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As a note to listeners, this podcast contains explicit language. 

 

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• How to get in tune with your inner potential and “higher self”
• Actions you can take to create space for mindfulness and spirituality in your day-to-day
• Locating your core values so that you can manifest your ideal life

When a torn rotator cuff dashed his (lofty) NBA aspirations, Erick Godsey began studying philosophy in his spare time and immediately developed a passion for it. Throw an intense mushroom trip into the mix, and Godsey set out on a path to understand the nature of humanity and psychology. He developed an obsession with Carl Jung’s teachings and ancient myths, and his own studies and seeking led him to found Kathedra, which offers courses, books, and a podcast that help others reconnect with their highest self. 

While philosophy is often affiliated with thinking, Godsey explains it’s actually the small actions that we take everyday which manifest our highest self. At the top of his list of recommended actions is a daily journaling practice. By journaling consistently everyday, without censoring yourself or trying to write a manicured piece for an intended audience, Godsey explains that you are able to hear your own intuition. This ultimately strengthens one of our most important muscles: our ability to be honest with ourselves. 

Honesty is at the core of building the life that you want, Godsey says, explaining, “The most practical thing that you can do everyday to become who you want to be is to tell the truth to yourself and to other people.” The biggest reason we are dishonest with ourselves and with others is because we are afraid – to ask for what we want, or admit to our dreams. Godsey points out the irony that being afraid of something requires cognizance of it, so facing your fears and being honest with yourself is actually much easier than we think it is – because on some level, we have already done so to form our fears in the first place! 

Once we are able to be honest with ourselves about what we want, we can locate and accept what we will have to sacrifice to achieve it. Picturing a day-in-the-life of your ideal self five years into the future is a beneficial exercise, giving you insight into the daily behaviors, emotions, and routines of the kind of person you can and want to become. 

Contrary to popular life coach advice, Godsey does not consider goal-setting a crucial element of mindful living. While goals are important and can help us recalibrate our path and get us going in the right direction, he suggests that if you believe achieving a goal will fulfill you, you’re setting yourself up for depression and disappointment. Rather than having an object or achievement as our “end-game”, he encourages us to examine what our goals tell us about the type of person we want to be. 

“Whatever your highest goal is, that is the “God-like” thing that you are sacrificing to everyday,” Godsey explains. So rather than sacrificing to an object or an achievement, he finds it more sustainable and compelling to sacrifice to principles and values, like the Greeks who based their Gods around idealistic virtues such as “Love” and “Truth,” rather than objects or achievements. 

Listen to the full episode and dive into your psyche! You’ll emerge with an honest assessment of your personal “gods” and inspiration to develop habits for a more mindful, self-actualized life. If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to check out the other Balanced Badassery podcast episodes and share them with a friend!

Host: Alli Waddell

Guest: Erick Godsey

Transcript:

This is a founding media podcast.

Welcome to the balanced bad-ass re podcast, your weekly fixed of wellness wisdom. I’m your host, Allie Waddell. How do you find time for mindfulness? This week, I’m digging into connecting with ourselves, each other, and being more mindful in the ways we move through this crazy universe with philosopher, thinker, and friend Eric Godsy.

Here’s my conversation with Eric.

And I have my man, Eric gutsy. He is what I like to call a modern day philosopher. He’s a woke as fuck. Human, who is really helping people understand themselves and live better happier lives. So Eric, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you for having me on and thank you for giving me way too big of a title to possibly live up to, but I will do my best.

You really are a modern day philosopher. You read more philosophy. A man under the age of 30, then I would say 99.9, 9% of the population. So how did you get into this down the rabbit hole of the younger land and everything else? So I guess to answer that question, it’s really, how far do I want to try to go back to explain it, but I think essentially.

I got a big ego in high school getting good at basketball. And then I thought I was going to be in the NBA, which was delusional. And then I tore my rotator cuff when I was a junior. And then a week after that, my mom was taken a online college course in philosophy. And she was explained to me what was going on.

And I had never really been introduced to philosophy before then. And with the ego that can only be developed from being good at a sport, but being dumb enough and naive enough to think that you could play professionally. I started studying philosophy. And then I started eating mushrooms when I was like 19 and I had an existential crisis that the only way that I could save my brain was to study philosophy and sanely.

And I actually just thought about this a couple of weeks ago, but I think if I had been living with my parents when I was 19 and I had this. Existential crisis. If they had taken me to a psychiatrist, I would have probably have been diagnosed with some type of mental disorder. I would have probably have been given drugs and I probably would not be who I am now, but I lived alone and I tried to put my brain back together.

And the person that kind of helped me the most was Carl Young. And I knew. In the back of my mind that I would be that I would read his collected works before I was 30. I don’t know why, but I had that feeling. And then I went to Peru a couple of months ago, did watch Houma and just came back and realized, okay, it’s time.

And then since then I’ve been doing that every day. And where are you on that grand journey of reading all of his works first, explain how many works he has. Like what, because I’m guessing most people don’t know like the mass of things that he wrote. Ridiculous, which is ridiculous. Yeah. So his collected works are 20 volumes and each volume is a collection of essays and books and lectures.

And I read decently fast and I’ve, I’m reading for an hour to two hours a day and I’ve read almost every single day for four months. And I’m 28%. When’s your birthday? January 1st. Oh, January 1st, like in a few weeks. Oh man. Oh man. Get on it. I’m trying to stay on it literally. So what I love that I just heard you said is that something resonated with you at some point and said, I need to read this by the time I’m 30 and one of them.

Philosophies that I’ve heard you talk about is this idea of everybody is their own God and this idealized self is all, is always within you. And that’s the thing that’s judging you from within. And that’s where that drive comes from of okay. Yeah. My life is fine, but obviously I need to put.

A little further, so explain your philosophy around how has everybody have a God within them? Yeah. So I think whatever. So the word God is really a symbol that we’re using to try to point to something that’s beyond language. And it’s if you go to a restaurant and you see the menu and you try to eat the menu you’re misunderstanding what the menu is.

The menu is actually something that you can use to get food, and then you can experience food. I think. Whatever God is beyond my understanding, but I think that there’s a category in everyone’s mind that feels like God, and it’s your potential, it’s the human you could be, if you did everything that you know, you should, and you stopped doing all the things that you know, you shouldn’t, and it’s so it’s weird, but all of us feel this, all of us feel that there’s the person who we could be, who we aren’t yet.

All of us know in the moment when we’re doing a thing that we know we shouldn’t be doing. And all of us know, like these are the things in life that I should be doing, but then I’m not. And your potential, in some sense is watching you right now. Like it’s watching you all the time. It knows all of your thoughts.

And I choose to believe, and this might just be a useful fiction, but it’s helped me manifest the life that I want is that my potential wants me to become him. And he talks to me through intuition. And it’s up to me to be heroic and to do the things that my ego is afraid to do, that my intuition asks me to do.

And like one of those things is to read this collection of fucking books that is so aligned with kind of a philosophy that I teach people is The only thing you need to do to be this higher version of yourself, it start to act like them, her act. Yeah. And the daily small Manouchehr action.

People think it’s like this huge oh God, I have to become this other person, which you do, but you do that in the small action. And so I always say you need to first take the time and the space to envision what the hell that person is thinking, doing, being, feeling every single day. And then.

Then it makes everything an AB decision. It’s is this decision in this moment, getting me closer to that path or keeping me here or moving me away. And another thing that you talk about that I like, I’m going to beat this into people’s heads is like this idea that you’re stuck, or you don’t know what you want or that you.

I don’t know what I want. God, it gets really annoying. I’ll just tell you. But one of the issues is that people just do not give themselves the space and the time to sit the hell down and get crystal clear on what that future person needs, wants desires and bodies feels what they’re going to be doing with them, like their lives.

And so how do you take people? How do you explain people? The importance of that? Yeah. So there’s a couple of ways to get at this. The first one is I think anyone who says that they don’t know I’m a part of me genuinely feels like they’re being insincere and that the truth is I’m afraid.

So when people say, I don’t know what I want to do, I think what they’re really saying is I’m afraid. And all of us have if we sat down and we set a timer for five minutes and we were like, What are the things that I know I should be doing that I’m not doing because I’m afraid and we’re willing to be honest, every single person listening to this has a list.

Those are our quote unquote dragons. Those are the things that we know we need to face that we’re not facing. And I feel like when there are obstacles that we know we need to face that we don’t face out of fear. It like it restricts our energy and it yeah. It brings a mist and a fog into our life, and then we can claim, oh I don’t know.

I think you do know. And I think the truth is that you’re afraid. Now I do meet people who seem like they’re genuinely trying their hardest and they don’t seem to know. And my advice to those type of people is to try to act and to do a bunch of things and to feel how your body feels while you’re doing the thing.

And. You will find it by acting and trying and feeling how you feel in the moment. So I think that there’s two types of people that say that thing, 80% of them, I think it’s just fear. You’re just not facing the shit that you need to face. And I think that there’s a smaller percentage of those people who it seems to be.

They’re genuinely trying and they seem to not know their thing yet. And I think that the way that those people find their thing, it’s not to write about it and not to talk about it, but to go and do it. And then to feel how your body resonates when you’re doing the thing. I absolutely love that. Turn it in.

I say game-ify it like, make it fun? Like it’s There’s all. You have a smorgasbord of options to like, do whatever, like regarding fitness regarding how you’re eating regarding your philosophies that you like go out and try. Just give yourself a challenge. I’m gonna read five different philosophy books and see which one resonates with me.

And then you can go down that rabbit hole, or I’m going to try 10 different mind mindfulness practices because in the end. It doesn’t matter which one you do, it’s that you’re giving yourself you’re continually pushing your edge to try to learn and grow and be, but a big part of that is like making space and time to do that.

And I think today in our kind of busy lives, people. Put all of that on the back burner. So one of the things that I know that you find so important as journaling, so explain to me, when did journaling start in your life and how do you use it now and how do you teach it to use as a tool for sure.

I probably recommend journaling more than anything else, because I think at the core, if you learn how to journal you then become your own coach. And so I think that’s the like end point for anyone who wants to try to help other people as you make them. So they don’t need your help anymore.

It’s kinda being a great parent as you want to teach your kids enough to where they don’t need you. And that’s actually scary for the parents, but so the beginning of journaling happened for me when the girl that I dated for three years. And I was absolutely in love with. And the three days before she left, because we broke up basically because she was moving, but we also knew that the passion was gone and we were pretending to be in love for a year, but we weren’t and we were too afraid to have that one conversation anyways.

I was squatting at the gym. And I tweaked my back so badly that I couldn’t, I literally could not stand up for five days. So I was crawling on the floor to go to the bathroom. I couldn’t stand up. And I bought the artist’s way by Julia Cameron. Everybody put that on your list. Everybody should read that book.

And so I was at this really intense new chapter in my life. And again a part of me feels guilty about this, but I seem to have this really strong intuition that it just tells me to do shit and I just have to show up and I felt this irrational compulsion to do the artist’s way religiously.

Every single day, I’m writing three pages and basically the way the journaling practice and the artist’s way is recommended. You write for three pages, you don’t edit anything. You never reread it. You don’t show it to anyone. And the point is just to do it. It’s not to make art just vomit on the page is one of the phrases that she said.

And doing that actually got me back into reading young for the first time since I was 19. And I, I can’t explain why it just as I started to clear my bullshit, it’s like I could hear my intuition more and I started reading young and this is going to sound ridiculous. But before the artist’s way, I didn’t believe in God.

And by the end of the artist’s way, I found my God. I still didn’t know what it meant, but I’ve found a connection to something inside of me that felt godly. And since then, it’s like, whenever I don’t know what to do seriously. Like it takes one page. And by the end of that page, I at least know what my next action is.

And it’s something that I think is going to guide me the rest of my. I absolutely think that’s fascinating because for so many people, I think the idea, if you have not, journaled is oh, it needs to be, it needs to say so I’m going to turn somebody, who’s going to read this. Somebody is going to find it in an attic one day.

And turn it into a book, which they’re not it really is that’s what I tell people. I’m like, just start writing, like stream of consciousness. It doesn’t matter. It can be gobbledygook and it really does calm that kind of monkey part of your mind, especially if you do it in the beginning.

Part of the day, like in the morning, if you haven’t any sort of anxiety, I use it for people who do emotional eating. I’m like, sit down and write for one minute. I go 90% of the time. Most people will not eat whatever they want. I’ve never heard of use it that way with that makes sense seconds. It’s like I’ll set a timer for 60 seconds and write down.

And if you still want to eat the damn doughnut, eat the doughnut after, but I promise you it’s probably emotions coming up there. Yeah. You’re not even, maybe even realizing that are there and you’ve become so disconnected from himself. And so it creates that reconnection. How do you then have people like, so say people, okay.

Now we’ve started journaling. What would you say would be the next step on this mindfulness, maybe creating some more spirituality in your life. You’re doing journaling consistently. What are some other practices that people could have. Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And what you just shared makes me think about what I think about journaling as the most important.

And it’s essentially people developing the habit of actually being honest with themselves. So when you don’t, when you write in a way where you don’t expect it to ever be read, it allows you to take the critical way or the sensor. If you dare, you actually might be honest with yourself for the first time in your life novel idea.

And I think that is actually how the healing process starts is our, we are so weird, but we are afraid of our own truths, but the fact that we are afraid of them shows us that some part of us knows that they’re already true and there’s this internal resistance. And so at least in my world, The degree to which I’m able to be honest with myself, seems to have a direct correlation to how much grace my life seems to give me.

And so I think if you develop the honesty, then the next practices, okay. What do you want? Imagine that you actually get to get the life that you want, if you’re willing to make the the adequate sacrifices, which has all the bullshit that you do, that you shouldn’t be doing that you have to give up in the name of the thing that you say that you want.

And so a practice that I really like is imagine that I guess there’s a couple of ways to do it, but the really easy one is try to imagine the life that you want five years from now. And viscerally imagined that day from beginning to end and write an out like moment to moment. Feel it, smell it, taste it.

And the thing is that you could be wrong, but to do it badly as better than to not do it. And just if my own life as my only data, but it is eerie. How much life seems to give you, if you set a super viscerally clear intention. And what I offer people that I don’t hear offered enough is when you do that, also write out exactly the life that you would get five years from.

Now, if you didn’t do any of the things that you knew you should, if you let all your bad habits control you, if you stayed weak and you kept lying, like what type of life would you create? And then I think you get a heaven and hell in some sense. And There are types of people. And there are people who will resonate with the heaven, but there are people who will be motivated, viscerally, understanding the hell that they could create if they kept just being weak. Yeah. That is the number one thing I have people do. That’s the first step with every single client is the day in the life project, which is a Debbie Millman kind of thing that she got from some other person at some point.

But it really is. It’s like people are never have given themselves the time. I’m like, I want you to devote three to four hours. I want you to really clear a day, have some teeth and on some comfy clothes go somewhere that inspires you. And I’m like crystal and I’m like, what are your sheets?

Who was your dog? I want you to get as crystal clear, because even if you got 60% of it, Compared to if you never give your self the time, because your life is going to look a lot different and you’re going to make a lot different choices. If you want to live on the beach in five years in Costa Rica, then if you want to be the CEO of a company, but if you’re not thinking about it, I love this idea that people are going to wander into their dream life.

They’re like I didn’t plan at all. And all of a sudden I’m here and look, I have all of this amazing stuff that I never even thought. That doesn’t happen. I haven’t seen it. Yeah. And then it gives you real actionable goals, which I know you say you really want to pick an inspirational goal that will keep pushing you.

How do you feel about goals and setting goals and people’s lives? I’ve actually been playing with this idea a lot lately, and this might get weird, but I’m sure this gets to get weird. So I think if you look at like Western and Eastern philosophies, the core. Highest goal of the Eastern philosophy is basically if you imagine that life is a video game, the end point of Eastern philosophy is to recognize that the video game to put down the controller and just to be like, okay, but it seems like the main story of Western philosophy is pick the biggest fucking dragon you can find in the game, find all the allies, train as hard as you can take on as much suffering as you possibly can.

And then go slay that dragon. And I think that both have their merits and S but I think that there’s a third way, which is essentially, especially cause I came from the west. I can’t pretend that I came from the east and maybe the story that I would tell would be different if I was born in that part of the world.

But because I was born in the west, it seems as if the best story, the best way to do this is you set the right. Inspiring goal that you can possibly fathom, like what is the biggest problem in the world that you could solve? And then once you set that goal, then you bow before it, and you make all the sacrifices that you need to make.

And my intuition is that at some part along the path, you can actually give up the goal because you’re in accordance with the type of human that you would have to be to achieve it, that you actually achieved the Eastern ideal, where you don’t even have to try. And just your way of being is going to be in such a way that you solve the problem.

But I think to start, especially if you come from the west, you have to make goals. Cause I hear the people who are in the Eastern camps, especially if they come from Western world, they actually look down on goals and think that goals is missing the point. I think that goals help you. Calibrate your GPS and then you can get so good along the way that you don’t need it anymore.

Yeah, I think it’s so important. I think you’re right about Western culture is we’ve been inundated. Like we have to go achieve something and go achieve something. For a lot of people. What I actually want people to unpack is not only just like the actual goal, it’s what emotion are you really going for?

Because the thing is you see people striving and striving for the thing, goal, like the money, the job, the lady, the whatever. And then if you get, yeah, And you actually haven’t achieved the emotion behind it. That’s when the emptiness comes in. And that actually feels worse than never getting the goal.

Because I’ll tell you just on body-wise like I’ll I work with girls all day long. They were like, I just need to be a size six. And I’m like, but why. I was like, what is that going to give you? You really want to be confident, but if you haven’t worked on the mindset part, I’ll get you to a size six.

You’ll still hit yourself and it’ll feel worse because now I got the thing that I thought I wanted and I got it. And now I still feel like shit. And you see that? Yeah. People with success, especially around money in business, like you’ve worked and worked and I’m on top of the hill and I have the house and I have the girl and I have the, all this stuff.

And then they’re like, oh shit, I’m still miserable. I still hate myself. I still am unfulfilled because I haven’t done the emotional work to really tap in to the path, which I’m thinking you, I heard you explain it. One on one podcast is your Dow is you haven’t really embodied. The emotion that you want to feel when you get there.

So a couple of things come up when you say that. And I think that you’re completely right. Is that whatever your highest goal is, in some sense, that is like a God-like thing. Like it’s the thing that you’re sacrificing too. And the thing is that you can pick the wrong God. Like I think that’s a mythological motif that is shown over and over again.

And I actually heard mark Manson talking about this on the podcast with Aubrey. And I think it’s going to be the main crux of his next book, but he was talking about be conscious of what your God value is. And if your God value is a thing, you’re probably going to have a very uncomfortable time when you achieve it because your God value, calibrates your emotions, basically like it lets you know, what’s good and what’s bad.

And the thing is that if you achieve. You have to, you’re going to enter a period where you don’t have a God value. And that’s like, when people like suffer really severe depression it’s because they don’t have the thing that they’re aimed at. So what he talks about is what the Greeks did is that their highest values were virtues.

They were principles. They were ways of being every day that you don’t ever achieve. Or love or gratitude or honor, like those things cannot be achieved, but if that’s your highest value, you can do it every day. And you’re emotionally calibrated every day. Oh, I love that. And I think having people write a really strong value list is so important along with doing kind of the day in the life that like the really innate detailed oriented is then draw from that.

What are the values that you see pulled out in that is family super important to you is your honor is his service to others. What are those things? And then you can start integrating those big things into your life. Every single day of service and failure. Is of paramount to you, which I hear people say, and then I see you not spending time with your family or making time to actually give, be of service to other people.

You’re just lying to yourself and to everybody else. And everybody knows it. Absolutely. So I think that is a really interesting. Way to wrap up is like being a real mindful piece of what do you want and what are those values? And so now we’re going to go into my favorite part. We’re going to do some rapid fire questions.

Okay. What is your spirit animal owl. Oh, why now? My perception and I feel like the Al can see in the dark. Oh, That’s a good one. It’s interesting. I’ve never had anybody say owl, like who do you, what is going to be the name of your biography,

but useful fiction.

That’s awesome. Who’s going to play you in the movie. Someone who’s not alive yet. So I don’t know. Hopefully it’ll be after I die. I don’t want to have a biography while I’m still alive. That’d be awesome. All right. Final question. Two parter. What advice would you give to your younger self? You can tell me how old that person is.

And then what advice would your 90 year old self give you today? It’s going to be the same advice and it’s tell the fucking truth. Do you think you would. When you were younger, it would depend on what the experience was about how I came to me and told me what it made you listen. If it was a hallucination or a dream that had the vividness of a psychedelic experience, I probably would cause you listened to this.

Yeah. I love it. Is there any thing that you didn’t get to say on this podcast that you want to share with them? Probably things that I will learn over the course of the rest of my life that I don’t know now. But I think that the most practical thing that you can do every day to become who you want to be is to tell the truth to yourself and other people.

And it’s my highest value. And I still see places every day that I don’t do it, but I’m always trying to do it more. And I really think that’s the fucking. Truth bomb.com guys. That’s it. Eric, you are one of my favorite humans on the planet, even though we just met, but seriously, follow this guy on all the internets.

He’s an amazing dude. Thank you so much.

I’m ready to start a journal. How about you? Thank you, Eric, for sharing your wellness wisdom with me and our lives. If you love Derek, like I do, he’s also a fellow podcaster and you can hear more from him on his podcast. Miss that make us, we put a link in the show notes, the balanced bad-ass free podcast team includes me, Allie Waddell, producer, Mariah gossip, audio engineer, Jake Wallace.

And thanks again to founding media for years. Balanced bad-ass is available everywhere. You get your podcasts. So share it with your friends and your loved ones. So you can have more bad-ass people in your life. We’d really appreciate it. I’d really appreciate it. You can follow me on social media act.

Allie would L a L I w a D E L L. Thanks for listening.