The Violence Of Peace

Peace can be the hardest thing your body has ever tried to do. When you’ve lived with trauma, chronic stress, addiction dynamics, or a family culture that runs on tension, your nervous system learns to call conflict “normal.” Calm can feel like boredom, emptiness, or even danger, not because you’re broken, but because cortisol and adrenaline have become familiar. I unpack what’s happening in the brain and body when hypervigilance becomes baseline, why the prefrontal cortex goes offline under threat, and why “just forgive” or “just let it go” skips the most important part of healing. 

From there, we widen the lens to the collective: humanity’s long relationship with crisis, why stability can feel unfamiliar in politics and relationships, and why peace movements often collapse without support structures. I draw on stories of disciplined nonviolence through Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to show that peace isn’t passive. It’s composure under pressure, clear boundaries, and the costly refusal to become the violence coming at you. 

To make the crossing real, I offer a practical roadmap inspired by 12-step recovery: admit the addiction to conflict chemistry, prepare for withdrawal, fill the vacuum with new rituals and community, grieve what the war cost, make repair where possible, hold a North Star, and practice peace daily. If you’re in that messy middle where the old identity is gone and the new one isn’t formed yet, you’re not failing, you’re crossing. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs a map, and leave a review so more people can find this work.

Transcript

Why Peace Feels Violent

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Today I want to start with the most well-meaning, most repeated, and most harmful thing we say about peace. We say, just choose it. We say, just stop fighting, just forgive, just let it go, just be peaceful, as if peace were a light switch. As if our human nervous system, calibrated and layered over decades, over centuries, over generations, to the frequencies of conflict, could simply decide to run at a different voltage. As if a person who has completely organized their entire identity around a war, even in their own homes, could simply just put that down and pick up a different one without going through something that feels like from the inside, like complete annihilation. We skip the middle. We go straight from the wound to heal, more to peace, from injured to whole. As if crossing over to the other side is just a formality. We get a visa for it. We cross over. It is not a formality. The crossing over can sometimes feel like the most violent thing you can do to yourself. And today we're going to talk about that. We are going to talk about that crossing over, honestly. There's many of you who are trying to do that work right now. This inner finding peace. And yes, this outer finding. And so when this episode kept coming up for me, I kept thinking of this phrase: the violence of peace. So let's do this together like we always do. Let's do it step by step, like we always do. Because that's what we need to do when we cross over into new and healed identities. We need others to do it with us. And we need the step-by-step. We need the game plan. We need the instructions. The concepts help, yes, but that's not entirely it. We need steps. Steps. This is episode three, season four of the Heaven on Earth podcast. I'm your host, Claudia Ketarucci. I've been a psychospiritual therapist for over 25 years. I've sat with all kinds of humans in their deepest undoings. I've sat with myself in my deepest undoing. And what I know, and I know it all the way deep inside, all the way down, is that healing is real, peace is real, and that nobody gets there by accident, and nobody gets there by deciding to just do it one day. Today we're gonna talk about how you can actually get there. Welcome to heaven on earth. The show is not religious, it is psychological and spiritual. We don't start with doctrine, we start with the actual human being. On each episode, I take a topic that's alive in the world right now. Something you've already been feeling it, you might be naming it, you might not be naming it, and I study it from all sorts of angles. Biological, historical, psychological, spiritual, evolutionary, scientific. Like spokes on a wheel, they all lead to one center. My approach is simple. It's a signature approach that I call the all is in the small and the small is in the all. And what that means is that what's happening inside of one human being is happening all the way out there, outside in humanity. We work from the inside out, no bypassing all the way through. And for those who remember, Casey Kasom used to say, keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. And that's what we do here on the Heaven on Earth pod, a portal to possibility. So let's jump

Your Nervous System Learns Conflict

SPEAKER_00 3:54

right in. Let's start with what happens to your body when you've been living inside of conflict for a long time. Your adrenal glands will produce adrenaline and cortisol. Your amygdala, which is sort of like the brain's alarm system for aggression and fear. It tips those off, becomes alert, hyperactive, and it's it's like a radar. It's constantly scanning for threat, for danger. Your prefrontal cortex, this is a part that makes decisions, nuanced decisions. This is a part that can imagine a future. It can imagine possibilities, it can hold complexity, it can see patterns and layers. That goes offline because when we're in genuine danger in an emergency or what feels like an emergency, you're not exactly searching for nuance. You're actually searching for speed. You gotta take off and run. That's what your body thinks needs to happen. And this, of course, is what we call in the day-to-day a stress response. And it's brilliant. It's a brilliant survival design because it helps us survive. What's tricky and what actually happens is that it doesn't stop running. What's meant to run as an alert system is running continuously. What I call like cortisol showers or cortisol drips always running through your body, eroding it, eroding your body. When the stress response runs long enough through childhood trauma, through chronic instability, through living in a war zone, literally or metaphorically, even if that means that your parents fight all the time, or you're one of your parents who is drunk gets home and switches moods, that that feels like an internal conflict and the danger alerts go off. So then what happens is of course it moves from being an alert, an alarm system, and it just becomes normal. It becomes baseline. Your baseline actually moves up, where it's just always shooting these alarm systems. So it stops being triggered by threats. It actually just becomes the way that you live. And your nervous system is permanently conditioned this way. I want you to be thinking about you right. And let me tell you what's this is nuanced and tricky. It starts making you feel alive, electric. So that hypervigilance, that heightened sense, that constant, like low-level urgency, that rush vibe, I've got so much to do vibe. It's that feeling that something's important, something's always at stake. So for people whose nervous system was actually raised in these types of environments. This is what feeling alive feels like. Call it the edge. We feel like we're always on edge. We feel like we're at the edge. And it feels like home. It feels familiar. So calm, genuine, safe, undramatic, calm. Feels like nothing. Feels boring. It can feel like a deep emptiness. It can feel like dying. And we don't talk about this enough. About how folks who've grown up in complex post-traumatic stress have this unspoken need for edge because it is how they feel alive. Even for vets who come back. I mean, across the board, which is sometimes why we attract the relationships that we attract. Probably folks who have been on edge for all their life, too, because of some unexplored trauma. And that's what becomes a toxic relationship. It's always on the edge. So this isn't metaphor, it's actual neuroscience. The brain adapts. The brain is highly adaptable and it's it adapts to its own chemistry. Our nervous system now is used to running on cortisol showers. And if you have adrenaline running through your systems for all these years, the absence of it will feel like withdrawal for an

When Calm Feels Like Withdrawal

SPEAKER_00 8:24

addict. Literally. So we can really understand why this idea of the quiet mind or taking 30 minutes to sit and meditate or retreats, silent retreats, actually feel threatening. And you don't even know why. You have no idea why. All we know how to say is like, ooh, that sounds hard. Well, it is. It is hard for a nervous system that's been running on cortisol and adrenaline and urgency. It feels flat, it feels like intense restlessness. Am I speaking to you right now? It's really hard to find meaning and ordinary things. We think of vets coming back and going to just birthday parties or going to the grocery store. Lots of movies are made of those experiences. Like, how do you just live an ordinary life now after you've been to the edge? How have you had childhood abuse or living with an alcoholic or living in a house that feels like it's always on edge for different reasons, by the way? It doesn't always have to be about volatility. It might be about all the unspoken secrets in the home. That feels edgy. How do you just do normal after that? Whatever normal means. It feels like peace isn't safe. It feels like peace feels empty and scary, actually. I've sat with clients, people done incredible work. Deep, deep, deep, profound work, hard work, hard work. People who've just been determined to move towards healing, who maybe can start to speak to the fact that healing feels like nothingness. Life has gotten quieter. And instead of relief, it actually feels more threatening. It can creep in like dread. Like now what? Some of them think like, well, what's this about? Why is healing worth it? But actually, what really was happening, and there's a period of this, is that they were actually in withdrawal. They were still in detox. That can last a few years. Detox from their own cortisol spikes, their own adrenaline roller coasters. So I just want you to know that's part of it. That's a parenthesis that happens as you move from being on the edge of that cliff all the time into a life of healing. This is exactly a good sign. You're on the right track. But no one's told you. No one's warned you about this part. We tell people just be peaceful, just get sober without telling them that there's going to be an actual withdrawal from their own nervous system, not even from any substances, from their own behaviors, from their own ways of living their life. It's really a setup to feel. If you don't know about this middle stage, have you ever tried to grow your hair out? Woo! That middle stage. You're like, oh, what do I do? And you've just got to hold steady because it is a little formless. But it's good to know that it's going to happen. I've been talking about it a lot. I did a vlog that says on my YouTube channel, go check it out, that said, why for healing can feel so lonely. We're going to talk about it in depth today. That's why I always couldn't understand where this whole like say no to drugs things, especially for teenagers. You can't just have a teenager go to a party and just say no to drinking and say no to drugs. It's like social suicide. You've got to give them other language to mark boundaries. It's when addicts all of a sudden become sober. That's why there's so many free meetings that the that the person in recovery can go to as a substitute because when you take away the addiction, it creates a vacuum. And that vacuum must be filled. And the idea is that you fill it with things that are more constructive, that are helpful, that that give you self-esteem. But you've got we cannot ignore this weird tunnel, this weird vacuum of feeling flat, of feeling boring, of feeling off the edge, as I like to say, like you move from the edge of the cliff and you move more into the village. But you can't just plop into the hammock and be like, oh, I'm so peaceful. No, you've got to know that it takes a while to really shed, shed that internal experience of war, of conflict, of rush, of adrenaline. And that goes for addictions, it goes for trauma, goes for anything that's got our nervous system jacked. Okay? We need to have knowledge of this stage and words for it, to be honest. So let's go back. When

Humanity Addicted To Crisis

SPEAKER_00 13:27

we extend this from an individual to a civilization, literally, right? Humanity has run on this type of neurochemistry for centuries. When's the next shoe of war, of disaster, of something crashing, of nature hitting us hard? When's it gonna happen? We are civilizing, we are a civilization that's whose stories, whose heroes, whose economies are all erected, are all architected around conflict. All of us. No country is immune to this because we're all human. It's part of the human condition. So we are literally our collective central nervous system is calibrated towards crisis. So peace does not exactly feel like relief. In fact, it feels unfamiliar. It might even feel like what is that? The unknown, the threatening like when people say, Oh, I'm sober. Ooh, that's intense. It can feel like the awkward silence before the next attack happens. This is why peace movements are hard. This is why ceasefires collapse. And actually, this is why people vote for leaders who propose conflict over stability. Now that's changing. We see that it's changing, but this is why. It looks like they're woo. It looks like they're boring, it looks like they're unrealistic. The proposal of peace and stability. So if you don't know stability, it feels scary. It's almost like in relationships, if you don't really know commitment, it feels scary. It feels like a trap. It's like, yeah, that's the calm before the storm. Too good to be true. So the question is: why don't humans just choose peace? The question is, and what I'm proposing today is what does crossing over really require? And by the way, I happen to believe that we're on that bridge, not only as a humanity, as an earth, that we're slowly crossing over the bridge as we see things collapse into something that has to be better, more stable, more peaceful in order for us to continue as a species. Bam. Just throwing that in for right. And I'm actually here to talk about that bridge. How do we support people? How are we on the bridge? How are we saying, hey, there's a map, there's instructions, this is the way you go, this is what you might feel. You know, when a doctor tells that to you, you're like, oh, okay, that's what's gonna happen. It's not so scary, it's not so unknown, but we gotta know what that middle place is. Folks go into withdrawal, commitment, sobriety, peacefulness, all of that requires a detox. So let's talk about that violence, the violence of crossing. I keep thinking of Lord of the Rings in my head as I'm talking. For some reason, I keep getting images of Lord of the Ring because they were talking about what was happening and crossing over and how much when we're crossing over, it's almost like all of the evil will show up as we cross over. And that happens for a human, what I call the visitations. When we're up-leveling, we get a bunch of visitations from our past, fears, um, naysayers, people who don't believe in it, people who will try and pull you down as you as a human are trying to up level. Maybe you're trying to become sober. Maybe you don't want to trauma bond anymore. Maybe you don't want the toxic dynamics. Maybe you do want to leave the addictions behind. It's hard because there's going to be all these people on this side who will try to pull back. The visitations, I call it.

Gandhi And King As Warriors

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Anyway, let's talk about Gandhi. Let's talk about Gandhi because yeah, he was the goat. He wasn't just an icon. He wasn't just like, I don't know, a statue. He was a human being who chose in real time with real consequences to practice nonviolence in the face of an empire that was absolutely willing to use violence against him. That goes for Martin Luther King Jr., too. Yeah, violence was at stake. Real, real violence. He was beaten, he was imprisoned, he starved himself, he was on the edge of death multiple times. He watched people he loved to be harmed. He absorbed the violence rather than giving it back. Martin Luther King did the same thing. There's several people. I'm just gonna jump between those two for right now because they're very good examples of this. So again, not the absence of suffering, the acceptance of it, the knowing that this was a moment before the next up level, whether you're a one human or humanity or a group of people is gonna happen. You're gonna have massive visitation. So, can you see that this isn't passive if you're going through this? This is not passive. It is active, and it is the most aggressive act of inner discipline. I mean, think of actually detoxing from a substance. Your body writhes, it has to vomit, it has to purge. Yes, that happens spiritually too. That happens psychologically, you're convulsing as you release the edge and everything that created that edge. Hear me well, especially if you're going through this and you're wondering what's happened. This is part of it. You're on the right track, okay? I'm here, I'm in your corner. You're on the right track. So the same is true for the civil rights movement. Thank you. Thank you for paving the way. These were students who sat at lunch counters while people screamed at them, threw things at them, marchers that walked into police batons. We see it today with people actually dying for protesting. So this is not an avoidance of violence. Sadly, it's a step towards peace. It's a sustained practice and costly refusal to give in, to become the actual violence that was coming. So Gandhi and King weren't exactly peaceful people in the way that we think about that phrase. They were warriors, they were warriors of a different order. Their battlefield and possibly yours was inside. And if you've tried to become sober or move into a new identity, you know this inner battle that goes on. You know it. And it requires composure, and it requires composure under assault because there might be people around you, your ethnicity, your culture, your group, your family that might disagree. They might be against all of this because you're threatening the way that it's always been. You're threatening the relational dynamic you've always had. If you've ever tried to leave a group that uses substances or has addictive behaviors, you'll hear it. You'll hear it from them. That they feel abandoned, or why are you uh too good for them now? Or are you gonna start calling out things that there's been a there's been a shadow contract or a silent agreement to not talk about? All of that's gonna happen. And yeah, that feels violent. It feels scary. And it's like a rigorous training. You have to keep with your practices, which is why 12 step meetings are everywhere, all over the globe. They're free and they're at all times. Because you know that you need a place to go that's super consistent. So let's talk about that.

The Social Cost Of Changing

SPEAKER_00 21:56

Let's talk about the social costs. When you stop participating. Participating in the war. Any war. We just described it, personal or political. The people who are still in it will not celebrate you. They might even come for you. They'll tell you that you've changed, and that's not meant as a compliment. They might talk about you behind your back, like something's different. They'll tell you that you feel better than everyone else. They'll tell you that you've gotten soft certain groups, certain families. They might tell you you've been brainwashed. They'll test you and sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, to see if they can pull you back in. They want to pull you back in because your changing is a mirror, is a mirror to who they are, and maybe how stuck they feel, or maybe they don't want to change. And again, the all is in the small, and the small is in the all. Your willingness to leave the war implicitly questions their decision to stay in it, to stay in the bad marriage, to stay in gossip, to stay in addictions, to stay in rage, to stay on the surface, because you better believe it's too hard to go inside. So your seeking peace is a mirror that they haven't asked for. And so this can feel like social exile. And it's real, and it's one of the most underestimated costs of this crossing over experience. Sometimes people lose their friends, they lose their family. And that's painful because what you're seeing is that maybe those friends and family aren't choosing to opt for different, for better, for peaceful, for real, for honest, for transparent. They lose entire communities sometimes who want to share in that mutual conflict, whatever that is. Again, pick and choose. I know you're thinking of something right now in your case. And whether that be us as a nation or you going through your life, according to every spiritual tradition and self-help framework, you're supposed to do this with grace, with composure. And yet it's going to feel like grief. You will have rage. Remember in the last episode, I talked about leaving the cults. Doesn't matter, it's any group. It feels like an amputation. And like you're walking around with like that sensation, a phantom limb. You're gonna feel like you're standing there and you're gonna be asking, maybe many times, was this worth it? I'm sure Gandhi asked that when he was falling asleep. I'm sure Martin Luther King did. So many of us have asked, oh my gosh, this is hard. Is this worth it? So I'm saying it. Listen, the early stages of moving towards peace are aggressive, whiplashing, empty, writhing, convulsing, and maybe boring, and maybe all at once. If you're there right now, you're not falling short, you're right where you're meant to be. You, my friend, are crossing. So the hair growing out analogy is right on point. And let's stay with it for just a second. When you're growing out your hair from short to long, it's it there is a stage and it's unavoidable where it looks terrible. Doesn't matter who you are, it's not short enough to be intentional. It doesn't have a look, and it's not long enough to be beautiful or to give it a look. Do you know this part where you look in the mirror every day and you're like, ugh, is this worth it? And you have those impulses, those urges, like, I want to cut it, gotta sit through this, or you're always in a ponytail, or maybe for guys, you're always like brushing it back or trying to twist it. It feels restless for sure, but you can't skip it. And you always gotta know why you're doing it and where you're headed. I call that the North Star. And you do have options though. You can go through it or you can go back. And those are actual options. You can go back to doing what you've always done, what we've always done as a human. We know the cost of that. The crossing to peace is exactly that stage. You're not who you were, but you're not exactly who you're becoming either. The old identity is gone and you know it, you can feel it. You've outgrown so many things, but the new one is not solid yet. So you feel like a big blob. You're formless, you feel a little lost, purposeless, maybe. Because, see, the old identity knew what it wanted. Who are you here? You don't feel recognizable, not even to yourself. Okay, you know how I do my musings, how I make connections. I'll hear stuff and I'll start to connect it to the all is in the small, and the small is in the all all the time.

Forging A New Identity

SPEAKER_00 27:58

So there's a guy named Yushiba. He's the actual founder of Aikido. And we're gonna come back to him. He actually wrote something called the Art of Peace because I was, you know, I do a lot of research when I do my podcast, when I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, like the one I did on fasting and how I was connecting it to being just us, individuals, growing, healing. He describes this practice as forging, it's this continuous forging on the self. Isn't that just beautiful? You're forging. It's not a single one-time transformation, it's a constant fire molding. Ciao-to, fire horse year. In his in his book, The Art of Peace, he actually said, Those who are enlightened never stop forging. The way that I like to say it when I talk to empaths or sensitives is that we're always the student and we're the teacher, too. We're both. We're so willing to learn and we're willing to teach. We're always in that movement. We don't know it all. We're not always right. And in order to become more and more enlightened, we have to be in that constant state of forging. Now, if you know anything about forging, it's violent. It requires high heat. Last episode, I talked about alchemy. Same idea. See, see all the connections. I know you're making them too. All the connections. It requires pressure. It requires the willingness to be hammered into shape per se. A shape that you might not see just yet. Even in fasting, when we go through autophagy after maybe the 17th hour of fasting, certainly into the 24th hour, your body goes into a type of stress. And it's a type of stress that starts cleaning out anything that might be dangerous for your body. So, this idea of heat and pressure and stress, the good type, the type that is going to cleanse you. I like to call it the chosen one. Because we're going to be under pressure either way, y'all. I like to choose which type of pressure I want to be under. And of course, you guys already know me. I like the ones that lead me towards my best self, my favorite self. So this is what I would call the violence of peace. You get it? It's not the end state, though, it's the making of it. So let's choose a framework that's worked and worked and worked for so many people for all of the last century at least. We're finding new things we're doing, but this is a format that's worked, which is in addictions recovery, they they use the 12 steps. I thought of this too. I talk a lot about the 12 steps for so many reasons. I think it uses cognitive behavioral therapy, and they don't even know they're using it. They use universality, which is the group principle that no matter if you're rich, you're poor, whatever race you come from, that we have things that bring us together as humans. I mean, it turns me on. The 12 step recovery just turns me on because of that. We're all just human, and I certainly did the 12 steps. And it was all of that. It gave me affirmations, it gave me phrases, it gave me a group that helped walk over the bridge. It does universality. We're all just humans going through these hard experiences, and it gives you steps. Wow. And it makes you cleanse, it makes you ask for forgiveness, it makes you go through amends. Anyway, don't get me started. But from so many psycho-spiritual points of view, it's a very helpful format. Yes, yes, yes. I know there's a there's folks who don't agree with it, the idea of a higher power, but can can we just for this second go with it? Because I'm gonna I'm about to use it. The idea of the 12 steps is that good intentions or the urge to have a sober February are not enough. Willpower is not enough. Wanting your urge to be different. I need this to change, is not enough. You need a structure, you need a sequence, you need a community, a daily practice, a North Star. And the same is true when we're all walking over from war to peace. You feel me? You connecting. So drawing on 25 years of sitting with humans who are doing this deep work, transformative work, throw in developmental psychology, throw in trauma research, throw in attachment theory, throw in wisdom of yushiba and Sun Tzu. And every person who has made this crossing and has lived to describe it. Here are the 12 steps. And again, we're not moving from war to perfect peace. We're not doing that on this podcast. We're acknowledging and accepting the messy, and I would even say, and loving, loving the messy. It does move us from war, internal war, to actually having a life that feels good to live in. And it feels chosen. And what do we say? The freest human is the choosing human. Ready? Do you have your PhD on me journal? Do you have your pen? Because here goes. I'm always gonna have uh chapter stamps or whatever, time stamps for chapters, but here

Twelve Steps To Cross Over

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we go. Step one, we admit the addiction. We acknowledge that our civilization, that us as a humanity and us personally are addicted to the neurochemistry of conflict. You, me, yes. The cortisol showers, the adrenaline rushes, yes. Recognize that. That hypervigilance that's been mistaken for I'm alive. It's a psychological, a physiological, a spiritual reality. Okay? Yes. We cannot heal things if we don't name them. I always call that a naming meditation. Once we name it, we're like, oh, okay, now I know. No shame, no shame. On any addiction, by the way, they're coping mechanisms. Even this one, it's a way to cope with what's around us. Step two, we believe, we believe, I believe on the Heaven on Earth podcast that a different state is possible. Shout out portal to possibility. And that's not saying that peace is easy. We're not naive. We're not saying that peace is close. We're saying that peace exists, that humans have touched it, that you know your own moments of peace and who you're peaceful with. We know that communities have built it. We know that genuine moments of harmony, I want you to be remembering right now. Have memories, have happened. They are real, they are not naive. I want you to remember, even if it's for half an hour, these moments in your life, you can't, we can't walk towards something that we don't believe in. So we really, really want to anchor this step in. Step three, each of them are so powerful. I just love them. I can feel them in myself. Step three is the decision, which I decisions are abundance codes, by the way. Or they can be. We make a decision to begin the crossing. We're not rushing to arrive, we're just beginning, but we've decided. We cross from the familiar violence of what we know into the unfamiliar piece of what we don't know. And we know that the crossing will feel like a shedding, like a death. We've talked about death and rebirth. Go look up Scorpio season, my podcast on that, the Phoenix rising, look that one up. I've been talking about this for a few years now. And even though it feels like that, we do it anyway. Step four, we take inventory, we acknowledge what the war gave us. Right? We talked about it in the last episode, where the wound can be the gift. In my book, The Empath Leader, I talk about that a lot. How we can turn everything that we grew up with into chosen skills. We talk about it honestly, we talk about it without shame. It's post-traumatic growth. What did the conflict provide? Gabor Mate talks about that, but the addiction is helping us cope with pain. The pain of loneliness, it medicates, it numbs. So, what's the meaning? What's the identity? What's the community? What's the purpose? What's the superiority, the distraction from grief? If you've ever studied gangs, they join gangs to feel like they've got a family, like they've got a community. The deeper pain is the abandonment and the loneliness. We have a story about who the enemy is, who we are. We see it all over our politics today. So we have to honor what the war gave us in order to start the grieving of it. And the grief of leaving it, but we honor it. It's like, thank you for giving me this, but I'm choosing this now. A sovereign choice. Otherwise, trust and believe that you'll return to it without knowing why. Step five, we name the wound beneath the weapon. So we talked about in the last podcast that wounds become war. So every war has a wound underneath it. Every weapon was created as defense. So it's almost like a cry for help. And in therapy, sometimes I, when someone comes in as a new client, I notice what I call the cover story or the presenting issue versus the actual core issue, which we get to later. The anger isn't actually the root. We we dig, we find the root, we name it out loud. We name it to yourself, we name it to another trusted person, and that's the start. That's the start of working with it. Step six, we prepare for the withdrawal. And yeah, we talk about that in sobriety, but we don't talk about it as a humanity who wants to move into peace. When we stop feeding the addiction to conflict, y'all, even if it's internal conflict, the drama rousing, the trauma bonding, your nervous system will have a reaction. It will revolt. It's like when your body refuses, it has a baseline, it won't go below it in terms of weight loss or even weight gain. Because it says, hold up, something's happening. I've got to hold on tight, right? Which is, by the way, what many groups right now is on the political life are doing. They're like, hold on, we got to hold on tight. We got to hunker down because things are changing too quickly. This civilization is moving. All these connections are right here. So you might feel flat, you might feel purposeless, you might feel empty, you might feel bored. This is detoxic. It makes sense. You're letting go of what used to work and no longer works. The shakes are real, the cravings are real, the memories are real, the urges are real. Prepare for it. Get support like this. This is why I put out these podcasts. Don't go through withdrawal alone. And by the way, this is exactly what's happening on the global stage. Exactly. And some people are moving forward into a more healed world, and some people are moving backward and saying, hell no, we're doing, we're staying in the old ways. Just notice it. Step seven. We fill the vacuum, remember, with intention. Nature and human psychology, they don't like a vacuum. If we remove the war without replacing it with something, the war will return just in a different costume. You know how sometimes you rebound, you leave the abuser, the narcissist, whatever, the toxic relationship. And if you rebound too quickly, it looks like it's someone different, but actually, same old stuff. If we don't go through this stage first before starting anew, because you gotta be new in order to find a new type of engagement with others. So you must pre-pave. What's the new community? What's the new ritual? What's the new competitive arena? Where are you gonna put your fire? How are you gonna use your fire? What's the new story about you without the same old enemy? It's like going bowling with your 12 step group of friends instead of going to the bar with your old group of friends who are still getting. Trash till three in the morning every Friday. It can feel humble, it can feel unglamorous. Sure. But it is, if not the most important step, a super essential one. Step eight. We grieve what the war cost us. Now in 12-step programs, this is the making amends. We actually have to go back and face the things that we've done, how we've hurt people, how we've hurt ourselves. We're not just looking at what it costs the other side. We look at what it costs us. All those relationships that didn't survive our wounds. Maybe all of the versions of ourselves that never really lived because they were so busy surviving. Maybe we didn't protect people we loved, including our children, because we couldn't even protect ourselves. And remember, grief is an action. It's an actual way that our body metabodically, metabolically, moves out these pains, quite profound ones, these wounds. Grief metabolizes those wounds. Do it. Cry in the car. Cry in the bathroom. Grieve it out. Step nine. We make repair where repair is possible. Now this is like big boy, big girl pants. This is actual psychological adulthood. Emotional intelligence. Emotional regulation. Some doors are already closed. Some people may even be gone. So you can't repair. Some damage can't be undone. Yes. But if we can do repair, we do it. We attempt it. And it's not to absolve ourselves. We don't go exactly to be forgiven. Repair interrupts the inheritance. And we do do it to heal ourselves. Whether a group of people or someone can accept it or not, we do it for ourselves. We clean that out of ourselves. There have been nations that have asked for an apology from groups that they have harmed. Germany was one of them. The United States has not done that. Some of our parents have not done that with us as children. Some parents have. Repairing stops the wound from being passed forward as the next generation's starting point. Notice it in yourself. The wound was passed over, but not the apology, not the reconstruction. And that's just gonna give everyone else more work, including you. Do it for you. Start there. Some people might not accept it. You've done it. And that's courageous, profound, profound work. That's courageous. Step ten. We hold the North Star. When and there will be days that feel like nothing. When that quiet feeling feels like you've been erased, you feel lost, you feel forgotten, maybe. The old identity might be whispering in our ears, come back, come back, come back. You know that you've got the urge. Maybe some people will be doing that as well. Some people might be provoking you into it, into war. We need the North Star so that we can return to the why. For you, it might be your children's nervous system. Certainly it was for me, my own nervous system that I kept passing down, jacked up. For a community, it might be that you don't want them to start them off in war, in secrecy, in gossip, in superior, inferior paradigms, in sex addictions, alcohol addictions, substance addictions, to teach them how not to metabolize their pain through their own emotional system. For humanity, it might be the beautiful belief that we can have a sustainable planet and contribute to it, and that we lived amongst other humans who want to make that happen. Step 11 is that we practice it daily. When I'm working with clients, I call it the Chill Protocol. It's one of my cloudisms. Go find it on my YouTube channel. And the idea here is how do we have an amalgam of tools? And tools include community and steps and holistic practices that we use. And peace is not a destination. Okay. Peace is not a destination. It's an actual practice. It's a stopping in the middle of the impulse. It's like a keto. It's like sobriety. Like a marriage. We don't just get there and then we relax and we're done. No, it's constant, but it gets easier. It gets more fluid. It gets easier to do a sacred pause and not move into yelling at the guy in the car next to us. It gets easier to not be impatient with the person on the phone. You choose it every morning, you choose it every evening, you choose it at the staff meeting. You choose it in ways that you speak to someone who might have been incredibly disappointing to you. You choose it in the way you meet aggression or you meet your addiction again. That's when you choose it. Peace is a daily practice. Step 12, we carry the message. Now that we've begun the crossover, you have begun the crossover. Having begun the crossover ourselves, having survived the withdrawal, the boredom, the identity death, maybe the social exile. Hopefully not. Hopefully not. Hopefully the people who love you are in your corner and they can see how good things are for you. We become living proof that the crossing is survivable. And that's what I mean by lighthousing. We're not running out there, we are just living proof of it. Our beingness gives the message. We're not preaching, we're not performing, we're simply existing as evidence. And for that person who's still in the war, who's looking at us, you know, wondering, is that real? Our existence is the most powerful argument there is. And remember, these steps are not linear, they're not like one by one by one. You're going to be circling back. Sometimes we have to jump back. Sometimes we have to jump back to step one, and that's okay. It's just super yummy to at least have them there, anchoring us into this process. We cycle through them. So transformation always works that way. Even if you're on step nine, sometimes you're like, ooh, that visitation made me go all the way back to step two. Okay, but you've got the step. It's like a spiritual staircase, more than a ladder. And you don't do it alone. That's perhaps the most important thing. The 12-step community, the recovery community of 12-steps really understood that. That crossing requires swaddling, as I call it, and witness. We gotta see others who have done it. That requires community. Humans require connection and community. If we isolate, we can really drown. And as I like to say, you know, we shouldn't be left alone with our unsupervised mind. When we're at war, because a lot of times we're at war with ourselves. We need others who are ahead of us who say, hey, this journey is real. Keep going. Keep going.

Art Of Peace Versus War

SPEAKER_00 53:54

Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. Some of you might have heard about it 25,000 years ago. And what he articulated really easily is like, know yourself and your enemy. Be able to adapt to the changing terrain. Zeitgeist. Win without fighting if you can't. Generals, CEOs, politicians, they all quote him. There is strategic intelligence that's embedded in those texts. So as I was doing my own research, this is a little bit of what I looked for. I was actually looking for this. Every single principle in the art of war has a more advanced version in the art of peace. And that actually makes developmental sense. Right? Sun Tzu says, know your enemy. Yeshiva says, there is no enemy. Right? A little more unity consciousness. Sun Tzu says, use deception. If you need it, use it. Yesheba says, truth is the only sustainable strategy. And that, my loves, we are seeing in 2026. Truth is the fire sword that is piercing through everything. Exposure and the truth comes out. Even when we don't want to see it. Deception wins in the moment, but man does it lose in the long term. And it loses mostly for the person deceiving. Twelve-step programs say it. You're as sick as your secrets, because secrets will eat you. Sansu says win without fighting, if possible. Yushiba says that winning and losing are part of the war minds. That rigid duality. And yeshiba, like Rumi, promotes there is a place beyond those two options. There is a third way. And this is what I told my Wealth from Within group. And I've I think I've I've mentioned it in the podcast. In 2026, there is no lag time. Go look at my um, I think it's my podcast or my vlog. 2026, there is no more lag time. So the way that it's going to show up is that if you injure another, you will feel it directly inside of yourself. There is no more lag time where it catches up to you later. It's going to boomerang back so quickly. And Yeshiva said that to injure an opponent is to injure yourself. And we've been talking about it to injure your children, to injure your lovers, to injure your friends, to injure your family is a direct injury upon the self. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the art of peace. So this is a more sophisticated way of talking about aggression and of understanding what true, true, true, courageous strength actually is. Please listen to this. You're actually weaponizing your thoughts. If your thoughts are becoming weapons, even though you're silent, ask yourself: why do I feel in danger that I need to weaponize my thoughts? Why do I need to be critical, gossipy, talk in these ways, think in these ways about someone else? I must be feeling in danger. And that's what's to self-explore and self-investigate. And maybe that's the moment to redirect that energy instead of colliding, crashing up against it. Now, this doesn't mean that we accept mistreatment. No. Boundaries are part of the process of the art of peace. Actually, boundaries are a clear articulation of what you will and will not participate in. Even if you don't speak them out loud, you know them for yourself. You can agree, you could decide, I'm not doing this war, I'm not engaging in those dynamics. You can acknowledge that without having to participate in it. The small is in the all, and the all is in the small. How you meet aggression in your own kitchen is how a civilization meets aggression in Congress, in any of the corridors of power. The practice is identical, only the scale changes.

Choosing A North Star Future

SPEAKER_00 1:03:30

So why is it worth it? Let's talk about the North Star. Why is this worth it? Because it's so hard to sustain the crossing if we don't have a North Star. It is hard to go through our internal trials and tribulations, whether we're a human or a humanity, without knowing why we're doing it. Where are we headed? Imagine your life five years sober. Imagine your children's faces when you're happier and calmer in the home. Imagine waking up without shame, without feeling gooey and promising to yourself again that you're not up for that anymore. Imagine mothers, fathers, me saying I'm sorry, untying those wounds for our beautiful children by just saying, My bad. I'm sorry I can't change what I did, but I'm here to tell you that I see it, I recognize it. Imagine a government saying that to a whole group of people, to Native Americans, to African Americans, imagine what that would do. Imagine being present, being calm in a relationship. You don't know that person yet, but you can see yourself in that person. Because in the days that you're having with withdrawal, in the days you feel bored, in the days that you're having to experience the wounds or the pains because you're no longer numbing them or distracting from them or running from them? We need, you better believe we need to know why we're doing it. That's true for trying to reach a goal. You need to know why. You need to have something that pulls you harder than the addiction. So here's some options. What about the North Star, where you're living in your body with a calm central nervous system? And man, it takes a while as you're detoxing to finally get to a place where you're like, I'm at peace in my body. Doesn't mean you don't relapse, but Wow, that's a whole different experience. Like I can literally sit in my body. You're not numb. You're actually at rest. You're not rushing. You're not avoiding. You're not, you're not consuming whatever it is you're consuming. Getting so filled on that consumption that you can't stand beating in your own body. You're actually fully present with whomever you're with. Because you're not simultaneously running a whole bunch of other programs. You haven't been ruminating for the last three days. How about the relational North Star? Whether it's with a child, a friend, a partner, family members, where you're present because you're not so busy running all the strategies of a war, of hyper-vigilance, secrecy, how am I going to move? How about intimacy is not performed, outsourced, defended, negotiated? How about if you healed each other through intimacy? Beautiful. Healed each other, not make the wounds even worse. Maybe it's not a perfect relationship, but maybe, maybe it's a real one. Based in truth. Okay, what about the generational North Star? Your children's nervous system. If you interrupt what your children are going to inherit neurologically, psychologically, emotionally, physiologically, spiritually, your children don't have to start where you started. They start further ahead. They're more bold. They're more at ease. They're okay exploring because you're there, safely there for them. Their tolerance for peace is actually higher. They require it. Their transparency in relationships, that's baseline, that's standard relating for them. They get to make choices about what they will put up with and what they will not put up with. You can give them a better starting point. And if you haven't done already, you can do that today. You can start today. And generationally, this one's sort of cheeky. Um, but I really, really, really, really mean it. It's in all my books, it's in all the podcasts, it's a thread. It's so that we don't go extinct. That's a possibility. Can you believe it? In 2026, that's a possibility. What we're still doing to each other and what we're doing to our planet, to our animals, to our nature. Extinction is still on the table. Mind-blowing. A planet with clean water, with resources, that's actually the civilizational North Star. This is what we're choosing between what we will perpetuate. So Yusheba said in the Art of Peace that we are here for no other purpose than to realize our own inner divinity and to manifest that outward into lighthousing. Our inner enlightenment creates, creates, and perpetuates outer enlightenment. And for those of you who think, like, well, no, that's not possible for me. All enlightenment means is that we feel light. That we feel light because we've shed layers of trauma, of secrets, of lying, of toxic behaviors. We are light in the world. We have fasted through all of those wounds. We are enlightened. We can touch the earth and the sky. As we find that peace inside of us, trust and believe that it translates, it conveys. And so does war. Our inner war conveys. So in these last episodes, we talked about the egg being the sovereign, the decider. We trace that anthropologically, historically. We saw how that got terribly, terribly, terribly inverted, how it got inverted with children in episode two. This vengeance cycles that are dropped as wounds into our children and that just perpetuate more war, violence, pain, all the isms. We talked about the Olympic alternative so that we can still choose. And what's that mean? Where does it lead us? We're not saying, hey, let's go out there and change the world. We're actually saying, or I'm actually saying, start with you. Remember that whole adage, peace begins with me. Hell, yes, hell to the yes. Peace begins with you. Everything begins with you. If you're here listening, if you've gone through this whole podcast, it begins with you. You want love, self-love. You want peace out there, peace inside of you. You know, this whole thing, like, oh, I want someone who gives me peace. No, it begins with you. You carry the peace. You carry the love. You carry the practices. You carry the emotional regulation. Don't look for it outside of you. Start with you. Make the crossing. Do it with the community, with a North Star that can carry you through your withdrawals, with the steps, any steps. I'm just giving you some today. The small is in the all, and the all is in the small. Start at the kitchen table. Start with your nervous system. Your children's baseline is the legacy that you can leave with them. Grieve rather than weaponize. Grieve. Go inside rather than attacking outside. Your willingness to do all of this really, really, really makes an impact. I see myself how it's changed the way that I've managed my family life, which started with a lot of trauma. And I can see, I'm I can see that this place of middle chapterness, I can start seeing the powerful impact and effect it has had.

Start With You And Share

SPEAKER_00 1:14:04

Thank you for being with me on this podcast. If this episode or these episodes have stirred something inside of you, a recognition, an aha moment, even if it's just tickled your brain, even if you had never even considered these themes, share. Talk about it with someone, put it in the comments, subscribe, subscribe to the channel, subscribe to the podcast. Because really, for 2026, I'm just going to be on this podcast so that we can have each other in real time. Remember, keeping our feet on the ground, touching the earth like the Buddha is, and what Casey Kasim says, but reaching, reaching for the stars. I'll be here. I'll see you in the next Heaven on Earth episode A Portal to Possibility.