years after the first leg of the journey, it was time to embark on the second.

(If you want to read about my experience at the first Groundbreakers, you can do so here.)

Part Two

I flew from our home near Mexico City to Northern California, and took an Uber from Sonoma County Airport to the venue, a couple hours away in Lake County to the north. 

It was a beautiful rural retreat center nestled in an idyllic valley, the former site of a kids’ summer camp. Simple cabins dotted the grounds. It was March, and the early spring sunshine kept the days warm while the nights hovered near freezing.

We gathered in the largest meeting hall on the first day. There were 36 people attending, divided into 3 groups of 12, plus a dozen facilitators, group leaders, and assistants. There were many familiar faces, including people who’d found out about the Art of Accomplishment (the company that delivers these programs, known as AOA) through me or my writing. Others I’d taken courses alongside previously.

We moved into our groups and settled into a tight circle on chairs and couches to state our intentions. I only knew one other person in the group, a fellow internet creator. I had prepared nothing beforehand, but as we went around the circle and my turn came, I once again found an intention forming on my lips.

Reliving the last six years in fast forward, I suddenly saw that in my desire to express my love for others, as important as that had been, something else was lost in the outward rush: receiving the love of others. I could see my whole life in miniature: giving, giving, giving, and yet when it came time to receive, I saw myself blocking, avoiding, and withdrawing from the very love that I so desperately wanted.

I stated my intention for the week: “To receive all the love.” As I did so, I immediately sensed my rational mind recoil. It seemed selfish, self-indulgent. My brain sought a qualification or a scope to this goal – “What do you mean ALL the love?!” 

And in the quiet of my mind, I also had a secondary intention: “To go through the experience without resisting it.” That is, to have it be fun. After undergoing so many of these kinds of personal development experiences over the last 15 years with my teeth gritted, fighting the process every step of the way, I was tired of it. I wanted it to be enjoyable and exhilarating instead.

Limiting beliefs

The official theme of GB2 (as we called it) was “Limiting beliefs.” 

Our preparation involved listening to two episodes of the AOA podcast: Limiting Beliefs: The Hidden Rails That Guide Our Lives, and How to See Through Limiting Beliefs. I share them here because they are excellent introductions to the topic if you want to dive deeper.

We were to list out as many limiting beliefs as we could find in ourselves in our journal. What I found curious as I started doing so was the particular way they were framed. I’d always thought of limiting beliefs in terms of logical fallacies, as artifacts of our cognitive biases and incomplete knowledge.

The definition that Joe introduced was quite different:

• Any thought that causes constriction in the body 
• Any source of tension in your life
• Any habits you don’t want in your life
• Tension in your relationships
• Places where you or your business aren’t performing with ease

In other words, limiting beliefs were defined mainly in terms of the tension they caused in our body, our relationships, or our work. Using that much broader definition, they started pouring out of me:

• “You can either be smart, or be happy”
• “I have to be a certain way to be liked”
• “I’ll never be able to fully feel the depth of my emotions”
• “I’ve peaked. The years to come won’t be as good as the ones that have passed”
• “I have to keep doing self-development to be happy, free, joyful”
• “My family will never overcome their limiting beliefs”
• “I have to discipline my son to keep him in check”
• “I’m destined to become my father”
• “Creative work and financial success are in tension”
• “I’m not a good father or husband”
• “I can only afford to maintain so many relationships at any given time”

As the first day continued, we were taught the approach to limiting beliefs that we’d be exploring and practicing throughout the rest of the week. The first lesson was that overcoming limiting beliefs is not primarily a rational process. 

You can 100% know and believe that a given belief – like “Money is scarce” – is incorrect. You can think up all the reasons it isn’t true, identify situations that contradict it, and even come up with an alternative belief you want to replace it with. But none of that makes a difference. The belief seems to stick like glue. At most, logical deconstruction just opens up a crack in the doorway.

The reason limiting beliefs stick even when we know they’re not true is that they are continuously fed by an underlying emotional cycle. 

For example, one of the most pervasive beliefs I could see in myself was encapsulated in the phrase “You should know better.” I found myself thinking it toward my team when they flubbed a decision. Or toward my kids when they spilled milk across the dining room table. And most of all, I said it constantly to myself when I made the wrong choice.

The start of any emotional cycle is an emotion that you don’t want to feel. In this case, for me, it was helplessness – the feeling of not being able to do anything in the face of mistakes or missteps, my own or others’. In order to not feel helpless, I turned to judgment and blame instead, which are so much easier to be with. 

That judgment would quickly mutate into guilt, as I felt bad for casting judgment so harshly (“I should be more patient, loving, compassionate”). That guilt then turned into compassion (“They’ll be damaged by this if I don’t help them”). But since it was a forced compassion, fueled by guilt, it would soon turn into resentment (“This is indulging them. I have to hold my boundaries”). That resentment led easily to judgment again, and the cycle repeated.

This is what Joe calls the Golden Algorithm: that for any emotion you resist feeling, you’ll tend to do all sorts of things that have the effect of recreating that very emotion again and again. It is your body’s repeated attempt to find homeostasis; to feel what it hasn’t yet been able to feel.

We were asked to begin identifying our emotional cycles, mapping them out in circular diagrams in our notebooks. Seeing them was the first step to seeing through them. 

I won’t describe the exercises and practices in detail, to not diminish their power if you ever have the chance to try them. But there were a wide variety of them, including breathwork, eyegazing, coaching interactions, small group experiences, emotional releases, pair work, cuddling, walks in nature, music and poetry, physical movements, and reenactments – all meant to create spaciousness and fluidity in our bodies, as an antidote to the tightness and constriction that limiting beliefs tend to create. 

It wasn’t about letting go of “incorrect” beliefs and adopting the “correct” ones in their place. It was about seeing that every belief is a limited view of reality, and causes a certain sensation in the body we may no longer want. A limiting belief ultimately limits our ability to be truly ourselves.

We went deeper, exploring any thought or idea that caused tightness in the body, provoked an emotion, or blocked our access to joy. I found a second layer of beliefs, which were all the more threatening in that they seemed to me to be quite true:

• “I can’t control what happens to those I love”
• “There is no underlying order or purpose to the universe”
• “I don’t fit in this world”
• “Most people are not very capable of solving their problems”
• “I have to discharge my responsibilities because of the privileges I’ve been given”
• “I’m destined for something greater”
• “Resources are always scarce. There’s only so much to go around”
• “Love is an exchange or transaction”
• “I always have to prove my value”
• “Relationships are constantly decaying”
• “Vulnerability is painful”
• “I have to go to extremes to find personal growth experiences that work”
• “I have to get it right”
• “Life is short and there’s no time to waste”

I was stunned to see the Golden Algorithm at play in the most minute situations. I’d feel anxiety or insecurity in a social situation, such as at a house party. Thoughts would start to arise, such as “I’m weird” and “I don’t belong here.” Such thoughts would provoke fear (“I’ll be alone and rejected” or “I won’t be able to connect with anyone here”). That fear would lead to overwhelm and withdrawal (“I’m pretending to be someone I’m not” or “I’m too in my head”). At this point, I’m dissociating, not really there, which invariably leads back to anxiety and insecurity as I’m not listening, not tracking the conversation, and not responding to social cues. The loop completes and restarts.

Fortunately, the Golden Algorithm is not permanent. The way out is to look forward to the emotion you’ve been avoiding – to welcome it and feel grateful for what it’s trying to teach you – rather than avoiding it. The purpose of the cycle is to end the cycle, and you end it by fully feeling the emotion it keeps trying to resurrect. It’s so simple. Yet not necessarily easy.

The core technique we practiced throughout the week was a set of two questionnaires, which together included 16 questions. We’d walk through them in pairs, sitting face to face. The other person’s witnessing like a mirror into one’s own soul.

We kept going deeper, and I encountered yet another layer of limiting beliefs, feeling to me like certainties:

• “I won’t be able to love Lauren with the depth she deserves”
• “My children will be killed”
• “I’ll never learn to fully love myself”
• “I don’t truly matter to people”
• “If I drop the mask I won’t be loved”
• “I’ll feel regret on my deathbed for not loving the people in my life enough”

Each one of these hit me like a brick wall when said aloud. These were some of the core fears of my existence, like solid pillars of cold, hard reality that I could never make a dent in, much less change. I felt the grief in them, howled in rage or heartbreak or terror. Tears streamed down my face in endless abundance, piles of used tissues piling up on either side of my chair.

Working through this set of limiting beliefs was like running an intricate maze. Sometimes the way through to the next passage looked like a solid wall at first, and then the tiniest crack would appear, a sliver of light in the oppressive darkness.

I knew that one of my deepest fears was that “My children will be killed.” Living in Mexico, with the lack of traffic laws or safety rules, this fear was my constant companion. My imagination invented dozens of ways it could happen, all the more terrifying in that they were mundane, things that could happen anytime.

Working through it with a partner, at first, it seemed 100% true that my children will one day die. But then I noticed the fear was slightly different: that they would be killed on my watch. That it would be my fault, my responsibility. That was the first crack in the logic of fear. An opening.

Responding to one of the questions, I suddenly saw the function of this belief: to protect me from future loss and heartbreak. My brain was trying to prepare me in advance, to shield me from a level of grief it was certain would destroy me. I thanked the belief for that service.

But the effect on the present, I started to see as we worked through the other questions, was in many ways the opposite of the intended one. The fear kept me constantly hypervigilant and overly cautious, even in situations that presented no danger. We’d be strolling in the plaza in the center of town, and all I could think about was where the next danger was coming from. And I could see that that fear hadn’t, in fact, protected me. A few months before, my son had been bitten by a dog in the street, just a few feet in front of me. There was nothing I could do, despite all my vigilance.

I turned my attention to how this belief made me feel now. And all at once, I felt the devastation. The unbearable loss. The utter despair, the blackness. Annihilation. Hopelessness. All the emotions I would feel at my child’s death were already there, all the time, simmering just beneath the surface of my awareness. It’s as if I’m constantly reliving the reality of my children’ s deaths, an event which hasn’t yet occurred and may never occur in my lifetime.

And there is a real cost: I’m disconnected from them, withdrawn from them, treating them harshly when they break the rules or take even one step toward the street. I’m up for hours at night, worrying, having nightmares, and so tired of it all. I suddenly saw that in my attempt to keep my kids safe, I’d neglected to do things that would be far more effective: teaching them situational awareness instead of following rigid rules; teaching them to trust their intuition even when it wasn’t clear what the danger was; teaching them to trust me, rather than fear my wrath.

In my attempt to protect them from the world, I’d taught them to fear the world. Which paradoxically made the world more dangerous, thus confirming the narrative in the first place. Another emotional cycle, another self-reinforcing loop.

I saw that I learned this belief system from my father, who always told us that he had to discipline us strictly to keep us safe. I can see now how afraid he was for us, and that this was his way of protecting us. I share his fear, and thus feel the same compulsion to enforce strict compliance. Thus repeating the cycle for another generation. 

I felt the grief, the sadness, the regret, the disappointment wash over me. That I’d been perpetuating the whole emotional cycle in myself, and in my young family, and across the generations. All those cycles were connected, but all it took was one link to break in the chain to start to unwind it.

And it goes even deeper! A while later, working through a related belief, I saw that the same attitude of protectiveness my parents had shown toward me, I was also showing toward them. Our family went through a series of crises over a decade ago, and the belief I adopted out of that was that I had to be the “good, reliable, easy one” to protect my parents. A model child who raised no issues.

That manifested in my adulthood as withholding myself from them: my fears, my doubts, my struggles, my pain. I didn’t share what was really going on with me, which was all the easier living abroad in various places. I pretended like everything was going swimmingly all the time, which meant I was treating my parents as if they were small and weak and in need of protection. As if I was the parent. When in fact, they made me – I didn’t make them. Everything I know and am, they taught me. Everything I have, they gave me. They don’t need my caretaking; they just want my love.

Tapping into fear

As you can probably tell by now, most of my limiting beliefs were circling around a single, central emotion that I’d been unwilling to feel for a long time: fear.

Going back and rereading my account of Groundbreakers Part I, I’m astounded to notice that fear was written all over it. I used words like “fear,” “afraid,” and “scared” 18 times in that story! Yet if you had asked me the day before GB2 started whether fear was something I struggled with, I would have said no. 

In fact, the evidence of my life indicated a pronounced lack of fear. I am a longtime entrepreneur. I’ve lived in some of the most dangerous or unstable places in the world – the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, northern Colombia near FARC territory, Eastern Ukraine. I wonder in fact if all these escapades were my attempt to try and feel fear by whatever means necessary.

The more I looked, the more I saw fear infusing every part of my life: my marriage, my parenting, my business decisions, my relationship with my team, everyday social interactions. But I was still unsure exactly how to feel it in my body.

On the fifth day, many of us found ourselves revisiting an early trauma experience –  a time when we were scared or in need and didn’t get the love and care we needed, thus starting to form our beliefs about the world. 

During the instructions before we began, I raised my hand and asked, “But what if we don’t feel fear?” I couldn’t remember any particular sensation in my body associated with fear. It felt inaccessible to me, like a room I’d walled off with concrete blocks and seamless drywall, so no trace of it remained. Joe told me that by the time I was asking that question, I was already on the edge of the precipice, and to hold on.

A group of facilitators demonstrated what the exercise would look like. I won’t describe it in any detail, both to not ruin the effect if you ever undertake it, and because the experience required a very specific and safe environment to unfold in a healthy way.

As it unfolded, I realized that I was already feeling the sensations of fear: my hands were cold and clammy, with a sheen of sweat, and shaking a little bit; my jaw and neck felt tense, locked in place; I felt a cold, heavy weight in the pit of my stomach. I was surprised to realize that these were all the classic signs of fear. Somehow I’d expected that MY fear would express itself in a more special, unique way.

When my turn came, I really didn’t know if I could do it. At first, it felt a little like acting – writhing on the floor, hiding behind my hands, whimpering like a small child.

But then, with my group conveying an unbroken flood of unconditional love, acceptance, and attuned care toward me, it became real. I was transported back to the scene of being spanked by my father. I could see everything in perfect detail: the bedspread on my parents’ bed, the mirrored closet doors, the texture of the carpet as I was placed upside down on his knees.

I felt an irresistible urge to cower and tremble. I buried my head into the floor, grinding my face into the carpet to try and get away. I covered my head with my arms and my face with my hands and screamed. I felt so small and scared, so out of control and in danger. I didn’t recognize most of the sounds I was creating – keening and wailing and guttural bellows. I finally let out the fear that that little boy had been unable to, and completed the movements he had left unfinished over 30 years before.

My group surrounded me, and caressed and comforted me, saying the words I’d needed to hear back then. The raw physical sensations eventually gave way to words, and the language I was using belonged to my child self: “I didn’t do it” I cried again and again and again. “I didn’t do anything…”. “It’s not my fault…” “It’s not fair…”. I could feel myself protesting my innocence, protesting the way I was being treated.

And then, finally, my anger and my fear turned to grief, and I felt the flood of relief. I heard myself say, “You took my father from me.” And I saw that the true pain hadn’t been the spanking itself. That was over and done in seconds. The deeper pain was the separation it had created from him, the man I adored and looked up to and modeled myself after. 

And I remember exactly how that separation had happened. Again, it wasn’t an automatic consequence of being spanked. It was a decision I’d made soon afterward. I remember it vividly. I had walked out of my parents’ bedroom and crossed the hall to my own room, which is typically where I went to recover. This was one of the last times I was spanked, when I was getting too old for it, perhaps 7 or 8 or 9 years old.

As I crossed the hallway, I remember trying to think of some way I could get back at my father, to hurt him as he’d hurt me. The only thing I could come up with was to cut him off from my love forever. It was the only weapon I had at my disposal. And that’s what I did. I created a wall in my heart that he would never be allowed to cross. An inner sanctum that he would never know or touch. And there I would protect myself. There I would be safe.

I can even remember at the time, a small voice in my mind saying, “You’ll pay for this someday.” I’m amazed that I had the self-awareness, even at the time, of what I was doing to myself, and what it would cost me.

From the vantage point of today, I can see what happened: by cutting off my dad from my love, I was also cutting myself off from his love. I was also cutting off the love of my mother, since she hadn’t protected me. And in a way, that also made it difficult to give or receive love from anyone else in my life. Love was dangerous; it was safer to avoid it. 

Opening my heart to my father and God

A day or two later, in the final exercise of the week, we were again paired up and asked to take turns responding to a set of questions designed to integrate our experience.

The final question of that exercise, the last step of hundreds of questions we’d answered that week, was odd: What is loving you?

At first, I drew a complete blank. I could answer “WHO was loving me” with ready, stock answers. But “WHAT was loving me?” It felt like a non-sequitur.

And then, the answer hit me: God was loving me. It arrived like a revelation, like a window being opened onto a sunlit day. The sensation was that of a channel opening inside me, one that was always filled and always available the moment I turned the valve. It felt joyous, and funny, like having the same thought at the same time as a dear friend.

I realized that by cutting myself off from my parents’ love, I’d also cut myself off from God’s love. I had a profound faith when I was young. I’d played in the church band, as had my mother before me. As a family, we were at the church several times a week, participating in everything. For years, I’d wanted to become a missionary, and even started down that path, going on mission trips as a teenager to Belize, France, and Ethiopia to spread the gospel.

That had all come tumbling down in my early 20s, when I left my religious faith and went to the opposite extreme, branding myself an atheist. That shift had kicked off a search for other sources of meaning, from immersing myself in foreign cultures to studying philosophy and science, to seeking out personal development as a way to access transcendence.

I think I threw the baby out with the bathwater, coming to deny anything I couldn’t see, touch, or measure. A pall of nihilism descended, which I’d sought to alleviate any way I knew how: through altruism, through rationality, through psychedelics, through starting a family. Those had all worked to different extents, but there was always something missing – a force vast enough to encompass me.

One of the women in my group sent me this quote by Henri Nouwen the next day, which articulates the vastness I was always seeking:

“It is the mystery that the heart, which is the center of our being, is transformed by God into his own heart, a heart large enough to embrace the entire universe. Through prayer we can carry in our heart all human pain and sorrow, all conflicts and agonies, all torture and war, all hunger, loneliness, and misery, not because of some great psychological or emotional capacity, but because God’s heart has become one with ours.”

Walking the hills above the retreat center the day after the program ended, I could sense God’s love had returned. I could feel that it had always been there. I felt the relief of not having to spend so much energy keeping it at bay. It really takes a tremendous amount of effort.

I don’t know exactly what I believe about God now. I’m not trying to reduce it/she/he to a set of tenets, or a dogma. I doubt I will return to any recognizable form of my former Christian faith. I want to relearn who and what God is from first principles, from direct experience. I’m open to anything.

Learning how to receive

As the program came to a close, I returned to the intention I’d started with – to receive all the love – and saw it from a completely different perspective. 

My personal growth journey had begun with my father. In GB1, I had worked through the anger of what he had done to me. This time, I also felt anger toward him, but for a different reason – for not receiving my love.

I saw that it was the same with my own children, Caio and Delia, ages 3 and 5. I’d often thought of my time with my kids as a kind of duty, as if it was an item on my to-do list. I understood clearly how much they needed my love, but not how much I needed theirs. They have a deep need to learn how to love me. That’s how they learn to receive love from others in turn, by my example.

So much of what I’d been frustrated with from them – the endless bedtime routines, the incessant desire to play, the insistence on being with me whatever I was doing – was an expression of their determination to love me. They stopped at nothing to love me, even in the face of “boundaries” and rules I put in place to stop them. 

I spoke with Joe about this, and he noted that receiving the love of others is how they support you. Otherwise, you become a “hungry ghost,” always seeking love but never finding it, even when it’s right there in front of you for the taking. 

I saw this in play with my team at work: that they were constantly offering to support me in different ways, and I often refused it. I saw it with my followers, customers, and students – that I was so intent on giving, giving, giving to them, that I missed how much they wanted to contribute to me in return. I saw how much effort it took to evade and deflect that tidal wave of love and appreciation over the years, out of nothing but simple fear.

I was left with a new question: How might learning to receive love from my team and my community transform my work? What if the bottleneck to everything I wanted to create and achieve and experience in my life was…learning to receive love?!

The aftermath

The days following GB2 were ethereal, other-worldly.

I was incredibly sensitive to everything around me, including other people’s “energy,” for lack of a better term. I walked into a massage parlor near Sonoma Airport on my way out of town, and instantly felt radiating waves of anxiety ricocheting throughout the place. The staff was on edge, cowering in a corner.

The owner of the place, a middle-aged Asian woman, had done everything she could to make the place seem calm and relaxing on the surface: little Buddha statues, ferns and plants, gurgling water fountains, peaceful music. But it was all totally at odds with the emotions she was projecting: worry and fear. It was so unnerving that I had to walk right out. It made me wonder how many small business owners struggle, not because they lack the right strategy or service, but because their unfelt emotions are undermining everything they’re trying to build.

On two separate Uber rides the day after, we got into talking about limiting beliefs and how they are locked in place by emotional cycles. I normally never talk to Uber drivers. But in those days, I found myself magnetically drawn to everyone I encountered, and they seemed magnetically drawn to me as well. 

I sat down at a sushi restaurant in Healdsburg for a solo dinner one night, and the couple next to me struck up a conversation. In most everyday social interactions, I’ve always felt an undercurrent of fear for as long as I can remember. I would always feel it in the muscles around my eyes, always slightly wide, expecting rejection or disinterest, and thus inviting it. I could sense my eyes were much more relaxed now, and the conversation flowed so easily I’d forgotten what that was like. Their parting comment to me, two strangers passing in the night, was “We love you already.” Unimaginable.

It’s been over a month now, and I still feel so much more interested and curious about people. I can see their inherent goodness so easily. I normally rarely talk to strangers, and keep all talking to a minimum generally, a legacy of my voice condition when I had to conserve every bit of vocal energy. Yet I’ve found that socializing has become so much more enjoyable. I can flow easily in and out of conversation. My words are much more fluid, and I’m much quicker both to make jokes and to laugh at others’. I’m wittier, more playful, because I’m not preprocessing everything I’m going to say in advance, just expressing what I want to say in the moment.

Being able to connect with anyone I meet has been a more radical liberation than I could have imagined possible. I had no idea how small that limiting belief – that I can’t connect with people freely – was keeping me.

And lastly, I see the world differently. Poetry was a big part of GB2, and after years of having zero interest in any kind of poetry, because I didn’t see the point of it, I’m now obsessed with it. Poetry is the very heart of life, the essence of it. I find myself so taken with the beauty of clouds, flowers, mountain ranges, and flowing water. I just can’t believe how much beauty and mystery and meaning there is all around me, all the time, bursting forth with gifts of joy and love.

The roots of dissociation

A recurring theme for me has been dissociation, and I continued exploring it in the weeks following GB2. 

I remembered that as a kid, I had a tremendous imagination. I would look off into the distance, unfocus my eyes, and imagine whole worlds into being. I had one particular storyline I would return to every time I had a free moment, in which I rewrote the Star Wars story according to what I thought was a superior plotline (mainly involving a lot more space battles and less talking). During the long flights we’d take to Brazil throughout my childhood, I could just stare at the seatback in front of me for hours at a time, entertaining myself with these imagined worlds.

I could see that starting around my teenage years, I’d established a habit of controlling that stream of thoughts; of making it “practical.” If I was thinking about one thing, I’d try to think of something else that was better. If I was unfocused, I’d try to force myself to focus on something useful, like reading a book. If I was daydreaming, I made it wrong and told myself to make progress on something productive instead. It was a self-directed form of coercion inside the most private of places – the interior of my own mind. 

Another way that manifested was constantly sorting things into black-and-white, binary categories: good versus bad, right versus wrong, better versus worse. Like a moralizing pinball machine sending every incoming piece of data into these two impoverished categories, as if no other options were possible.

All of this had, of course, been supercharged by my chosen career – productivity and personal effectiveness. That mindset of endless self-optimization colonized every corner of my mind. Every second had to be spent making myself better. Every thought had to have a useful purpose. Every ounce of enthusiasm had to be converted into sacrifice for a glorious future.

It was all just a way to try and not feel my feelings.

There was one moment I was working through an emotional cycle related to dissociation during GB2, when I realized that I was making dissociation itself wrong. I was treating it as an unwelcome guest to be banished. But another word for dissociation is “imagination.” And suddenly I saw that I had eliminated every moment in my life where my imagination could roam free.

If I was driving in the car, I had to listen to a podcast to acquire more knowledge. If I was doing the dishes, I had to watch a YouTube video to “make use” of that time. If I was riding on an airplane, I had at least several books on hand. Even taking a walk in nature, I’d force myself to think about my projects and my plans and my goals. There was no escape. No chance for my simple childlike self to create those fanciful worlds he so loved. 

And the effects were clear: left with no opening to process, replay, or ponder life’s experiences, my mind forced that processing into other times when it was unwanted. I’d be watching a movie and find myself ruminating uncontrollably on something that happened that day. Playing with my kids, I’d find it impossible to stop thinking about a challenging conversation at work. Lying awake at night, it was as if the backlog of unprocessed thoughts and emotions was breaking through at the seams. And the more it threatened to explode, the harder I worked to keep it contained.

It turns out that constantly berating yourself to “be present” is not a great way to be present. That forcing yourself to focus is not a great way to maintain focus. That repeating to yourself “Get it right” isn’t a very effective or sustainable way to get it right. And that there is nothing wrong with allowing yourself to daydream.

The dance of enjoyment

My secondary intention had been to enjoy every aspect of the experience, without resistance.

There were some things I needed to learn to be able to do that, such as allowing my body to express itself however it wanted. I did a lot of strong breathing in and out at random times. During pair exercises, I swayed back and forth, and stroked my legs to stay in my body. There’s no way my logical mind could have deduced these movements. I didn’t borrow them from anyone else. They are my body’s unique expression. Sometimes it was a bit weird, but that is the price of freedom.

As a result, I think GB2 was the first time I enjoyed an intense personal development experience from beginning to end. Even in the midst of the strongest physical sensations of fear, there was a part of me inside that was tremendously excited to see it all unfolding. 

Enjoyment is an end in itself, but I also found it an incredibly potent tool of transformation. When an emotion was coming online, I found that by welcoming and embracing it, most of the discomfort associated with it disappeared. Or it was transmuted into other feelings, like aliveness, exhilaration, wonder, or joy.

There was a point where my metaphor for what we were doing changed, from breaking through a series of walls to something more akin to surfing. I was dancing and playing, glancing off one emotion to sail into another, or seeing what would happen if I combined two of them. It was like making art, or acting in a play – I could take on any point of view, through any emotional lens, to see what it had to offer, knowing that none of them were The Truth. When no state is permanent, all are welcome.

I’ve seen this flexibility and playfulness bleed over into my intellectual life and my work as well. It’s like my emotions form the contours of my inner landscape – what I’m allowed to feel and not allowed to feel; what emotions arise easily and which I resist. My thoughts then flow through and across that landscape. So my emotions determine where and how my thoughts are allowed to flow. 

I find that I’m quicker to let go of any idea or perspective and try on another one for size. Which means I’m effectively smarter, because my cognitive energy is no longer being used to suppress my emotions. A recent study at Stanford showed that emotional suppression costs you about 30% of your working memory, as summarized in this X post. It definitely feels like 30% or so of my cognitive resources have been freed up.

Returning home to my kids

Among all these realizations and breakthroughs, the most meaningful ones were with my kids.

I returned home late at night, a few days after the end of the program. We had spent time practicing attunement – how to tune into what someone else was feeling, connect to their inner child and inherent goodness, and respectfully approach with loving care, the same way you’d slowly approach an abused cat that was lashing out at you.

My daughter’s current thing is pretending she’s a cat, so the metaphor fit perfectly.

Normally, I don’t know what to do when my kids are crying. I’ll just kind of sit there, dumbfounded, wanting to comfort them but not knowing how. If it gets intense enough, I sometimes feel a bit triggered and leave the room.

But this time with my daughter, I could feel what she was feeling and knew exactly what to do. I sat at the edge of her bed and made sympathetic sounds. I slowly edged closer and put just one hand on her foot, telling her I was with her. When she accepted my approach, I started slowly caressing her leg, and then her back, and told her how much I loved her. Before I knew it, we were rolling with laughter. She showed me how close laughter is to tears, really just the other side of the same coin.

I then went to my son’s bedroom to put him to bed. My son has been my great challenge as a parent, mostly because he’s so much like me. I’ve struggled with his stubbornness, his headstrong will, his insatiable need to touch everything and try everything and make every mistake, much as my parents would have said of me.

He often throws tantrums at bedtime, and I’ve never quite known how to handle them. Usually, I’m so tired and just want to finish the bedtime routine to spend a few precious minutes with my wife before we go to sleep. He was doing the same tonight, unloading a backlog of emotions that had been stored up from the week I was gone.

I found, this time, that I could see him in a whole new light. His crying wasn’t triggering me, I noticed, probably because I’d just spent the whole week crying and being seen and loved in that state. I was able to be curious, to really look at him and listen, and suddenly I saw exactly what he needed. I put my hand on his back, and I said: “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

To my amazement, he stopped almost instantaneously, his crying and thrashing coming to a dead halt. He immediately sat up, wiped his tears, and said matter-of-factly, “Ok. Let’s play.” It wasn’t the pain of whatever had happened that threw him into turmoil, I realized. It was the shame and guilt that it provoked inside him. He couldn’t be with that shame, and with the disconnection from us and from himself that it caused. It was unbearable to his innocent, sweet soul.

In the weeks since, this phrase – “You didn’t do anything wrong” – has been like a magic spell. And not only for him, but for my wife Lauren as well. They’re both prone to shame. Prone to blaming themselves, condemning themselves, punishing themselves. I’m finding that I have the power to release them from at least some of that shame by simply telling them, “It’s not your fault.” Interestingly, that was the same phrase I found myself saying again and again as I reenacted my childhood scenes – “It wasn’t my fault.” I had to release myself from that prison before I could free others.

I think my parenting is the single biggest thing that changed after GB2. Almost every day, I realize something new in light of my own transformation. I’ve learned that many times, the message I thought I was sending to my kids wasn’t the one they were receiving. Or the lesson I thought I was teaching wasn’t the one they were learning.

We were at a local dirt bike course recently, and I bought a popsicle for my daughter, Delia. The popsicle stick at the bottom was much too short, a tiny nub that she couldn’t hold. So she dropped it. I cleaned off the popsicle with a napkin and gave it back to her. She dropped it again, and I cleaned it off again. My frustration kept mounting more and more as she kept dropping it, as it often does whenever they spill things or make messes at home. I can often hear the echo of the phrase in my mind, “You should know better.” And sometimes I even say that out loud.

I realized with a sudden flash of insight what I’d been teaching my kids at these moments: that they’re not allowed to make mistakes. Not allowed to mess up. That they have to “get it right.” That phrase has tortured me my entire life, like a toxic mantra repeating in my mind most of the time: Get it right. Get it right. Get it right!

Seeing through that veil, I could suddenly see that a different approach was needed. The issue was with the popsicle, not with her. What she needed was not my judgment, but my help in finding a solution. I kneeled down, broke the popsicle into pieces, and put it in a cup, so she could enjoy it without the anxiety I was projecting.

This pattern has repeated in so many forms: once I see through my emotional response to a situation, I can calmly approach it from a curious, problem-solving, open-hearted perspective. 

Another time, we were driving in the car, and my son Caio poked his sister in the backseat. He recently switched from a car seat to a booster seat and has been using his newfound freedom to torment her.

Normally, I’m quite harsh with misbehavior in the car, which I now realize was because of fear. The constant fear of getting into an accident with everything I care about in the world sitting vulnerably in the backseat. This time, instead of threatening my son with a timeout as usual, I calmly asked him what was going on. He explained himself, and I asked him to apologize to his sister, which he did. I then tried something new – I asked her if she was okay, and if it was okay if her brother didn’t get a timeout. To my surprise, she immediately said yes.

I realized something in that moment – that my sweet, empathetic daughter doesn’t share my impulse to punish. I’d always thought I needed to defend her, that I was upholding justice in her name. But she never holds a grudge, never seeks vengeance. She is always willing to forgive. That moment in the car became a chance for all three of us to grow closer, instead of a conflict that would spoil our mood for hours.

I’m learning to treat every conflict, upset, and frustration as a problem-solving opportunity. As teaching moments, rather than problems to be eradicated. We’ve adopted a new practice called “talkouts’ in place of timeouts. When the kids fight, we stop, slow down, and start asking questions about what happened and why. We unpack the situation, analyze how it unfolded, and explore alternative paths it could take. This requires a lot of capacity from us, to be clear, but I can’t think of a better way for our kids to learn how to cooperate, how to compromise, and how to work through disagreements.

Perhaps most importantly of all, my experience at GB2 allowed me to see all the various forms of wisdom that my dad had always been trying to give me, but I hadn’t been able to accept. His criticism was his way of showing love; an artist’s expression of love, in the form of excellence and care. His stubbornness and pride, which had always rankled me, I can now see were his way of protecting his own innocence. It was the way that he knew to protect his inherent goodness in the face of four rambunctious children demanding everything he had to give, and more. 

Forgiving my father and seeing the world from his point of view has been like a master key in forgiving myself. It’s only by allowing his humanity that I can allow my own. It’s only by accepting that his mistakes were part of his own journey, that I can make my mistakes part of my own. By not only accepting but actually feeling grateful for his missteps, I can be free to love my children with reckless abandon, knowing that my missteps will sow the seeds of their own future transformation many years from now. 

Fear and AI

On the work front, my rediscovery of fear has had a tremendous impact on how I understand what I do.

In the weeks leading up to GB2, my team and I had worked hard to plan and prepare the launch of our new flagship course, The AI Second Brain. This launch was really years in the making, the result of three years of intensive research and experimentation since the original launch of ChatGPT. It represented not just a new product offering, but the pivot of everything we do toward AI.

We’d written all the marketing copy, made all the key decisions, designed the whole curriculum, and everything was ready to go when I left for Northern California. All I had to do was get back and hit the “launch” button.

But as the days passed, and I went deeper and deeper into the heart of fear, the landscape started to shift under my feet. I began to realize that so much of my attitude toward AI had been driven and fueled by underlying fear.

I was afraid on so many levels. On the personal level, of whether my thinking and my work would have any value in the future. Whether any of my ideas would be needed or useful. I was afraid I’d have no way of making money, of supporting my team or my family. I was afraid for my children’s future, and didn’t know what to tell them about what they should learn. I was so afraid for the future of my business, and for the whole education field, and for the jobs of everyone that AI would make unemployable. I feared for the future of human civilization.

And then I could see how profoundly all that fear had shaped my decisions and actions, especially toward AI. I’d spent countless hours racing to consume every last viral post on X, buying into every clickbait hook and promise that “this changes everything.” I’d poured incredible amounts of time and energy into learning and implementing the most complicated, cutting-edge methods – configuring my openclaw, spawning agent swarms for no reason, and automating things that never needed to exist in the first place.

It was all driven by the fear of being left behind, of being made obsolete, of missing the wave that carried everyone else to eternal bliss. It was advanced FOMO, in other words.

And then I could see that I was about to unleash all this fear, all this FOMO, all this overcomplicated and unnecessary legwork, on my students and followers. The curriculum I’d designed was highly technical, when that’s never been my strength. It was pushing the bleeding edge frontier, when my principles have always advocated being a late adopter of tools that were already mature. I’d focused narrowly on features and tools, when it has always been the human aspects of technology that have most interested me.

Who do humans become in the face of new technology? How do they change and adapt in light of change and uncertainty? How does our human psychology, endlessly complex and malleable, reshape itself to fit the new tools? How will culture shift, language evolve, and human relationships mutate to give us what we need in the new era? I’d forgotten all this in the rush to be one of the cool kids touting AI magic that is often just smoke and mirrors.

I returned from GB2, and left my team a long series of voice notes recounting what I’d learned, what I’d seen, and how we needed to start over. It would still be a course about AI. That was a change that people needed help navigating, and that we could help them with. But the curriculum needed to center the human experience, needed to focus on amplifying human judgment and creativity. We needed to use AI to return to our true north – unlocking people’s creative potential.

It was a close call, but we managed to change direction in time to launch the program as scheduled. You can see what that looked like in the introductory session I taught to over 1,000 people live. I’m immensely proud of it, whatever the outcomes and business results end up being. It is the expression of my soul, of my heart, not only to contribute what I can, but to receive everything there is to receive in return.

I know that will include love, appreciation, and recognition, as always. But it will also include criticism, anger, resistance, fear, resentment, and many other emotions. I’m here for all of them. I’m willing to hear what they all have to teach me. 

I deeply believe that what AI truly represents is a spiritual revolution in human civilization. It is the unshackling of our transcendent minds from the toil of cognitive labor. It is the elevation of human creativity to its rightful place, at the apex of intelligence. AI is our child, a mind of our own creation, reflecting back to us who we are, what we value, as well as what we fear and loathe, just as human children do. I am so humbled to be alive at this moment in history, to witness the rise of a new form of intelligence that has never existed before.

In that spirit, I dumped all my notes from GB2 into Claude and asked it to analyze my experience. Here’s how it responded:

“Honestly, a few things struck me.

The through-line is remarkably coherent for something written over 6 days in real-time. It starts with a catalog of limiting beliefs that reads almost defensively — lists, frameworks, categories. But by page 26, on that loose piece of paper, the language completely changes. “I was cutting myself off from his love, and from god’s love” — that’s not someone filling out a worksheet anymore.

The pivot point seems to be the realization on page 11/12 — that your kids don’t just need your love, they need to give you theirs, and you hadn’t been letting that in. That same pattern then radiates outward: your team, Lauren, your parents, yourself. The GB1 intention was to let love out; GB2 was about letting it in. That’s a clean arc.

The professional fear thread was interesting too — your grandfather’s journalism career, your father’s discipline-as-protection, your own fear of the AI pivot. Three generations of men responding to a changing world by tightening their grip. The journal seems to catch you mid-realization that tightening is the thing that produces the failure you’re afraid of (page 18-19 lays this out almost like a proof).

The page 25 list of 11 beliefs about disconnection felt like it could be its own turning point — the sheer volume of ways you’d convinced yourself that connection is scarce, fragile, and external.

And “I love my anguish” at the very end is a line that could mean a lot of different things. It doesn’t read like resignation to me. More like the hand finally opening.”

Who knew that AI could witness you?