77 | Clarity Begins in Quiet: A Conversation with | Bill of Sage Life

A clearer life starts with a quiet moment. We sit down with Bill, spiritual author and founder of Sage Life, to unpack a grounded approach to awakening that trades vague ideals for practical steps you can apply today. No jargon, no gatekeeping; just a simple framework anchored in awareness, love, and personal responsibility.

Bill shares how he moved from building companies to building a life of clarity, and how his core framework unfolds: we’re animated by Spirit, we are eternal, and we must own our path. From there, we explore the daily practices that create real change: ten minutes of stillness, turning off the phone, and asking better questions: Is this love? Is this true? Bill explains why awareness is the beginning of change, how to spot hidden programming, and what to do when pain and triggers surface in traffic, at work, or at home.

We go deeper into Christ consciousness as a lived lens rather than distant worship, and what it means to embody love with strength and boundaries. If people pleasing drains your energy, you’ll learn how to let yes be yes and no be no, how to track where your power leaks, and how to align your choices with purpose. Bill’s practical tools: electronic retreats, micro-meditations, compassionate reframing; help you act instead of react and create momentum the universe loves to meet.

You’ll leave with a toolkit to start now: commit to the path, practice daily quiet, choose love in small moments, and treat triggers as teachers. When effort meets intention, clarity grows, peace expands, and life begins to align around what matters most. If this conversation resonates, follow, shar

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 2:20 Bill’s Story And Sage Life Origins
• 5:20 The Core Framework Of Spiritual Growth
• 9:55 Awareness As The Engine Of Change
• 14:30 Love, Boundaries, And Tough Compassion
• 19:56 Starting The Practice: Quiet And Unplugged
• 23:36 Christ Consciousness Versus Worship
• 28:06 Clarity, People Pleasing, And Energy
• 32:26 Loneliness, Lifestyle Shifts, And Community

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

You're listening to the off balance podcast, Word of 24 Family and Business Collaborate, hosted by Brook Family, Doctor of Business Administrative Business Coach, and Bridgillion Expert. Each episode features real life conversations to help entrepreneurs like you build resilient and lead with confidence.

SPEAKER_01: 0:32

Welcome back to Off Balance. I'm your host, Dr. Brooks. Today's episode is all about spiritual awakening and the journey of living with clarity, love, and purpose. Our guest today is Bill. He is a spiritual author, a teacher, and the founder of Sage Life, a platform dedicated to spiritual awareness and growth. Through his work with Sage Life, he blends teaching with creativity, offering meaningful apparel that serves as a daily reminder of inner truth. Bill, welcome to Off Balance.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01

Happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 1:03

Listen, I am so glad to have you. So I gave listeners a brief introduction about you, but can you tell them who you are and what it is that you do?

SPEAKER_02: 1:12

I'm a child of God just like the rest of y'all. Animated by the Spirit of God. I've got six kids. I've got two ex-wives. I've started four or five different companies. Only one of them was like monetarily successful. I've had a bunch of spiritual experiences. I wrote a book, The Awakening to Ourselves, The Practical Art of Building a Spiritually Aware Life, because I wrote that book because we are animated by the Spirit of God. And so all the attributes of the Spirit of God are inside of us. And it took me a long time to learn that and to begin to master those energies. And I wanted people, actually, the Holy Spirit told me, write a book that makes it easier for people to walk down this journey. I've never written a book, started writing a book, and now I'm building a brand because spirituality is very practical. And religions, it just seems so complex, but it's not.

SPEAKER_01: 2:23

That's interesting because you said that you had a moment and Holy Spirit told you to write your book. What was that specific moment when things started to shift for you?

SPEAKER_02: 2:34

If you're on the spiritual journey, on the spiritual path, things are shifting all the time. I had sold my last company, made a little money, was able to semi-retire per se. And I had started Sage Life already. And Sage actually stands for spiritual awareness, growth, and enlightenment. And I was printing t-shirts, and then I wanted to codify my thought process. And I don't know, I just sat down and started writing and figured it out like I have the rest of everything else in my life.

SPEAKER_01: 3:15

So, what has Sage Life done for you on your spiritual journey?

SPEAKER_02: 3:21

The biggest thing is that it's made me codify my thought process because I would start writing stuff and I'd go, do I really believe that? Is that true? And I'd go back and reword it. But it gave me a framework. And once I had that framework in a book, then I put that framework in my consciousness and starting a YouTube channel. It enabled me, I write a story every week. I'd love for people to go to my website, SageLifeWithBill.com. You can sign up for my free weekly story. I spend about anywhere between four to eight or ten hours every week on that story. And it is woven with my, I call it my Bill Consciousness, just like Christ's consciousness, just like Brooks Consciousness, right? We all have consciousness. And it just weaves practical spirituality into your lives and tries to help us realize things that we're not paying attention to.

SPEAKER_01: 4:26

And you mentioned a framework.

SPEAKER_02: 4:28

It's pretty basic. The word soul comes from the word anime, which means to animate. So our souls are animated by the Spirit of God. So that's number one. You have to understand that. Number two, you have to realize that you were in the field of consciousness of God, and now you're in this world, okay? But you're an eternal being. We're all eternal beings. Okay. So that's number two that we're eternal beings. Number three is really just taking responsibility for your spiritual path. And real quickly, I'll tell you what the spiritual path is. It's really just a subtraction. We come into this world pure as babies. We're just pure as light. Okay. But after about the age of five or six, our families, our teachers, our cultures, everybody starts putting these beliefs on us, and we forget who we really are. And so the path to wholeness and holiness, because those words are the same words, that path to wholeness and holiness and to enlightenment, which we can talk about that too, that definition of that, is a subtraction of all the worldly things. And in the Bible, it says, do not conform yourself to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that you may know the perfect, pleasing will of God. So we come into the world, we get conformed to the world, we forget who we are. So we have to transform, actually make a different formation in our minds. And when we do, then we can stay tuned in to the intuition and to our higher spirit and to our soul path and our soul journey and what we came in here to do.

SPEAKER_01: 6:40

When it comes to your framework, how would that look in day-to-day practice?

SPEAKER_02: 6:45

I can tell you lots of things. But first thing, I'm real big. I put the practical art of building a spiritually aware life, okay. Awareness, I've got a whole chapter on awareness. That is one of the keys, okay. If you realize that you're, let's say you're gaining weight and you're not feeling good, and you're eating a McDonald's 10 times a week, okay? At some point in time, you're going to come to an awareness that that is not healthy for your body. Your body's telling you that you're sludgy, you're picking up weight, all those things. You just don't feel good, right? And I actually coined this phrase awareness is the beginning of change. Whenever you become aware of something, okay, really aware of it, then the change becomes automatic. So awareness is a beginning. Like in awareness, if you go to church, lots of people go to church just for social reasons and things like that. And that's all okay. But you have to, another one of my tenants and my three or four tenants is you have to take charge of your own spiritual journey. Okay. You cannot give that to your preacher, you cannot give it to your wife, your children, anybody. You have got to take take power over your spiritual journey. So awareness is one of the things. Every time you make a decision, make there's always two choices. There's love and there's not love in every decision we make, whether it's to ourselves, to anybody else. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. You've got a decision. You know, blow your horn, give them the finger, all that type of stuff. Or you can go, man, I have no idea what that person's going through today. Bless them, bless me, keep them safe, send them beautiful energy. So every decision is either a love decision or not a love decision. But you we've got to remember that love is not a weak thing. There's different types of love. There's and this is, I'm going to use gender, but we all have both genders. We're all male and female. But there's a motherly love, right? Which is a warm, nurturing love. And then there's more of a masculine love. When you see a mother bear take care of her babies, that's beautiful, feminine, motherly love. You get between a bear and her babies, and you're going to see some masculine energy come out, and she's going to claw your face off, right? And good for her. So we have to remember that love's not always a soft thing. Okay. It's and all the energies that we have to be balanced. Love Jesus. I don't love what the religions have done to him. And I write a lot about Christ's consciousness right now. But Jesus turned the table over in the temples. He needed to make a point. And so he used his passion, his anger, to flip all those tables over. That's a beautiful example of tough love. Everything, either when you're giving love, you're giving a life. When you're not giving love, you're not giving a life. Okay. And if you take the word live and flip it around, it's evil. Okay. So every time you're not giving life to something, you're giving evil to something, which is means you're taking life away from it.

SPEAKER_01: 10:37

That's very good. And I never thought of it that way. So if you have someone that's listening and they never experienced love before and they don't really understand, you know, what is one step that they can take?

SPEAKER_02: 10:50

Commit yourself to the path. That's the first step you have to do. If you're really going to make progress, you've got to just say, I'm going to do this. I want to become the best person, not from a good right perspective, but honoring yourself, the best person. I want to develop myself into the best spirit I can be while I'm here on this planet. So that's number one. The second thing is you've got to take time out. You've got to sit in the quiet at least 10 or 15 minutes every day. I don't care if you're sitting out in the grass. I don't care if you're on your couch. I don't care if you're laying in your bed, probably if you're sitting up, but you don't have to have any special, you don't have to call it meditation, you don't have to have any special mantras, you don't have to do anything, okay? All the spiritual leaders, all the great people throughout all of history, they step aside and they take time. And once you start taking time, you're listening to the spirit inside of you. And the spirit inside of you is connected to your soul, and your soul is connected to the God consciousness, to the field of consciousness. But you can't hear all that and develop those skills unless you stay in and start staying in the quiet. And in this world right now, and I love technology and I love my phone and I love my computer and lots of technology, okay? But we keep our phones on way too much. I have electronic retreats where I shut all my technologies down for days at a time. At first, I started with half a day, and then I went to a day, and now I can go weeks almost without it. A lot of times I'll run to the grocery or run somewhere. I don't take my phone with me. I don't have my phone with me all the time. And that helps with the quiet too.

SPEAKER_01: 12:49

Yeah, I would definitely have to build up to going off the grid. I can go a couple of hours, maybe a day or two without my phone, but you are real disciplined and unplugged if you could go to the grocery store without it. So you speak a lot about Jesus consciousness, and that is something that's really not taught in the faith. So, what's a common misconception that people have about Jesus consciousness when you're teaching them about it?

SPEAKER_02: 13:16

The biggest thing is that the Christian religions have taught us to worship, and I really don't like the word Jesus a lot. I use the word Yeshua. Christ's consciousness is actually a little different than Yeshua consciousness. The bottom line that the churches teach us to worship Yeshua and to give our power away. It was not Yeshua's message. Yeshua's message. Your power and your love and all wisdom and knowledge that you need is inside your spirit. We give our power away to churches, countries, and movements, but we're responsible, and everything we need to know is in our heart. Jesus was a God, but we're a God also. And that's what he really came to teach us is that we're gods and we need to start acting like gods. And so then some of the basics of Christ's consciousness. If you think about Christ's consciousness, if you think about Brooks' consciousness, that's your perspective, your belief systems, the lens that you look through the world. And then I've got a consciousness, and Yeshua had a consciousness. Love your neighbor like yourself, stay connected to God, no judgment, pull the log out of your own eye before you pull the splitter out of somebody else's. Do not fear. It's a huge one all through the New Testament. Jesus is going, hey y'all, don't be afraid. There's nothing to fear here. Once you stay in the quiet and you start to meditate, if you want to call it that, and you connect with your higher self, you will start to see the falsities that you've adopted in this world. As we walk down this spiritual path, we start pulling all these false beliefs off. And the more false beliefs we get pulled off, the clearer we are tuned in to our inner spirit. And then once you get to a certain point, you get so clean and peaceful, it's just like, why didn't I get here earlier? Why didn't I overcome this earlier?

SPEAKER_01: 15:30

What do you think your experience of clarity has revealed about yourself as a person?

SPEAKER_02: 15:37

I also, though, have really up until the last few years have been a huge people pleaser. And I've really I overgive and I try to keep the peace. And I've really had to work on that a lot because I know that's not healthy.

SPEAKER_01: 15:55

And how did you recognize that you were people pleasing?

SPEAKER_02: 16:00

I started tracking my energy. Okay. We have X amount of energy, okay? And we can spend it on anything we want to. So if you start looking at how you're spending your energy, okay, then you'll realize a lot of stuff about yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 16:21

So when you were people pleasing and you wasn't aware of it, what do you think one of the biggest mistakes that you made that turned into your greatest teacher?

SPEAKER_02: 17:21

I started studying just in my mind, okay, awareness, right? Trying to change my consciousness. I started studying about and thinking about when Jesus said, let your yes be yes, and your no be no. And I had a hard time saying no to people, but it was unhealthy. And so I just started looking at it and I started to see where my energy was being drained, and when I was saying yes, when I should have been saying no, and I just kept looking at it. And I'm telling you, I'm still struggling with this one. This is probably my Achilles heel of everything, because I don't want to say this in any type of way that's bragging, but I've unleashed myself quite a bit. And when you start unleashing yourself, the love and the power of God starts flowing through you, and it's super powerful, and so I've got lots of love, and I can love the stew out of everybody. I got a little homeless ministry going on the side, and I got a fairly big family with six kids, and you know, lots of people come to me for wisdom, and all that stuff just takes time. But you have to, I still have to balance that out with time for myself and time for my writing and all those things.

SPEAKER_01: 18:52

What advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_02: 18:56

You have to learn yourself first. You've got to put your oxygen mask on yourself first, and as you start you get in the quiet and you start lying up with your intuition, your intuition will tell you everything you need to know. And I keep going back to the Bible just because I was raised Christian and Catholic, and I've done a fair amount of Bible study, but I also love Buddha and I love a lot of the Hindu stuff, and I love the Sufis, and all religions have got wisdom in them. So, and I've and so my wisdom knowledge comes from many sources, not just Christianity.

SPEAKER_01: 19:49

So you have led a spiritual book club for over 15 years. First, congratulations because that is definitely dedication and commitment to stay consistent for that long. What are some of the lessons or patterns that you notice with people are growing in their spiritual walk?

SPEAKER_02: 20:06

One is the hearts just start changing. They start noticing their bad programming and they start releasing it. They get lonely because once you start raising your energy level up, not everybody can handle that. And even if they can handle it, they don't understand it. So it can be a real lonely place. Now you come out of that loneliness later on. But see, what else on the spiritual walk? I don't know. They're a lot of times you're gonna get more quiet, you're gonna get more introspective. They are gonna some of the things that they used to do, they're not gonna want to do anymore. Right? I love music, but for me to go to a music concert now, it's sensory with it's not the music, it's the people. It's overwhelming for my spirit now at this point in time. I rode my bike today for a couple hours, and part of that means I ride to a park and sit in the park for a while. They've got to they've gotta have more alone time. I can't watch a TV program and with commercials on it. I just can't do it. I no longer can watch a commercial.

SPEAKER_01: 21:31

Yeah, that makes sense. So, what's next for you? How do you see your work with Sage Life impacting the future?

SPEAKER_02: 21:38

I just want to bring very practical spirituality into people's lives. They don't have to memorize any mantras, they don't have to go to church. They have to start with their quiet time, tuning into themselves. And then in my book, it's two parts. One's kind of the first part, which we discussed, and then the second part is specific issues like awareness, death, everything's energy, all that type of stuff. But I put practical all the things that I do, which I do a lot of little things, which I've added over a long period of time. I've put all these little practices that I've done in my book so that people can practice them a little bit if they want to. But I want people to be able to walk down the street and catch themselves thinking something and go, is that a truth? Is that love? And if it's not, then I want them to learn how to release it. And this is all stuff you can do as you're walking around. You don't have to be in a church, you don't have to be anywhere, you don't have to be doing anything. You just start paying attention. Okay. So what I'm gonna try and do is just start to build my YouTube page. I've got another book coming out pretty soon. I got a third book that I'll be hopefully be out late in 2026, which I haven't even started on, but I'm framing it right now. And I've got my weekly stories, and I just want people to that resonate. I know that I'm not gonna resonate with everybody, that's not the way it is. We're all different threads of the same tapestry, right? And but there's a certain percentage of people out there that will resonate with me. And I say that Spirit told me to go do this, and so I started it and I'm just gonna keep doing it. We can create anything we want to create in this world, it's just a matter of, and this is the beauty, because when you're on the other side, when you're on the other side of the veil in the God consciousness, you can create instantly. But down here in this heavy, gravity-laden world, it takes persistence, it takes focus, and it takes energy. And those are the things that teach you how to use your skills and your energies. And did we finish pain? So when you have pain, then you stop and look. So if you are walking outside and run into a boulder, that boulder doesn't have pain. You have pain. And so the same thing is if anything in the outside world happens and it causes you pain, it's not them that cause the pain, it's some deep trigger that you have. You're walking down the sidewalk again, right? And something happens, somebody throws a cup out, and you're like, rah, a stupid idiot, littering, blah, blah, blah. Or you can go bless them. I was that way one time. Everybody's doing the best they can at any point in time from their given position, okay, their given perspective. Or you can go pick the cup up, bless that person, okay. And so you start looking at all the pain and the triggers and look at them deep. And as soon as you find them, you look at them with awareness, and over time they'll disappear. It's just like a cloud. I used to get deeply sad, depressed almost. And then I realized that over time, as my heart lightened and my love kept expanding, and I kept taking these stupid worldly rules off. So you just start letting these pains, you look at them with awareness, and they float away over time, and then you just get purer and purer, and now your energy's stronger, okay? And then things start aligning because you're aligning with yourself and your energy is getting stronger, and the whole thing just and it gets to a point where it's a snowball, okay? But it all starts with these little steps of dedicating yourself to the path, putting yourself in quiet time, choosing love, looking at your pain and triggers, not judging. When you're judging other people, you actually are judging yourself first. So when you realize that the judgment that you're putting on other people is really inside you, then you have to look at why you're doing the judging. Okay, I can either act or I can react. Okay, there's a difference. Like when a fly goes by you, that's reacting. But if I hear that and I think, I wonder why Brooks said that to me. Is there something going on here I don't understand? Once you start acting instead of reacting, you'll realize that we are the only ones that give away our power. And that is just so critical. So when you stop giving your power away, you keep your power, and then you can put that power wherever you think you need to create your soul plan here on earth.

SPEAKER_01: 27:17

As I'm listening to you speak, it seems so simple, but it's so hard because when you have to do like introspection, what is a simple practice that you believe that they can try to help them to become more aware?

SPEAKER_02: 27:33

It's like anything. You get one customer and two customers, and then you get three customers, and then that third customer tells somebody else, right? You've just got to start walking down the path. Okay. And the thing is, if the universe is a cosmic law, the universe rewards effort. Okay, that is a cosmic law. So if you don't put any effort out, the universe can't help you. Okay? So you've just got to start walking the path. And it's little things. Take 10 or 15 minutes every day and be quiet. Start looking at your decision process. Start looking at where you get triggered and what those pains are. It's day-to-day stuff. You can do that while you're walking around, while you're sitting on the couch, while you're at work, while you're at the water fountain. One of the reasons why we come into this world for this lifetime is to learn how to use our energies of creation because God is a creator. So one of the things we're here to do is we've got all these beautiful energies, we've got all these emotions, but if we waste it on drinking or we waste it on too much sports, or we overpeople please, whatever it is, okay, it's learning how to balance your energies. See, Jesus had disciples because the word disciple means disciplined. Those are the same words, disciple discipline. And these are not big, hard disciplines, they're just real basic stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 29:21

Is all of that on your website as well?

SPEAKER_02: 29:24

Yeah, my book's on Amazon. And but you can obviously get to it through my website, SageLife with Bill dot com. And you can sign up for my weekly story on my website, and my YouTube page is SageLife with Bill also.

SPEAKER_01: 29:44

And then I will make sure that I have all of that in the show notes for listeners to be able to get in contact with you. So as we wrap up, what's one message or a piece of advice that you want to leave with all listeners who may be navigating their own spiritual journey?

SPEAKER_02: 29:59

Jesus said, but both your hands to the plow and don't look back. And then and remember that all wisdom is inside of you. And we are these great big genies in these itty bitty little bottles, right? This itty bitty little lantern. We are so powerful, we're scared of our own power, and that's one of the reasons why people don't step out, they're scared of their own power. Marianne Williamson, there's a famous quote by her so learn how to love yourself, just start loving yourself, okay? And if you really start to love yourself, you become so powerful and so peaceful. And so joyful. It's very scary and it's fun.

SPEAKER_01: 30:55

Yes, it's definitely scary in a good way, Bill. You have been an absolute pleasure. It would definitely love to have you back to talk about that book that you're going to release in 2026. Again, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_02: 31:09

Thanks, Brooks, so much. I appreciate it. Yes. I always like to end with the word namaste. A lot of people have heard the word namaste, but a lot of people really don't know what it means. It's a Sanskrit word, and it means the divine in me honors the divine in you. So I say namaste to you, Brooks, and Namaste to all our listeners.

SPEAKER_01: 31:32

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 31:42

Thanks for listening. Please rate this episode and share it with your family and friends. To learn more about your host or to book a coaching session, visit www.brooksdeming.com. Until next time, rise.