July 11, 2025 • 38 mins
Discovering Inner Peace: A Radical Approach to Stress with Dean Graves
In this episode of Real Men Feel, host Andy Grant is joined by Dean Graves, a spiritual philosopher, author, and coach, to delve into the complex phenomenon of stress. Together, they explore the deeper meanings of stress, why men experience it more intensely, and how to address it beyond mere coping mechanisms. Dean provides a unique perspective, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, authenticity, and emotional honesty.
He reveals that stress is a spectrum and that true healing comes from revisiting unresolved moments and making sense of them. Through a blend of philosophy and practical advice, this conversation serves as a guide for anyone feeling overwhelmed or seeking inner peace.
00:00 Introduction to Stress and Expectations
00:25 Welcome to Real Men Feel
01:12 Defining Stress with Dean Graves
03:22 The Spectrum of Stress
05:09 Healing Trauma and Emotions
06:47 Awareness and Consciousness
15:16 Gender Differences in Stress
21:54 The Path to Awakening
33:40 Meditation and Self-Healing
36:40 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Connect with Dean
Dean Graves -- https://www.ddeangraves.org/
Facebook -- https://www.facebook.com/deanhalf
Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/simpleenlightenment/
LinkedIn -- https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-graves-985390239/
Resources
Enigma of Consciousness: A Spiritual Exploration of Humanity's Relationship to Creation by Dean Graves -- https://amzn.to/4lNdHzw
Chatting with the Arcturians Podcast -- https://open.spotify.com/show/6lw6ciJPfhhJaQydEnUHDw?si=4ebac8cf780445a9
Simple Enlightenment Podcast -- https://open.spotify.com/show/52aVtnZmCNNJOGLeFm2ZyY?si=c8d9a566c4a544ab
Connect with Andy and the Real Men Feel Podcast:
Book a Clarity Call with Andy and get clear on your goals, what's in your way, and what you can do about it at https://theandygrant.com/talk
Instagram | @realmenfeelshow & @theandygrant
Andy Grant Website | https://theandygrant.com for coaching, healing, and book info!
Real Men Feel Website | http://realmenfeel.org
Authentic AF Community | http://realmenfeel.org/group
YouTube | https://youtube.com/realmenfeel
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Stress is the difference betweenour expectations and how things
really are. So when we have an experience
and when we interpret that experience through our
expectations, that gives us the opportunity for stress.
We are obligated to make a decision about every experience
(00:22):
before we can go to the next experience.
Hello and welcome to Real Men Feel, the show that reminds men
that they're human beings. I'm your host, Andy Grant.
Today we're diving deep into something that every man
experiences, but few are truly equipped to understand or
transform stress. My guest today is Dean Graves, a
(00:42):
spiritual philosopher, author, and coach with a powerful
perspective on stress, inner peace, and the journey from fear
to love. In this conversation, we explore
what stress really is, why it shows up so intensely in men,
and how we can begin to dissolveit, not just cope with it.
If you're tired of running on empty, reacting in anger, or
feeling like peace is completelyout of reach, this one's for
(01:04):
you. Let's do it.
Hello Dean, and welcome to Real Men Feel.
Thank you, Andy. Glad you to be here.
Thank you for having me. You wanted to talk about stress,
so let's start at the start. And would you please define
stress? Sure.
Yeah, that's a a great question that most people don't even
think to ask. Stress is the difference between
(01:28):
our expectations and how things really are.
So when we have an experience and when we interpret that
experience through our expectations, that gives us the
opportunity for stress. We are obligated to make a
decision about every experience before we can go to the next
(01:49):
experience. And our perception of an
experience covers some period oftime, 15 minutes, thirty
minutes, some period of time, usually strung together by the
commonality of environment and the stream of thoughts.
The reality is that every perceived experience is actually
(02:10):
dozens of thought, is comprised of dozens of thoughts each and
every thought that we process inand of itself is a complete
experience. And it is with every single
thought we are obligated to makea decision.
And the decision that we are obligated to make is the
(02:31):
decision that this thought feelsgood.
And I like it or it doesn't feelgood and I don't like it.
And the basis for that determination is purely how it
feels. We don't go through a the I like
it because of this, that and theother process.
We don't do a rational, logical estimation of every thought.
(02:52):
We just feel it, that thought. If it reinforces our identity,
our herifant, our ego to all thesame thing, then we like it.
If it doesn't, then we don't like it.
And that is stress. Anything that challenges the
(03:14):
authenticity of our ego for the sake of simply understanding,
then we don't like it. Stress is a spectrum, a very
minor stress. You know, I don't like, I don't
like milk in my coffee. I'd rather have half and half
that. Very minor, but it nevertheless
it is on the stress stress spectrum.
(03:37):
The opposite end of that would be something that we deem to be
traumatic. So when we experience a thought
that is so challenging to the authenticity of our identity of
our ego, then we are unable to make that decision for that one
(04:01):
thought that is so challenges myperception of self that I'm
unable to make that decision. And we that becomes traumatic.
Now what has actually happened is for that one thought, it is
so challenging to our perceptionof self that we our awareness
(04:22):
actually leaves our body. And for that moment we enter a
condition of well, stress, but shock.
And so we go to the next thoughtbased upon how we are.
But that one moment will remain unresolved until we go back and
(04:44):
adjudicate that thought, whetherit feels good or doesn't feel
good. And so in an experience that we
deem to be traumatic, whether itbe military oriented or crime
oriented or just simply an everyday experience that we are
in a lessened condition of how we normally are can be
(05:06):
interpreted by us as traumatic. And so the healing of a trauma
is actually a very simple process of guiding yourself.
You can do it to yourself. It's very difficult to do
yourself as someone who has a a knowledge of how it actually
works to guide you back to that moment and allow you to make to
(05:30):
adjudicate that thought. That is a a vacancy in your
stream of experiences and the trauma becomes healed.
That decision that we make, thateither the thought feels good or
doesn't feel good in and of itself is a complete emotion.
Matter of fact, that is the onlyemotion that there is.
(05:51):
There is no emotion of the thousands of names that we have
assigned to. Emotions are actually conditions
of being that we are in, rather than an emotion.
If we are in a condition of grief, we allow ourselves to
have a certain vibrational levelat that condition of grief, and
(06:14):
we are most likely to interpret all of the thoughts that we
process while we remain in that condition of grief as unpleasant
because we are in a reduced state of of being.
Are all of those perceptions anddecision points of of I like
this or I don't like this? Is that conscious or
(06:36):
unconscious? Well, it can be conscious for
the most part it it is unconscious and that is actually
a measure of how we are evolving.
We are consciousness. Everything that we experience is
consciousness, one of the the most, probably the single most
(06:56):
essential characteristic of the range of consciousness.
In their multiple ranges of consciousness, we just all share
a certain range of consciousnesswhich is actually very low on
the consciousness scale. As a population, we are tasked
with becoming awareness, and it is awareness that is both our
(07:17):
discovery tool of what needs to be healed and the healing tool
itself. But as we evolve within our
range of consciousness, we will actually be be becoming more
aware. And there is a significant break
point in our Incarnate lifetime,which is the point that we reach
(07:43):
a point of awakening. And awakening is nothing more
than that awareness that all thestuff that I've been doing in my
life before this point and it can occur at any time throughout
your life. I may be successful from
external measurement basis, but I'm not getting happier.
(08:06):
I'm not with all my successes, I'm not happy.
And that is the point of awakening and it we are cast at
that point and that is overcoming unconsciousness,
which is the condition that we are born into and must overcome
with each new lifetime. We are tasked to look around and
(08:27):
see what other alternatives are there besides what I have been
doing. That point also is designed to
take the natural awareness that we all have, and instead of
having that awareness pointed outside of us, to measure how
we're being received by the world around us.
(08:49):
To learn to invert that same awareness inside and begin to
become aware of what it is that we have incorporated into our
perception of self that is perpetuating our lack of
happiness. So deciding something feels good
or doesn't, we're relying on ourfeelings.
Purely. Purely.
(09:11):
And so something just end. It's a body sensation.
Is it a knowing? Is it different for everybody?
What, what, how do, how do, how do I feel?
What's what's good or or bad forme?
How do you know when? How do you know what's what is
truth? It feels right.
I mean, you can get all of the statistics in the world
(09:31):
collected, but you, you know, you still have that feeling.
This doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel true.
And that is? Along the lines of intuition or
just your gut instinct. You call it intuition, but it's
actually your your authentic self that is telling you that
that's not true. We are part of the design that
(09:54):
we go through with each lifetimeis we form this herophant, this
identity, this ego. We form it every lifetime that
we we enter into and it's based upon our experiences as well as
influxes of those that are around us when we're an infant
(10:15):
and a child, certainly our source of information and
experience as parents and immediate family.
And so they, we get that by osmosis.
We don't, you know, it feels good.
If I behave this way, then I getrewarded.
I like that it feels good. I want more of that.
If I don't, then, you know, the,the other stuff happens.
(10:36):
And so we learn to to balance this identity that becomes more
complex as we go through childhood.
When we reach the teenage years,then our awareness has greatly
accelerated, but we don't have any information.
And that's why those teenage years for everybody is always so
(10:59):
challenging and why teenagers, as a rule of thumb, by
comparison, are pretty untethered.
We're experimenting, we're gaining information.
We're trying to get information as to what it is that we like in
order to fulfill the equivalent of awareness that we have
increased. And we will stay in that
(11:21):
condition based upon that herophant that we've created
essentially as teenagers, but but including those childhood
years as well, until we have that realization that, you know,
something's not right. I'm not happy.
So there's got to be something that has to be changed.
Only thing I can change is me. It it seems like modern day
(11:44):
society and culture is very stressful.
Is is the does every time periodthink their time is the most
stressful or is today more stressful?
Has to do with us, doesn't have anything to do with the nature
of our experiences. The experiences, you know, you
and I could probably sit down ina couple hours and write out
every possible experience that ahuman can have.
(12:08):
And you say, you know, I, I felloff a chair, I fell off a roof,
I fell off a Cliff, you're falling.
It's all the same experience to grid to different degrees.
And so the number of experiencesthat we have available to us are
actually very limited. What changes is how we are and
how we interpret those experiences.
(12:30):
And so one person may interpret well, going back to the trauma
example, you have two soldiers in a foxhole.
They experience the same firefight, the same external
experience. One of them has a trauma, the
other one doesn't. The only difference is the
condition that they are in at the time that they have that
(12:50):
experience. The same is true of of any
experience that we have, what one person may deem to be very
stressful on the stress scale space spectrum.
And the other person said, hey, well, you know, didn't work out.
No big deal. So it depends on how the
individual is. But by virtue of this process,
(13:12):
we are actually magnetic. We attract experiences to us
that we need to have in order tofulfill our purpose in life.
And as being consciousness, our our there is no variety in the
purpose of life. Our purpose is to explore
ourselves. Our mission is unique and that
(13:33):
is separate from our purpose. Our mission is to learn what we
like, do what we like, become proficient at what we like, and
by doing that, that will attractthe types of experiences that we
need in order to fulfill our purpose in life.
Did you have a particular turning point, breaking point
(13:53):
with with stress that made you have an awakening experience and
and realize all these? Truths Yeah, yeah, I've, I've
experienced this. I teach it and guide others to,
to have a path to follow. But I, I lived a very
conventional life and was moderately successful, I thought
in what I was doing and till about my 50th year.
(14:17):
And, you know, I just, I just had that feeling though, this is
this is Sisypusi. And I'm pushing the rock up the
hill every day. And now I know it's going to
roll back down the next day and I'm going to have to do it all
over again. And so that kind of was the, the
spotlight on my unhappiness thatI had this realization that all
(14:39):
of the things that I had been taught for 50 years is this is
what you need to do in order to be successful and happy in, in
life. And had that spotlight, as I
say, that awareness, well, you know, this isn't even getting
any better. And I'm running out of time
here. I need to find some other way of
doing things. And so, and that's the way
(15:01):
anybody that has an awakening, anybody that assumes that self
responsibility for healing and for finding that happiness has a
similar type of experience. It can happen when you're a
teenager, It can happen when you're 80 years old.
Do men and women experience and express stress differently?
(15:21):
They experience stress the same way because whether you're male
or female, you are obligated to create this herofant.
Now what differs is the nature of that herofant that we create.
Men create a herofant, a lot of it provided to us by the
surrounding cultures that we grow up in.
(15:45):
And our power is in strength andthat is attributed somewhat
degree with our body. We have a male body but strength
isn't always possible in physical strength.
So we have other things like wealth, money, job titles, all
(16:07):
sorts of things like that. Add to that perception of
strength and we will defend and protect that because that is
what we use to reinforce this herophant, this false identity
that we create. Women, on the other hand, also
create a herophant, but their power source is beauty.
And look at the billions of dollars every year that women
(16:31):
spend on maintaining beauty, which is actually just a
socially acceptable way of identifying sex.
So women's power is sex. But if you think of the women
woman's body and women's function is providing the next
(16:54):
generation, you know it. It is biologic.
It corresponds biologically withthe relationship of of male and
female. The female is much going to be
much more inclined to learn to invert that awareness because of
the biological quality of havingchildren.
(17:17):
Men, on the other hand, don't have that.
And while they may assume a fathering or a paternal role,
they don't feel that internally as significantly as the female
does. And so awakening and healing,
(17:37):
you can actually say is more difficult for the male.
Matter of fact, the the nature of, of creation is predicated
upon an object subject relationship.
The male and female is always anobject subject relationship.
In spite of all of the cultural things that we've been talking
about. The female is always the object.
(17:59):
The male is always the subject. The object is the teacher, the
subject is the student. That's not to say in a
relationship that we are solely the object and solely the
subject. We alternate that role depending
on subject matter in the instance that we're dealing
with. But the the master image is the
(18:23):
male is always the subject, the female is always the object.
A lot of men myself can tend to hold things until they explode.
Yeah, so. Why is that suppression a common
way of dealing with stress? Is is that strength?
Is that your strength? Yeah.
This is strength. I mean, I can't, I can't show
weakness. I have to be strong.
(18:45):
I have to be superior in some way.
And so we, we, we fulfill our role by holding that inside.
But it's not until we begin to learn to be vulnerable with
ourselves, not anything outside of us with ourselves, that we
(19:10):
begin to heal. So a level of authenticity and
vulnerability with the self is enough to heal and release
stress. Stress and bring on our
awakening. Only thing we can change is
ourselves and in order to changeyou have to become a vulnerable.
You have to, you have to learn to be honest with yourself.
What we actually seek, we perceive that we seek love.
(19:33):
What we actually seek is intimacy.
Now we are we are taught that you can be intimate with another
person, but to be intimate with another person you have to be
able essentially know what they feel, which we cannot.
It is beyond our capacity. In this range of consciousness,
we can feel what's inside of us and we can learn through total
(19:58):
honesty. Intimacy is nothing more than
total honesty. Total honesty.
When we reach that point, then we can reciprocate with a
harmonic resonance with someone else that has also achieved the
same level of awareness that we have, that feeling of intimacy
with another person which is in our future.
(20:21):
What are some of the What are some of the symptoms of
unresolved stress in men? Physical difficulties, heart,
heart problems, gastrointestinalproblems, PTSD, osteoporosis,
that it, it depends on how we have stored that stress because
(20:42):
our storage of stress is geographic within the body.
And so someone who is experiencing lot of heart
problems is that you can always,always count on that being the
thought of lack of love, which is the lack of intimacy.
We have gastrointestinal problems, you have stomach
(21:04):
problems, that's often fear and a guilt, shame, things of that
nature. When we have throat problems,
excess responsibility, things ofthat nature, you know, if you
look generationally, generationally if you look at
people and what Tom Brokaw defined as the greatest
(21:25):
generation and what is that? What was a common characteristic
of that generation is Stoop's shoulders as they got older.
And if you consider what they contended with, they contended
with depression, with World War 2, tremendous responsibility not
only for themselves but their family and all of the the world
(21:45):
really. And stooped shoulders and bent
spines were characteristic, which is the weight of the
stress that they were carrying. So you mentioned the key to an
awakening is our own self-awareness.
How might a man listening to this begin that journey of
becoming more aware? Spending some time in
(22:08):
introspection and learning to behonest with themselves.
And the process of healing is actually a 2 step process and
it's the same for everybody, whether you're male or female or
whatever. All the experiences that we've
had in a lifetime are purposefulin that they bring us the
opportunity to learn. Now what we can learn about is
(22:33):
ourselves in relation to people,places, and things we perceive
that I can learn about other people, I can learn about
things, and so on and so forth. The reality is we are a
participant in every relationship, whether person,
place, or thing that we have. We cannot exclude ourselves from
(22:53):
those interactions. It is ourselves that we can
learn about, that we can become familiar with.
And being aware of that allows us to learn to invert that
awareness from outside of ourselves, inside of ourselves.
And how am I feeling? Your whole, your whole podcast
(23:16):
is about real men who feel. And so learning to be aware of
what it is that you're feeling brings your awareness inside.
Now that is a, that is an endless deep process.
It's not a matter of, Oh yeah, Idid that for 10 minutes.
I got it figured out kind of thing.
It is a lifelong process. But as you do that and as you
(23:38):
heal, then what fills that void automatically is happiness.
Happiness is not something that you can get.
It's not something that you can give.
It is something that you are. And so if you think of happiness
as the, the ocean wave that's flowing into the shore, and when
it hits the shore, it fills all the gaps, all the crevices, all
(24:02):
the, the holes in the, the shore.
It doesn't have to be dispensed.Each little corner and nook and
cranny in the shore, it automatically fills those voids.
And that's what happiness does. When we surrender this what's
called emotional baggage, which means we have learned the
(24:22):
lessons from the message, from the experiences that we've had
up to that point and resolve those unresolved lessons that we
didn't learn, then we have sufficient, more than sufficient
awareness to become aware of thebeliefs that we've incorporated
into our false identity that we are obligated to create.
(24:44):
And when we begin to throw out those beliefs that no longer
serve us, then that greatly escalates our awareness and
greatly escalates our experienceof happiness.
So it really seems like there's a very spiritual essence to
stress. It's like our soul is trying to
tell us things so that we can get to our natural state of
(25:05):
happiness. Yes, and it'll hit you in the
head with the two before once ifyou get the lesson that you
don't have to do that again. But most of us, we have that
tendency to just keep bopping ourselves in the head with the
same 2 before. And that is the difference
between stress and suffering. Hitting yourself in the head one
time with the two before and learning the lesson is stress.
Continuing to bop yourself in the head with the same 2 before
(25:28):
is suffering. What leads someone to ignore
stress and let it become suffering?
Fear because you have to choose yourself.
You have to change yourself. If I'm not who I think I am,
then who the hell am I? And my perception of self is?
This is false. It's always false.
(25:49):
Our authentic self is always underneath our perception of of
self, and if you think of the authentic self as the gold and
you bury the gold in the ground,you piled a bunch of trash on
top of it. You want to get to the gold, so
you got to get rid of the trash and then dig a little bit of
depth to get the gold back out of the ground.
(26:12):
All the stuff that causes us perpetual stress or perpetuates
our stress is the trash that we have piled on top of our
authentic self. And so our our authentic self is
a state of happiness. It's in a state of bliss.
Bliss is perfect happiness. What are the signs if if a man
(26:33):
is just completely unaware this is all just new to them?
What are the signs that they areoperating from love or from
fear? Well, love, Let me qualify this.
We perceive love to be an emotion.
We perceive love to be somethingthat we can give or get.
Love is not a commodity. It's not something that I can
(26:55):
give or get. Love is the condition of being
that we are in. It is our natural state of being
and what we are evolving towards, which we will begin to
experience after we become awareness, after we evolve to
the next range of consciousness.And just like we are tasked with
becoming awareness at this rangeof consciousness, we will be
(27:17):
tasked with becoming love in thenext range of consciousness.
What we get in this lifetime, this range of consciousness is a
peek behind the curtain. Every time that we have felt
love in our lives, it is not because we have gotten love from
the person, place, or thing thatwe're interacting with.
(27:38):
It is because we have felt so comfortable with that person,
place or thing that we have beenwilling to temporarily surrender
the authenticity of this identity that we've created.
And we felt who we already are. And that's why it's not, we
don't feel it constantly becauseas soon as we get past that
temporary interaction, then we immediately bring back up this
(28:02):
false identity. And that's the face, the facade
that we, that's our perception of self that we again put out
there for the world around us. Every relationship, every
marital relationship, we the, the, the person that we choose
to to to marry. We choose out of love.
(28:22):
But if we don't define it as love because we feel so
comfortable with this person that we're willing to more
frequently surrender this false perception of self, all the
people we date, you know, we may, you know, really like
hanging out with Susie Q or whatever, You know, we dated for
three or four years, but she's not the one.
(28:44):
I don't feel that with her. And I may like being with her,
but she doesn't allow me to surrender this false perception
of self. Nearly a mutt enough to spend
that time. When a relationship, a marital
relationship, or a long term relationship breaks down, the
only reason that it breaks down is 1 or both of the participants
(29:08):
have slipped back into that false identity and they're no
longer allowing themselves to bethat authentic self with the
other person. This next range of
consciousness, when we truly experience our ourselves as as
love and as happiness, is that beyond the human experience or
is that possible here? It is beyond.
(29:29):
OK, Yeah. We're under an evolutionary
track which is synonymous with the Enlightenment path.
And So what has been so strategic in the teachings of
our historical spiritual leaders, as well as those today
is the importance of the Enlightenment path, because that
is the experiences along the path are immutable.
(29:51):
There's it will feel exactly thesame for you when we achieve a
certain degree of progress, as it will for me and everyone
else. And what we are doing, what
allows us to be what what causesus to be, have the experiences
that we do and to be consciousness is our authentic
(30:12):
self, which is, and I'm going you're way ahead of us here.
We are the one infinite creator experiencing ourselves at this
range of consciousness. What allows us to experience
this range of consciousness is our spirit is intoxicated with
free will. That's what allows the all of
(30:33):
creation to exist. Free will is a misnomer.
It is not the choice of turning right or turning left or eating
hot sandwich or cold sandwich that is the result of free will.
Free will is our perception of separation, and because we
perceive ourselves as separate from everybody and everything,
(30:56):
we have choice, and that choice is how we explore ourselves and
explore creation. The whole process of evolution
and the whole process of the Enlightenment path is
incrementally surrendering our perception of separation so that
we can allow more of our authentic self to emerge and
(31:19):
dissolve our perception of autonomy.
The whole process of evolution is a greater integration into
unity, which eventually concludes with our full
awareness and dissolving any perception of separation with
the Creator. All is 1.
There is no separation other than our perception of
(31:40):
separation. So the ultimate evolution is we
drop free will and we're all in alignment with God's will.
Well, we're not. You're the the two quite
problems for that question. There's no longer a we, there's
no multiples and there's no reunification because we already
(32:01):
are. We just don't perceive it as
such. So it's just dropping our
perceptions of separation of free will.
And then it's the natural state is unity.
Yes, I I love the depth of of this and and your teachings and
work. What?
What's one thing that you wish more men knew?
That they don't have to be the strongest guy in the room every
(32:23):
time to allow them to to to understand that they are
learning by virtue of their interactions, as is everyone
else that they're interacting with.
And every time someone challenges your authenticity,
they are giving you a gift. They are giving you the
opportunity to become aware of what it is about yourself,
(32:45):
myself, that I need to become aware of and surrender so that I
can be more of my authentic selfand experience greater
happiness. But we are trained as men.
I was, and I assume most every other man was that.
No, you have to defend your territory.
You have to defend your identity.
And that often ends up in bellicosity.
(33:08):
Every war that has ever been fought has been predicated upon
that concept. And so instead of resisting and
battling back, certainly you have to defend yourself.
But you don't have to feel I'm upset.
So I'm going to beat the hell out of you until you see how
wonderful my identity is. If if someone is listening to
this and they're past this pointof past the point of stress that
(33:32):
it is suffering and they're justin a feeling that the constant
state of over overwhelm and hopelessness, what's the best
first step? The first step for me was to
beginning to beginning to meditate.
And there's not a better tool. It is proven for centuries, as
long as we have recorded history, the most productive
(33:55):
tool for self healing and awareness in in finding greater
happiness for most people. And I teach this and I tell my
students, it's difficult for everybody.
Begin however you can begin. I began with listening to guided
meditations. You'll reach a point where those
guided meditations become a distraction and you'll know that
(34:18):
you've reached that plateau, that point.
So you'll, you'll go to other things, you know, the candles
and the gongs and stuff, whatever gets you into the mood
of meditation until you go through that and you no longer
need that. Those are just permission slips
to allow yourself to slip into that that inward feeling until
(34:41):
you you can just sit down and meditate.
You sit down in the middle of Times Square and just have a
great meditation because you canshut out all of the stimulus
that's coming in both physicallyand mentally and learn to take
control of your thoughts. Most people have the
misperception that the objectiveof meditation is to stop your
thoughts. Well, you can't stop your
(35:02):
thoughts. There's no way that you can
stop. If you were able to stop your
thoughts, you would move out of time because time is nothing
more than our incessant processing of thoughts.
It's beyond our capacity at thisrange of consciousness.
But what I tell my students is when you meditate, you allow
(35:23):
yourselves to go into the guru'scave.
We exist in the village. In the village are all problems.
When we learn to meditate, we allow ourselves a daily retreat
into the guru's cave. And there are no problems in the
guru's cave. And mindfulness is nothing more
than learning to take that awareness and that condition of
(35:43):
being that you learn in the guru's cave with you back into
the village so that you're no longer engrossed in the problems
that exist in the village. And when you do that, then you
have become awareness. You have become in control of
yourself. You've healed in you're no
(36:04):
longer trigger. You've healed that emotional
baggage that we talked about, and you've significantly begin
to throw off those beliefs that you've incorporated into this
ego mind, this ego that perpetuate your attraction of
experiences that highlight what needs to be.
Healed well, that sure puts a new spin on it Takes a village
(36:25):
for me and. Well, it takes a village to give
you experiences, Yeah. And it's only through those
experiences that you learn what you need to learn about yourself
in order to heal. They often tell people the only
wrong way to meditate is not to.Yeah, absolutely.
Beautiful, Dean, again, I find this this has been a fascinating
conversation. What's the best way for people
(36:45):
to connect with you and learn about everything that you're up
to? Well, I have a website that has
all my contact information as well as the the work that I've
produced D the initial D deangraves.org, alloneword.org
and I have 4 books, all of whichare on consciousness and
(37:05):
designed to guide you along thisprocess.
The most recent book that's available from your favorite
bookstore, The Enigma of Consciousness, a spiritual
exploration of humanity's relationship to creation.
And it covers, it's, it's my compendium book.
It covers all of this that we'vetalked about as well as defining
(37:26):
the the Herophant and how that serves as the basis of our
experiences. I have two podcasts that I do,
chatting with the Arcturians andSimple Enlightenment, and those
again are all about consciousness and defining where
we are as a population. We are at a significant
(37:47):
transformation point and if you think things have been hectic
for the last 100 years, you ain't seen nothing yet.
What is supposed to transpire inthe next 5 to 10 years is the
equivalent of what has transpired in the last 100
years. And so we are being compelled,
we're being motivated in order to move forward.
(38:10):
May you live in interesting times, right that the blessing
or the. Curse.
There you are. Awesome.
Yeah. Thanks so much for your time
Dean and and all all your work and service.
Thanks everyone for listening. That was Dean Graves offering a
radically compassionate and empowering take on stress.
Stress is not weakness, it's a message.
And when we listen to it with curiosity instead of fear, we
(38:31):
can start to move from survival to serenity.
If this episode spoke to you, please share it with another man
who needs to hear it. And remember, real strength
includes feeling, healing, and choosing love over fear.
Until next time, be good to yourself.
Stress is the difference betweenour expectations and how things
really are. So when we have an experience
and when we interpret that experience through our
expectations, that gives us the opportunity for stress.
We are obligated to make a decision about every experience
(00:22):
before we can go to the next experience.
Hello and welcome to Real Men Feel, the show that reminds men
that they're human beings. I'm your host, Andy Grant.
Today we're diving deep into something that every man
experiences, but few are truly equipped to understand or
transform stress. My guest today is Dean Graves, a
(00:42):
spiritual philosopher, author, and coach with a powerful
perspective on stress, inner peace, and the journey from fear
to love. In this conversation, we explore
what stress really is, why it shows up so intensely in men,
and how we can begin to dissolveit, not just cope with it.
If you're tired of running on empty, reacting in anger, or
feeling like peace is completelyout of reach, this one's for
(01:04):
you. Let's do it.
Hello Dean, and welcome to Real Men Feel.
Thank you, Andy. Glad you to be here.
Thank you for having me. You wanted to talk about stress,
so let's start at the start. And would you please define
stress? Sure.
Yeah, that's a a great question that most people don't even
think to ask. Stress is the difference between
(01:28):
our expectations and how things really are.
So when we have an experience and when we interpret that
experience through our expectations, that gives us the
opportunity for stress. We are obligated to make a
decision about every experience before we can go to the next
(01:49):
experience. And our perception of an
experience covers some period oftime, 15 minutes, thirty
minutes, some period of time, usually strung together by the
commonality of environment and the stream of thoughts.
The reality is that every perceived experience is actually
(02:10):
dozens of thought, is comprised of dozens of thoughts each and
every thought that we process inand of itself is a complete
experience. And it is with every single
thought we are obligated to makea decision.
And the decision that we are obligated to make is the
(02:31):
decision that this thought feelsgood.
And I like it or it doesn't feelgood and I don't like it.
And the basis for that determination is purely how it
feels. We don't go through a the I like
it because of this, that and theother process.
We don't do a rational, logical estimation of every thought.
(02:52):
We just feel it, that thought. If it reinforces our identity,
our herifant, our ego to all thesame thing, then we like it.
If it doesn't, then we don't like it.
And that is stress. Anything that challenges the
(03:14):
authenticity of our ego for the sake of simply understanding,
then we don't like it. Stress is a spectrum, a very
minor stress. You know, I don't like, I don't
like milk in my coffee. I'd rather have half and half
that. Very minor, but it nevertheless
it is on the stress stress spectrum.
(03:37):
The opposite end of that would be something that we deem to be
traumatic. So when we experience a thought
that is so challenging to the authenticity of our identity of
our ego, then we are unable to make that decision for that one
(04:01):
thought that is so challenges myperception of self that I'm
unable to make that decision. And we that becomes traumatic.
Now what has actually happened is for that one thought, it is
so challenging to our perceptionof self that we our awareness
(04:22):
actually leaves our body. And for that moment we enter a
condition of well, stress, but shock.
And so we go to the next thoughtbased upon how we are.
But that one moment will remain unresolved until we go back and
(04:44):
adjudicate that thought, whetherit feels good or doesn't feel
good. And so in an experience that we
deem to be traumatic, whether itbe military oriented or crime
oriented or just simply an everyday experience that we are
in a lessened condition of how we normally are can be
(05:06):
interpreted by us as traumatic. And so the healing of a trauma
is actually a very simple process of guiding yourself.
You can do it to yourself. It's very difficult to do
yourself as someone who has a a knowledge of how it actually
works to guide you back to that moment and allow you to make to
(05:30):
adjudicate that thought. That is a a vacancy in your
stream of experiences and the trauma becomes healed.
That decision that we make, thateither the thought feels good or
doesn't feel good in and of itself is a complete emotion.
Matter of fact, that is the onlyemotion that there is.
(05:51):
There is no emotion of the thousands of names that we have
assigned to. Emotions are actually conditions
of being that we are in, rather than an emotion.
If we are in a condition of grief, we allow ourselves to
have a certain vibrational levelat that condition of grief, and
(06:14):
we are most likely to interpret all of the thoughts that we
process while we remain in that condition of grief as unpleasant
because we are in a reduced state of of being.
Are all of those perceptions anddecision points of of I like
this or I don't like this? Is that conscious or
(06:36):
unconscious? Well, it can be conscious for
the most part it it is unconscious and that is actually
a measure of how we are evolving.
We are consciousness. Everything that we experience is
consciousness, one of the the most, probably the single most
(06:56):
essential characteristic of the range of consciousness.
In their multiple ranges of consciousness, we just all share
a certain range of consciousnesswhich is actually very low on
the consciousness scale. As a population, we are tasked
with becoming awareness, and it is awareness that is both our
(07:17):
discovery tool of what needs to be healed and the healing tool
itself. But as we evolve within our
range of consciousness, we will actually be be becoming more
aware. And there is a significant break
point in our Incarnate lifetime,which is the point that we reach
(07:43):
a point of awakening. And awakening is nothing more
than that awareness that all thestuff that I've been doing in my
life before this point and it can occur at any time throughout
your life. I may be successful from
external measurement basis, but I'm not getting happier.
(08:06):
I'm not with all my successes, I'm not happy.
And that is the point of awakening and it we are cast at
that point and that is overcoming unconsciousness,
which is the condition that we are born into and must overcome
with each new lifetime. We are tasked to look around and
(08:27):
see what other alternatives are there besides what I have been
doing. That point also is designed to
take the natural awareness that we all have, and instead of
having that awareness pointed outside of us, to measure how
we're being received by the world around us.
(08:49):
To learn to invert that same awareness inside and begin to
become aware of what it is that we have incorporated into our
perception of self that is perpetuating our lack of
happiness. So deciding something feels good
or doesn't, we're relying on ourfeelings.
Purely. Purely.
(09:11):
And so something just end. It's a body sensation.
Is it a knowing? Is it different for everybody?
What, what, how do, how do, how do I feel?
What's what's good or or bad forme?
How do you know when? How do you know what's what is
truth? It feels right.
I mean, you can get all of the statistics in the world
(09:31):
collected, but you, you know, you still have that feeling.
This doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel true.
And that is? Along the lines of intuition or
just your gut instinct. You call it intuition, but it's
actually your your authentic self that is telling you that
that's not true. We are part of the design that
(09:54):
we go through with each lifetimeis we form this herophant, this
identity, this ego. We form it every lifetime that
we we enter into and it's based upon our experiences as well as
influxes of those that are around us when we're an infant
(10:15):
and a child, certainly our source of information and
experience as parents and immediate family.
And so they, we get that by osmosis.
We don't, you know, it feels good.
If I behave this way, then I getrewarded.
I like that it feels good. I want more of that.
If I don't, then, you know, the,the other stuff happens.
(10:36):
And so we learn to to balance this identity that becomes more
complex as we go through childhood.
When we reach the teenage years,then our awareness has greatly
accelerated, but we don't have any information.
And that's why those teenage years for everybody is always so
(10:59):
challenging and why teenagers, as a rule of thumb, by
comparison, are pretty untethered.
We're experimenting, we're gaining information.
We're trying to get information as to what it is that we like in
order to fulfill the equivalent of awareness that we have
increased. And we will stay in that
(11:21):
condition based upon that herophant that we've created
essentially as teenagers, but but including those childhood
years as well, until we have that realization that, you know,
something's not right. I'm not happy.
So there's got to be something that has to be changed.
Only thing I can change is me. It it seems like modern day
(11:44):
society and culture is very stressful.
Is is the does every time periodthink their time is the most
stressful or is today more stressful?
Has to do with us, doesn't have anything to do with the nature
of our experiences. The experiences, you know, you
and I could probably sit down ina couple hours and write out
every possible experience that ahuman can have.
(12:08):
And you say, you know, I, I felloff a chair, I fell off a roof,
I fell off a Cliff, you're falling.
It's all the same experience to grid to different degrees.
And so the number of experiencesthat we have available to us are
actually very limited. What changes is how we are and
how we interpret those experiences.
(12:30):
And so one person may interpret well, going back to the trauma
example, you have two soldiers in a foxhole.
They experience the same firefight, the same external
experience. One of them has a trauma, the
other one doesn't. The only difference is the
condition that they are in at the time that they have that
(12:50):
experience. The same is true of of any
experience that we have, what one person may deem to be very
stressful on the stress scale space spectrum.
And the other person said, hey, well, you know, didn't work out.
No big deal. So it depends on how the
individual is. But by virtue of this process,
(13:12):
we are actually magnetic. We attract experiences to us
that we need to have in order tofulfill our purpose in life.
And as being consciousness, our our there is no variety in the
purpose of life. Our purpose is to explore
ourselves. Our mission is unique and that
(13:33):
is separate from our purpose. Our mission is to learn what we
like, do what we like, become proficient at what we like, and
by doing that, that will attractthe types of experiences that we
need in order to fulfill our purpose in life.
Did you have a particular turning point, breaking point
(13:53):
with with stress that made you have an awakening experience and
and realize all these? Truths Yeah, yeah, I've, I've
experienced this. I teach it and guide others to,
to have a path to follow. But I, I lived a very
conventional life and was moderately successful, I thought
in what I was doing and till about my 50th year.
(14:17):
And, you know, I just, I just had that feeling though, this is
this is Sisypusi. And I'm pushing the rock up the
hill every day. And now I know it's going to
roll back down the next day and I'm going to have to do it all
over again. And so that kind of was the, the
spotlight on my unhappiness thatI had this realization that all
(14:39):
of the things that I had been taught for 50 years is this is
what you need to do in order to be successful and happy in, in
life. And had that spotlight, as I
say, that awareness, well, you know, this isn't even getting
any better. And I'm running out of time
here. I need to find some other way of
doing things. And so, and that's the way
(15:01):
anybody that has an awakening, anybody that assumes that self
responsibility for healing and for finding that happiness has a
similar type of experience. It can happen when you're a
teenager, It can happen when you're 80 years old.
Do men and women experience and express stress differently?
(15:21):
They experience stress the same way because whether you're male
or female, you are obligated to create this herofant.
Now what differs is the nature of that herofant that we create.
Men create a herofant, a lot of it provided to us by the
surrounding cultures that we grow up in.
(15:45):
And our power is in strength andthat is attributed somewhat
degree with our body. We have a male body but strength
isn't always possible in physical strength.
So we have other things like wealth, money, job titles, all
(16:07):
sorts of things like that. Add to that perception of
strength and we will defend and protect that because that is
what we use to reinforce this herophant, this false identity
that we create. Women, on the other hand, also
create a herophant, but their power source is beauty.
And look at the billions of dollars every year that women
(16:31):
spend on maintaining beauty, which is actually just a
socially acceptable way of identifying sex.
So women's power is sex. But if you think of the women
woman's body and women's function is providing the next
(16:54):
generation, you know it. It is biologic.
It corresponds biologically withthe relationship of of male and
female. The female is much going to be
much more inclined to learn to invert that awareness because of
the biological quality of havingchildren.
(17:17):
Men, on the other hand, don't have that.
And while they may assume a fathering or a paternal role,
they don't feel that internally as significantly as the female
does. And so awakening and healing,
(17:37):
you can actually say is more difficult for the male.
Matter of fact, the the nature of, of creation is predicated
upon an object subject relationship.
The male and female is always anobject subject relationship.
In spite of all of the cultural things that we've been talking
about. The female is always the object.
(17:59):
The male is always the subject. The object is the teacher, the
subject is the student. That's not to say in a
relationship that we are solely the object and solely the
subject. We alternate that role depending
on subject matter in the instance that we're dealing
with. But the the master image is the
(18:23):
male is always the subject, the female is always the object.
A lot of men myself can tend to hold things until they explode.
Yeah, so. Why is that suppression a common
way of dealing with stress? Is is that strength?
Is that your strength? Yeah.
This is strength. I mean, I can't, I can't show
weakness. I have to be strong.
(18:45):
I have to be superior in some way.
And so we, we, we fulfill our role by holding that inside.
But it's not until we begin to learn to be vulnerable with
ourselves, not anything outside of us with ourselves, that we
(19:10):
begin to heal. So a level of authenticity and
vulnerability with the self is enough to heal and release
stress. Stress and bring on our
awakening. Only thing we can change is
ourselves and in order to changeyou have to become a vulnerable.
You have to, you have to learn to be honest with yourself.
What we actually seek, we perceive that we seek love.
(19:33):
What we actually seek is intimacy.
Now we are we are taught that you can be intimate with another
person, but to be intimate with another person you have to be
able essentially know what they feel, which we cannot.
It is beyond our capacity. In this range of consciousness,
we can feel what's inside of us and we can learn through total
(19:58):
honesty. Intimacy is nothing more than
total honesty. Total honesty.
When we reach that point, then we can reciprocate with a
harmonic resonance with someone else that has also achieved the
same level of awareness that we have, that feeling of intimacy
with another person which is in our future.
(20:21):
What are some of the What are some of the symptoms of
unresolved stress in men? Physical difficulties, heart,
heart problems, gastrointestinalproblems, PTSD, osteoporosis,
that it, it depends on how we have stored that stress because
(20:42):
our storage of stress is geographic within the body.
And so someone who is experiencing lot of heart
problems is that you can always,always count on that being the
thought of lack of love, which is the lack of intimacy.
We have gastrointestinal problems, you have stomach
(21:04):
problems, that's often fear and a guilt, shame, things of that
nature. When we have throat problems,
excess responsibility, things ofthat nature, you know, if you
look generationally, generationally if you look at
people and what Tom Brokaw defined as the greatest
(21:25):
generation and what is that? What was a common characteristic
of that generation is Stoop's shoulders as they got older.
And if you consider what they contended with, they contended
with depression, with World War 2, tremendous responsibility not
only for themselves but their family and all of the the world
(21:45):
really. And stooped shoulders and bent
spines were characteristic, which is the weight of the
stress that they were carrying. So you mentioned the key to an
awakening is our own self-awareness.
How might a man listening to this begin that journey of
becoming more aware? Spending some time in
(22:08):
introspection and learning to behonest with themselves.
And the process of healing is actually a 2 step process and
it's the same for everybody, whether you're male or female or
whatever. All the experiences that we've
had in a lifetime are purposefulin that they bring us the
opportunity to learn. Now what we can learn about is
(22:33):
ourselves in relation to people,places, and things we perceive
that I can learn about other people, I can learn about
things, and so on and so forth. The reality is we are a
participant in every relationship, whether person,
place, or thing that we have. We cannot exclude ourselves from
(22:53):
those interactions. It is ourselves that we can
learn about, that we can become familiar with.
And being aware of that allows us to learn to invert that
awareness from outside of ourselves, inside of ourselves.
And how am I feeling? Your whole, your whole podcast
(23:16):
is about real men who feel. And so learning to be aware of
what it is that you're feeling brings your awareness inside.
Now that is a, that is an endless deep process.
It's not a matter of, Oh yeah, Idid that for 10 minutes.
I got it figured out kind of thing.
It is a lifelong process. But as you do that and as you
(23:38):
heal, then what fills that void automatically is happiness.
Happiness is not something that you can get.
It's not something that you can give.
It is something that you are. And so if you think of happiness
as the, the ocean wave that's flowing into the shore, and when
it hits the shore, it fills all the gaps, all the crevices, all
(24:02):
the, the holes in the, the shore.
It doesn't have to be dispensed.Each little corner and nook and
cranny in the shore, it automatically fills those voids.
And that's what happiness does. When we surrender this what's
called emotional baggage, which means we have learned the
(24:22):
lessons from the message, from the experiences that we've had
up to that point and resolve those unresolved lessons that we
didn't learn, then we have sufficient, more than sufficient
awareness to become aware of thebeliefs that we've incorporated
into our false identity that we are obligated to create.
(24:44):
And when we begin to throw out those beliefs that no longer
serve us, then that greatly escalates our awareness and
greatly escalates our experienceof happiness.
So it really seems like there's a very spiritual essence to
stress. It's like our soul is trying to
tell us things so that we can get to our natural state of
(25:05):
happiness. Yes, and it'll hit you in the
head with the two before once ifyou get the lesson that you
don't have to do that again. But most of us, we have that
tendency to just keep bopping ourselves in the head with the
same 2 before. And that is the difference
between stress and suffering. Hitting yourself in the head one
time with the two before and learning the lesson is stress.
Continuing to bop yourself in the head with the same 2 before
(25:28):
is suffering. What leads someone to ignore
stress and let it become suffering?
Fear because you have to choose yourself.
You have to change yourself. If I'm not who I think I am,
then who the hell am I? And my perception of self is?
This is false. It's always false.
(25:49):
Our authentic self is always underneath our perception of of
self, and if you think of the authentic self as the gold and
you bury the gold in the ground,you piled a bunch of trash on
top of it. You want to get to the gold, so
you got to get rid of the trash and then dig a little bit of
depth to get the gold back out of the ground.
(26:12):
All the stuff that causes us perpetual stress or perpetuates
our stress is the trash that we have piled on top of our
authentic self. And so our our authentic self is
a state of happiness. It's in a state of bliss.
Bliss is perfect happiness. What are the signs if if a man
(26:33):
is just completely unaware this is all just new to them?
What are the signs that they areoperating from love or from
fear? Well, love, Let me qualify this.
We perceive love to be an emotion.
We perceive love to be somethingthat we can give or get.
Love is not a commodity. It's not something that I can
(26:55):
give or get. Love is the condition of being
that we are in. It is our natural state of being
and what we are evolving towards, which we will begin to
experience after we become awareness, after we evolve to
the next range of consciousness.And just like we are tasked with
becoming awareness at this rangeof consciousness, we will be
(27:17):
tasked with becoming love in thenext range of consciousness.
What we get in this lifetime, this range of consciousness is a
peek behind the curtain. Every time that we have felt
love in our lives, it is not because we have gotten love from
the person, place, or thing thatwe're interacting with.
(27:38):
It is because we have felt so comfortable with that person,
place or thing that we have beenwilling to temporarily surrender
the authenticity of this identity that we've created.
And we felt who we already are. And that's why it's not, we
don't feel it constantly becauseas soon as we get past that
temporary interaction, then we immediately bring back up this
(28:02):
false identity. And that's the face, the facade
that we, that's our perception of self that we again put out
there for the world around us. Every relationship, every
marital relationship, we the, the, the person that we choose
to to to marry. We choose out of love.
(28:22):
But if we don't define it as love because we feel so
comfortable with this person that we're willing to more
frequently surrender this false perception of self, all the
people we date, you know, we may, you know, really like
hanging out with Susie Q or whatever, You know, we dated for
three or four years, but she's not the one.
(28:44):
I don't feel that with her. And I may like being with her,
but she doesn't allow me to surrender this false perception
of self. Nearly a mutt enough to spend
that time. When a relationship, a marital
relationship, or a long term relationship breaks down, the
only reason that it breaks down is 1 or both of the participants
(29:08):
have slipped back into that false identity and they're no
longer allowing themselves to bethat authentic self with the
other person. This next range of
consciousness, when we truly experience our ourselves as as
love and as happiness, is that beyond the human experience or
is that possible here? It is beyond.
(29:29):
OK, Yeah. We're under an evolutionary
track which is synonymous with the Enlightenment path.
And So what has been so strategic in the teachings of
our historical spiritual leaders, as well as those today
is the importance of the Enlightenment path, because that
is the experiences along the path are immutable.
(29:51):
There's it will feel exactly thesame for you when we achieve a
certain degree of progress, as it will for me and everyone
else. And what we are doing, what
allows us to be what what causesus to be, have the experiences
that we do and to be consciousness is our authentic
(30:12):
self, which is, and I'm going you're way ahead of us here.
We are the one infinite creator experiencing ourselves at this
range of consciousness. What allows us to experience
this range of consciousness is our spirit is intoxicated with
free will. That's what allows the all of
(30:33):
creation to exist. Free will is a misnomer.
It is not the choice of turning right or turning left or eating
hot sandwich or cold sandwich that is the result of free will.
Free will is our perception of separation, and because we
perceive ourselves as separate from everybody and everything,
(30:56):
we have choice, and that choice is how we explore ourselves and
explore creation. The whole process of evolution
and the whole process of the Enlightenment path is
incrementally surrendering our perception of separation so that
we can allow more of our authentic self to emerge and
(31:19):
dissolve our perception of autonomy.
The whole process of evolution is a greater integration into
unity, which eventually concludes with our full
awareness and dissolving any perception of separation with
the Creator. All is 1.
There is no separation other than our perception of
(31:40):
separation. So the ultimate evolution is we
drop free will and we're all in alignment with God's will.
Well, we're not. You're the the two quite
problems for that question. There's no longer a we, there's
no multiples and there's no reunification because we already
(32:01):
are. We just don't perceive it as
such. So it's just dropping our
perceptions of separation of free will.
And then it's the natural state is unity.
Yes, I I love the depth of of this and and your teachings and
work. What?
What's one thing that you wish more men knew?
That they don't have to be the strongest guy in the room every
(32:23):
time to allow them to to to understand that they are
learning by virtue of their interactions, as is everyone
else that they're interacting with.
And every time someone challenges your authenticity,
they are giving you a gift. They are giving you the
opportunity to become aware of what it is about yourself,
(32:45):
myself, that I need to become aware of and surrender so that I
can be more of my authentic selfand experience greater
happiness. But we are trained as men.
I was, and I assume most every other man was that.
No, you have to defend your territory.
You have to defend your identity.
And that often ends up in bellicosity.
(33:08):
Every war that has ever been fought has been predicated upon
that concept. And so instead of resisting and
battling back, certainly you have to defend yourself.
But you don't have to feel I'm upset.
So I'm going to beat the hell out of you until you see how
wonderful my identity is. If if someone is listening to
this and they're past this pointof past the point of stress that
(33:32):
it is suffering and they're justin a feeling that the constant
state of over overwhelm and hopelessness, what's the best
first step? The first step for me was to
beginning to beginning to meditate.
And there's not a better tool. It is proven for centuries, as
long as we have recorded history, the most productive
(33:55):
tool for self healing and awareness in in finding greater
happiness for most people. And I teach this and I tell my
students, it's difficult for everybody.
Begin however you can begin. I began with listening to guided
meditations. You'll reach a point where those
guided meditations become a distraction and you'll know that
(34:18):
you've reached that plateau, that point.
So you'll, you'll go to other things, you know, the candles
and the gongs and stuff, whatever gets you into the mood
of meditation until you go through that and you no longer
need that. Those are just permission slips
to allow yourself to slip into that that inward feeling until
(34:41):
you you can just sit down and meditate.
You sit down in the middle of Times Square and just have a
great meditation because you canshut out all of the stimulus
that's coming in both physicallyand mentally and learn to take
control of your thoughts. Most people have the
misperception that the objectiveof meditation is to stop your
thoughts. Well, you can't stop your
(35:02):
thoughts. There's no way that you can
stop. If you were able to stop your
thoughts, you would move out of time because time is nothing
more than our incessant processing of thoughts.
It's beyond our capacity at thisrange of consciousness.
But what I tell my students is when you meditate, you allow
(35:23):
yourselves to go into the guru'scave.
We exist in the village. In the village are all problems.
When we learn to meditate, we allow ourselves a daily retreat
into the guru's cave. And there are no problems in the
guru's cave. And mindfulness is nothing more
than learning to take that awareness and that condition of
(35:43):
being that you learn in the guru's cave with you back into
the village so that you're no longer engrossed in the problems
that exist in the village. And when you do that, then you
have become awareness. You have become in control of
yourself. You've healed in you're no
(36:04):
longer trigger. You've healed that emotional
baggage that we talked about, and you've significantly begin
to throw off those beliefs that you've incorporated into this
ego mind, this ego that perpetuate your attraction of
experiences that highlight what needs to be.
Healed well, that sure puts a new spin on it Takes a village
(36:25):
for me and. Well, it takes a village to give
you experiences, Yeah. And it's only through those
experiences that you learn what you need to learn about yourself
in order to heal. They often tell people the only
wrong way to meditate is not to.Yeah, absolutely.
Beautiful, Dean, again, I find this this has been a fascinating
conversation. What's the best way for people
(36:45):
to connect with you and learn about everything that you're up
to? Well, I have a website that has
all my contact information as well as the the work that I've
produced D the initial D deangraves.org, alloneword.org
and I have 4 books, all of whichare on consciousness and
(37:05):
designed to guide you along thisprocess.
The most recent book that's available from your favorite
bookstore, The Enigma of Consciousness, a spiritual
exploration of humanity's relationship to creation.
And it covers, it's, it's my compendium book.
It covers all of this that we'vetalked about as well as defining
(37:26):
the the Herophant and how that serves as the basis of our
experiences. I have two podcasts that I do,
chatting with the Arcturians andSimple Enlightenment, and those
again are all about consciousness and defining where
we are as a population. We are at a significant
(37:47):
transformation point and if you think things have been hectic
for the last 100 years, you ain't seen nothing yet.
What is supposed to transpire inthe next 5 to 10 years is the
equivalent of what has transpired in the last 100
years. And so we are being compelled,
we're being motivated in order to move forward.
(38:10):
May you live in interesting times, right that the blessing
or the. Curse.
There you are. Awesome.
Yeah. Thanks so much for your time
Dean and and all all your work and service.
Thanks everyone for listening. That was Dean Graves offering a
radically compassionate and empowering take on stress.
Stress is not weakness, it's a message.
And when we listen to it with curiosity instead of fear, we
(38:31):
can start to move from survival to serenity.
If this episode spoke to you, please share it with another man
who needs to hear it. And remember, real strength
includes feeling, healing, and choosing love over fear.
Until next time, be good to yourself.
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