Summary
Joe Hudson and Brett Kistler interview Emile DeWeaver, who served 21 years in prison for murder committed at age 18. Emile traces his evolving relationship with fear through three stages: first, using rage to mask fear in a hyper-masculine culture where showing fear meant being prey; second, developing traditional courage — doing the right thing despite fear — partly enabled by self-loathing that made him indifferent to consequences; and third, arriving at a mature understanding of fear as a road map and partner rather than an enemy to conquer.
The conversation explores how Emile’s identity shift — from prisoner to father and writer — gave him the strength to resist prison politics and transform himself. He shares the powerful realization that everyone in his prison environment had been pretending not to be afraid, each thinking they were the only impostor. Joe draws direct parallels between prison dynamics and corporate boardrooms, noting the same anxiety, bravado, and fear of showing vulnerability.
Emile articulates why he refuses to be defined as “a murderer” — not to dodge accountability, but because self-definition shapes behavior. Hating himself would be easier than the harder work of creating a world where kids don’t kill other kids. Through somatic therapy, he learned to honor the survival mechanisms his body developed rather than demonize them, seeking choice over default responses.
Key Concepts
- Fear is a road map, not an enemy to conquer
- Manufactured rage masks fear and creates destruction
- Everyone is pretending not to be afraid
- Refusing to be defined by your worst act enables transformation
- Survival mechanisms deserve honor not shame
- Prison dynamics parallel corporate dynamics
- A new identity gives you strength to resist toxic systems
- Self-loathing can accidentally open a doorway to courage
Key Quotes
“I can spend my time hating myself or I could spend my time helping to create a world where little kids don’t kill other little kids.”
“I did murder somebody. I am not a murderer. And I think that that is a very important distinction.”
“Come to find out everyone was pretending. Everyone was pretending in the name of survival.”
“Fear isn’t something I overcome. Fear is actually a road map for me. Fear is a signal that I need to pay attention right now.”
“It’s not about demonizing these parts of you that you want to get rid of… they’ve actually saved your life.”
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome.”
Transcript
foreign Illusions right I cannot make amends to the man I killed I cannot make amends to his family and that still needs to be a North Star right in my world in my life what I feel like and so I can spend my time hating myself or I could spend my time helping to create a world where little kids don’t kill other little kids welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson foreign [Music] a lot of time on this podcast talking about fear it’s one of my favorite topics and we’ve covered it from many perspectives from parachuting off of cliffs to having difficult conversations in the boardroom and showing up authentically in relationships but what if the fear you’re facing is the fear of life imprisonment for murder that’s not something we’ve really touched on in this podcast but you’re in luck because today Joe and I have the pleasure of speaking with Emil De Weaver who has been there and is here to tell us all about it that is the most interesting introduction I have ever had and I’ve had some good introduction I was I was trying not to laugh too hard or or haven’t heard and then once you laughed I was like all right good now we get to we get to laugh at that that’s great that’s the beautiful thing about about human laughter like when you come out of the other end you can laugh and it does feel good to laugh because you know what you survived right and you know that it’s not a laughing matter um but you know that like your world’s a better place for it and you can make the world a better place for it so there’s still this joy in it so yeah let’s laugh at that yeah yeah well all right let’s dive into it I dropped a little bit of a bomb there to get our listeners hooked into the episodes so I hope we have their attention now and let’s give you the floor Emil tell us how you came to be here today and what you’d like to tell us about your journey with fear yeah um those are all big questions I kind of just start by just kind of introducing the context behind your introduction and that is you know since I was 18 years old I was serving a life sentence 67 years to life in prison uh for murder and attempted murder at the time it was basically a homeless kid on the street I was in the uh I was selling drugs so you know I was involved in like uh drug wars in Oakland when Oakland was definitively like the Oakland that you read about in the news and feel like you know maybe uncomfortable to walk the streets at night starting interrupt what years was that what what years were uh 1997 1998 in fact like uh what part of Oakland 106th and MacArthur so like uh back then it was called like the rolling 100 so it was like I lived on 47th and San Leandro in those years okay so you are I know I know I mean I am familiar that many years before 97 that like Oakland was like one of the murder capitals of the world uh oh yeah I mean Fourth of July New Year’s Eve there’d be bullets landing on our on our rooftop I mean I have a lot of visceral memories from that time I mean and you’re you’re part of the neighborhood was worse than my part of that I mean my part of the neighborhood was not good but it was worse where you were at least everybody in my neighborhood would say that that where you lived was worse so yeah that’s where I come from I come from a lot of different places but that’s another podcast and yeah so like I was tried for murder I was convicted because like I did it um since this is 67 years to lay and my relationship to fear were like I kind of like think about my relationships to fear in like three different stages and that’s like before I got arrested and also sometime near after and that was like you know I grew up in a in a hyper masculine culture in a very abusive household uh What Fear wasn’t actually allowed I put that in quotes because there’s no way to disallow fear like it was definitionally a part of being a man a strong man to not be afraid and the problem for that for me was like you know you know I have some muscles now but I was a pretty small kid I was always afraid I was the youngest of two of like three of us boys or brothers and an older sister but brothers were kind of big and I was always afraid but I was messaged that this wasn’t okay so that means I was also always ashamed and so I was always hiding this and there was no way that I could authentically show up as myself in any situation because like it felt like I was hiding this thing that was very true about me that was saying that there was something that was wrong about me and I discovered at a young age like the power of like anger and rage to like cover fear I remember there was this time my oldest brother he’s like four years older than me and I have no chance in hell in like standing up to him physically but he was kind of just you know bullying me as like big brothers do and like I reached a limit not that like not that I had like courage and any sense of the term I had just really reached the limit and I went into this rage and I threw this deodorant at him uh we were in a hotel room and it shattered against the uh he jumped behind the bed and shouted against the window and my dad who was a pretty scary guy like he was like five foot five but he was like a really scary guy and he did not play right like I would expect for him to skin my ass alive or something like that right but instead he had this look of Pride on his face and he was like yeah I bet you’re leaving Mill alone now and like from that moment I was like oh this is way that I can one cover up fear and cover up uh this sense of inaccurate adequacy I have through anger right and like outbursts and that was a genuine Outburst right it’s like I don’t feel like I’ve had many genuine outbursts in my life I felt like after that moment understanding that that was a source of like power and safety in a way that I could like not feel afraid and so not feel the shame I would manufacture anger and feed it and Stoke it and Stoke it and Stoke it until I could like draw drive myself to like move through this fear and so my earliest relationships to fear was that of complete denial and rushing through it right through and with anger that of course ended and perhaps the most traumatic moment of my life uh when I killed a man which like let’s be clear it was much more traumatic for him and his family but I’m like you know I’m speaking for myself and like that’s something that um you know 20 plus years later I don’t know that I’ve still recovered from fully so I went to prison holding this this like tragic act that I committed out of fear and uncontrolled anger manufactured uh I have a memory in my so when I was first out of college I taught Head Start in the Hayes Valley projects in San Francisco and I re and I remember the culture of no fear right and I would say it wasn’t just with the masculine I saw it very in the feminine of that culture too there was very little room for fear and I remember even at that age with very little understanding asking somebody about it you know saying like nobody shows any fear here and they said look if you show Fear your prey so you’re either predator or prey if you show Fear your prey you don’t show Fear and I remember how much like that viscerally hit me so I I just want to say for the viewers to try to grok that that helped me rock it so I’m hoping that story helps grok it for other people how important it was not to show Fear so sorry to interrupt you were saying uh and yeah if I could like you know take a quick Divergent path real quick to like respond to that story I’m gonna tell you something interesting that I discovered right so I spent most of my life or most of my even my juvenile life and like juvenile facilities juvenile hall Youth Authority uh like boot camps things like that and of course I was always afraid there I couldn’t show it and so I had this like pretend person that I was I was like play acting hardcore like the hardest method acting you have ever seen like I have never liked to fight fighting scares the [expletive] out of me but like no one could ever know that and I had to be able to fight on a dime right and so I grew up in that environment pretending that I had no fear pretending that I like to fight pretending that I welcome violence right yeah and like as the system is kind of constructed the same people I knew in juvenile hall I would run into them in the county jail and I ran into them in prison and we became adults in our 30s and our 40s and we kind of grew up and we grew out of that and we changed our relationship to fear and then we started to have conversations with each other about our childhood and it kind of come to find out everyone was pretending everyone was pretending in the name of survival saying that like a fight don’t do this pretend I won’t be able to survive because other people are somehow different than me I’m somehow different because like I’m this imposter in this thing I’m like afraid all the time I don’t want to fight I don’t want everybody was thinking that and acting on this pretend character that they think it thought they had to be to be safe not knowing we were all pretending yeah I have to say this sounds a lot like a lot of boardrooms that I have been in a whole bunch of people who are anxious and scared who are doing everything they can not to show it and not to react from it and trying to have the bravado and and they’re scared the whole thing’s gonna go away yeah it’s not not too dissimilar that’s amazing so you were at the part of the story where you you had this trauma you killed somebody and then you went to jail which seems to me like the number one place where you can’t show Fear like you were recreating this reality so what happened when you got to jail like what what occurred for you there I feel like my relationship to fear changed and I think it changed in stages the first one was I mean what lands is that traditional conception of fear and courage like like courage isn’t the absence of fear it’s like you know doing the right thing in the face of fear or functioning in the face of fear that’s why I ended up Landing but where it actually started was you know the reality of like waking up in the morning right like because in the act you know you can numb yourself right you can force yourself through it that’s its own traumatic event to like force yourself through like uh something that you know you absolutely should not be doing in the aftermath of that lives a lot of self-loathing right so for me like I couldn’t have the same relationship to fear of like you know I’m just gonna work myself up into a rage and recklessly like move through it and I’m gonna deny it existed because I could clearly see that that had resulted in like the most horrible thing I’ve ever done so that didn’t quite quite work for me anymore right what was that what was it so there’s obviously some people who did that in jail and then they kept with that technique right like they they’re like I learned that to overcome fear with anger worked and then they I created this heinous act and now I’m in jail and I’m Gonna Keep on with that strategy whereas you were like no I’m not I can’t do that strategy anymore what do you think is the difference between the people in jail who keep with the strategy and the people in jail who are like yeah that’s not how I want to be I felt like an important part of that answer to that question is luck yeah there are a number of factors that coalesce that created that like impression for me right one was the filling of utter disillusionment with my with my value system that like with this value system I have this is where it has broadened me and it brought me there while my while the mother of my child was pregnant and so my kid was born while I was on trial for murder I saw my kid through like a glass partition when they were born and I was struck by the reality that this child is going to grow up and one day someone’s gonna ask them what their father does for a living and I was like you know Junior High School Dropout drug dealer by Society standards like a murderer uh and when I I say by society’s standards because I don’t believe in identifying a person based on the worst act they’ve ever committed I did murder somebody I am not a murderer right and I think that that is a very important distinction so I knew like you know I was picturing this moment of when someone would ask my kid this one day and I knew that you know either they were gonna lie about it and be ashamed or they were going to tell the truth about it and be ashamed but I knew that they were going to be ashamed and I knew that with that shame might come some measure of hating me and I knew from my relationship with my father like I had already sensed on a level uh that she can’t hate me without hating herself and I said she but what I mean is they because they’re they’re a trans person but at the time I thought of them in those gender terms and so I felt like I had like mortally crippled my kid in their first week of life I felt like I had did I had just been bored and I had failed them in every conceivable way and that was a lot you know my dad did a lot of things wrong but from what he tried to do like he had already instilled in me the value that there was nothing more important in this in this world than being a father so that hit me really hard and I was like in a state of sheer panic and when that receded I began to realize the one they’re not quite old enough to even know what a dad is or even what I did or what prison is and so I felt like I grabbed hold of that and I was like you have until the time they are old enough to understand that to completely transform Who You Are right and if you I had to turn I was like you know I’m gonna get out of prison I’m going to write my way out of prison with this which is his own story that like actually happened 21 years later but I was like even if I don’t succeed at that if I can at least show them that it’s never too late to build something it’s never too late to turn around and go in a different direction and create something for yourself then that that at least can be my gift to them so I think that was the big difference yeah that’s huge I want to double click on something that you said which is about the being defined as the worst thing that you’ve done and I’m sure that there’s somebody in who’s listening who’s like wait you’re not allowed to let go of that shame of of being a murderer you you’re not allowed to like choose the definition of who you are you know something wrangles in people when that happens and and at the same time when I hear it I know so much the truth of what you’re saying which is how we Define ourselves is how we end up acting right if we think that we are that our value is that we are smart then we will go around acting like we’re smart maybe less likely to listen to people more likely to be arrogant or if we go around thinking oh we are um more important than other people then that’s how we’re going to act or if we go around thinking we’re less than other people that’s how we’re going to act and so to to take away the the self-definition of murder to me is an incredibly important thing because it it prevents it from happening again it allows you the freedom away from an identity that’s been put upon you or that you put upon yourself either way you get some freedom from it but that’s my interpretation of it and I’m wondering what is your like what makes it important for you to to not be defined that way like what’s the Practical implication of that yeah I mean I resonate with a lot of what you’re saying and I feel like um my commitment to not being defined as a murderer functions on on three levels and I’ll start with I’ll start with something close to the one you offered I think that one of the more valuable things that happened to me while I was in prison is I became a writer and I became a father and those two things became my identity to the point where like I would literally have conversations with myself and others especially when it came to prison rules and prison politics like you know you know you got to do this thing those are the rules of prison and that that identity as a father and that identity as a writer gave me the actual stretches like nah that no I know those were prison rules and I’m not gonna live like I’m in prison I refuse to live like I’m in prison that was not moral courage that was like I needed that to be sane I needed that to feel like I had a chance of one day going home and being a father to my kid and I had resolved Within Myself That I’m not really super clear about how I’m gonna get out of prison because you gotta understand when I was when I got sentenced to 67 years to life in California but tough on crime meant in California was that like there were people who’d been in prison with five years to life when I went to prison who had been in prison for 20 years and they hadn’t killed anybody right right like the the grant rate of life or Parole in California when I was convicted was like maybe less than one percent right it was definitely less than four percent and if the people who were granted parole the governors would revoke 80 of them so less than one percent of people were found suitable who had life sentences and of that less than one percent 80 to 90 percent of them had it revoked by the governor that’s what tough on crime meant in California and so I was very reasonable for me to feel like I’m not quite sure how this is gonna happen right but I do know that if it is gonna happen I gotta be ready for it if it is gonna happen I’ve gotta behave in a way that makes that possible and so those two identities help me to resist prison politics because I became something more than a than a prisoner or a criminal or this identity that you say that well if you’re this then like that’s what that’s what you act like the thing that I want to like share with the people is like how dare you right is that look it’s not a place I came to overnight right like I wasn’t 20 years old talking about like I’m not a murderer right I wasn’t even 30 years old talking about I’m not a murderer right I’m 42 and 40 I’m like 43 years old and it took me a long time to come to a place or I could one forgive myself and to recognize that hating myself was not the answer to doing a heinous act and in fact was a bit of a diversion in the scapegoat because you know I know a lot of people spend a lot of time feeling guilty about things and there’s a way in which we can become comfortable in that this is like my punishment this is my Penance see what I’m saying feeling like that and and saying that I’m not right but what does it look like to actually try to make amends I am under no Illusions right I cannot make amends to the man I killed I cannot make amends to his family and that still needs to be a North Star right in my world in my life what I feel like and so I can spend my time hating myself or I could spend my time helping to create a world where little kids don’t kill other little kids and that requires a different orientation that’s why it’s very important to me and you know I get it I get why you would say bro who the are you to say I’m not a murderer or don’t call me a murderer right I get it man I get it but I respectfully disagree with you and I say that you know if you like there’s the tendency to feel like you’re trying to get over right or like you know uh you know you’re kind of that’s real that’s quite convenient email you don’t consider yourself a murderer right and I gotta say like that’s for the proverbial you to hold that’s not for me to Hope I feel really solid about my own Integrity what I love about it is just the simple that Vision you just drew like to me was amazing because what it says is if you want to be the person who helps little kids not kill other little kids defining yourself as a murderer makes that a lot less likely than if you have actually learned to love yourself learn to forgive yourself and overcome that limiting identity that and that’s just it’s just true you know people who who feel that about themselves and you’re still hating themselves in that way it’s it’s very unlikely that they’re going to make a difference in the way that you want to yeah so beautifully said I’m jumping in here now having been off of most of this conversation due to Wi-Fi issues but there’s something really there that I like is that there’s it’s not that you’re like bypassing the identity of a murderer that what that’s something that you’ve done it’s like in in some sense teaching kids not to murder involves being hey look I am somebody who is murdered I am in that regard a murderer and that’s not the only thing I am that doesn’t entirely Define me there’s still freedom to be had in who I am and how I show up in the world regardless of what I’ve done in my past you know it’s not this oh I’m not a murderer that was just that wasn’t even me that was just some other some other thing that I’m dissociated from and don’t hold me accountable for those actions it’s just yeah I am all of me I’m all of my actions and I am everything beyond that as well yeah absolutely this isn’t a conversation about like I’m not accountable for killing a man I am accountable for killing a man I will always be accountable for killing a man whatever the consequences of that are whether that’s someone killing me one day because they feel like you killed this person who was important to me like for me that’s like that can happen those are kind of the consequences of killing somebody so like that’s like you know you got to live with that but like take a different parallel take someone who’s not me right there’s this practice in uh in prison in the name of accountability of like always leading with like this is the crime I committed and I’m sorry right and I can see why in a world where people are struggling to even come to terms with like I did a horrible thing right I can see why someone could be like we need this extreme practice in order to assure ourselves that this person is actually filling remorseful for this thing they did but I think that like goes off the track because who do you know who in this world do you know who introduces themselves with the worst thing they’ve ever done you don’t there’s only a certain I’ll say classic people that we expect to do that right yeah and and if you define Yourself by like if you’re with the things that we’re ashamed of are the things that we recreate in our lives and so I think it’s great it’s like where where do you allow the empowerment of accountability to be there without the the recursive nature of shame how do you allow someone to like be fully accountable feel sorry forgive themselves love themselves get over it and when does somebody’s need societies need prisons need for you to feel shame actually get in the way of that I think is is the thing that I imagine you’ve been wrestling with for a long time there’s one other thing I’ve got to say you said something about prison politics in there that I just have to say because we have a lot of professionals listening to this it’s you were talking about how I am not going to be I’m not going to do prison politics because if I do if I if I follow the rules of this prison I will do be defined that way and I and I can’t do that because then I won’t be able to be a dad then I won’t be able to be um a writer in the the things that I want to be in this world I just want to know if you are at right now at home and you are in an office and you’re playing office Politics the same is true for you if you are in that office and you are obeying rules that don’t work for you it is stopping you from being the father the mother the person that you want to be and if it’s possible for a man to not play by the politics of prison it’s definitely possible for you not to play by the politics of some office in Silicon Valley so I just want I needed to point that out there because that is a truth that I see so many people wrestle with and never really get the kind of clarity on that you did that is such a powerful parallel and um I just want to know if we have time for one more digression we do I talked to people about solitary confinement in prison sometimes right and like most people can see like I mean the science backs are this like one of the worst forms of of torture that are available to humans and so most people can see the problem with solitary confinement but what I’d like them to understand I was like you know it’s a different scale but solitary confinement is not different from prison it’s just like more severe than the general conditions of prison and the thing that I would say that would link to what you said is much of what’s happening in prison which is why I’m an abolitionist right because I think it’s actually what the world needs it’s what Society needs right much of what happens in prison is paralleled also in society in workplaces like that think about prison as a mechanism of disposability and then think about how many people feel in an office something really funny like you know when you go to prison like you know this that’s a lot of trauma and anyone who leaves prison after 21 years needs some therapy they need some help right and like I have all kinds of therapists different kinds of therapists from like couples therapists to therapists to somatic generative somatic therapists like sex therapists like I need them all right but something funny that I have found now I know a lot of people in a lot of different circles whether in Tech whether in philanthropy whether in the non-profit everyone is trying hard to heal from trauma in their life and I’m like wait and that like it’s different details but there’s something very similar about my healing journey and the healing journeys of many people around me who have seen nothing of like what I have seen and that tells me something it’s like why is that why we’re like how is that so right and that’s because these things are parallel these are like this these systemic issues that we’re talking about like they infect all of our institutions whether it’s a corporate office whether it’s College whether it’s law school whether it’s prison and what you can learn from what’s wrong with prison is something you can actually learn about what’s wrong with the society we live in when I was in my 20s and early 30s I was in this men’s group and we would get together every Wednesday for about three hours and we would talk about our Journeys our healing Journeys our spiritual Journeys and I remember there was this woman who wrote um something called The Vagina Monologues I don’t I can’t remember her name but she had this PBS special that was called what I want my words to say to you and in it she she basically took women in Maximum Security Prison and one of them was famous even I think the woman who like cut off the Johnson of one of her whoever boyfriends or something Babbitt or I can’t remember but something like that right and she was doing the work with them in this prison and they were sharing these stories and I remember going these women who have most of the murderers and now I’m thinking about the way that I just said that most of them had committed murder and they were going through the same stuff we were going through like their stories were a little bit different but their Journeys their healing Journey it was all the same it would there and I remember just being blown away by it it shook me that there was really no difference between what they were doing and what we were doing yeah and I remember like that that moment for me was one of the more profound moments of that year was just like oh yeah this is this we are all in this together yeah okay so we’re on your first relationship with fear is now changing into your second because at the beginning you were like there’s three your fear had kind of three different steps to it the first one was overcome it and make it violent and so you don’t have to feel it and then you’re in prison and it’s changing to like the first thing but a place of Courage the act of you feel fear but you’re gonna do the thing you know to be right you might be wrong about that but you’re gonna do the thing you know to be right or believe to be right or at least try to do it for me it was just like you know I was rooted in a deep sense of self-loathing so I didn’t really care about my life so it was like I’m not gonna do this other thing and I’m gonna be afraid but like you know I’m not go I’m going to like steal do the right thing and if that doesn’t work out and someone kills me okay I mean that’s that’s that’s okay like I I deserve it right you know I killed a man so like you know someone should kill me and so I’ve never heard that that one’s blowing my mind like what’s interesting is that the there’s a freedom in what you’ve you found a freedom that was basically like I deserve it which allowed you to be Fearless that just blows my mind a bit what an interesting like way to turn guilt into Freedom like to turn shame and guilt into Freedom fascinating yeah and and it was like a doorway to accountability I wouldn’t Advocate that like that’s the healthy way to deal with your guilt right that’s what I mean by I got lucky there’s a way in which like the things that were happening for me coalesced in a way that allowed me to it gave me the space and the time to help myself and to expand my imagination because I wasn’t doing the right thing exactly for the right reasons but I was doing the right thing and that showed me that more was possible yeah then I came to get to full kind of Engagement of fear as like oh everyone feels fear that’s like really normal that’s really human there’s no way you will ever like Escape that right but what you can choose is how what you choose in the face of fear and that is what virtue is and like at the time I was reading a lot of like great philosophy and stuff like that and so I was like oh in fact I think that yeah this came like I was reading the dialogues of Plato and they were talking about like the virtues and courage and like all these things and I was like oh okay like I’m a kid like I haven’t heard these things before I’m like 19 I’m like this sounds good I like this right and I was like okay so like it’s about having the moral courage to do what you believe is right even when you’re afraid and then that became my relationship to fear for a very long time that that was uh my relationship to fear uh I think until the time I got out of prison uh and it like changed and it had like its different manifestations like there was a time like I was afraid I’m running straight towards it right which I don’t advise right I just like you know because this is and this is less in the Realms of like surviving in prisons and More in terms of like personal relationships interpersonal fears right like I’d be afraid so I would just like dive into it right and then like this is only recently like my relationship to fear and like emotions in general have changed and that like at the time fear was still like a bad thing right it was something that I felt like was something that was apart from me it was something that I had to like conquer in some way and like the first stage of my relationship with it was like conquering it in the most like irresponsible way possible uh and like the idea of like courage was a way of conquering it uh with something that felt like integrity but what I actually came to find that like no no fear isn’t something like separate from me it’s not my enemy right it’s like something I learned in somatic therapy it was like the things that’s like the things that you do even the things that kind of make you feel shame whether it’s like you know maybe you have attachment issues and you fall in love really easy uh and you feel ashamed about that or maybe uh you don’t let people in and like so you’re like you’re very caught like any number of like habits that like we are working through as we heal and tried to come and become our best human beings something that I learned a somatic therapy it’s like look the body is smart think about where you learned that right and then for me the conversation is all often like in the context of prison like let’s be real about what that environment is and in that environment all these things that you’re ashamed of can’t you see how smart actually your body was like do you think you could have survived that if your body didn’t develop these mechanisms if your body didn’t develop these habits so it’s not about like demonizing these parts of you that you want to get rid of or feeling like they’re holding you back they’ve actually saved your life right they’ve off and they’ve actually made it possible that so that you are a sane human being that most people meet you and they can’t even tell you’ve been in prison your friends tell you all the time that like man sometimes I’m sorry I have to actually remind myself of the trauma you carry because it can you can easily fool yourself into just thinking Emil has it all together he’s fine because you present that well right and that is part of the mechanisms that you’re body has created for you to survive now let’s honor that let’s say thank you now here’s the thing about bodies they tend to find something that works and they use it for everything right and so it’s like you know maybe you can just use this when you need it and not use it when you don’t so that’s the thing that you want to learn in somatic therapy is like I want a choice about the mechanisms my body employs to protect me not a default right and so that began my relationship with understanding fear as a part of me that I get to love and have compassion for and also collaborate with now fear isn’t something I overcome fear is actually a road map for me fear is a signal that I need to pay attention right now fear is a signal that I’m avoiding something right now and I may need to be careful about how I approach it right that doesn’t mean like dive into it but it is signaling something very important to my growth in my spiritual journey that I need to pay attention to um and so now I use it like a road map it’s like oh I feel nervous about that okay what’s going on with that what’s what’s beneath that what’s happening for you what is it that’s what is it that’s crying out to be healed in this moment what is it that’s crying out to be taking taken care of in this moment yeah I find in my own journey and in the Journey of people that I get to witness and experience is that if you’re on a quest for a deeper understanding or Awakening or anything whatever words you want to use for that that in even in meditation if you’re in like deep meditation following the road map of fear is one of the most direct lines to finding the truth of Who You Are finding the truth of your identity like I remember at the beginning of my meditations I would like not want to feel the fear and so I was meditating to manage that emotion by the time I was finished not well not that I’m ever finished but the time that like where that Journey ended for me of like of looking for something that was me when that ended it was I was just following fear it was like the direct like going right into the abyss every time and finding out that that thing that I was most scared of is actually where I find my deepest truth so for me when I get fear when I feel fear when fear moves I’m just like you very excited like oh great there’s some good information here there’s something to pay attention to exactly exactly there’s something really interesting that you said about about not diving all the way into it and I think there’s times we’re diving into it it’s great and there’s also a way that we can build an identity me speaking as a base jumper here of diving into the thing that’s that’s most scary and then that can be something that becomes less free where you know I see a bunch of things in my life and one of the things is the most scary and then I’m like well that’s the one that I gotta dive into and there can be a way that I become attached to being the identity that dives into certain kinds of fears and then I’m actually ignoring a whole bunch of the rest of the fears and then I’m like why do I keep recreating all these worst case scenarios when I do all this work on myself to accept the worst possible outcome and it’s like oh wait I’ve actually done all the work to accept that worst outcome and I haven’t accepted the subtle small fears of actually taking any different path than going into that one like first of all like the human brain and the body like like we are like some brilliant creatures and there are ways in which we can fool ourselves even by doing the right thing because it’s like I’m doing the right thing right but there’s a way that we can focus so deep on that that we can ignore all the things that we’re hiding from that’s awesome all right well I don’t even know where we are anymore I know I know I want the conversation to keep going but I don’t know where where it’s going well I mean we’ve talked about like my three different relationships to fear right and like we’ve reached that third one of like it’s a road map like it’s a it’s a partner in this life as our you know all of our feelings and our emotions right it’s like they’re Partners in this life right that we walk with instead of running from or running through or pushing over or or hiding from it’s just like you know give all of your parts that space that room to be and love them right just like you know like you know your parts are acting because they love you right um so love them right and also like you know I have conversations with my body my heart my mind my fears all the time and it’s like look man I want to name that like you know I’m unhappy with what’s going on here but I love you and like can you trust me can you trust me to take care of this this is what I’m gonna do when you trust me to take care of it if you can’t trust me that’s good we’ll we’ll work it out I still love you right but can you give me a chance you’d be surprised of like you know if people might think like man that sounds pretty crazy but you’ll be surprised right giving yourself the time of day giving your feelings giving your body the time of day to acknowledge and say that you matter how much space that creates for you to move through them I have a question for you so I have a saying it says joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome and it basically is saying yeah that is so good that’s a great reaction and that’s what I’m wondering if you can relate to that like as you learn to love all these parts of yourself do you find your life becoming more joyful absolutely I have I mean I’ve never I’ve never thought about it I’ve never had it phrased that way but it like perfectly encapsulates but I feel like I’m trying to do and what I’m discovering and like as I discovered more and more Heights of like peace and happiness even in Conflict right like in the last couple weeks like you know I’ve had like a lot of conflict in my life and I have felt very much at peace and very much like in feeling like you know conflict usually is a thing that makes me feel insecure right you know I come from a place where conflict often means death right so like even small amounts of conflict have been known to make me super anxious right to make me unable to settle into my body because it’s just like I can’t miss anything and I gotta know everything because if I don’t I could be in danger but I’ve been finding this place where it’s like I’m really at a much more peace and conflict and I’m happy and I have a a ton of faith that this conflict is only going to work towards my growth and the growth of the people I’m In conflict with and that is a powerful source of Joy yeah right to just be like wow like I’m adulting I’m doing this again I want to just say how similar that is to a lot of the people that I coach right these are high-powered people in charge of billions of dollars thousands of people and that whole idea of like constantly having to track the environment for the potential conflict that’s coming the anxiety that runs their life looking for all the ways that it could go wrong and their Journey from that to oh I can I can trust myself and I can trust that every adversity that comes my way makes me stronger and it and it’s an opportunity to be more connected with myself and more connected with the people around me more connected with the my mission and what I want to do in the world and I mean that’s the the same story for the ones that are lucky enough to make that Journey instead of just constantly be in the fear and anxiety of the Perpetual attacks of a of a capitalistic you know system and a business system I’m not saying it’s bad or good for that I’m just saying it’s just the nature of it it’s competitive yeah yeah what a pleasure what a pleasure oh my goodness this is like what a absolute Delight of my of my week thank you I’m so glad that you spent time talking to us thank you very much yeah thank you so much Emil thank you man I was a little nervous coming on because I was like you know I looked at your podcast like this is kind of a big deal right and I felt like I thought you know I talk to people all the time right like I’m a public speaker I’m on panels like I give talks I do workshops and I’m never not nervous before and I’m okay with that I feel like that’s also part of uh that’s a different kind of fear that I’ve actually developed like a kind of pleasurable relationship to that’s just about like being really high functioning right but and not like hamstrung by fear but like motivated by it letting it be your aliveness yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah in the Jewish tradition there I just wanted to somewhat recently that they don’t have a word for fear they have two words for fear and one word is kind of means the fear of existential life of like you’re you’re threatened right and the other fear is the fear of stepping into a room that’s bigger than you’re used to it’s like being on stage it is growing into something that you’re being asked to grow into or or to be the person you’re being asked to be that you haven’t been yet and they have different words for it which I just think is I love that yeah I think that’s super useful because like I mean I haven’t thought about fear in a long time but I started thinking about it uh for the show and I was thinking I was like you know the fear that I’m talking about like the one that I had different relationships to I feel like there’s another brand of fear that’s like kind of different than that right and it’s like I’ll end with a quick story and this is the kind of fear it is and it’s not a fear I want to ever avoid this is like clearly my friend and like is the thing that keeps us like living at Keeps Us Alive um last year I drove across the country and back and like uh I was coming back and I was coming through the Rockies and I was like driving through like my sixth snowstorm in the Rockies and this is kind of an intense experience um and so like I’m like got my high beams on uh I get out of the Rockies I’m in Utah speed limit in Utah is like 80 miles an hour so I’m like 100 miles an hour I think the speed is actually 90 miles an hour right but I’m like just like I’m gone I’m like down the freeway it’s two o’clock in the morning there’s really no one on the freeway which is why I forgot my high beams were on so I’m driving down this kind of like Back Road in Utah like 100 miles an hour and ahead in the road is a boulder and I barely see it right and I say that to me that like if I hadn’t forgotten those high beams I’d I would have certainly been dead because when I swerved I barely missed it but I’m going so fast that when I swerved like the car is going out of control and like there’s no brakes at 90 miles an hour and I’m like turning into it and I’m like fishtailing and I’m in this complete Tail Spin and as all of this is happening like I am feeling no fear in the traditional sense that like I’m not feeling that fear that felt like paralyzing but I describe my relationship to it right it’s a very different kind of fear because I’m certainly like the more alert than I have ever been in my life and I have never spun out before right but I’m remembering everything I have ever heard about spinning out and number one was don’t hit the brakes number two was turn into it right and I’m doing it and it’s like a movie almost right and I am like working this car and I’m like on this two-lane Highway and I’m seeing the front and flashes like and every flash right I’m like taking a snapshot and I’m like okay ahead of me no lights okay I can survive this and then I see that you’re moving to the left and you’re moving off towards the dirt and like this fence that’s like a cow pasture fence and I’m like okay if I can stop on the road great if I can stop in that dirt I’m probably gonna lose a tire if I hit that fence this is done right and so I bring the car to a stop still on the asphalt facing the other way smoke everywhere and then I stop then I take a breath then it hits me like holy that just happened right but I recognize the feeling of before it happened it’s the same feeling I’ve had being shot at the same feeling I’ve had with a gun in my face and having a gun in my face certainly didn’t mean that I turned into Captain Commando but like there’s this feeling there’s this state of intense awareness and activity and if you decide to move you move and it’s like it’s like the most high performing that I have ever been like in those situations and that’s actually not a fear that I’ve ever had a problem with that’s actually a fear that’s like it can only be defined as fear but it’s not that fear that I feel like we’ve been talking about on the show right right yeah that’s that’s the same kind of fear in in a base jump where something goes a little bit wrong and all of a sudden you’re just present you’re just there you’re not thinking oh no I don’t want this fear to be happening it’s just you’re just there and you’re you’re acting and it’s moving through you and it’s energizing and then you know after you get out of the situation and that’s when that’s when like the next wave hits and you’re just like oh my God that just happened awesome well thank you thank you thank you thank you for your time really appreciate it yeah thank you so much Emil all right man you guys take care thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com