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Link to Kalvin smith’s website –
http://www.warriorspathsystema.com.co/
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Full Transcript
Hello, its bill the knee pain guru and welcome to the pain education podcast, brought to you by the comella foundation. I wanna introduce a friend of mine from down under… Calvin-Calvin Smith. Thank you so much. We actually had this conversation, we were deep into a conversation right before I actually started the recording, and I was like galvanised… And this is what I was sharing with you before. It’s like, I like this podcast because I get to talk with cool people like yourself, buddies of mine that I train with, and they’ve all overcome adversity, tragedy, pain in their life somehow, and that’s what I wanna capture, that essence of your experience. And so I wanna welcome you to the show, and I’d like you to just give an introduction to… Well.
First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you for thinking of me. So highly, I really don’t deserve it. And for anyone who’s wondering about the accent, it’s Sidney, various London. So I’ve always almost on a half and half life now, really, I… Surrealisti, London elites is… Yeah, basically, I caught me a very early 70s, and I say like… And if anyone remembers back then, the world is a very interesting place, especially if you compare it to where we are now, we were in the middle of the, I think the oil crisis, as I was saying, so I was pretty much born into an environment in which people are scared. And what’s happening tomorrow? What’s going on? People were Kuiper. As a little kid, I hated the dark and there were power cuts like twice a week. Do you know what I mean? And fortunately, I didn’t realize at the time, I was born into this kind of post-war culture, where many of the older people I looked up to, if I had a problem as a kid, fill over in the park, anti-Lily or anti-nearly would pick you up get a tissue out what you need and say.
Oh, it’s alright, darling. During the war on dailies, they was always in the background that.
Yeah, things are perfect, but they could be a… Well, not less. Perfect. And they are now. So you always had that… If you like that, what psychologist a pool. Cognitive reframing. But it was the way you were… It was kind of your way of being… You just didn’t realize it. And I was having this conversation with my brother and another friend recently, where like kids playing in the park, and most of the council workers that we were familiar with, there were a little more veterans, and a lot of them have PTSD, which is kids we thought was funny because they had these funny ticks and twitches and he thought they were just being funny, we didn’t realize that we… Formation there, strikeout. The thing was, they made it part of who they were, so when we sat in the park, I mean, we’re playing more games as kids for them to see us probably broke their hearts, but we didn’t know that. I only realized that recently. But they would say, Oh, your kids come and sit around and I’ll tell you a story, and the gilas going to is a story, and I do it roerich, the two fingers that you have left…
You know what I mean? So it was a case of a motel you, a story about how I lost these fingers and how I make Bob died. And that was what we got as kids, and that was normal to us, so you normalized what was trauma, and it was only recently that I was talking to a friend about our first jobs in London when I was about 16, 17. And at the time, the Irish Republican Army had a campaign against the UK, and so almost like clockwork every six or eight weeks, you’d be sitting at work, tapping away, buying… My building would shake and I go, I’m not… Again, the army are gonna be outside. I might… We just stay here and work an extra hour, or you do the on the underground and the train would stop and all the lights would go off, bearing in mind that you’re 60 feet under the streets of London. And you’d hear the Postmates and gentlemen, these are bomb threat in the station ahead, they’re gonna have to stop the train, and as there are two trains backed up behind us, what we’re gonna do is he’s put the trains back to back, and you’re gonna hold hands with if someone who’s this fortunate in you and you’re going to walk back really train, then we’re gonna climb down onto the tracks, which have been turned off, then we are going to walk the Haiti back to the last station, plamondon and we go.
Not again, and you don’t get someone to… It’s alright, it’s not as bad as during the war, so you learn to reframe, and we had that older generation who pass those skills down and we didn’t see it for what it was at the time, so I really do feel sorry for younger generations, you never had that opportunity, because reframing emotional pain, reframing physical pain. If you can work with your perception and give that pain a significance, give that pain a meaning, oftentimes, it doesn’t just help you deal with the pain, you can get something akin to what some would call a post-dramatic growth, where the pain can drive you… So you can either be a victim of it, or you can use it as a type of… As a form of fuel, and I found that quite early in life because I found I didn’t have much choice, it’s either that will go mad, right. And you use it as a form of fuel, but you do need constant reminders because you go through these traumatic experiences, these growing pains on a regular basis, if you decide to grow, and that’s a very big if…
Right, ’cause a lot of people get to a certain stage in life and they go, Oh, I’ve done this, I’ve achieved this, I’ll put my feet up. And then they say to themselves, What is life side pain for that? Because they’ve stopped growing, they’ve stopped taking lives, challenges on, and there are only challenges if you don’t want them or if you haven’t chosen them, and it’s like the old saying of a bad surprise is only a bad surprise if you don’t want it… If you can’t frame it positively, and that’s always a choice. So it really is down to, if you can get your head straight, you can get your mind right, you… You’d be surprised what you can reframe… And I often quote, Victor Frankl is a very good example of that. Mastermind, yeah, you can watch your finally being murdered and your relatives and people in your community dying in front of you and say, You know, that’s unfortunate, if I turn this in on myself, how long I do… How long am I gonna last? My option is give this meaning, give this significance and use that to drive me, and he is an amazing work, wants to be Utah concentration camp.
And he documented what happened to people, and this is a sort of stuff that I think should be torture schools, and so I occasionally do that, I get invited to talk at schools and apologies, and occasionally the corporate lunch meeting, I stand up there and start my junk or people find that you fell occasionally… It is what it is.
So your background, you’re an engineer, you’re also… You’re a system instructor? Correct, yes.
Or an interesting bone of contention recently. Yeah, so when I left school, you couldn’t do computer science ’cause I had… It wasn’t on the curricular locally, I did electronic engineering, and it was the year after that, the B-Tech off of computing is a subject you can study. And I actually was lucky, I got an industrial training ship with a company called IBM. So I worked from the south bank of London next to the National Theatre, and had a wonderful manager calling Woodhouse, who one day said to me, Oh, Calvin, this course has come out for something called the IBM PC, I think it might go somewhere… It looks at the promising technology, would you like to do the course? And I went, Yeah, I don’t mind if I do. And that launched my career at the time, IBM electronic typewriters, telephone exchanges and photocopy is… So it was an IBM engineer, I would actually carry around a tool pace with a havering it and span is seriously… How so? Walking around all the banks in London and we update the Russian embassy in the American Embassy back was fun at that… I thought this was an embassy or as it got an army barracks underneath it, that kind of cool stuff.
And because of I had a pretty rough time as a kid, I was a small kid, man, smallest did an all into utility, I left, I used to get me up and pulled all the time, and so I developed a small guy complex, which gave me a very dark side, which I quite enjoyed actually, ’cause it kind of became my friend and I kept people away from me, but I realized pretty early on, you’re not gonna go in life… No, I instinctively knew where that would take me, and then one day a friend of mine, Tony said, or Cal, I’ve had it, this Korean karate class, and I mean, the careers do care anyway. Yeah, I was a Bruce Lee hit, I’d seen in the dragon at least once, and I had a little bit of an Afro, I can do that. So I just want a lunch to my first Honda class, I got kind of addicted and then a few weeks later, my mom, if you gotta take a little brother, and I was like, No, it’s mine, so even often became British champion and for the World Championship. And I was too short to do Take one to really…
So I just like fighting. So I just did that whole round the world fighting thing, while maintaining a career in technology, which took me into finance, in government work as well, and running projects for financial institutions, government institutions, both here and then… So in the UK, then eventually here as well. So it’s been fun. I’ve led a multi-channel life, which has been so fruitful and interesting, and it’s like I think… Not Bill Gates, Sr. Mr. Apple said, you can’t connect the dots. See, Jackie, you have to look backwards.
Was that Steve Jobs, you were eating…
I think it was Steve Jobs, I’m paraphrasing. But basically, if it is really, if you have that momentum going forward, you don’t actually have to know where you’re going, genetically, you have a predisposition towards certain things, and if you can feel your gut and that’s what system it really comes in, and where it’s very useful as a teaching modality methodology, both for colleges, schools and in the corporate space, in the corporate space, it works exceptionally well because where you’re doing the internal stuff, if I went in and said, Hey guys, we’re gonna do a breathing class, they’re like, Oh God, not this bloody yoga app stuff, and the eyes roll and they start… The ETH crack berries and the iPhones come out, if I turn on to them and say, Hey look, I was taught this by Russian special forces guy, the phones go in the pocket and they’re like, Yeah, but I can talk to them about heart rate, variability, breath work, and I’m a hard math advocate, I have been for many years now. So I could actually get out an iPad, look it up to a projector and show them how their emotions and self-regulation have a massive impact on their cognitive function, so be they left brain by the writer in, they’ve got something they can buy into.
And especially with dealing with pain, if you can’t communicate with your paraphrases and it’s a non-starter, we do live in a culture, especially in the west, where that sort of stuff is looked at as Foothill, you get chronic pain, more a deep, significant emotional issues, and then that stuff becomes front and center, I mean, even to the point where there’s the comprehensive… Is the comprehensive worry of fitness program run by the US defense force? And they actually use heart Mathers, one of their front line tools and dealing with PTSD, so we’re talking about all these food stuff, there’s enough science in it now that people are saying, Oh yeah, we are organic in nature.
Who now… We all did. Yeah, I think you’re bringing up a point where there’s this balance in life that we don’t allow… From a western perspective, we don’t allow that aspect of who we are to be okay in a way, and it locks people into this box that actually creates their pain, that they can’t get out of that box in order to relieve their pain, because if they go there, that somehow not allowed.
Yeah, and I’ll be honest, I’ll be flat out. They’re honest with you, even up to quite recently with me, I mean, you don’t realize how much is in that living black box of your emotional pains when you stop poking it, and it really is a Pandora’s box, and it’s not like you open it once, and I am free and Pegasus flies out hell now, each stage of life you go through requires that you dig into that box even deeper, and that’s how you develop further skills, cognitive abilities and levels of emotional awareness, which take you to the next level in life. If you’re not looking for it, it will come, I find you. And that’s what a lot of painting… That is literally what a lot of pain is, it’s your either lack of willingness or inability to look into yourself and say, What is this pain trying to tell me, and we ignore it, the louder it will get, and I’ve seen people ignore their pain and in their lives because of it. And I’ve seen people ignore their pain and then life ends itself in them because of it. I’ve seen it happen both ways.
And I’ve also had calls from people that strange hours of the morning night day, or on Bloody Boxing Day, in the middle of Boxing Day brunch, where I met you at a seminar X years ago. You don’t remember any, but I was the guy in Vernon. I remember you and I, I’m in a car on the edge of the cliff, this has happened and I can’t cope anymore. And I’m like, Oh, okay, right. Where are you, what are you doing? And you help them as much as you can and look… And I find that, especially with guys, because the system and health principles are very easy to subscribe to, because a lot of guys for some reason, and I can understand why I’ve done it myself, you can identify with the pain, so if you’re given pain is a gateway to address your pain, that actually works, because for some reason, we believe we have to pay a price for our freedom, our culture does that. Some were easy, you have two options, and you can get rid of the pain with comfort.
Or you can get rid of the pain with pain, and most of the time, or it’s in the Western mentality that we have to push through pain to get out of pain, I’d like for you to kinda go into the nuance of how do you know if you’re pushing through pain, like in system that is actually going to release the pain and pushing through pain, which is actually making the pain worse… That is an interesting one, ’cause we sell what is self-abuse, right, when it’s.
Self-flaunting a 100%. And what you’re doing is you’re investing in your pain, you’re trying to justify your pain as opposed to solve it, so that is one way you can look at it from a physical level, if it’s a healthy pain, it should be a pain you can laugh at and laugh with. Example being, many of my private students, in fact, for most with you, all of my private students, when they call me, I usually turn them down a few times, and you said sometimes they’ll come back to you 18 months later, I already do do anything and I do anything, and they say, Yeah, and I said, Well, okay, well, you’re gonna drink black coffee for two weeks, and they go, What? I’ll go, okay, see what you mean. And I’m like, Okay, these resistance there. No, I’m not gonna teach you or work with you, because it is a matter of working with someone, so they’ll drink the black coffee and I’ll get these messages, are you after the son of a… Even I’ll go here and I’ll get these messages on my phone and I’ll go, good, they’re learning to deal with it, and then it’s go, Okay, now you’re gonna have cold showers, or at least the last 30 seconds of bias gonna be cold, and then I’ll get the You black some good, that’s your learning to deal with it, and then a week or so like get a message, Hey, Calvin, and I’ll go A ha, I can’t sleep without a cold shower, and I go, Oh…
And then I’ll go, You know what? And I know the Coach O, and I’ll say the other guy, I actually find them quite calming, so they’ll realize, once you learn some of your pain on the other side, it’s kind of like… You have to go up to it and you have to realize how much of that pain is your own perception, what you’re projecting onto it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, so it’s a double-edge sword. It’s the person’s ability to let go of it or inquire into why are they doing it to themselves, because a lot of the pain you’re doing to yourself, it’s something you’re not prepared to let go of. I mean, when you look at it, the number of the percentage of people who basically die, or I should say really kill themselves unnecessarily because they’ll go to a physician, they’ll say, maybe you’ve got type diabetes, if you make these lifestyle changes, we can pretty much over time fix you address or its biggest stipe to… And 80% of people won’t make your changes, and they will lose a ton, they’ll lose a limb or ultimately out their lives away…
I get one, I’d have to double check the statistics, but I know it’s an alarming number of people, and that’s because at some level, they identify with the pain so much that it’s who they are, and that’s half the problem, because if you don’t have a purpose in life… And that’s a really big deal if you don’t give yourself a reason, you’ll go, Well, I’ll hang on to the pain ’cause it’s a familiar friend… It’s something I’m familiar with, so it’s helping people, if you just show people that in themselves, a lot of the time they’re like, I’m no good, and they’re rough, but some people do need… A lot of people do need to be walked through that, and it’s more about the assessing their readiness to go on that journey.
What do you think differentiates the person who’s willing to do that journey and who’s not purpose, our purpose, so it comes outside of themselves or… No.
It’s genetically, it has to be in you that you have… So for example, you can talk to someone about smoking and you’ll say, you do now… Smoking is not the best thing for you, right? And they’ll go, Oh yeah, no. Well, have you tried giving it up… Oh yeah, yeah, you know a lot of that. And you’ll go, Okay, and then you’ll say something like, Do you have any kids? And so I’ve got this wonderful two daughter, she’s three, and I’ll say Fine, will go home to her and explain to the Looker in and tilted killing himself. And these guys will get angry, what do you mean? I say, Well, that’s what you’re doing and you’re obviously okay with it, eat. Next time you can tone you think it… Where’s the disconnect, it’s a level of awareness that they’re not connecting with what they’re doing with the result, and that’s why the vagal tone work is so good because you’ll meet a lot of people who are disconnected emotionally, they have very low vagal tone or emotional in that mind-body connection is… We got a break down vegan, ’cause I think there’s gonna be people that may not know what Valois…
Okay, 10 cranial nerve nerve that grows out of the side of your skull, down your neck, forms a root ball goes into the heart, across the lungs and down into a stomach, so basically the part of you that when you get the Shivers, that’s your Vegas note. So it basically is that awareness, that feeling of self… Okay, so if you’re like, That’s your information super highway that nature has given us to tell us what our environment is doing, so if you’re the kind of guy that walks into a bar or a kind of woman that walks into a bar and you get the Shivers someone is looking at me and you look around it in… Someone looking at you here, welcome to your Vegas now. And so when you’re talking about the heart rarity, your physiological circuitry for your heart and your lungs and the rest of your nervous system having a little powwow and saying, Right, fight off light. What does that mean? How do I respond at a low sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system level, so literally the hard wire that your hard wiring of how your body functions, and then your emotional awareness and cognitive connection to that, which ironically were not ironically, which the only way you can interface with that consciously is through your breathing, which comes back to breath work, which is why I give my little students three and four years old bubble to blow and getting to do tactical breathing or square breathing by…
For whatever you want to call it. And then I will be talking to someone at CBA, so I’m on a Westpac ankle wherever, or whichever institution or which have a sports team they play for, and I’ll say, Guys, we’re gonna do square breathing. What… Okay, is Guys, guys, we’re gonna do tactical breathing. Okay, so we’re the blow bubbles, okay, so you give them an emotional because that’s what they need, they need an emotional buy-in, so then you get them sitting there Blane bubbles in the park, and they’re like, Wow, I feel better, and you know what? My pain is going and you go, Oh… And then they’ll say, If you Eastland, you know what, my wife and kids are getting on better with me, and you got… Oh, really? And they say, I Osgood with a system and I’ll go, I don’t know what you think. And they’ll go, No, I’m like, Oh yeah, you’re right. But as long as I feel better, who is…
Right. No, that’s brilliant. It’s good stuff. And I think it really leads to, just like you were saying, a level of awareness, a level of connection with those different aspects of who we are as human beings, are we moving more towards tension, holding our breath, or are we relaxing our body and being more easy to get along with… Just more comfortable in general. In our physical body, 100%.
I mean, I love it when students used to bring their children, especially their babies, to my class, ’cause we’d have a hard core tactical plus big men doing men, staff and striking ’cause everyone likes striking. Right, ’cause it’s good for the body. It easy to be soft, or if you wanna sell flagella and hurt yourself, sure will hit you on, its up to you how you interpret the stimulus naturally. So we’d have a… Sorry, I’ve brought the baby in an is okay for the baby… Put the baby in the stroller at the end of the class, I’d say, No, no, no, no, the baby will run the class, and they’ll be like, Well, I’ll get the guys to all lie down and you get the baby to crawl across everyone and you will watch these big grown guys soften, and tears might come out because they’re connecting with a part of themselves, they’ve neglected to done it, and I’ve actually had seminars here guys have actually… They’ve been lying and All of a sudden these tears come out and they go.
What’s happening to me, what’s happening to me.
What have you done to me in anger comes out because they don’t understand, and you’re like, right now, that’s your emotional self Nest club out very often.
It’s not a bad thing in… You’ve been in system for a long time, and I started a while ago myself, so I’ve had a few punches and a few of those punches hurt more than other punches. Yeah.
And then to you, not… But it’s kind of up to you, isn’t it? What you think it means?
No, even on the other side of what I think it means there’s a releasing like my body’s attention or whatever, and how different parts of the body will evoke different emotions, DE… And I know the person who’s hitting me, ’cause I had some of my best friends punched me, and I know there is no malicious intent, I know it’s on me, but it’s been whatever is… Is like the stuff of brought…
I feel you. We were fortunate and after I have Aslan reach over, system are talented. Love those guys. They’re so beautiful, they’re really so humble and share everything, and at one point, we were training and I said, Hey guys, everyone let us along punch you, let him really strike you deep strike, and it was like, Well, I said, yeah. And so I said, Look, we’ll just like me and I stood, I put him in Ashland, please do really honor a nice deep strike, and he struck me and everything with White Like lethality, and I was like… I was a Eeyore back, right? And it was like holy… Was holding on to stuff. But those guys, as Levantine, exceptionally highly skilled guys, but you can tell by who they are, you just look at their eyes and the softness, the gentle power that they personify, because it’s who you are, right, it’s not who you pretend to be, it’s who you are, and that’s really the crux of it. Unipolar culture, which everyone is pretending to be someone or something, rather than being… Because being scared the hell out of a lot of people being… Takes balls, man.
It really does, and that’s why I like training with babies, like training with kids ’cause they haven’t learned to fund themselves off yet, but they seem to get up from their parents and that’s been on the problem stuff, and all the… All the bad mojo comes across, all the band, negative conditioning, generational stuff tends to slip in, it’s like the elder the monkey experiment, if you’re familiar with that one, at…
To sweep the repeaters. Yeates the story, ’cause it’s maybe been here…
Well, it’s like the one you can look up on YouTube, ’cause there are some really good analogies there that pretty much is a very similar story.
We’ll put the video link in the description of that, but I want you to tell it as well…
Well, well, it’s basically along the little paraphrase here, basically, if you have a group of maybe like four or five monkeys, and you have a banana at the top of a ladder, and the monkeys, the complete E for the banana, and what will happen is the money that will get the baton, will be punished by the others, and then you’ll get to the point where the monkeys will look at the banana and say, I’m not gonna go there, because if I do lactose gonna happen…
Yeah, or the water, didn’t they spray called water?
They can have an experiment with water, but I do like the monkeys on the ladder reaching for the banana, it… It’s very easy to visualize. And also when people visualize it, they visualize it comically, which makes a big difference, because when people think of cold water, how do they react this rally, shiver they are… They feel it, in their mind, they picture an uncomfortable experience to what you’re trying to explain to them now has a feeling associated with it, so kind of sustain or 101. So what I prefer to do it is use examples that bring humor and warmth, so the subconscious self is open, so I like to teach with humor and use humorous examples because it softens the body. So I will say that my study at one of the Monkeys tried to grab her in an and the other monk, he’s scared it, and then even if you change those monkeys out, you put a fresh monkey in, a monkey will go on up an… We’ll go up and get punished and go, Well, I’ve not done anything wrong, but so what you end up with is a meme, a cultural mean of, I can’t go for what I want because it’s faded and I don’t know why, but everyone will punish me for it.
So after a couple of generations.
Little Jamie says, Dad, I want to travel the world. That’s all you can’t do that. Why? Because your uncle Stern generations, he tried it and some tasty happened… You know what I mean? Yes, yeah. So we take on these cultural significance, which are false, and then we become afraid to even challenge them, and if you’re not careful, you will compile all of this cultural stuff and believe that’s who you are, and all it ears is software settings. So your human being potentially becomes a person… You’re like an iPhone, this is an app for that. All of your cognitive states are apps, and you can choose them, that’s how the therapy works, so I went study back for a while, which was great, fun. Self-hypnosis is a thing, just use emotions, it’s quicker and easier, cognitive reframing, it’s quickness, and also that’s a very good way of dealing with pain and discomfort as well.
Do you have a way a person could begin to become conscious of these memes or these patterns within themselves that are limiting their experiences…
Of course. Do things you don’t like. What do you think you or do things with low consequence that you don’t normally do or been told not to do, because what you’ll find is you will justify these things with a cognitive logical part of your brain that really make absolutely no sense. So good things to do that I give people to do things like the coach hours is a great example.
On… No, no, no. Why not?
I can’t wake on you what am… Okay, well, if you did, what would happen? Well, and I go, Oh, here you go. That’s an example. You know what I mean? Yes, I just get them to do something that they wouldn’t otherwise do. And the more opposed they are to it, and then get them to say, Okay, well, if you weren’t opposed to do it and you did it, and you look back on the experience, what would it be… And so basically what you’re doing is you’re hacking the brain, you’re removing the pre-condition, and what you will find is the brain will then jump forward because look, ’cause a lot of what your subconscious is doing, it’s trying to stop you from her in yourself. So if you can tell it that in a huge version of yourself, you’ve already done on it and you’ll still alive, it will go, okay. That’s it, and you’ve done it. Literally, you’ve re-written and then if you look at yourself, re-respectively, your mind will say, I am my mind, and I project myself into myself because that’s how human the human mind works you or what you think you are, and any psychologist will tell you that…
Yeah, if you walk down the road and say, Man, you are what you think you either guy, it’s walking lowermost, that’s what cognitive therapy is, and that’s what it motherly does. So basically, that’s the interesting thing about human permission in the mind, whatever you think to be true is true, and until you change your mind… That’s it.
Yeah, I’ve had multiple experiences where I remember back in college, when I walked into my first martial arts class, he was a judo class and they were doing demonstrations and they were throwing people and they were hitting the ground, and I’m going, Oh my gosh, that would hurt a lot. And then I learned how to fall and I wasn’t so bad, and then I saw him choking each other and I was like, I don’t even like wearing a tie, how can I stand being choked yet? There was… If you break it down into baby steps. And that’s something that I really liked about system, was how they would… The master’s Lada and other instructors, how they would take this task, this activity that we’re doing, and they would break it down into a little piece… Right, yeah. And you begin doing that and then they give you another little piece, not open their old piece before you knew it, knew it, you’re doing this task, and it wasn’t that big of a leap for your brain to do it because it was broken down into bite-sized chunks that were… Yeah, definitely.
Will simply make it fun. The stuff that I would teach, I’ve worked at a couple of tactical guys, and the stuff that I would teach them, I would teach it. I mean, I pinch Alef at a laundry carry of book and we’ve tried it the Andre, if he’s… We’ve been fortunate enough to host it here on a couple of occasions, and you’ll watch him, the stuff that you’ll teach to tactical guys is the same stuff he teaches pre-school is because at the most fundamental level, you’re dealing with the same part of the human that child, that subconscious in self, whatever you wanna call it. But the thing is, we’ve been… As we get older, we put more and more layers of BS and conditioning on top of it, so literally, I will train everyone like they’re two years old, it’s just easier, and I can ignore their stuff because dealing with their stuff really, I don’t have any interest in it, I don’t have the time for. And you don’t get anywhere, especially if you’re working with these hard core corporate Alpert PEs, if you can give them a visualization or a scenario to work with, and then you’re teaching them the same stuff, because at the fundamental level you’re working with, say, the parasympathetic nervous system in many cases, so you can call it a chicken if you want, it makes no difference, right? You’re just giving them…
You’re just giving them permission to go there, and that’s one of the things that makes me love people seem to think that permission to be healthy and happy. And you realize, you tell them, You do realize that there is no precondition to happiness, right. And if you’re happy, that’s the whole idea, EBI, chasing success. Okay, what does success mean? It means I’ll be happy. Well, just be happy now. I can’t… Kayenta, if you meet anyone who’s successful, they’ll tell you, Well, I just enjoyed it, I just got into it. No, but that was hard work. Was it… When I look at some of the things I did in Marshall Arts, and I was speaking to my brother again recently, he was on… He has his own annual tournament that he invites other clubs too, and we were talking to other instructors about the stuff we did as kids, and some of the people that were listening to us, we were nothing and…
Oh my God.
You mean broke or faded, I broke my toe and then I had five more fights with a broken foot, it was so much fun, and people are looking at you terrified and he like, You guys in San heparan, you go now is because when you enjoy it. And it’s like when we were kids in, we go to… In England, we go to market and we bring… And your kids… And it’s freezing cold and its English, right England, the water’s murky and the seas cold, and it’s raining, and your mum’s got a big fit co on and you’re in your underpants running into the ocean, laughing going, Man can have an ice cream. And it’s not running down the nose and you look so blue, but you’re having the best time. Yeah, a lot of it is literally, you have to choose, because if you don’t, so choose, that in itself is a choice, and in dealing with pain, in dealing with adversity, in leading a team of executives, of running a business, in running a family, in pulling yourself out of a deep emotional hole, it’s more the same. You have to make that decision, and once you’ve made that decision and things will incrementally get better because we’re engineered that way later is pretty cool.
You know what I mean? You’ve been doing trial and error for a very long time, and in quite a specific direction, that’s why we call it evolution and not devolution, low stagnation in effect is the evolution, you have distinct called entropy, which is a matter of physics, and that applies to all of us all systems be like organic Al rather work. And it really is that, and it comes down to whether you wanna look at it from a scientific western viewpoint or an Eastern philosophical spiritual view point, look, it’s the same thing, it’s just the label you put on it, but we’re at a point in history now or everything you’re taking to, everyone’s starting to… Across the divide and meet in the middle. Callander ago, he was one of my favorite cosmologists. Physical loved the guy, and he said, it does go. The university is mostly be nine. It really doesn’t care about you and what you do. You’re not that important, but you give yourself meaning and you give your pain meaning, hopefully. ’cause if you don’t, you just say, Oh, I put me. And then you get what you get.
Yeah, I see a lot of people… Well, I work primarily with people with knee pain, mine, and a lot of them get to this long, slow decline with their needs getting worse at arthritis they could born on bone, and then pretty soon they’re a perfect candidate for a new replacement surgery, and they’ll say they tried everything, but their joints are wearing away and they’re in pain on a daily basis, what would you say to somebody in that type of situation… I mean, purpose, like you were saying, that’s gonna make a big deal.
I would say that after the east, after about 32 years of take onto an open style competition, I had what we call take one to own needs. It sounded like I was walking on a box of dummy nose when I got up in the morning, and it would take me about five minutes to put my feet on the ground as broken toes and broken feet, they cap chat with you after a while, they do so it used to take me like five minutes to put my shoes on to get to the office, and I would have the stand, I would walk to the bus stop like a ballerina, ’cause my feet bloody her, all my toes pointed in different directions, so it was literally a case of, you know what, I’m gonna take responsibility for this. I’m not gonna just hope that it goes away ’cause I know it won’t. So you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna find the most pleasurable way to deal with it and the most constructive way to deal with it, because otherwise I will look at it as a core and then I won’t do it because… Why would I do it? You know, and it would tell you that, so okay, I’m gonna make it a positive, fun thing, maybe you have got kids who you wanna job along the beach with, so maybe you get them to pass…
Participate with you, and then you say, You know what, I’m setting an example to my God kids. Now, that means more than my knee discomfort, so you give it a meaning, you give it a significance and you give it a positive purpose, and that’s why I came up with a whole thing about warriors path. If you choose the Warriors path, the higher way, a lot of the me, me, me, me, me, I, I, I, Palme falls away because you’re giving your situation a significance that goes way beyond you, so when you are walking down the road, people are saying, What… And you’re waving back. And the people are saying, what a champion. And you’re like, No, I’m just doing my thing. And people say, No, but you don’t understand me seeing you do that inspires me and that inspires you in your turn, and you’re getting that dopamine hit you in… Or meaning sense of purpose. Exactly, so that’s why it really comes back down to purpose, if you do things on purpose, it makes a heck of a difference, it makes all the difference, so you really do have to reframe it, otherwise you go into that You don’t…
Black hole of self and self-pity and I don’t wanna do it, and then you get what you go… It doesn’t help anyone.
Right. I think I speak to… ’cause there’s times I feel like… Like something happened in my life. Good friend dies. Whatever the situation is, there’s something significant. Is there a gauge you go by at the amount of time you give yourself to process that experience, ’cause sometimes being down is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s a process that I think you’re by to you to go…
Yeah, yeah, it’s like everything in life is a cycle… Everything in the natural world is a cycle, we’ve got days, weeks, months, years, songs that goes down, we… It comes up, ’cause now ties in, that goes out, and as products of nature, we are the same. So I’ve lost a few friends. I mean, I think it’s kind of one of those things, right? It’s like what they removed now, I think it’s a reconnaissance, everyone you love will die. And I’ve lost people who have been very close to me, I’ve lost girlfriends, a couple actually, and real people have really meant a lot to me, so… And occasionally, with digital majors is sometimes you be down and a sudden someone’s birth, they will come up, and it will be someone who died five or 10 years ago who I was really close to, and then you feel that little shadow come up, but then also it will be like, Oh, I remember that time you were dancing, and we dinaric often four in the morning, Jesus, we had a good time. And that was one time a girl friend of mine, we actually were together… She was my boss’s boss.
And we ended up going out for a couple of years and lived together, love her to bits, and I still think for from time to time, because we had great times, we went to balestier and hang out with my relatives over there, and I remember I was at her funeral, and ironically, she passed away from cancer, I don’t remember some of her best friends puffing on cigarettes at the funeral, or we were so close, I’d like you when you enclose it all now, and I remember putting a flower on the coffee and then actually thanking them and say, Honey, you’ve taught me the biggest lesson in life, and so you let yourself breathe because it has a purpose, it to remind you of how fortunate you are to have met them and have a fortunate you are to… Don’t be alive to grieve, so you let it happen, and then remember the good times you had… I mean, I was a friend of mine, a different of mine back home, and his father died, I was invited to the wake, and this is an old Caribbean Alderman guy, and this guy had a great life, man, and I remember looking into his coffin and I swear he was laughing.
I kid you not, I swear he was laughing and I started laughing myself, going, You cheeky lugger. And then late of the day when we had a funeral, and they lowered his coughing into the ground, there were these three old black guys and they were standing by the grave side, waiting themselves laughing at the funeral, crying light, almost falling into the grave themselves, and they had four shot glasses, and they were pouring out his Caribbean rum, and they were knocking it back and they pour the fourth blast and then pour it on top of the coffin, and they were talking to the cuff and go a summer that time you met those girls. And we went to that party that almost falling into the coffin. You know what I mean? So you see both sides is a duality to everything that is the human condition, but then we have choice. Which side do you want to see? So in dealing with that, I keep polarities on my phone, I have photos of people who are with me, photos of people who have gone, votes of people who have done… And they’re smiling. We’re out dancing, because as long as you have those memories…
The person’s still alive. Right. Rightist.
That’s great.
I know that the hard way, Brother belief.
Is… I hear you, I hear it. Well, then you were saying trail and are that’s how we learn, we gotta screw it up in order to know how to do it, right.
Well, it’s what Joseph can… Well, you to say Say yes to everything, because ultimately saying yes to everything can’t kill you and you can always set preconditions, and that was a big one for me. I actually gave myself that as a project because I used to watch Seinfeld and… Yeah, I remember one episode where George Costanza, a character. He had a contrarian week where he said, That’s it, Jerry, I’m gonna say yes to everything. I say no too, and not everything I say yes to. And all of a sudden his life pivoted, and then you realize that if you actually do that, you’ll realize that for a lot of people, 18, 90% of what you do, you’re actually getting in your own way. Seriously, so oftentimes, people will come to me, in my life a mess, I’ll say, Go to bed. ’cause you can’t make it any worse… Great. You not a man. And then they’ll contact you. A week later, I say, You’ll never believe what happened. And I’ll go, Yeah.
Things got better. Yeah.
You start to bugging in your own stuff.
Yeah. That’s a brilliant piece of advice. And it’s easy to gloss over that. If things aren’t going well, stop doing everything is not doing everything, ’cause it can’t get worse because you’re doing it, you are the agent, you are the agent that…
Randy, that’s why I love stoicism, but the thing is, so isn’t very often converted into the modern era, but they will tell you a chill, cold, your breath, do nothing and wait and see what happens out, that’s what get out of your own way means, because you are genetically programmed to be brilliant from birth, tires don’t take time lessons, they train, but they don’t take time lessons equals don’t take Eagle lessons, Wolf don’t take all lessons, but they’re pretty efficient of being what they are, we are the same, but unfortunately, culture can get in the way, if you have one in the middle of nowhere in a tribe, by five years old, you be fully self-sufficient and to gather… Is there still a… Still a few of them about, when you’re a kid, it’s not like they wait till you’re 15 or no London. No, no, you’re out there, and for some reason, we think that we’re born and competent and then spend the rest of our lives acquiring stuff, and then if you’re lucky, you’ll get to your 50s and you’ll say, Why isn’t my life working the way I thought it would? I’m gonna just sold you on and keep smashing myself, but the smart ones say, Hold on, when I look back at my life, Hey, I love myself, and those are the ones that wake up, but that’s a very small percentage of people most of the time.
So brilliant, Calvin. Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s fantastic to tingle.
That’s why I keep telling people I don’t know, that’s why I try not to take on students ’cause I know bugger all I’ve done is just look at my life and go, You messed up. It was you. You did that, stop.
Dominican. We’re gonna wrap it up here in a minute or so, but I wanted to thank you so much. Is there anything else you wanna… Like a loose… We might have out there. You wanna tie up?
Yeah, one last thing, low self-esteem is an epidemic, so I would say for 99% of the people that company, their problem is low self-esteem wraps up in one parcel or another… Go and see a psychologist. There’s nothing wrong with that. Or if you’re fortunate enough, maybe you’re a member of a loving community, find someone who is happy and just spend time with them just to observe them. That is enough. You’ll pick it up by osmosis. There is nothing wrong with you. We’ve had a wonderful… Is something wrong with me? Culture since the 50s and 60s, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re born fine, if you wanna give yourself problems and label yourself, go ahead. ’cause this culture tends to allow you to do that because it’s a great way of making money out people, it doesn’t make you very useful, so just be useful, be happy and start there, you gonna need an excuse to be happy and healthy. Just do it. Happiness, health and success. They are cognitive states, they are not things you would give… They are mindsets. That’s it. And if you want to achieve, be happy and you know what, you’ll get there…
It’s impossible to fail. Literally. Unless you sabotage yourself. That’s it. I know it ’cause I tried it, and I wish someone had had told me fucking 40 years ago, but the thing is, if they had told me, I wouldn’t have acquired all of the wonderful experiences I’ve acquired because those experiences helped me in relating to other people. You don’t understand my pain. Let me show you my SKU or Jeez-a. Exactly. So I think in a nutshell, that would be it.
That’s awesome, Calvin. I appreciate you taking the time to… With us today, I’m on it.
A privilege that you think… I’ve actually got some work. Sewell.
I didn’t say you did, I’m just saying No, I’m glad you shared your time… Well.
Come on now. Absolutely, so it’s a pretty… Look.
Usually I’ll get friends from the UK ringing up and say, Make You should chat… You’re upsetting people. I’m like, I don’t actually care. I don’t click on my face if it upsets… Is that simple? It’s a choice like everything else in life, in how we have it set up with the podcast and in the chameleon DAT on, we have the ability to set it up where there’ll be a button below this, if you’re open for people reaching out to contacting you for consultation or something like that.
I’d love to share, to be honest with you, my Facebook page is my diary, so most of what I say in public when I go through stuff… I put it out there ’cause I really don’t get it. That’s what the whole Warriors path thing is about. Where your heart on your sleeve. Because that’s the whole point. That is the whole point. So oftentimes, oh, I’ve got this problem, I say, I’ll go back three weeks and look at my Facebook pages there, ’cause otherwise I’d be overwhelmed and Swan, which occasionally happens, and I do consult. It’s not cheap, so what I try to do is I try to make all of my stuff available for free, that’s the whole point, but otherwise, yeah, reach out a canoeist dot com, which is my professional LinkedIn.
Yeah, we’ll put all of that information down below in the description of it. We’ll do that. Thank you. Once again, we appreciate it. This was fun. It is of. We will. We’re gonna do it, you could be a regular face on it, if you’d like…
I’d love to… ’cause I mean, I’ve even re-branded the, we used to be peaceful warriors in training were now peaceful worry is an active service, it’s time to resolve to get out there and do stuff, and you do stuff by just being who you are, that you live as an example, and you just wear your stuff when you sleeve and when you mess up, you say, You know that was my bad and you change it, you just do the right thing. That’s it. It’s not hard. Awesome, thank you. It really again.
Really… Opportunity, thank you. So this is Bill Parravno, the knee pain guru. Thank you so much for being here. On behalf of the pain education podcast on the Comella Foundation, thank you so much and we’ll see you on the next one.