My "Dan-Iversary" - Words Have Weight with Dan Kumar
Meet Dan Kumar! If you haven't yet heard his other two episodes with me, make sure you tune in. In short: Dan Kumar is the psychic who changed my life. We met about a month after I got sober, and he predicted that I'd build a business called The Mindful Life Practice, quit my job, and run it full time. And the rest is history! In this episode Dan and I chat about the weight of words.
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Dan does one-on-one sessions through the MLPC which can be booked here: https://www.themindfullifepractice.com/intuitivehealingwithdan He also will be making a guest appearance this week for #SOBERGIRLSYOGA members only at our next group meeting. Become a member of #SGY for only $33 a month and meet him on Sunday April 24! The info is here: https://themindfullifepractice.com/sober-girls-yoga. Follow me on Instagram @alexmcrobs and check out my offerings in yoga, meditation and coaching at http://themindfullifepractice.com/.
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Transcript
Intro
Hi friend, this is Alex McRobs, founder of "The Mindful Life Practice" and you're listening to the "Sober Yoga Girl" podcast. I'm a Canadian who moved across the world at age 23 and I never went back. I got sober in 2019 and I realized that there was no one talking about sobriety in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, so I started doing it. I now live in Bali, Indonesia, and full-time run my community, "The Mindful Life Practice". I host online sober yoga challenges, yoga teacher trainings, and I work one on one with others, helping them break up with booze for good. In this podcast, I sit down with others in the sobriety and mental health space from all walks of life and hear their stories so that I can help you on your journey. You're not alone and a sober life can be fun and fulfilling. Let me show you how. Alex
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of "Sober Yoga Girl". I am here today with one of my guests who has been on the show a couple of times already, but you guys all love him. Dan, my psychic. Dan and I met back about three-- I think it's like my three-year Dan-iversary. Oh my God, Dan-iversary. [inaudible] It's around my three-year Dan-iversary. So I met Dan about three years ago, right when I was getting sober. And I think I'm going to call this episode of that, my three-year Dan-iversary. Anyway, he really set me on the path to a lot of the steps I took and I mean, pretty much everything to be where I am now, which is really cool. So if you haven't listened to the earlier episodes where I had Dan on kind of telling my story, I'll put a link in so you can go back and hear a bit about my story and his journey. But Dan is an intuitive healer, a traveling psychic. He splits his time between Dubai and India and Canada, and he's here today to chat with us about words.
Dan
Hi, everyone. It's great to be back, Alex. I mean, I think that before we even start chatting or before we even get into the podcast, it's always great to speak to Alex because through the podcast we always have a little chat with each other and there's always a new perspective for Alex. And even today, the same thing happened. Her perspective changed in minutes.
Alex
Yes.
Dan
As we're talking about words today and we're talking about how words impact us and how words actually create a narrative that we kind of draw ourselves towards without us wanting to, maybe be on that narrative, but we end up doing that. I keep talking about, you know, watch the words that you say because they kind of lay down a path for you. So, I mean, Me and Alex really didn't have a conversation about what the chat was going to be like today, but we did speak about a post that I had put up a couple of weeks ago or about a month ago where I had put up a picture of myself and I said something about, you know, feeling highly emotional and from me stating me being highly emotional with a beautiful photograph, by the way. I got a lot of messages from family members and friends saying that, you know, we're here for you. If you need to speak, if you need anything, you know, we love you, we care for you. And with all my heart, I was so happy to see that. But then I was also thinking, why did the word emotional trigger everybody to reach out to me? Because I wasn't talking about emotional from a bad point of view. I was just saying that I'm emotional, but emotional maybe in a good way. There are a lot of things that happened that week, that were very emotional for me, but emotional in a good way. They brought out these different emotions that I haven't had before. And it felt good to be churning in these emotions. So basically what happened was, it was the death anniversary of my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, and she's died for a few years. But my cousin had posted something on a story, on one of the social media sites. And I was at home and I was like, wow, I didn't realize. And I had a picture of her. So I picked up the picture, and it was also a very spiritual day or religious day for my religious belief [inaudible] on that day. And I just looked at her picture, and I think I started grieving and I haven't grieved her in so many years. I haven't grieved her even when she-- but I started grieving her. And then I smiled and I turned a picture around for some reason. And on the back of that picture was a prayer. And that prayer was significant to the--you know, significance of that day. It was a prayer for that same deity or the same God. And I was like, wow, that's shocking because I didn't even realize that it was there. That happened and then a few days after that, I have-- a part of a mentorship program for a private members club here in India. And I was working with the mentees, and there's something about them that really touched me, and it got me emotional, but it also made me proactive, that I needed to do a lot more for them. And I wanted to do things that were outside of their own space of getting it done. And that proactiveness made me speak to a lot of people and talk to a lot of people. And, you know, I had to regurgitate these stories of these kids. But it made me feel very emotional because I felt happy that I was trying to help them. But the emotions that I was getting were an emotion of sadness, an emotion of happiness, and an emotion of calmness also. I mean, there are all these emotions at the same time. Obviously, that means emotional, right? Feeling so many emotions that one time you're getting emotional. And then on the 7th of every month, I kind of post a picture of myself as gratitude to myself, as love to myself, and as vanity to myself, because I always felt that I wasn't-- while I was growing up, I never felt that I was attractive. And so I was like, this has to be found. Then I put down these words, and it was framed in a beautiful way. And I just let the world see it. But everybody getting back to me and giving me the love and the support. It was beautiful. It was amazing that everybody wanted to do that, but it made me also think that why did this word conjure up such a big stir in everybody for them to fear the worst? Because it wasn't the worst. So when I was speaking to Alex, I said you know, words kind of really dictate how we position ourselves or how we kind of move forward in life. I think in one of the podcasts that Alex and I had done, we spoke about this briefly, and, you know, we're saying that why are certain words like death so heavy? And why they don't--you know, if we use the same word instead of saying death and said bubble gum, it changes the ideology of the whole thing, right? We try to change the way we feel about something. When we say bubble gum instead of death. So, you know, my grandmother passed away a few years ago. Instead of saying death, I said, you know, I used to call her nanny. So nanny basically bubble gummed her way out. So now I've made this into this more humorous way of looking at it. That was a sad moment. But again, I've changed that ideology of that word being so heavy, you know. And we have many words like being, you know, selfish. Selfish is the word that everybody says is a bad thing. You shouldn't be selfish. You know, you should only-- not only think about yourself. You should think about everything. But in hindsight, it's good to be selfish. It's good to spend time with yourself and give yourself love, give yourself compassion and kindness and give yourself rewards and give yourself treats and give yourself trips and give yourself happiness. That's a part of being selfish. Or if we change the word to being self full, then we're self full. But then, selfish just makes it seem like it's such a bad thing, right?
Alex
Yeah.
Dan
Do you agree, Alex?
Alex
I love that, self full. I want to take that.
Dan
You take it or run with it.
Alex
Self full instead of selfish. It's so great because we think that when we're being selfish, it's like we're only thinking about ourselves. But the reality is that we can't take care of others. We can't provide for others unless we're providing for ourselves. And I think that's like a huge thing that people have missed or definitely wasn't modeled for me in my childhood was like prioritizing our self. Self full.
Dan
Yeah. You've got to change, you know, the vocabulary we put out there. I've spoken about this a few times already, but the dialogue, the internal dialogue we have with ourselves, we've got to be a little bit more conscientious about what we're saying to ourselves also and the words we're saying to ourselves and how we're, you know, making a path forward. You know, are we putting down the right words for what has to happen next? Are we living in the moment or are we just assuming and presuming about the future? Are we thinking about things that really don't matter in the now? But if they don't matter in the now, what does matter? What does matter is that I'm kind to myself. What matters is that when I speak about myself to myself, I hold myself in the greatest regard. Does that make sense? That I hold my work in the greatest regard? I can be critical, I can analyze it, but I need to be able to hold my own words. And the way I project myself internally in a way that vibrates so beautifully inside of me that also vibrates out and creates this beautiful vibration of abundance around me or happiness about me. Yes, we can't be happy and go lucky and be skipping down a trail every day, but we could be kinder to ourselves and not use words that put ourselves down. Like, you know, I look at myself in the mirror and I said, oh, my God, I've got a line here. Oh, God, I've gotten, you know, a gray hair. I'm looking so old. I'm looking so-- so now, instead of saying, I'm looking so old, I look at my gray hair and I said, okay, wow, aren't I ripening really well? So, now, changed the dialogue from, like, I'm getting really old to aren't I ripening myself really well? So now it's, you know, you're articulating yourself differently to yourself. Yeah? And that we're using words and we're thinking about the words I used for myself. And I don't allow anything to snowball into a bigger issue or a bigger problem, you know. When we're talking to our families and, you know, you're under the weather. You know, I'm sick. I've got a cold. I've got this. I've got-- I'm not feeling well. You know, they're concerned. They'll send you a cup of-- well, I was going to say a cup of tea, but they're probably going to send you some soup, or they're going to send you whatever you need. Maybe they're going to send you lots of gifts, or they'll send you something. They'll send you some food, or they'll send you medicine. They'll do something. But then also when we talk about being sick, how are we talking about being sick? Are we saying that we're in pain or sad? So we articulate ourselves. Instead of saying sick, I'll speak to my mom and say, hey, mom, I have a little Flu, a little congested. It's going to get over. I'm good. But that word sick becomes even bigger, right? Does that make sense?
Alex
It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've been thinking a lot about, you know, so, I did my Instagram post and Instagram story the other day about having bipolar. And I've been thinking a lot about how--you know, when I started experiencing moods and I started identifying it as bipolar, I think it started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy where I was like, this is what it is, and it's always going to be like this. And every low got way lower and every high got way higher. And now I think the self-fulfilling prophecy is saying, like, you know, I have recovered from it, and I do have emotional struggles from time to time, but the words that I use to describe how I'm doing, dictate the whole experience.
Dan
Yes.
Alex
And I think there are a lot of things like that. Like the words that we use, the words that we-- it's something that comes up a lot in my work around mental health and sobriety, you know. Because even, like, the very word you choose over, whether you're sober, whether you're alcohol-free, whether you're dry, like, that has a certain weight and certain connotations around it that can shape people's opinions of what they think you are.
Dan
Correct. And you're using a word like being bipolar. Yeah, you could be diagnosed with it. You could have gone to a psychiatrist and gotten this or neurologist or whoever to get it done. But am I force-fitting a problem within my life? Am I kind of molding a problem into my life and saying, hey, because I have high emotions and low emotions, that means I'm bipolar? Is that the meaning of it? Is that where I came to that conclusion? I could also be diagnosed with it. I could be diagnosed with it and somebody would say, yeah, you're bipolar. And then I also pre-empt those types of scenarios for myself or pre-empt those kinds of symptoms for myself because somebody's told me that. So now, again, I'm kind of driving my destiny towards that direction. So then everything has to do with that. There are some things that I don't speak about with you, Alex, and most people don't know this, but I'm dyslexic. I'm highly dyslexic, and I've been dyslexic since I was a kid. But you wouldn't realize that. I also had a little problem with self-esteem and stuttering at some point, but nobody would really understand that because they didn't focus on that. Do I use dyslexia as a challenge? No, I wear dyslexia on my sleeve like it's part of my superpowers. I said, you know, I have it. It's a part of me, but it's not a negative part of me. Yeah? Alex has mood swings. She has super highs and super lows, and she had these medium swings also. But those mood swings that Alex has are the mood swings because of a mental health issue? Are the mood swings because she didn't do the yoga the way she should have done the yoga? Is it because she's analyzing so much? Is it that she's sitting in her thoughts so much that she's gotten herself down to a lower level? Did she have her lunch that day? Did she have her breakfast? Maybe she didn't do what she needed to do. Maybe the consistency in her life wasn't there. And because she didn't stay consistent with what she needed to do for herself, her mood went low. So now, does that mean Alex is bipolar, or does that mean Alex is not consistent? It means Alex isn't consistent.
Alex
And the truth could be-- both truths could be valid, you know.
Dan
Both truths could be valid. I agree with you. Both truths could be valid. You could actually have an emotional, mental disruption that brings you all the way down. But now when it brings me all of the way down, logically or illogically, what did I do to make myself feel better? Did I come out of it? And what did I do to do those things to come back out of that? So the problem isn't being bipolar or having a mental health issue. The issue is being consistent to recover, to feel better.
Alex
100%. And I think about this all the time because-- or not all the time. But I had this conversation with one of my groups yesterday. We were talking about like, what you have in your tool kit to make you feel better. And for me, I used to just get into these spirals of, like, you know, one thing would go wrong and I'm like, it's over, it's over, it's over. My business sucks. I'm a failure and just be there. And actually what I do usually, now when I'm feeling low is I reach out to you and that is my-- it's like you're more my pep talk person than anything, you know. And, like, you being able to phrase something for me, it really is. It comes back to our theme of using different words to reframe a situation to make me feel a different way about it. Like saying that, you know, it's going to be a lot better by next week and then I'm not in this like, it's over, it's over, it's over. I'm like, it's going to be better by next week, you know. And then it changes my whole perspective on things.
Dan
Well, I want everybody to understand that Alex isn't using me as a crutch. Alex actually uses me as SOS whenever she needs it. But when I deal with Alex, I actually don't tell her what to do. I just bring her a new perspective and then she actually changes her mind.
Alex
Yeah.
Dan
So I ask her certain questions and I bring about certain thoughts. So it kind of makes her think a different way and that she's like, actually, yes, that's there. I've done that. You know what? Yeah. I was feeling better when I did that. So I keep on reminding Alex, or I kind of make Alex accountable for what's happening around her and then re-- looking at it from a different perspective. So she gets a different insight within herself. Not because I've told her the new insight, but because I want her to incite a new ideology or a new way of thinking of a problem. So now the problem isn't a problem because I've done a solution. Yeah? I found my own solution within myself. I've just gotten my healer who kind of just poked me in the right direction.
Alex
Right.
Dan
Without giving you all the information, I just poked you in the right direction, correct?
Alex
Yeah.
Dan
And that little push towards the right direction makes everything feel better. And it's easy. I mean, even if Alex asked me, you know, Dan, I'm feeling really bad and I'm not good. And just by me saying, don't worry, next week things are going to be better. She is already relaxes. So you can get that with anybody. Mums are really good with this. A lot of mums say this too, right? Whenever, you know, we've not won an award or we didn't do so well in a spelling bee or I'm really old. Spelling bee? What am I doing? Okay.
Alex
You're not old. You're right.
Dan
I'm right. Yes. I must take my word. I'm right. But my mother probably would have, you know, she would say, hey, this is just one spelling bee. There's always another. We always do better. We do the best we can. So those words of wisdom stick with us. That's also a mother or a father even. You know, it could be a father also, or grandparents or an uncle or aunt, anybody. But these words of wisdom are there to just make us know that we're worthy of making better happen in our life. Yeah? So I hope that resonates. But again, words. So, yeah, just like Alex just corrected me from old to right. And some people might say, well, I don't know about right either, Dan. I think right might be a little too fruity. And maybe we could come up with a better word. But you think about what is the better word for you. Does that make sense? If you feel that this is a better word for myself or this is a better word that makes me feel a little bit more comfortable then I use that word because it makes it feel better, not because it's positive or negative, but I feel better. Yeah? So let's look at words differently from now on and change our perspective. And that doesn't mean that I sit there and every time I speak, I think about seven different words [inaudible] the source or to understand what I need to say. No. I'd look at it and say, you know, am I impacting myself in the wrong way? And it takes 30 seconds to just rethink it and say, hey, you know what? Actually, this is what it is. And this is not wishful thinking. This isn't you kind of psyching your own self out to be better about yourself. No, this is you being accountable and saying, I need to start programming myself differently with the words I use, with the stories I see, and with the books I read. How are these things programming me? How's the news programming me? How's social media programming me? How are my friends programming me, you know? Is there a program happening? I think everybody without knowing that they do do this. So I know I have-- I'll give you an example in my life. I was with a very close friend of mine a few weeks ago, and I was speaking about something that was happening with another friend, and he just said, does that matter? In the scale of life does this really matter? And then I said, well, in the scale of life, it doesn't make a difference at all. And he's like, why are we putting energy into it, then? He's not a healer. He's my best friend. But those are his words of wisdom. And I said, wow. You know what? You're right. I need to ask myself that from now on, whenever I get into this kind of thought process, does it matter? So then, now, I'm checking myself on certain things, certain ways of looking at life, in certain ways that I'm dealing with situations in life. Because everything that we go through right now, everything that we feel right now is supposed to happen, be it good or bad, and because it's happening to us, how do we now take care of it? Be it a bad situation, be it a good situation, but how do I take care of it? Do I proactively do this or do I passively do it? You know, speaking to a client earlier today, and, you know, she was having little issues with a family member and I said, well, what is the issue? And she was looking at security for herself. I said, well, why not just get it done now? Why are we waiting for five years down the line or ten years down the line? If you feel like you need to be secure, be secure now. Why do wait? Why pre-empt it? And she's speaking to me because she wants to know about the future. And I said the future doesn't matter here. What matters is you need to feel secure. So let's do what you need to do now to feel secure. Change your perspective. And she said, yeah, actually, I'm going to do that. I'm going to make sure I take charge of the situation instead of making it a problem. Her family member was not understanding what her emotional need was. And my point to her is, do you need the family member to do that? Do you need them to understand your emotional needs? She goes, yeah, because, you know, I have an expectation of what the future needs to be. And I said that's the problem. Don't have the expectation of the future. And that need to make that person understand goes out of the way, goes out of the bubble altogether. She goes, actually, yeah, if I don't think about the future and the expectation of the future, yeah. Why would I need to worry about what they need to do right now? And I said, cool. And let's not do that. So back towards, Alex. Well, let's use you as an example or a guinea pig right now.
Alex
Yeah.
Dan
Yeah?