Optimize Your Soul with Adam Siddiq

In this Episode

• [02:06]What are some of the things Adam has done that have created the greatest impact in optimizing his soul and spirituality?
• [06:33]One key thing to do is master your energy state, Adam reveals, and then explains why.
• [09:07]Stephan gives the example of someone cutting you off on the freeway to demonstrate how easy it is to fall into a reactive state from the lower mind. Adam then explains how he comes at situations like this from a more elevated response.
• [13:54]Adam relates a story Tony Robbins has told of meeting Nelson Mandela. He then relates this to what he has been saying about perspective and focusing on the bigger picture.
• [19:02]For listeners who aren’t already familiar with the term, Adam explains what an entrainment is.
• [21:45]Adam describes an experience he had at an airport when being between two payphones gave him an instantaneous migraine headache. He then memorably points out that “we’re drowning in information, but we’re starving for wisdom.”
• [26:14]Stephan steps in for a moment to share a little bit of his own transformation, explaining that he’s completely unrecognizable from who he was before Tony Robbins helped him achieve a significant breakthrough.
• [27:27]Adam and Stephan compare how many Tony Robbins events they have each been to. Stephan then explains that Tony Robbins is the reason he met his soulmate.
• [29:06]We return to the topic of the three seasons: the season of discover, the season of transform, and the season of awaken. Stephan and Adam dig into this topic in more detail.
• [33:41]Adam brings up the fourth (and most powerful) season, which is the season of integrate.
• [34:41]Stephan talks about the perspective of someone who isn’t familiar with Donny and is seeing entrainment for the first time. He describes how odd it might look, then he and Adam talk about what causes the physical contortions involved in the process.
• [41:30]Stephan describes what he has discovered about himself as an external person, and explains how the description of an external person matches his own traits and tendencies. Adam then shares a powerful multi-generational family story involving Donny’s entrainment process.
• [48:42]Stephan draws out some of the threads of what Adam has been saying about his grandfather. He then shares one of his own profound entrainment experiences involving a former employee.
• [54:34]We hear about Adam’s new book, Shackled, which tells his grandfather’s story. He describes some of his fascinating and intense family history.
• [60:01]Adam outlines the second reason he wrote his recent book.
• [62:19]We can change both the future and the past for our lineage, Stephan explains, if we come from a place of soulful connectedness.
• [64:00]Adam finishes off the conversation by sharing some suggested resources for listeners.

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

Are you ready to have your soul optimized? Imagine experiencing the awe of the infinite, plugging into the fabric of creation using an energetic discipline that is almost beyond description and beyond belief for that matter, yet it is also something that mega-successful entrepreneur Tony Robbins swears by. I hope you’re curious because this episode is gonna be well worth your time. I am your host Stephan Spencer, and our guest today is Adam Siddiq. Adam is the host of the podcast, The Soulfully Optimized Life. He’s also authored the brand new book, Shackled, which chronicles his grandfather’s life story of living through twenty years of political prison starting at the young age of 6 in Afghanistan. Welcome, Adam. It’s great to have you on the show.

‏‏Thank you, Stephan. It is great to be on the show.

‏‏We just saw each other a week or two ago. We were at a Donny Epstein event called The Transformational Gate, which was amazing and otherworldly.

‏‏Yes.

‏‏You do a lot of stuff that optimizes your soul, and that’s one of them. That was definitely soul-optimizing and expanding – expansive like exchanging versions and stuff. It is pretty amazing. What sort of stuff have you done that is the most impactful in terms of optimizing your soul and your spirituality?

‏‏Yeah, great question. Well, really what I’ve found for me to be of the greatest impact has been integrating the technologies, the modalities that Donny Epstein has developed, along with consciously living and integrating a lot of the principles he’s taught. We both have gone to the program at separate times – The Ultimatum Program. Even just at the end of this gate, the extra day, we had the energetic experience where (for those listening who might not know, basically there are these organizing intelligence or wisdom, as Donny calls it, that organize all creational life, all matter. We can see the patterns that have been taught throughout time – everything from every major traditional religion to even the ancient Vedics. We can go as far back. People talk about certain – even the chakras – they’re a life force energy that organizes and stabilizes and creates the body and develops the living tissue and everything and how’s that running autonomously. Emotional, energetic intelligence that helps experience emotions, radical changes, rapid changes, and such alters our gene expression. We technically become a different us when we experience different emotions.

The lower mind is more about the condition thoughts. The upper mind is really about making the best of things.

The mental intelligence – Donny has mapped it out as a lower and an upper mind. The lower mind is more about the condition thoughts, generally based on our culture, society at scale. It’s just like the thought patterns that develop the rules, the boundaries – these kind of things – to basically fit into the culture. It is part of our survival mechanism back to the dawn of humanity. The upper mind is really about making the best of things, optimizing things. It is being able to experience and witness multiple maps and models the world simultaneously, innovating all these juicy stuff that you talk about a lot. And the soul, going beyond the mind – the place where we basically – the way I feel in experiences, like we experience a remembering. A remembering that we’re all one. We’re actually not all separate, that there is a light beyond the form, that there is something behind the matrix of what we see as reality, that we can experience the energy, the love, the light, the gratitude, the joy, the pure art, for no reason just pure causeless joy, and be reunited with the sense of spirit and this love and this sense that we’re all in it together.

And then to the farthest range of the universal spirit – everything from like the essence of the oneness energy, the energy that unifies and organizes everything in the whole entire web of cosmos. He gave each of these intelligence a name, a personality. The life force, he calls it “survivor.” It ultimately helps us survive. Emotional – the “reactor” helps us react and respond to situations. A lower mind is the thinker, “condition thinker.” The upper mind – the “optimizer.” Soul – the “illuminator.” It shines the truth. And the universal spirit – the “weaver.” I would sit through “The Ultimatum Program” – we both experienced all of them and individual entrainments and all of them in that full experience, where we’re all seating down next to each other, oftentimes hands on our head, our hearts, as Donny is magnifying an intelligence as a focal point. Kind of like shining a magnifying glass on it. We all just experienced it in this group entrainment where we get supersensitized to it. Being conscious and recognizing that there are – I guess a simple way to say it – higher powers that organize everything. I do my best to consciously call upon what will be the best for the situation and integrate them.

So how can I integrate the pure love and light and knowing of the soul with the upper mind to create a strategy and take action with it based on the mix of strategy and logic along with a post-rational knowing of knowing intuitively what to do, where to go to, who to speak to, something like this in my daily life. I think that another key thing is mastering the energy state. One of the things I love that Donny says is that energy is the context to all content. The way that I envision that statement is that every single thing that we do, everything that’s expressed, every thought, every idea, every emotion, every relationship, the state of our physical health, the state of our business – everything is based on the amount of energy that it’s ultimately operating at a core level. Really, at any moment, we have the ability to add more energy to the system. We have the ability to add more energy to our body, to fuel it, to feed what it needs, to train it, to develop it in a stronger way. We have, at any moment, the ability to connect with the higher resource to get more creative insights, whether it is listening to your podcast, while you’re working, or whether it’s going to a seminar to develop or gain more insight or even just being in that field around everybody who’s thinking at a different level, resonating at a different level, and you are influenced by that atmosphere.

I do whatever I can and everything I can to always keep focusing on developing it better, of consciously focusing on what energy state I’m showing up at in the moment and adding more energy to the space in relation to others. Even if it seems like I am alone and I am working on my computer, is it putting more energy to the environment, whether it’s as simple as just purely putting my focus there or whether it’s something as simple as putting my hands over my heart and breathing into my heart, and focusing as if I am inhaling and exhaling love. Every time I exhale, I am doubling or tripling it, to really condition the space with whatever I am looking to consciously create. I’d say, those are the main things that I found to be the best ways I go to optimize more soul and just to have a sense of accountability and sensitivity to measure it. I know it’s hard to measure soul, but just to measure in the sense of seeing: what results is this creating in my life for others? How is it influencing other people? It gives me a gauge to know, whether I should focus on adding more energy, or which intelligence to focus on – something like this.

‏‏If somebody cuts you off on the freeway or yells at you, somebody is very reactive – it’s so easy to drop into a reactive state and come at it from a really base kind of energy, emotional or lower mind, instead of from the soul or from the upper mind.  How do you in those kinds of times of stress and people pushing your buttons – do you come at it with a more elevated response? Because it’s easy when it’s easy. You say, “I am going to meditate, and I am going to do this visualization exercise, double the love and triple the love and everything. I just had a really good day, so this is easy.” But somebody just started yelling at me and all that stuff tends to go out the window for a lot of people when they are in that kind of stress.

‏‏Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great question. I am going to think of something that happened. I have had a number of challenging life events happen recently, so that definitely stretched that. Not necessarily something that would elicit maybe a reactor response of anger, but for instance, my grandpa recently had heart failure and pneumonia, and he was in the ICU. When I went to go and visit him, I could tell that he was having a tough time. There’s a whole bunch of people that were swarming him, checking on vitals, and everything like that. I could tell that he was really fighting hard just to survive. I can’t help it. I just saw him, and he just looked at me in this really weak state. He has an oxygen mask on. He puts his hand over the oxygen mask and slowly moves out to me to blow a kiss over, let me know that he was gonna do whatever he can. I can’t help but just start breaking down. I think in some cases – and a case like this, this is a pretty gnarly, sudden things. Not to ignore the raw emotion of sadness or potential grief or whatever it is, but to really experience it and let it just move through us, as opposed to trying to bind it and trying to manage and control it because in reality, I don’t really think emotions last too long once experienced. I completely broke down at that scene. When I was in my car, I was sobbing intensely for a few minutes, but afterwards I felt this vibrant sense of energy pulsing though me – juts kind of a grounding energy.

Whereas, in the past I would have probably bottled it in and not shown it and just thought like, “Men are not supposed to cry like this, so I am not gonna do this.” But this is one little example there. It’s not necessarily a stressful kind of response that you were asking about, but I think it is important for me in terms of that, like if it looks like somebody might have deliberately done something that can offend you or even wronged you, I still feel sometimes frustrated or angry, but I always want to focus on the bigger picture and see how does this tie in to this whole web of life. I really believe that it started off from what I heard from Tony, and then I liked what Donny added to it. Tony Robbins says, “Life does not happen to you. It happens for you.” I love that statement because it really flips any mentality. If I’m seeing myself or perceiving myself as a victim because of this circumstance, or this event, or this person – when you believe that “Life does not happen to us. It happens for us,” we no longer can be the victim. We have to step out as a victor and do something about it or do something with our lives as constructive, as progressive. What I love that Donny took that life does not happen to you, it happens for you. And then you happen for life. That’s where I think is where the cycle is completed. We’ve seen it many times in history.

Like for example, Nelson Mandela just comes to mind right now. He’s imprisoned 27 years of his life, and his whole country is falling apart. He comes out of the jail and immediately is like, “Okay guys. I’m free now, so what we’re going to do is – the same people who imprisoned me – we’re gonna come together. We’re going to work together, and we are going to create a harmonious country. We’re going to create a harmonious society. We’re gonna develop. We’re gonna progress.” Tony even mentioned it too. He says something along the lines of when he met Nelson Mandela, that he asked Nelson Mandela, “What was it like? Was it tough being in prison all these years, over a quarter of a century?” And he said, “No, that was my time for preparation, for what I would do with the country.” A totally different perspective. I really value the power of changing perspectives. Same with Dr. Viktor Frankl from Man’s Search for Meaning, how he documented certain people who survived during one of the worst events in human history, the Holocaust. One of the key differentiators that he noticed – something that was novel about them versus others who unfortunately experienced tragedy and died was that they focused on a bigger vision than what was going on in the moment. There’s even a woman that Tony interviewed a few years ago. Her name is Alice Herz-Sommer. She is the longest living holocaust survivor. She’s passed now, but she lived to 108 years old. She was a really famous pianist, I think, from Austria. She experienced some horrible, horrific things in terms of her family that was executed and such, but it was her and her son, I believe, in Auschwitz. She was basically forced to have to play the piano perfectly, as new people will be coming into the camp, to basically create some sort of propaganda like it was gonna be something calm and natural. She’s playing beautiful piano, as everyone’s getting boarded off the trains. She was told that if she misses a note or she plays imperfectly, they will kill her son in front of her, and I think they said they would rape and kill her. It’s a really, really high-stress situation – extremely.

She said the way that she made it through all that was she focused on everything that was beautiful in the middle of this horrific, horrific place, where things I can’t even imagine were happening. She taught her son the same thing. She said, “Focus on the beautiful things – things as simple as like look at this flower that is growing out of this wasteland. Let’s look at the beauty of it, and let’s focus on it. Listen to the beautiful sound of this piano. Look at the sky. How beautiful it is.” And she just focused and had pure appreciation and gratitude for everything that was beautiful at the moment, so much that she even said – this is one of the things, like the most mind-blowing thing – she enjoyed her time in the concentration camp because that’s how much of her focus was on pure appreciation and gratitude. I think to sum up the answer to the question, for me, is I do my best to focus on the bigger picture. I don’t think I am not even a fraction of close to the abilities that Alice had to be able to focus on gratitude in that kind of environment, but with the tools and skills I developed, most of which from Donny Epstein and Tony Robbins and some others as well, I do my best to use that in a constructive way. So no matter what happens, whether extreme things happen, I could focus on the bigger picture, recognize that this isn’t happening to me, these are happening for me, and it’s somehow because of this experience, I’ll be able to grow to a new level, gain some new insights, feel more empathy or compassion. And because of that, I will be a better human to make a bigger impact in the world. I think that’s the gist that I look at it with.

‏‏I am on the same boat here with you. I love what Donny and Tony both teach. It’s been life-changing for me. Definitely.

‏‏Absolutely.

Listeners, do check that out, so you can watch that interview. It’s really profound.

‏‏Yes, absolutely.

‏‏Before we move on to some other topics, let’s explain a couple of things for our listeners who are not familiar with Donny Epstein. You’ve interviewed him on your podcast, on The Soulfully Optimized Life. I’ll be interviewing him here on Get Yourself Optimized, coming up as well. I’d like us to explain for our listeners, who are not familiar with the energy work, healing work that Donny does. First off, what is entrainment like? What exactly is entrainment because you used that term a couple of times? What do you tell people who aren’t familiar with it, haven’t seen it before? It looks like something crazy, like they are being punked or something.

‏‏Yeah. Entrainment, for short, is the name for the set for a network session or an epi-energetic session. The difference between network and epi-energetics – the way that I perceive i‏‏network chiropractic is a chiropractic field that Donny developed. In a nutshell, it basically helps people liberate bound energy inside their living system, inside their body, on their nervous system, on their spine. Over life, we can go through certain experiences we don’t wanna focus on. We don’t want to be with this energy – don’t wanna be with this situation. We want to throw it to the back of our minds. The issue is that we throw it to the back of our mind – it shows up in our spine. I like to look at the nervous system as the software for our life, and the spine is the hardware for our life. The inconvenient truth is that today with all our rapid progress with technology and the amount of everything from telephone poles that are up, to Wi-Fi that’s beaming everywhere, to satellites, all the electronic stress that we experience everywhere, everything from our cars to our homes to our airplanes now (for those who travel often or travel at all) – we’re beamed by a lot. That’s electromagnetic stress. We’re not even talking about chemical stress with pollution, all the smoke that’s coming out of our cars. If we cook a lot with oils, how that creates toxicity. [00:22:50] has created a source to learn about oils from what I found.

‏‏He’s got an oil that you can get at Whole Foods and coops and so forth called Udo’s oil, which is really healthy.

‏‏Yeah, I love that stuff. In a nutshell, we are bombarded. Our bodies are basically bombarded with more stress than ever before that exists in human history. In fact, with all the information that is carried through all these electronic devices, major phones, and satellites, we have more information being beamed at us in a single day – I think even a single hour – than people 150 years ago or even 100 years ago did in their entire lifetime. I found it hard when I found that out, and I heard that the first several times. How can we really measure that? These are invisible signals that are beaming through. The best way I felt it was actually after I went to The Ultimatum Program for the first time. I was at the airport when I was leaving, and I went to sit down. I went to sit down because all the seats were taken. Everywhere was fully booked. Just against this pillar by the gate and on both sides of the pillar were these payphones, and as soon as I went to sit down, as soon as my head sunk in between the payphones, I had this instantaneous migraine headache. My head was throbbing. It was pulsing. There was this magnetic density. It was so intense that even when I jumped out of there, I was walking around, the headache effects stayed with me for a few minutes. I just took it as like, “Wow. At The Ultimatum Program, we were just so sensitized to the field of energy information in the universe and everything.”

We are drowning in information. We are starving for wisdom. – Tony Robbins

You’re just supersensitized to everything, and you go beyond previous conditioning and beneath, so much that I realized that it was the first time I had a phone nearby my head. The intensity of that made me realize that, “Wow, this is the world we are living in.” Flipping it over, I’ve heard Donny, other doctors say this a lot. Tony Robbins says this as well. Many, many people have said this. “We are drowning in information. We are starving for wisdom.” This is the reality of how I experienced the drowning with information, being with information everywhere. Advertisers have us locked down based on whatever websites or anything we watch. We have so many things coming at us, and we really as a human species need some major development in our nervous system to be able to be efficient, energy-efficient with how we live our lives, how we organize and process information. These are kind of longwinded answers. In a short tale, it’s a gentle type of network chiropractic, where any energy that has been bound or stuck somewhere along the nervous system of the body can be liberated and moved through. It is not like it is released because I don’t really see it as a release. I don’t really believe that releasing is always so effective because this energy can be in a sense, transformed for something productive and constructive. Bound energy is still energy. It can still be used as fuel, so tapping into, let’s say, some experiences I’ve had with network carriers, like maybe I felt I had suppressed some real rage because I don’t want to be with it, express it or share it.

Tapping into in a way where it’s constructively used as energy to help me set new standards to take massive, forward action towards a greater vision, or maybe even something totally different. Maybe it’s experiencing the lightness and the spaciousness and the interconnection to all life through the awaken entrainments with network care, which was like the last one or two at the gate, which we both were at. That’s the gist of what I see network as, and entrainment is just to me getting tuned into your inner and the outer rhythms. Tony talks about the different seasons. There’s a season for discover – is being with what’s raw. There’s a lot of raw emotion, I think, in the season of discover. It is like being born, in a sense. It’s really raw. Transforms is about setting new standards, creating vision, taking massive action, transformation. Tony is phenomenal with that season, how he leads people to make a real transformation in their life, a sustainable transformation, one where they get to a point where enough is enough. They’re never gonna tolerate this ever again, and they just leap through. Then they just become this new person. This new identity takes place, and they’re transformed.

‏‏Like myself. For my long-time listeners, you’ve probably heard this before, that Tony changed my life. I had a massive breakthrough, and I’m completely unrecognizable from who I was pre-Tony. I feel 15 years younger. I look 15 years younger. The internal changes of who I am and how I show up in the world – it’s so much more intentional and powerful. Yeah, the external changes are pretty profound. It’s impossible to miss. But those external changes were small in comparison to the internal changes. With Tony, you learn to change your identity to something that is more who you are at the soul level and not settle for less, and not be less in the world. Just set a new standard and change your thermostat to be at that new state, and it really works. It’s amazing. So how many Tony events have you been to?

‏‏I think fifteen.

‏‏That’s a number.

‏‏It’s a bit. How about yourself?

‏‏At least that. Actually probably more like 30. I’ve been to 5 UPW’s, Unleash the Power Within, 3 Date with Destiny’s, 3 or 4 Business Mastery’s. I’ve spoken at 2 Business Mastery, so that was really cool. Life Mastery, Wealth Mastery, Leadership, though I only attended part of Leadership. Platinum trips – did almost three years of Platinum, and four trips a year, although I did miss a few trips. Yeah, probably 30. They were amazing. I have Tony to thank for, for example, me finding my soulmate because we met at Date with Destiny.

‏‏2013 right

‏‏2012. Also, just all the transformational stuff that I went through, especially at the beginning. It all started with the firewalk at Unleash the Power Within, the fall of 2009. That was his entry-level event, kind of like his little sampler. This is good stuff. I should do more. This actually completely shifted me. I got tons of value out of the following events, but even just having gone to that one event, which is like $700, four days, by itself completely changed the trajectory of my life. Just that one even.

God is not a belief, but an experience.

‏‏Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that.

‏‏So let’s go back to the three seasons just to finish that up. So there’s the season of discover, the  season of transform. People who are not familiar with Donny’s work are probably thinking, “Wow, this just sounds really esoteric and weird. It doesn’t really make sense to me,” but you really have to give it a fair go and spend some time like  at a Donny program or getting care with a network chiropractor and experience it for yourself because the monks in India taught me, “God is not a belief, but an experience.” Similarly, with really anything in life that has a lot of meaning to it, it’s not just rote learning: “I’m going to read a book, and I’m just going to believe it,” but you have to embody it. You have to live it and experience it, and that’s what happened to me on Tony Robbins’ trip to India – is I experienced the divine. I went from agnostic to connected to the creator, and it feels like I’m finally awake now, which gets us to the next season of awaken. Talk a bit about that.

‏‏Absolutely. I just want to add one thing too for discovery. I feel like some of the beautiful traditions that I feel really help us connect with this season of discovery is sometimes something as simple as meditation, to really just be. I think discover is really the essence of being missed. But anyway, a season of awaken, also for those listening – two of my favorite books in the world are Donny’s books. One of them, 12 Stages of Healing goes into much greater depth and explains it a thousand times better than I can ever do. That’s too beautiful.

‏‏What’s the other one?

‏‏There are the 12 Stages of Healing, and there’s also a workbook with it, which goes really in-depth with being able to practice the actual SRI stages and know the consciousness behind it. The other one is Healing Myths, Healing Magic. Then a fun, short, little read is The Boomerang Principle. It talks about the law of karma, but with a Donny twist to it, which I think is really fun. The way I perceive awaken is really about – I think real awakening is less about the feeling like we’re up in the clouds or in the stars and more about recognizing that we’re more accountable than we could have ever even imagined that we are. We’re more accountable, and we’re able to make more of an impact than we can even conceive consciously by mastering how we use our focus and our energy. I think with awakening and awaken is living a line and noticing the serendipities and synchronicities happening more often in life, recognizing this grand orchestra that life is and the organization of it is also divine. There really isn’t any charge on anything. In fact, I don’t think even a charge exists in awaken because an awaken i‏‏a sense of self does not even exist. We’re no longer a “you” as Donny would say. In fact, he would describe this season as “discover we’re a nobody, and that’s our pain.” We feel like we’re a nobody, and we need to be a somebody. There’s a huge gap. The pain there transforms all about becoming that somebody, developing that somebody-ness. In the awaken, we become no-body, where we are nobody. We are everybody. We are one with the web of life, and we recognize that we have many gifts to share and that every time we give our gifts, it just lights up the field around us. It lights up people, and it just goes on and trickles and causes these ripple effect per se.

‏‏That separateness is like a myth.

‏‏Yes, the separateness – I think that’s the essence of discovery really is. That is where suffering is. It’s separation. It’s feeling totally separate, feeling totally alone, like we’re nobody, but, yes, separation is an illusion ultimately. Seeing beyond that, seeing the interconnectedness in the community that we all are with awaken. Then there’s the fourth season that he talks about as the most powerful season is – the season of integrate, where we consciously blend the seasons together to make a greater impact in the world, in our lifetime. Blending awaken with discover. We’re discovering what the energy of the awaken are, blending transform with discover, awaken with transform. So we’re creating a vision that ultimately unites us, that adds more love to the world, and more gratitude, more joy, or we’re discovering. I think that’s the beauty of a lot of what Tony has developed, as he creates systems and processes that help people get down to the real, raw depth of what’s the challenge, what’s really going on here, and how can we change, how can we grow, how can we transform, blending those two together.

‏‏Somebody who has never experienced Donny or his programs and might be skeptical, especially if they see an entrainment from the outside looking in. They watch somebody on a chiropractic table getting an entrainment from either Donny or from a network practitioner. They see the person flailing about, putting their butt up in the air, when the person does not even touch them or super gently touches them. It’s like, “How can they respond like that?” The person is looking straight down. They can’t see what Donny’s up to, and he didn’t even touch the person. The spot where he pointed at suddenly flies up in the air or something. You think, “Okay, I am being punked. Where are the hidden cameras? This has gotta be a joke, right?” And so what do you tell somebody who’s watching this and saying, “This can’t be real. There’s gotta be somebody communicating to this person to let them know to put their head up or their butt up or somehow respond.” Then they’ll see something that Donny calls the wave, where the person’s spine starts to go in this pattern, and it’s moving in a way I’ve never seen before prior to network. It’s just mind-blowing. “What the heck is going on here? It’s some sort of alien thing going on.” How do you settle somebody down who thinks these, “It’s crazy!”‏‏

Yeah. I think it’s gonna be really beautiful to see what Donny is coming out with soon because he’s developed so much. Most of the information – we really only see it in programs because obviously there’s a huge – he’s coming out with some new stuff. He talks about epi-energetics, as “epi” meaning “around,” and energetic, so the energy field around the body. What’s fascinating is that every major religion, every ancient wisdom has talked about an energy field around the body – these different intelligences that organize around the body and help us organize different levels of life. It seems like Donny, when he’s doing his epi-energetics work, is not even making a contact on their body or even certain network docs that have gone through the mastery program, where they’re starting to learn how to influence the field between them and the patient or practice member. There is the wisdom – these organizing intelligence are coming into play, and they naturally organize us as matter. When there’s more energy in the soul field, we can’t help but lift up our chest and our hearts and just feel this profound love that seems endless, or the universal spirit that a lot of times you see people going to this full extension. That’s probably the most punk kind of feeling, when people see is their arms are fully out, their legs are fully out.

‏‏They’re flying like superman or something.‏‏

Basically, yes. They’re flying through the galaxies. It didn’t even make sense to me for a long time in the beginning, but I just noticed naturally when I feel this wisdom, when I feel this energy, whether it’s in a program with Donny or whether it’s just me about my life, and all of a sudden I just feel like an intervention. This intelligence just popped in, and I can’t help it. This just kinda happens. It’s unconscious with the way my body just moves. It just naturally wants to move with the rhythm, and it just feels very liberating to do so. But I think in the beginning, when I see all this stuff happen, and I noticed that I wasn’t moving so much or I wasn’t making these sounds or whatever it was, I thought maybe I wasn’t this enough or that enough. I think that’s the big myth. I would rather just say to everybody, “Look into anything Donny said about it because anything I’ll translate to is not gonna be as clear as he says it,” but he talks about the internal and external – where is the orientation of focus. Someone who’s more internal is not gonna have these crazy movements when they’re getting entrainment; whereas someone who’s external, they’re way out there. In fact, their emotions are not their emotions. They are experiencing other people’s emotions. They feel emotional when they see other people feel emotional. They connect with everything outside of them. As soon as you bring it too close inside of them, all the energy drops, or they feel worse. They feel like they’re breaking down. Internal going far out – this is just unheard of. It needs to be relevant and has to relate to their past experiences and events and all this stuff and be able to add to this existing base of knowledge to help come up to the future.

Externals are more likely to be early adaptors with new technologies, with new ideologies, with new philosophies. That’s because, for them, they experience all the energy outside of them. That’s where their home base is for them. Obviously, we can’t live in one or the other. They’re both intertwined like a needle with the thread going through a fabric. But there’s a home base for us. It’s important to know what our home base is. I think the best way to do that is – you’ll really experience your raw nature at a program with Donny, but I believe that they will be creating some sort of forms or questionnaires that’s gonna help people assess this, not just in their own life like for health practice but also – I don’t know too much info about this, but for anyone who might find this relevant, they could look into this. I know Donny has already taken these principles into the corporate world with his partner, Cheryl Cran, who’s one of the top female keynote speakers in the world. She became really famous for her work speaking about the generations in relation to the workplace. They together are leading a corporate training program. I’m sure there’s more info about the different products and services that they’ve created, but I think the website is epsteintechnologies.com or .net, but Cheryl Cran and Donny has both created something for the corporate world in relation to everything that we just talked about, including the seasons and the energy states, so people can apply this in the business world as well and witness the results and how they can be the most efficient, effective business – how can they optimize their processes, how can they optimize their internal meetings, their external meetings, everything.

‏‏I discovered that I was external from going to Ultimatum. It made a lot of sense to me. It allowed me to go with my nature instead of going against my nature and trying to push a rock uphill. Like for example, an external person, when they’re working on their own projects, it tends to break down. It’s an energy drain versus working on somebody else’s projects. It’s more invigorating and builds energy and excitement and so forth. I always found that working on my own projects were really hard. Having my own websites that I had to maintain versus working on somebody else’s website, it’s just a completely different thing. My website is actually smaller and easier to work on and maintain. Why am I struggling so much to just get anything done with it? Why am I just blocked in terms of progressing my own stuff? And it’s because of my external nature. If I want to improve my relationship, I can’t look at it as my relationship with my significant other, my wife Orion. I need to look at it as I’m helping Orion; I am helping my wife. She’s external out there. This is something for her. If I wanted to treat myself better in terms of my fitness or my diet, I need to externalize myself and say, “What’s the impact on future Stephan?” Using one of those tools online like face retirement type tool, where you upload a picture of your face and then ages it by twenty years. That’s future, Stephan. What am I doing to future Stephan by skipping a meal right now? That’s not cool. So very different. Somebody whose internal does not have those kind of struggles; they have different struggles. But knowing my nature and then knowing how to work with that, it’s so powerful, so helpful. For you, listeners, who this resonates with you, “I might be external too from what Stephan’s describing,” it’s really powerful stuff. Was there a particular entrainment experience that you wanted to share, where there’s a profound transformation or opening or awakening experience? Why don’t you share one?‏

It was the entrainment that happened this past December at the Gate. I went with my dad, grandpa, and my cousin. Donny went to entrain my grandpa. My grandpa, when he was six years old, he was politically imprisoned – lasted for twenty years. The day he was politically imprisoned, his uncle, my great-grandpa, was executed like thirty minutes or an hour before they showed up to the house and put him on imprisonment. Throughout the time of imprisonment, more of my grandpa’s uncles and older cousins and even older brother – they all died, the majority of which were through execution, some of which were from tuberculosis in the unsanitary conditions of the general environment. In a nutshell, significant tragedies and wounding that he experienced throughout his life. When Donny went to entrain him, I just felt the emotions well up in me. My grandpa was not even aware of what was going on. He was not emotional, but I felt it swell up in me. My cousin was hyperventilating on the floor, totally broken down. My dad was fully alert, and Donny was with him. As he entrained him, my grandpa just started to – it was something deeper than a cry because it didn’t sound like a cry. It was like a really deep, overdue wail of grief. It was just soul-shattering.

The whole room just started breaking down – everyone who was around us. My dad was holding onto my grandpa’s shoulders. I was holding onto my dad’s shoulders. This wave just went through us all – this wave of a lineage, healing the lineage per se is one way to look at it – changing the lineage. He asked my grandpa, and he said, “Do you forgive them?” My grandpa was crying and said, “I forgive all of them.” Donny said that he felt that my grandpa was witnessing and experiencing all the people, who were involved with torturing him and our family and executing family members. He held them in a light with pure love in his heart. I didn’t know this was going on. I just was overwhelmed with the emotions. It cracked me open. This was definitely the most powerful entrainment that I’ve had up to date. It was completely mind-blowing. I’ll show you the pictures. I think the pictures can describe more of what it was like. What’s interesting was at the same time that this was going on, my grandpa’s great-grandson, my cousin’s son (older sister of the cousin who was there at the Gate with me) – they’re in Boston. They said that the whole day before the time that my grandpa had a session, my grandpa’s great-grandson was having all these muscle spasms and his body is contorting. He felt locked; he couldn’t move.

They said, “This is totally strange because there’s nothing he did or ate that will cause something like this. This never happened before to him in his life, and after the entrainment – after it was all over, all of a sudden, everything just unwinded for him. He was more calm, peaceful, and grounded than usual. Usually, he was a little bit boisterous, and he doesn’t like to eat and stuff like that. He just had this different sense of grounding-ness to him. I even seen pictures of him since that day. Something is different about his character. I think what the beauty of it is – at least the way I feel it and experience it, is that entrainment did so much to bless the lineage, not just backwards, but forwards to the point, where we living right now in this time experience the echoes of the blessings of it because my grandpa chose to bless all those people, when there was such a horrific experience attached to it.

‏‏That’s incredible. Your grandfather is such an amazing man, so much so that you were inspired to dedicate a lot of your time to writing an entire book about his life story, the book Shackled, which is now out – brand new book.  I want to share briefly just one of my own profound entrainment experiences to give listeners an additional case example. In January of 2013, I was at an Ultimatum Program, and I had just met my soulmate, Orion, not even a month prior. I had been in India, as I had mentioned, at a Tony Robbins’ Platinum Partner trip back in October – so a few months prior. I had this profound awakening experience, felt connected to the divine. I went from agnostic, not believing in God or not having any sense of connectedness to the divine, to being so connected. One thing that was an incredible experience for me in my life was being on the table getting entrainment from Donny, and I’m blissed out. I feel so connected to the fabric of creation, and people pick me up and put me on the floor because that’s what happens when you’re blissed out and you’re not even aware of time and space.

So I was just laying on the floor, and I get this divine inspiration that I could give a remote oneness blessing. I learned in India how to give blessings called Dikshas. When I received a Diksha by one of the monks – that was when I had this profound experience. Everything was technicolor. I had never seen green like the green I saw in the grass immediately after getting this Diksha. Incredible experience. Now I had learned how to give Dikshas myself. I had given some to people over the course of months. So I get this divine inspiration that I could give Dikshas remotely – these blessings remotely, and so I run through in my mind all these people in my life that I’ve known or have been part of my life, people who aren’t part of my life anymore, or who I didn’t even like as well – at least 50 people that I went through and gave this remote Diksha to without even knowing that this was even a thing I could do. You’re supposed to put your hands on the person’s – on top of their head, and so I did that including people that I hadn’t thought of for many, many years, like a guy that was an employee. I had fired him on the spot, after I had heard he was saying some things behind my back to other staff. I didn’t like it, and I took offense to. Being full ego and not that mature at that stage in my business life, I just completely severed the employment relationship with him immediately and walked him off the premises. Anyways, it’s a work at will state.

The state was Wisconsin. I was within my rights. We went into a lawsuit though because he felt unjustly treated. I would have won that lawsuit, but I ended up paying him a settlement just to end it at my lawyer’s advice. “Hey you’re gonna win, but this is gonna cost you more than just settling.” So I did. Fifteen years go by. I never hear his name. I never think of him. I never see him. He just basically disappears from the face of the earth for 15 years. Then I think of him. I gave him this Diksha blessing remotely, and he calls me on my cellphone four days later. We are all connected. I’m a pretty pragmatic, skeptical person. I just don’t take on anything that is presented to me. I’m very thoughtful in what I take in and incorporate. This defies traditional logic, but it really underlines the power of connectedness at the soul and the creation level, that we are all connected. The idea of separateness is really just an illusion. It’s really all true, and there was a profound healing that happened with this guy, who called me out of the blue. He called to apologize and had kept thinking, “Should I do it?” He was hemming and hawing about calling me for a while, and then four days later after I pray for him, he calls me out of the blue. I encourage all of you, listeners, to give this a try to get network treatment ideally from Donny, if you can, by going to one of his programs like Ultimatum. It’s an amazing program. It’s very small though, so it’s hard to get into that one. It sells out months and months in advance. Try Transformational Gate. You may not get work done by Donny, but other practitioners instead, and that’s still gonna be amazingly transformational and incredible. Let’s jump now to a little bit about your book. We’re running out of time, but I wanted to give our listeners a little synopsis of what Shackled is for, why you wrote the book, and what’s somebody’s gonna get out of it by reading it.

‏‏Yes, totally. Thank you. Shackled, the book, it chronicles the life of my grandpa. It tells even some of the history that happened behind why all these events happened. It’s pretty crazy and intense. In a nutshell, my great-grandfathers and their brothers were working with a king in Afghanistan, and this king was unlike any other king that has ever been documented in the history of Afghanistan. Just one interesting note about him – this blew my mind because it happened about a hundred years ago, and to think of how progressive this was for Afghanistan a hundred years ago, and what everything would look like in the country, if everything proceeded as intended to. The first rule that he made as a king in Afghanistan was – he made laws and rules to ensure that there was equality in the country and ultimately women’s equality. I think for a king in the Middle East at that time, that was unheard of back in the early 1900s, but this is what he did. He had a very loving relationship with his queen, and he wanted to make sure that everyone was treated fairly and had equal opportunities. Anyways, they’re working together with him to totally develop Afghanistan. Ultimately, he partnered and wanted to develop the eastern world, make the eastern world a developed world, and so they wanted to integrate a lot of the technologies, the systems, the philosophies of the greatest countries in the West. They made partnerships with all these countries and all these high-ranking people.

My great-granduncle was working with Atatúrk in Turkey. Everything looked pretty bright for them. What happened was inconvenient betrayal within the internal team that happened with a spark of a civil war that exiled the king, that exiled some of my ancestors, and that lead to the execution of my great-grandpa and such because of his influence and him being a detriment to the other king’s agenda. Out of fear, he went on to imprison everybody else that was related to him or a friend or a family friend in any way, and usually, the older men were executed as well publicly. That is the historical part behind it, as far as the raw story. The essence of the book is a story told from the perspective of my grandpa’s eyes. I’ve been with him, interviewing him consistently for a few years, and what materialized is really a story of a young, innocent 6-year-old boy, who was just playing and making a model home on the top of his roof with his brother and his cousins. All of a sudden, his whole life turns around because a crowd swarms in the courtyard, and in the center of the crowd is the corpse of his beloved uncle. That marks the beginning of a 20-year political prison sentence, although nothing was sentenced. It was totally up in uncertainty.

Within all this tragedy and darkness, he finds so much light.

There was no documents really even about his time as a prisoner. In fact his youngest cousin, he was a prisoner and was only a few months old, and how he endured and went through some really intense times just to try to and survive, like not having food to eat for a week and no water, except for dirty well water, which may have led to tuberculosis on some people in the family. Regardless, within all this tragedy and darkness, he finds so much light – everything from my great-grandma making a hidden underground school system for them, so they can be educated while they are in jail, because they had no idea how long they are gonna be there, to being in a political prison as a teenager and learning from some of the brightest scholars in Afghanistan and generally in the eastern world. They were imprisoned out of what they knew. Learning six languages in jail, reading, writing, speaking, learning everything from Arabic literature to the philosophies and poems and such from Rumi, Hafez, Rousseau, Locke, and all these great philosophers and thinkers and poets. Ultimately, getting out of jail, getting out of this life, and choosing to lead a life based on being human, being kind, being loving. There’s a pretty, powerful twist at the end of the book. It really embodies the essence of being a human despite whatever we go through. We all have the choice to be a human. That’s really the essence of what I wrote the book about.

The second biggest reason I wrote the book would be I noticed over the years – I’ve always had a close relationship with my grandparents. It’s just always been embedded in my family and really in our culture. We have a high respect and value for being with our elders, and I couldn’t help but feel sad often when I’d visit my grandparent or someone who was temporarily in an assisted living home. I couldn’t help but just see other elders that were there, not having their grandchildren or even children come and visit them often. Here’s my grandpa. I’m coming regularly, once or twice a week. He’s got nephews visiting him sometimes every day. He’s got a lot of company coming in, and I just thought to myself, “Wow. Here are all these people that are in this assisted living home, whether they’re living in senior homes or wherever they are. They lived so much life, and they have so much wisdom.” Just in their life story – just being able to hear a story that – wow, this person went through this, and they rebounded and became this and did this and this. And then this happened, and they still made it through this.

There’s some sort of wisdom in that timeline of hearing their stories that I found something that I felt that a lot of us can really benefit from. I actually wanted to write the book also just to inspire other people to go out there, learn about their elders, learn about their lineage, learn about their ancestors, learn about where they came from. A little hidden cue that I was intending behind doing that is that in the learning and discovering in being with their elders, hearing their wisdom and the enriching stories that they share with us, I believe that we can also learn and even discover certain patterns that have been adopted throughout the lineage, and we can actually change those patterns to have a more constructive future for our future children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and also bless our elders and everyone, also to us that are currently living, if there’s something that’s still not serving us. I don’t think I would have ever even discovered that that would have been a possibility, if it wasn’t for Donny Epstein.

‏‏Yes, we really can change both the future and the past for our lineage, if we come from a place of soulful connectedness, love, and forgiveness. It’s amazing what that could do. Also, hearing the story of your grandfather really underlines this fact that we are so much more than our circumstances.

‏‏Absolutely.

‏‏Amazing. We’re out of time. Let’s give our listeners a few more resources. Maybe share a couple of your favorite episodes of The Soulfully Optimized Life, your podcast, that they could start with. Maybe the Donny Epstein interview would be a good one. Is there maybe a favorite talk or video that you would direct listeners to learn more about Donny? For example, I love to share the talk that Tony Robbins gave about Donny. They are like best buddies now. But when Tony first heard about Donny, he was skeptical, and he goes through that whole journey. What Donny did for both Tony and for his wife, Sage, in terms of life-changing stuff. That’s a powerful video. But is there another one that you like to share or recommend as a starting point for people to learn about Donny?

‏‏Totally, yeah. One link off the bat from my podcast, my favorite episode also, is the one I did with Donny, it’s adamsiddiq.com/047. The title of that episode, if you find on iTunes or on your phone, it’s “The End of Personal Development (…and what lies beyond).” Donny goes into real depth with everything in terms of the energetic intelligence, the energy states, the seasons, how to constructively and consciously use our energy and focus to create magnificent results in life along with twists and turns in different things in relation to relationships, to health, to business, to pretty much all aspects of life. That’s a pretty enriching episode there. Another one that I really enjoyed as well, this one is with Donny is adamsiddiq.com/13, and it’s an invitation to the second-tier of consciousness. Basically, the gist of it, Donny describes the essence of the first tier of consciousness and the second tier of consciousness. That’s just a short one, like 12 minutes long, but I really enjoyed it. There’s an in-depth article on the website, if people want to check it out, weaving other people that represent this second-tier style of thinking. For example, with business and technologies, I think Peter Diamandis with his Exponential Technologies is a really awesome showcase of this, whether what we are seeing is more possible in the world.

Obviously, he talks about abundance, how abundance will be the baseline of the world, and how we’ll be more abundantly – we’ll have things in abundance and more readily available. Everyone’s going to have the basic needs covered with the exponential technologies that are developing. In terms of video, Donny has all these – they’re great. They’re short. They’re entertaining. They’re packed with wisdom. He’s created videos on his Facebook page. I’d actually recommend as a first resource – just go into the Facebook page, which I think is facebook.com/epsteindonny. Have a look through the videos that are already on there. I found them really valuable and entertaining. He just put one up actually yesterday. I think it’s called “The True Goal.” I couldn’t help but laugh, when he said this statement, because I found it to be so true for myself. He said, “The only thing you really get when you achieve your goals is more goals.” What’s the true goal here? What are you really after? He goes in-depth with it, but I just thought that was funny. Those are just some resources in terms of stuff that I’d recommend as far as that, and people – if they wanna see some video interviews I did with my grandpa, along with any information about the book and stuff, shackledbook.com is the website for that. Those are the gist of some resources and references I would recommend for now.

‏‏Awesome. Thank you so much, Adam. Listeners, I hope this has inspired you to connect with your elders, to be more intentional, to maybe work with Donny Epstein, to maybe go to one of his events, programs or Tony Robbins’ program, or just be more intentional in the world. This is Stephan Spencer, signing off. We’ll catch you on the next episode of the Get Yourself Optimized.

Photos of Adam’s most powerful entertainment experiences.
(Photo Credit: Jackie Epstein)

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