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How can we mitigate that? How can we live in the here and now? How can we be present? How can we be available? How can we be centered and grounded in the here and now as Eckhart Tolle might do?
And you know, there's a number of things. Number one, you know, be careful what you bring into your body.
Be careful what you bring into yourself. Be careful what you see, what you hear, what you taste, what you feel, what you smell.
Be careful of all those things. Be careful what you're breathing in.
So, you know, take in only healthy things as best as you can and then, you know, do healthy things and don't do stupid things and don't do unhealthy things and don't take in toxic things.
And, you know, that's one start. One start is to like, you know, watch what you're show, who you're hanging out with, you and what you're hanging out with and what you're accepting inside of that vessel you call yourself.
So let's just assume that the two of us have a human frequency.
In order for me to connect with you, the closer I am to being, you know, unadulterated by the mud or the cobwebs or the rust that can, you know, can accumulate over time, the possibility exists that is I become clear to my own core self.
If I, you know what, look, over time, we have learned how to pretend to be someone that we're not in order to protect the person that we are. And that just doesn't work.
I mean.
What's up, journeyers? Welcome back to the Thrabble Journey.
Today we're diving into a powerful topic, being present in our lives with mental health.
Think about it. So many of us are either stuck in the past or anxiously planning for the future.
That often keeps us from fully experiencing the here and now, but what would it look like if we learn to live mindfully and stay present on our journey?
Well, today we have the perfect guess, I believe, to help us explore that topic. Dr. Fred Moss. And now Dr. Fred Moss, let me introduce him a little bit.
He is a pioneering psychiatrist, mental health advocate and visionary with over 40 years of experience as the creator of Welcome to Humanity and the True Voice course.
He empowers people to discover and express their authentic selves.
He's also the author of Creative 8, Healing Through Creativity and Self-Expression and Find Your True Voice.
You may have even heard of him on over 150 podcasts he's been on and he shares his unique approach to mental health and breaks down stigmas in that field.
Today we're talking about mindful living and how to find balance and peace even in life's chaos through chaos, through Dr. Fred's innovative tools.
Let's go ahead and just dive in and welcome Dr. Fred. How are you doing today?
Great. Thank you for having me on. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Very excited about it.
Awesome. I, you know, it's, I would like to just go back just a little bit before we kind of get deep into it.
As I was doing research on you, you were a college dropout, but then you got a job at a psychiatry center and you became a psychiatrist.
How did that shift happen?
Yeah, first of all, I was a two-time college dropout. So, two times. Yeah.
So, you know, I ever since I was a child, I was very interested in learning how to communicate. I had two older brothers that I grew up with and also my younger sister,
but my two older brothers are the ones that I was watching and watching them communicate effectively or ineffectively with my parents just had to be that one day maybe I would learn how to communicate,
how to speak, how to listen, how to exchange ideas and connect with other people.
And I was expecting that would happen in school, you know, that's what I thought school was for. What else could be so important?
But of course, that isn't at all what happens in school. In school, we're told to sit down, be quiet, do what the teacher tells us to do.
And, you know, it's not our own ideas or an openness discourse.
So, I made it through elementary school, very precocious, you know, my brothers had taught me way too many things.
I knew how to read and write when I entered kindergarten and I knew about a little bit about rock and roll and sex and drugs and, you know, I was pretty young and you're pretty young and worldly.
Yeah. And, you know, the people in my class, they were more interested in little kids stuff and that was okay.
But just had me go to the rise to the top of the class and all my early elementary school efforts.
And I figured, well, the big kids seem like they know how to communicate. Maybe they're learning it in the junior high and then it got worse in junior high. Oh, maybe learning it in high school.
It's like, no, got actually worse in high school.
You know, I began to learn how to communicate, but only when I was outside of school.
And I decided eventually that I would go to college.
And since it was only 40 miles away to the west and they had some super cool helmets.
And I had known and loved them for all my years. I went to the University of Michigan and went to University of Michigan for about a year and a half.
And it was in the engineering school. I had no idea what an engineer even was. I got there because I had very high math scores.
Okay. And so after a year and a half, I was like, no, this isn't going to work for me. I'm not, it's not my style.
So I got on a bus and went to Berkeley, California to find out what my life is about.
And, you know, I did find out that summer a little bit about what my life is about. And I did communicate and learn met some very cool people in Berkeley,
but it wasn't going to be sustainable. So my family convinced me to come back and try college one more time because there was this new industry.
There was this new industry that was growing and ready to blow up and they thought that I had all the aptitude for it.
You might have heard of the industry. It was actually called computers.
Oh, yeah.
So there was a big computer building at the University of Michigan. It was the only computer that I knew of in all the entire state.
And so I went back to learn how to be a computer guy. You know, I thought, okay, Fortran, cobalt.
And then I spent all night with batch jobs and punch cards and turning those in and, you know, being in this big old room with a bunch of other people doing the same thing.
That eventually was just tasteful as well. And I just said, you know what, it's not going to work. I'm leaving college. I'm never coming back.
And that's what I told my family. I'm never coming back. Never doing college again. My mom was like, okay, that's cool.
But you got to get a job. I was like, mom, anyway, and mom's will be that way. That's fine. So, of course, I had to get me a job.
And, you know, there was like civil service was an opportunity. So Michigan civil service. There was two jobs available that I could apply for.
One was working in the unemployment office where I could like help people get unemployment checks.
Or the other one was working at a, an adolescent, a state hospital for adolescent boys.
And that would be being a childcare worker. And that one was coming out a little bit sooner than the other one.
And I think the pay was very similar. And they were paying three weeks for orientation.
So I was like, okay, I can sit for three weeks of orientation. I can at least do that, you know, 40, 40 hours, 13 hours an hour, maybe a thousand hours net over three weeks.
Sure, that's going to get to you, right?
And I just, then I just be gone.
Yeah.
I just have enough money to buy myself a car and drive around the country and figure out what my life is about.
The important stuff.
Yeah, the important stuff.
But the fourth week, my friend, Paul convinced me to go up there and just, you know, stay one more week because he said he would have to quit if I quit.
And so he's my orientation buddy. And we went up there on the fourth week. I remember that Monday, like it was yesterday.
And I was very, very afraid of these older adolescents that they might hurt me or get in fights or I wouldn't be good enough or strong enough or bad enough or whatever.
But it worked out okay. You know, I landed through that day. I worked through the whole week. I stayed another week. Then I stayed another week.
And, you know, before too long, I'd stayed a few different weeks.
And then the thing I really despised about that job, which I kept then for a few years was that I didn't like the way psychiatry was going.
I really hated the way psychiatry was going. You know, we would call the psychiatrists when Jimmy and Johnny got into a tussle or when Tony was up to late.
And he'd come down and talk to Jimmy and Johnny for like five seconds. And he'd talk to me for like seven seconds.
And he'd go into the nursing station and write some kind of order. And then we'd have to go retrieve Jimmy or Johnny and hold them down in the quiet room,
slip down his sweatpants a bit and jam them full of some injectable cocktail that was meant to put them in a stupor for the next 24 hours.
Was this all like protocol?
Yeah, it's still protocol dude.
Oh, okay.
It's not. It's absolutely happening in every hospital. It's happening everywhere. You know, it's happening in all hospitals, all through the country.
It's happened hundreds of times this morning already, I promise.
Okay.
So this is not old school. This is present day school. It's called chemical restraints. It's what happened.
So, you know, if the kid stays in a stupor for like a whole day, we call that a success story. And then we chart that, you know, was positive effect, you know, like it was, like, you know, like it was like, it's successful.
And it really was never successful was really barbaric and unacceptable to me.
But I knew the communication was really where it all was. And I decided to come into psychiatry. My brother was already a psychiatrist 14 years older than me.
So I decided that I could come back into psychiatry and bring communication at the central feature as a central feature.
But what ended up happening is while I was in medical school, I so I applied to medical school, I got accepted to a great medical school in downtown Chicago at Northwestern University.
And I really got to really deeply enjoy Chicago and I arrived there in 1984 and you might know there was another dude who arrived there in 1984 he was born number 23 and so I had season tickets for the bulls all four years of medical school and I went there 16 times a year.
I got to watch Michael from rookie up and really had a great time. And you know, the good plus there was one Super Bowl and 86 with the Super Bowl shuffle. So I had that.
Yeah, that was a good era. Yeah, it was a cool era in Chicago and but I'm a big Detroit guy. So it was a little bit of a rivalry thing and I really enjoyed it though.
I had a great time in Chicago and when I got out. Prozac had been introduced and Prozac really shifted the entire format of how psychiatry and mental health forever to be defined again.
All of a sudden there was this notion that there was a chemical imbalance that was causing you to be uncomfortable.
And that if there was if you are uncomfortable if you are afraid or anxious or depressed or awkward or distracted or confused or terrified, then there must be something wrong with you.
And Prozac was like the first drug of its kind that promised to be able to fix that so called chemical imbalance.
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, well, that's not how life goes at all and it's not how prozac goes at all either and but that's how it was being marketed and they were even talking about putting it into the water supply in Los Angeles and New York and other cities in the country to help like, you know, uplift everybody.
Yeah.
This is not something I was really appreciated but by the time I came out of medical school and come out of residency, you know, there's already sunk in costs so I already had been tight cast as a psychiatrist to be able to diagnose people will be able to medicate people.
That's what I was now being called on for and that's not what it was when I first entered school.
It was what it was when I got out of school. And so, you know, and now I was really being asked to be a psychiatrist in the formal way, you know, if you ask people now what's the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
They will say, oh yeah, a psychiatrist is the one who prescribes medicine.
So I hated prescribing medicine. I never liked it. I never liked it. And I've written over 100,000 prescriptions in my life.
And I haven't really enjoyed any of those prescriptions. I've not been aligned with anyone because I don't ever think that it's the proper first line treatment for anything.
But I still write them, you know, the agencies or the corporations or even the patient themselves demand these medications and it's not going to get it from me. They're going to get it from somewhere else.
Somewhere else, yeah.
And I feel like I want to keep the client working with me so that I can teach them and be with them about communication and human connection.
So for many years, I lived duplicitously. I was a lot of soul sacrifice. So it's a lot of, you know, heartache, a lot of headaches.
And, you know, because I was actually doing something misaligned with what I knew was right.
And I eventually started doing something different in 2006, where so we're talking, you know, maybe 16, 17 years later, I began to do something that people thought was pretty radical, which is I started taking people off of medicine.
It's like, whoa, it's funny that people are more afraid to come off medicine than they are to come on medicine.
Yeah. Well, it's like a dependency there at that point, right?
Well, it's a lot of issues going on, you know, there's a lot of issues when you look at, well, why would people not be afraid to come on medicine?
These medicines are made in laboratories, nothing food like about them. There's nothing. I mean, they're going to alter the way you think, even if they don't work.
So why would people not be like totally terrified of starting medicine?
And in the meantime, when you start taking people off medicine, that's when they really get afraid.
They're afraid that, you know, life's going to go in a wrong direction, maybe because of different movies or something that they've heard about or read.
But in 2006, I started taking people off medicine, had some amazing results, like, you know, reliably and predictably, everybody got better, way better.
And many say situations, their entire original diagnosis disappeared completely when I took them off their medicine.
So they were no longer depressed, no longer anxious, no longer hearing voices, no longer having like racing thoughts, no longer awkward.
They would actually get their self back off of medicine.
And we started really looking at, well, what is really here?
And what people want, I then took my act around the world.
I was all over the country as a traveling doc for a number of years, about 10 years.
And then I took my act around the world to Thailand, and Bhutan, and Nepal, Israel, France, England, and Italy, doing telepsychiatric work from around the world.
And the question I kept asking is, why do people come to a psychiatrist in a person? What do you really, what do you want?
Yeah, you say you're act, what is that the tell it, tell a psych, I looked it up.
I was a psychiatrist. I was a psychiatrist.
Telepsychiatry?
Yeah, I was.
What is that actually?
What is the act?
Yes.
Yeah. So when I was around the world, I often would just pipe in, I was already talking about telepsychiatry back in 2013.
I taught a course called Mastering Telehealth in 2013 that I developed myself because I could see very easily that these two things that psychiatry and computers would get along very well.
And they do, of course, and just like what we're doing here, you just have, you know, you can have formal, powerful interviews with people when you're online with them.
Yes.
So from Thailand or from Nepal or Bhutan or from Israel, I would often like pipe into my clients back in the United States at a different time zone often.
I'd be working like afternoonship in Israel and it would really be day shift here in the US.
And I began to do a lot of work and really interview a lot of clinicians, shaman, medicine men, and their clients, their customers, you know, their mentees or their, you know, their patients.
And what was really going on around the world is what I was exploring and what do people really want.
And what people want more than anything, Michael, is people want to have a human connection.
Right.
And that's why we're coming, you know, that's why we're meeting today.
We're hoping that we, you and I will have a human connection.
And we just, you know, strive and really, really search for and, you know, explore and have created ventures in order to have human connection.
And that's really where the power is.
That's really the most potent medication that has ever been created for the human race.
Way more potent than anything that's ever been created in a, I don't know, some sort of high rise corporate laboratory, Eli Lilly or something like that.
Right.
Before we get to like the depths of medication and mental illness, let's deal with that, that this part right here, which is human connection.
It's often I even I use myself often find myself and I train myself.
I'm training myself differently now.
But I found myself not being present.
Right.
I, what I'd said earlier is that there's a lot of things that remind me of my past and I live from my past, which informs my present.
And then I get anxious about things in the future and try to over plan for the future, but you never know what the future brings.
Right.
And so that future that I'm living into informs my present as well.
Yeah.
And I not often, but I'm continually working on myself to be present.
I how does one continue to work on themselves in the mental in the mental aspect of being present and not always working in the future or dealing with the past.
Well, first of all, you know, thank you for a great question.
But you know, the human condition has us all caught up in the past and all caught up in the future.
So there's nothing wrong with actually getting, you know, tied up and past concerns or and being very worried about the future.
It's just part of the default human connection before you ask a really important question here is, well, how can we mitigate that?
How can we live in the here and now?
How can we be present?
How can we be available?
How can we be centered and grounded in the here and now as Eckhart Tolle.
And, you know, there's a number of things.
Number one, you know, be careful what you bring into your body, be careful what you bring into yourself, be careful what you see, what you hear, what you taste, what you feel, what you smell.
Be careful of all those things.
Be careful what you're breathing in.
So, you know, take in only healthy things as best as you can and then, you know, do healthy things and don't do stupid things and don't do unhealthy things and don't take in toxic things.
And, you know, that's one start.
One start is to like, you know, watch what you're showing, who you're hanging out with, who and what you're hanging out with and what you're accepting inside of that vessel you call yourself.
Right.
And then there's a multiple set of very real practices and tools that are, you know, centuries, millennial old.
And I know that you like to talk about meditation.
Meditation is a super powerful tool that'll suggest how to, you know, pursue equanimity, meaning in the face of the chaos of the world and the face of the challenges, the obstacles and the obstacles.
And the hurdles that the world has to offer in any given moment.
Meditation has us actually get to, we don't have to default and become that negative experience.
We can actually experience and something negative and let it go by and then come back to center.
Let it go by and come back to center.
This is a tremendous opportunity to upend the default system of becoming entirely miserable because of things happening in our outside world.
Things happen in the outside world.
Some very, you know, some very undesirable things that happen in the outside world.
There's like, you know, sex trafficking or wars or racism or, you know, even if some people say climate change or this upcoming election, all these things that are, you know, very difficult on the human traits on the, on what it means to be human.
But it becomes even more difficult if I become those things.
Right.
And seeing them happening to me and then calling myself back to center, which is what, you know, what the meditation practice is really about, allowing us to have our thoughts, have our feelings, have our emotions, have our physical sensations, let them go by and then call ourselves back to center.
Just realize that those are happening out there.
I am here and I don't have to be entirely thrown off my, you know, thrown off my safety space just because of things going on in the world.
Do you think that people can meditate with their eyes open and still dealing with what they're dealing with in the world?
So let's just say if they're at work and all these traumatic things happen or something traumatic happens, but in the midst of all that chaos, they can still find themselves like meditating with their eyes open and still being present.
Yeah, I think you can.
You know, I think that having your eyes closed is not an absolute necessity and most powerful meditation.
You know, the idea is that you have a center space somewhere to return to and so, you know, there's certain kinds of meditation, there's one called return to sitting for instance, which is a meditation variant or and there's a one that's based on listening as your attempt to vocal mantra like focus.
So you might be like just listening to everything that's going on in the world and having that be your mantra or your touch points like what what's touching the ground.
He's in as we both sit here.
My feet are on the ground.
My butt is on my chair.
My elbows are on the armrest and my back is against the back and I can actually focus on those things.
So for sure, in a brief period of time, you know, just to deal with the chaos of any given moment of life, you can always like just kind of bring yourself back.
Maybe not a 20 minute full lotus.
Close your eyes, you know, you can certainly benefit from, especially if you have a practice in place.
You have to have a practice in place and then you can tap into that experience.
That's awesome.
You talk about also about people expressing their true authentic selves.
Is that something that is part of the true voice methodology methodology?
Can you talk about that?
Yeah, it is really, really important.
So if we're going to humanly connect with people, if we're going to connect through our human intervention, you know, through resonating harmonically with another human being, it's going to be really important that we actually capture our own frequency of what it means to be human for us.
So let's just assume that the two of us have a human frequency.
In order for me to connect with you, the closer I am to being, you know, unadulterated by the mud or the cobwebs or the rust that can, you know, can accumulate over time, the possibility exists that is I become clear to my own core self.
If I, you know what, look, over time, we have learned how to pretend to be someone that we're not in order to protect the person that we are.
And that just doesn't work.
I mean, not only is it so, there's so much, you know, there's, there is so much work that's actually involved in trying to make that happen, trying to pretend to be somebody else.
And it's, it's absurd.
It's ludicrous.
It's preposterous and it's ineffective at the same time.
So what we start doing is kind of washing away those things, those things that almost all of us have learned to be somebody that we're not, and, you know, to present this particular image or to make sure that we don't get thrown off the island or not disturbing somebody or not being misunderstood.
So we're generally afraid of losing who we belong to, you know, the groups that we belong to, and we're willing to start saying things that even we don't believe.
That's when you think that's just crazy stuff.
It is crazy, but that kind of speaks to who you're connected with.
So people that you're connected with can influence you if you don't know yourself and be expressing yourself authentically, that the people that you're connected to can really speak to like who you're actually pretending to be.
Right.
So you make an assumption here, this idea that you don't know yourself.
So the idea if you don't know yourself is a controversial idea because you actually had to know yourself to decide that you're not going to be that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So you did know yourself.
You always know yourself.
You're walking around with yourself.
You're the dude who knows you more than anyone.
You're the same guy who was there when you were three as you're there now.
It's that guy.
Like you are you and you are, you're, is a core person called you that's there that has a basic set of values and beliefs that are at your center.
Like how are you here?
Why are you here?
What kind of contribution are you here to make?
What really matters to you?
Who's who and what is important to you?
So this idea of not knowing yourself and therefore being at the influence of others is not really an honest truth of way I see it.
So you do know yourself.
You've just relinquished your responsibility for being you.
And now you're pretending to ask, well, who do I need to be so that I'm not thrown off the island?
Who do I need to be in order to stay in this tribe?
And that's a different truth than I don't know myself because I don't believe that people really don't know themselves.
I just believe there's a lot of muck and haze and rust and cobwebs that have, you know, mud that have covered over who that self is of yours because you've been afraid to expose that to the human race instead pretending to be someone else in this, you know, faulty way to protect yourself from others.
Just to follow up, I agree with you.
I just wanted to kind of just bring that out so that it's more understandable because I knew I understood it, but that's the way I that's the way I phrase the question so I can understand.
Yeah, and so the listeners can understand it more.
Yeah.
In your early work, let's go back a little bit in your early work.
What, what influenced you on that, the approach to the mental health and the psychiatry?
Let's see. So first of all, of course, it was my brother, you know, my brother was 14 years older than me and he was a psychiatrist by the time that I was, I don't know, 10 years old or something.
Maybe, maybe 12, I don't know. So I always looked up to him.
And then I also went to a psychiatrist when I was a child, you know, we had some chaos and disarray in our family. So as a teenager, I was a patient and then went a couple of times a week to see a psychiatrist.
So I appreciated him very much. He was keeping me in line and keeping me focused and keeping me fresh and clean.
Well, it wasn't doing that good of a job. I wasn't always fresher clean, but he was doing whatever he could do.
And, and, you know, and then I'd say the biggest influence was definitely Farrell on center, the place I talked about that I got hired in, in 1980.
And then moving on, just realizing that as I was medicating people and as I was diagnosing people, I was not doing them any favors and they were often getting worse right in front of my very eyes, even though they would say they were, they might say I'm better.
But they'd be like, you know, shaking or scared or sad or muted or blunted. And they would say I'm better.
You know, they would say stuff like I'm better. No, the medicines work, but I'm worse or something like that. I'd be like, What does that even mean?
Yeah, I'm thinking that myself.
Yeah, how, how could that be? And that's because the medicine give a little surge when you start taking them of the relief of whatever it is that you're looking for.
So you get a sense that the medicine is working, but very quickly after you start taking these medicines and take on the particular diagnosis that you have, you end up getting worse because the system is built to perpetuate the symptoms it's marketed to treat.
So this is just how the system is built. It's designed that way. It's not a problem. Not a problem. It's just how it's designed. In fact, it's a fantastic business model.
If you know, like if you can create a business model that actually creates the symptoms that has you buy that particular product.
That's what people end up doing over and over again.
And so it's not, it's not the problem of the system. See, I'm not mad at the medicine system. I'm not mad at big farm. I'm not mad at insurance companies. I'm not mad at the doctors. I'm not mad at hospitals. I'm not even mad at psychiatry.
Here's the thing. The problem is that why do people come to a psychiatrist in the first place? Now, we already talked about, you know, maybe we think that they're coming for human connection.
That isn't why they come to a psychiatrist. The reason people come to a psychiatrist is because they know, they literally know that there's something wrong with them.
They have been convinced in their own mind that there's something wrong with them.
To the point that psychiatry might be the only sub specialty in all of medicine that if you tell somebody they're okay, they get pissed.
What do you think that is?
Because people want confirmation that there's something wrong with them so that they can say stuff like that wasn't me. That was my alphabet soup, whatever.
That wasn't me. That was my BAD. That wasn't me. That was my ADHD. That wasn't me. That was my narcissism. That wasn't me. That was my spectrum.
That wasn't me. That was generalized anxiety. That wasn't me. That's my, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder. That's my Osperger syndrome.
Whatever they people have to say, they can then relinquish responsibility for the parts of their life that aren't working as well as they think it should.
Got it.
Instead of really recognizing this is all part of the human condition. Your life doesn't work like you think it should.
Many times per day, your life is not going to work like you think it should.
And if you can really just accept that as being a basic truth of what it means to be human, that's where the whole brand name of Welcome to Humanity got built.
So that's how I'm on Welcome to Humanity Doc. And that, you know, when really looking at Welcome to Humanity and how do we create connections between humans, the things that really mattered were creativity,
were true voice, you know, where now the Moss method, which takes into consideration all these, you know, tools and practices, including gratitude and meditation and nature and creativity and spirituality and service and, you know, pampering ourselves and nutrition and hydration and all of these things.
There's a list of 20 that I just named about eight or 10 of that are part of the process to getting to that true self so that you can start being capable of relating to another person and resonating harmonically in that human connection because, as I've already said,
and I firmly believe to the bottom of my soul, the most potent medication ever created for humanity ever is a human connection.
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Give me a connection.
There's, you said, this is what it means to be human. So it seemed like there was a bit of a difference that you talked about. You talked about the the authentic self, the creativity, you know, taking care of yourself, being creative.
This is, is this the, is this the depth of who we are as human beings?
Can you rephrase the question, please?
Let me rephrase it. Yeah. So earlier we're talking about, you know, people are taking the medication, right? Taking the medication and they want to use the medication to take blame off of themselves and put it on something else.
No, they, that's just about diagnosis more than medication, but they were. So then it's not about taking medication so they can give it to it's about accepting a diagnosis that there's some diagnosis.
Yeah. Okay, but then there's the other side of it, or what it means to be human is the more expressive part of it. Like, like you talked about the, like to say, the creativity and the human connection.
Can you talk about more about that and how, how, how can we connect to that?
Yeah, so, you know, being human includes many, many, many difficult times. We have very difficult challenges and obstacles and hurdles to deal with every single day.
That's part of the natural state of being human. Those things are happening. You know, there is sex trafficking, there is wars, there is racism, there is, you know, climate change, there is this elections and these divisive, you know, topics that we get to deal with.
There is argument, there is hate. There's some terrible things that are happening in the world.
And that's just part of being human is that there's going to be times when you feel anxiety, you feel depression, you feel afraid, you feel awkward, you feel distracted, you might even hear things that you call voices that are really just your intuition talking to you or something like that.
That's all part of the natural state of affairs of being human. Now we start looking at, you know, what about the things we can do to mitigate the effect of those things on our everyday life?
Can we experience all those things happening and still live a rich and real life? That's the real question. You know, can all those things going on, even some of those things that are almost unspeakable and intolerable, can they all be going on and have us live a powerful, rich, free life?
And the answer is yes, we can or at least we can approach that and the way that we do that are these age-old exercises and tools that we talked about. Once you just mentioned again, you know, gratitude or meditation or hydration or nature, creativity, spirituality, being of service,
you know, getting along with our pets or there's movements as well, you know, maybe even your financial status like squaring away your financial literacy so that you're managing your finances properly can be an important piece of what it really means to be a steady individual in this creative world.
All of that is what it means to be human. So the disempowering aspects that are the default system is part of what it means to be human as it is all the things that we can do to offset or to counterbalance those experiences of negativity and, you know, lower by negative vibrations that can happen and really take us off center.
Got it. That makes that makes a lot of sense. How do you how does when people are disconnected from themselves or not from themselves but from the human connection? Is that one of the are those some of the ways that people can get reconnected?
Yeah, I'm talking about post COVID people are not as, you know, connected as a what it seems like they were before COVID.
Yeah, so, you know, generally it's fear again. That's that's what we're really talking about fear is a big, you know, four letter word starting with F that gets in a way of a lot of what we do.
And, you know, we have been taught during that three or four year lockdown to fear people to think that somebody else could give us a deadly disease or to think that we need to just spend, you know, don't get closer than six feet or don't look at everybody's smile.
You can't see anybody underneath their mask and, you know, we were we learned that people can be dangerous. We learned that people, you know, that no longer agree with us like, you know, and there's so many stories that as a psychiatrist I've heard about people, you know, who no longer talk to their family members or no longer talk to their friends because they
disagreed about a particular topic and, you know, can be any of the topics that are out there and the election and vaccines and be, you know, like any any story and, you know, we were friends until you said that and now when you said that I'm going to never talk to you again.
Yeah, so, you know, that can that's a pretty big price to pay for speaking up in a true voice.
On the other hand, if you have a friend who's going to dump you if you say a certain thing that you believe, then they probably weren't your real friend in the first place despite what you really thought.
So what this really offers what these practices really offer.
And what this emphasis on communication really offers is a way of getting that this is all the in the human experience and there is a way to actually love appreciate and deal with authentic authentic people who might already be in disagreement with you.
So have you ever noticed that someone might say something that's diametrically opposed to how you think of things like totally a different you say you think X and they say why and you're like, yeah, I don't I'm not aligned with you.
Right. Yeah. But if they're authentic, if they're actually speaking from their core truth, if they, you know, supporting what they say with a level of, you know, emphasis on their own genuineness, you can actually deal with it.
Because authenticity can carry its own weight, basically. And so even though that person is saying something that you flat out disagree with, if they're saying it from their heart, and they're saying it with their authentic genuineness genuine self, you can actually tolerate it and even listen to it.
It's when people become lying and inauthentic, which, unfortunately, we've all learned how to do that it becomes much more, you know, unpalatable.
Right. That's interesting. Why do you think that that people are more so like that now, where they can't connect or reconnect or have these disagreements and then be okay. I remember, I mean, back in the day, you know, I, we could just we could disagree.
But then the next moment will be fine, like, you know, whatever. And then you keep on going. But now it's just a total, like, I'm going to shut you off. I'm going to erase you. I'm going to get rid of you, because you don't agree with me.
Right. Yeah, I think it's become sort of a social norm. It's something, you know, we, it's very highly deeply unfortunate. It's deeply unfortunate experience that it's become more kind of
sort of more global or a collective way of looking at things is that, you know, I can if I don't like what you say if I don't like what you put on my, on my social media or something, then I'm just going to erase you and because we get to turn on and turn off people.
It's almost like we treat people as if they're TV stations. Like, if I'm running through a TV station, I get the channel seven and showing a show that I'm not interested. And I just like turn it off and go to the next layer. So all the electronics, the electronics and all the social media and all the social, you know, all the social behaviors that are, that are cultivated that have us want to stay in the same team with somebody really promote the possibility of well,
you know, he liked that candidate. So I had to cut off my relationship with him or he thought that about vaccines. So I had to cut off my relationship with him. It's just very unfortunate because if we're going to deal with anything here, if we're going to deal with anything, we're going to have to do it collectively.
We're going to have to be able to deal with people who are who think differently. It's much more important than anything else out there is to somehow unify us.
Yeah. What do you think that unifying piece would be?
So I wrote an article that was a award winning article in 2019 called global madness what we must all do to unite.
And that one the best article of the year for the conference for global transformation.
And what that was at the time what I thought might be what I submitted what I proposed was that a Martian invasion might be enough to do it might be but probably not.
Probably not in our present state of affairs. So if we knew that there was a Martian invasion coming in exactly 60 days, would we be able to drop our arms and work together and allow people who disagree with us to pick up their strength?
Or would we stay fighting in fighting with each other and let the Martians take over the earth?
And I think if we could pull ourselves out of our present holes and actually begin to work with people that we disagree with on important issues and actually respect them for who they are and who they're not, then pity the Martians.
I think the Martians wouldn't have a shot against the human race that would not unify.
We totally annihilate. We totally annihilate any any threatening influence if we could work together because humans are tremendous.
Yeah, yes, yes we are.
Yeah.
Just kind of going that kind of let me think about your methodologies with creative eight and true voice. Can you what shape those approaches?
What was the last question? What?
What shape the approaches of creative eight?
Those approaches. So the creative eight is what I learned over time was that, you know, when communicating and in the effort to create a human connection, that when people were involved in performing arts or visual arts like art, music, dancing, singing, drama, cooking, writing and gardening,
which is the original creative eight, when people were actually finding themselves involved in those activities, their sense of despair, their sense of discomfort, their sense of unpleasantness goes away while they're involved in the art or the music or the dancing, singing, drama, cooking, writing, gardening.
So the encouragement was take a minute, one minute every day and pick three of those. So like three minutes total and just get started with three of them. Like just go ahead and do some art for a minute.
You know, even if it's tracing, it's fine or do some music for a minute. Instead of banging the side of the table with a pencil. That's fine.
Like do some dancing, like, you know, go in your room and close the door. No one has to see you just turn on some music or not and just dance for a minute. That that opens up those pathways and leaves folk in the possibility of a release of some of the so-called symptoms you think you have.
And when that happens, you start to realize that when you're done dancing or you're done singing or you're done doing art or music or whatever, you now have a choice to go back to who you were before you started doing the art or not.
You don't have to be like, snap back to the depression you had before you started doing the art.
You can actually choose now because you've been released to, you know, really reduce if not eliminate the depressive experience you thought you had going into the activity.
As I'm listening to you say that there's me being a creative person myself, being an actor. The first part is when I get to work as an actor and experience like life through somebody else's words. I feel this, I don't know, transcendence when I take on someone else.
But then when I'm not doing that and I'm in a space where I might not be feeling great or almost depressive, I would say, I do get into music and music really helps take me away from that moment.
Dance is one thing I love to do. You know, I like dancing. It takes me out of just taking me to another space. And what is that that happens when we're actually in those creative spaces?
Yeah, I'm not really sure how to explain it 100% physiologically. I think that's what you're asking. I think what really happens is we get a sense of our self expression being purified.
You know, right now we depend so much on this spoken word and listening like we're doing now. And there's, it is so many moving pieces that are going on right now while you and I design our conversation unrehearsed actually say our next thing on the fly and then have to be 100% responsible for whatever it is that spit out of our mouth.
That we say, yeah.
And we, you know, and there's no rehearsal, there's no editing, you know, you just kind of say and be whoever you are, and then you got to own it afterwards. And the other person will tell you, oh, no, you said that and right.
No, I didn't mean that. Well, yes, you did or you wouldn't have said it. It's like, it's very entraping.
But when we start using the other forms of self expression in the form of art, music and dancing, it expands our capacity to get certain points across that words and linear fashion don't actually cover.
And, you know, we start being able to communicate with the community at large and start being able to communicate maybe with humanity at large when we start being a vessel for the sources of art and performing arts and visual arts that are available.
And it's super exciting. And, you know, in that possibility, we really get an opportunity to, to resonate with ourselves or resonate with the collective, you know, resonate with the, with all of humanity.
And in that process, we get a form of communication that actually is out there. We get, oh yeah, this is a pure entry. And as a pure entry, it's likely that Michael will actually appreciate who I am, because I'm now delivering, you know, pure human energy.
For me, that speaks to the another level of community, connection with humans. Another level of human connection.
You, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Right, that's it.
Okay, you spoke about like reclaiming one's one's life embracing like their full potential. How does that look like from day to day for someone?
Yeah, so it's incremental. It's incremental. And some days you may feel it may not feel like you did a great job. So you just keep on pushing on and, you know, how do you reclaim your life? How do you actually find your power?
Again, we're back to this idea of the 20 things, maybe the 20 things in the Moss method, where the meditation and gratitude and movement and nutrition and hydration and, you know, creativity and spirituality and service and all those things that we talked about.
Sleep hygiene is also included in there and, you know, no white powder. So no processed foods, you know, really being careful what we do.
This gives us an opportunity to do good things more often and do bad things less often and then feed ourselves with exercises and tools that can literally create power, pleasure and joy and peace and freedom in our life as we pass through it, you know, so we can pursue peace and freedom.
It's not something there's very few people, if any, who actually have their peace and freedom under control, you know, like, in there done that I'm peaceful, I'm free. Not exactly. That's not how life unfolds really.
You're going to have to continue to climb that mountain of what it means to be alive because of the fault system has us dropping into a very disempowered context. If we do nothing, then we get, then it gets worse.
We have to do something just to actually continue to take the ride up the mountain of, you know, like combating our tendency to become very skeptical or become very negative, become very cynical, become very resigned.
Can we reduce that tendency to do that by taking on some of these powerful practices and that's where you would get to really regain who you really were.
And you'll notice that because you no longer will have to think very hard when you're speaking because you won't be hiding anything and just be saying what's so day to day, minute by minute and be in touch with yourself and in that, you know, resonating with yourself.
You then are clearing up the tuning fork and by clearing up the tuning fork, I'm saying I know that I'm speaking mostly my own humanity and it's likely to translate very well to your humanity sitting over there, whoever else I'm with.
Yeah. Is that kind of, does that connect with people like I say that I go through things and sometimes I feel stuck. Right.
What you just said, is that like a, what people can connect to, to being unstuck.
Yeah, exactly. So being stuck is, you know, it's an experience, but it's, it's a manufactured experience. You're really not stuck.
Right.
You're really not stuck.
The term.
You have made some decision to keep doing whatever you're doing. And you're generally really not stuck. Now, I suppose there's sometimes you got to put in a, you know, in a, I don't know, a tiger trap somewhere, you'll probably, you'll be stuck.
That's actually stuck.
But typically when people feel stuck, they feel like they're caught up in the same sort of cycle on how to think and be. It's not really true that you're in that same cycle.
That's you being really caught up in something about your future or your past. And when we start looking at what it really means to be alive and free and open and available and, you know, present and curious.
You start seeing that you could, your choice for what to say or what to do next about anything is goes like thousands of different choices of what you could say or be or do in any given moment.
So when you start realizing that you start seeing that even being stuck is just a story that can be annihilated very quickly.
It's a story. And there are things that informs those thoughts, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that the, you know, that again, it's a collective notion that being stuck is like an is like something that is accepted by others.
So when I tell you I feel stuck, you're like, Oh, I know how to feel stuck to and then you might even support me being stuck.
I got troubles with my wife and trouble with my kids and trouble with my money and trouble with my job and trouble with my relationships.
And it's like, well, yeah, I feel stuck and you're like, okay, you know, that ends the conversation in some ways, like you're willing to and you're willing or the outer, you know, my environment is willing to support me saying that I'm disempowered.
And in fact, I'm not nearly as disempowered as I say, I have several choices always. Thank goodness, by the way, it's not been true over all of time, but I have several different choices of how I can look at the same data and have it not be, you know, overwhelmingly disempowering.
So stuck is not real. It's just a story.
It's just a story.
You know, you this is fascinating. I do want to get a perspective from you. What do you when people are talking about work life balance.
Do you believe in that thing called balance?
You know what I just I was just in a conference earlier today and the guy, the leader brought up this exact topic and what he said, which I think I agree with is that you're only looking for balance if you if you're overwhelmed.
Like if you have your enough time, enough money and enough magic going on in your life, if you've created a life that is like, you know, again, physically responsible financially, you know, literate, literate actually taking care of your finances taking care of how you're balancing your life so that you're not overwhelmed
and overspent in certain areas of your life like time, like, you know, all the time you're putting in at your work or all the money that you feel like you have to make.
Then you won't have to worry about balancing because you just you already have enough and you there won't be this like stretch on the edges.
Yeah, it's really an important way to look at this. Do I believe in balance? I mean, the truth is many of us are overwhelmed and overworked and over caught up with things that we have manifested into our lives.
And then for that, I think that balance is really important. But again, when you're looking at balance, you're really looking at the tools and exercises that we talked about the meditation and, you know, gratitude and yoga, Tai Chi, those kind of things that are actually in place to help us humans balance.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
For me, it was like when I think of the word balance, I think it's it's like I'm trying to fix like I have work over here on the left, I have personal stuff over here on the right and I'm basically trying to compensate on one side or the other.
If it's once once overworked and or overdone and I'm trying to, you know, overcompensate on each one side of the other to create a balance for my life.
Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I can go deeper deeper than than we have but I want to give you an opportunity to kind of give advice to someone that these like your, you know, your last words on on on the podcast, what would be your advice for someone or a story or something that you can give
someone to yeah, further their life for
The ring just believing that there's something wrong with you doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you just because you actually think you know there's something wrong with you still does not confirm that there's
anything wrong with you.
And just because a doctor has finally confirmed for you that there's something wrong with you still doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you.
So what if you could go through life and realizing
that there might be nothing wrong with you at all
and that there's never been anything wrong with you
and all that's happened is you've experienced
some of the very real unpleasant experiences
of what it is to be human.
Like it includes some very cold, very dark,
very uncomfortable times to be human.
Hello.
Yeah.
There's none of us getting through life
without those times.
And you can choose to stick to those times
and say, no, I'm really depressed all day, every day.
Okay.
I need to tell you that there's a bit of a choice in that.
Now, with all that said,
there's a group of your listeners out here
who's pretty sure that they've got the right diagnosis,
the right treatment plan, the right medications
and the right therapist.
And that's fine.
Those people should keep doing what they're doing.
If they don't wanna shift anything out,
if they're pretty sure that's the best it's ever gonna get
and they don't even wanna hear about any alternatives,
they should keep doing what they're doing.
Because that's when,
if you reach that point anywhere in your life,
you should keep doing whatever that is for sure.
Because hard to reach that point.
If you really reach it, you're at the pinnacle,
this is as good as it gets by goodness,
please keep doing it.
But for the people who aren't there,
and there's hundreds of millions of people
who feel underdiagnosed or overdiagnosed
or mismedicated or undermedicated, overmedicated, et cetera,
those people could really learn that
maybe there's nothing wrong with you in the first place.
And that's gonna be a requirement
to come off these medicines.
So if you come off your medicine
and you come off your diagnosis,
and I'm called the undocker,
because I undiagnose, I unmedicate,
and then I undockernate people.
What you're gonna have to do that
is actually take into consideration
that there may have never been anything wrong with you,
even though you have been convinced that there was.
That's the most important teaching.
That's the most important.
So let me, well, I was going to end,
but I just want a little bit more from you.
When you talked about undockery,
what about people who deal with a mental illness?
I don't have it that they deal with a mental illness.
You don't have it that they deal with mental illness.
Not that you.
And this is what they say to themselves,
or how does that work?
Yeah, we already went through it.
One of the reasons, as soon as I say
there's something wrong with me and I'm mentally ill,
like I'm too afraid or I'm too depressed
or I'm too awkward or I'm too distracted
or I'm too sad or too, you know, like scared
or whatever my experience is, anxious or confused,
that is not the way you are as a fixed,
you're not a fixed being.
I got it.
You're not a fixed being.
So in fact, you can shift those things.
And I get that you're walking through a phase in time
where you feel confused or distracted or depressed
or anxious or sad or scared.
Totally get that.
But the opportunity exists to see that you,
on every given moment, have a choice
to go any of hundreds of ways.
And you could dig yourself out of the sense
of so-called mental illness.
But people love digging into their mental illness
as we talked about, you know?
I tell people they're not mentally ill
and they get mad at me.
I'm like, dude.
No, I agree with you.
I completely agree with you where your philosophy is.
I totally agree with you.
And I think that kind of speaks to everything
we talked about.
Just it's part of being human.
It is.
You know, we have the downs, we have the dark world,
we have the white light world.
And it's just part of being human.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I mean, I appreciate the way
that you're approaching psychiatry.
I've never had a psychiatrist or had to deal with it,
but I know that there's people that are listening
that have.
And your way of undactoring, I really appreciate that.
And that goes into what you've created,
with Creative 8 and the true voice methodologies, right?
Exactly.
Same thing.
Yeah.
Same thing.
I appreciate you being here.
Is there anything that you would like to share?
No, you can find me at DrFred360.com
or at welcometohumanity.net, which is more my two websites.
And I'm also kind of scattered over social media.
And I have been on a couple hundred podcasts as a guest
and have my own podcast a few times.
So I've dropped over 300 shows as a host.
And I'm eager to talk to anybody about this stuff.
You know, it's my passion.
It's in the idea of really helping people find
their own stability, including through physical responsibility
and financial responsibility.
I've recently got caught up in a way
to really teach people how to fix their finances
and how to make it that they can be stable in any environment
without any fear of losing money and actually getting
themselves stable and even an opportunity
to create multiple revenue streams is something
that I'm really interested in as well as part of the Moss
Met.
So that's sort of the next thing that I'm on.
Well, I've learned a lot.
And just talking to you, just open my eyes up to, you know,
just the presence who we are as human beings on this planet.
And I appreciate you being here.
And for all you journeyers, if you have not connected with us,
you can connect with us on Instagram or on Facebook
and just look up The Thrive Will Journey.
And you'll find us and connect with us there.
Dr. Moss, again, I thank you for being here.
And we'll talk to you later.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
It's really been great.
Yeah.
Woo!
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