E06“The Groundhog, the Sunset, and Clarity: How to Find Peace in a World Full of Chaos”

In this episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, Chris Jones tells a raw, personal story about a moment that transformed how he sees identity, distraction, and inner peace. Through a vivid anecdote—Chris explores personas, social constructs, and why we habitually avoid being alone with ourselves. He explains how distractions and overdeveloped personas keep us from discovering our true self, facing mortality, and making meaningful choices. Expect insights on self-discovery, mindfulness, emotional courage, reclaiming your center, and practical steps to reduce distractions and live more intentionally. Perfect for listeners interested in spiritual growth, personal transformation, mental clarity, and becoming more authentic in relationships and life purpose.

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Episode 6 of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome, I'm Chris Jones. This is where believers and skeptics alike are invited to embark on a journey of faith, philosophy, and life from a different perspective. Whether we are joined by an insightful guest, or we just jump into the deep end, this exploration promises to challenge us all. Are we getting it right? This is Spiritual Hot Sauce.

UNKNOWN: 0:31

Spiritual Hot Sauce

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

We've been talking about the social construct versus humanity, our identities, our true selves, our heart, our center, our essence, how we choose and how we navigate our compass versus our personas and how we unknowingly become NPCs. I want to continue diving into this subject more. There's obviously a lot here. But today I want to talk about personas. Why do we have such an overdeveloped persona or personas and we struggle with knowing who we are? I recently read about a study that was done. They observed a beach. They just watched as people would come in to sit down and have a day at the beach, and they monitored to see how long it would take before they picked up their cell phone. The average was 10 to 15 minutes. That means that somebody that's unplugging from society is getting out from underneath of their daily responsibilities, the grind, and just having a day to rest, that it's 10 to 15 minutes after being in that environment before they acclimate and they realize they're alone with themselves, so they pick up their cell phone. When I read this, it reminded me of something that I experienced when I was young, younger. I was a young teen and I was trying to grow a mustache. And all I had was like just peach fuzz, starting to get kind of dark hairs on my upper lip. And it was kind of... A rite of passage of becoming a man. And I would keep an eye on it daily, and I would look, and I would watch, and I would watch, and it just never changed. It always just looked the same. And I don't remember when it happened, but I remember looking in the mirror and then seeing a mustache. Now, it wasn't a real full mustache, but it was a mustache. And I remember being shocked about how I looked. For the first time ever, I was seeing the man in the mirror rather than the boy. And it scared me. It frightened me. I couldn't look myself in the eyes in the mirror. I kept looking away. It was a bizarre thing. The person in the mirror, that man in the mirror, was not who I was inside. I was still a boy, but I was seeing the man, and it was frightening. It would be a long time before I could really really look myself in the eyes in the mirror and feel comfortable. I think that's what's going on when we're picking up our cell phones at the beach because we're at that point where we're alone with ourselves and it's like looking at the mirror and we don't know who that is we're seeing. I had this I don't know what you call it, this thing that happened to me. And everything I'm about to share with you is totally true. I'm not exaggerating or taking creative license, but I had this moment in my life that would become extremely impactful over time. When it happened, it just seemed surreal. It was just a bizarre thing, which is why I think I participated. But in 2010, I was going through a really bad divorce. And during the divorce, she was living in the house. And I went and rented a house out on the outskirts of town there, kind of by myself on this little road. There was several houses, but in the backyard, just backed up the fields. So it was kind of peaceful, which is weird that I would pick such a place that is peaceful because I was working about 70 plus hours a week. It was kind of the pinnacle of my career. And when I wasn't really busy, I was filling my my life with distractions. And it was either online on my computers before smartphones. We still had flip phones back then, but I was just absorbed online and would be in social media and chat groups about my hobby. And I was just totally submersed in my hobby, like hyper immersed in it, where it's almost like a quest to So if I wasn't doing that, I was watching TV. I was always distracted in my life, much like most of us live our life now. But it was in the summer, and it's at the end of the day. The sun was still up, and I came home from the grocery store. And I looked in the backyard. Now, in the backyard that butted up to these fields, there was an outbuilding. This outbuilding was relatively new, a few years old probably. There was still a stack of material kind of staggered haphazardly in a stack or a pile about two feet tall. I noticed that on this stack, there was what looked like to be a really large stuffed animal. It was just standing up on this stack of material, at least two feet tall. So I parked the vehicle and I left the groceries there and I just kind of carefully and cautiously started walking towards this, what I believe to be a stuffed animal. And as I'm walking directly towards its back, just in case, because it feels off to me, I start moving to its left, putting myself between what I believe to be a stuffed animal or something like that in the house, but keeping a healthy distance. I'm about 30, 35 foot away from it. And when I come around to the side, I realize it's a groundhog. It's a really large groundhog and it's standing straight up and it's just staring at me. off out into the middle of nowhere. Which is really bizarre. So I don't know what's going on with this animal, why it's all tranced out like that. And I start moving towards it, but very slowly. And I get about, I don't know, 20 foot from it. Again, I'm not trying to get real close to it. I'm just trying to get close enough to see what's going on with it. Is this thing sick? What's going on? But as I get about 20 foot from it, it turns and looks at me. And not with its body. It's demeaning. His demeanor doesn't change at all. His body position don't change. It just turns and looks at me. It's just making me aware that it sees me, and it's just seeing what I'm doing. But its demeanor doesn't change. It doesn't seem aggressive. It doesn't seem protective. It just is acknowledging me. And it looks at me for several seconds. We just look at each other. And after it looks at me, it turns back and looks at whatever it's looking at. Back to its trance. Well, this gets my interest piqued and I want to find out what's going on. Curiosity is getting to me. So I get a little closer, maybe about 15 foot from it. And now I'm looking in the direction it is trying to see what it's looking at. But I can't hardly see because the sun is setting right where it's looking. So I put my hand up. I'm trying to block the sun out of my vision and see what's up ahead. And I'm looking at the groundhog that I'm looking for. and I can't figure out what it's looking at. And then all of a sudden it hits me. This groundhog is watching the sunset. Well, this is nuts. This is just something like what seems like normal life, like you're just going on every day, but then something that happens that's just out of the norm that's extraordinary right in the middle of your path. It's like you're being flagged. And that's kind of what this was. And I was like, well, how often do you get a chance to watch a sunset with a groundhog? Well, you don't. So I took advantage of it. So I moved a little closer, maybe 15 foot to 10 foot, somewhere in that range. It's about as close as I was comfortable getting. And then I just watched the sunset with a groundhog. And I was there for a while. So I can't imagine what that would look like for anybody that was around saying, what's going on with that weird neighbor out there? He's just watching the sunset, standing out there in the backyard with this groundhog. They're just both watching the sunset. But that is what was happening. But something, strange happened when I was watching the sunset. Because as you watch the sunset, it's a process. It's not an event. And as I'm watching it, there's a cadence or like a metronome with the sunset. And as there's something that was in me, in my center, my cardia, my heart, that I realized that that I was not in tune with this whatsoever, that I had all this anxiety and all this worry and all this stress going on in me, but the sunset was just kind of setting the tempo. This is going to sound weird, but it felt like the universe was That was the metronome. That was the cadence. And what I was experiencing internally was way out of sync with that. But as I watched the sunset, there was something in me that my metronome and my cadence just started to pair with it. heart, my center that was in there, it suddenly felt plastic and synthetic. But what I was experiencing in that moment with the groundhog felt extraordinarily real. And it felt like peace. It... I think it's kind of one of those situations where when you're underwater and you can't breathe, but maybe you're not aware that you're not breathing and what you think you're doing is breathing. And when you come up out of the water and you get your lungs full of oxygen, you know, and it becomes a moment. And that's kind of what it was for me. And I just watched the sunset with this groundhog until it almost eclipsed. And then I left and I went and got my groceries and put them in the house. But then I went and watched out the back window, this groundhog. And it stayed there till the end. And then it just got down and it left and it went home. It was so weird and so bizarre, but it would become almost metaphorical for anything in my life that meant seeing myself. And I don't mean to make it sound like a religious experience. It was not religious. It was spiritual. But it wasn't spiritual like when I talk about the universe and the time. I don't see it as like for me. And this is just for me. I don't see it like from the Buddhist perspective that it's this consciousness. And I do believe I am in the universe. I think we go through life feeling like we're an external being inside the universe kind of experiencing. And in the moment there, I realized. No, I am part of the universe. I am part of this creation. And there is a metronome. There is a cadence to it. And that cadence is a piece and it's a natural flow. I don't see the universe as alive and like conscious, but what I see it as is God's creation. But whether you see it as created or expanding, there is still this cadence and we are still a part of it. And in that moment, I felt that. And I felt that in that was peace and that everything that I'd filled my life with was a distraction, a distraction to keep from having to look at myself, not everything. And I'm not saying that the social construct and these personas we build are bad. That's not the message at all. But what I'm saying is we use those to keep from figuring out who we truly are in the center of our compass, our hearts, our essence, the hand on our rudder, how we choose. and who we are. We fill our lives with these distractions and these personas to keep from having to look at ourselves in the mirror. Like me, when I was young and I had to look at myself from the perspective, from the internal looking at the external, how the world saw me, I didn't know that person. And it made me very uncomfortable. It scared me because I only knew how I felt on the inside. And I was very, I was still just a boy, but I was seeing the man. It's very similar, except it's the other way around. We are seeing from the external towards the internal of ourselves into our cardia. But we fill our lives with distractions, so we never have to be alone with ourselves and look at ourselves because, like me when I was younger, that person scares us because that person is the one that experiences our mortality. It is that sense of urgency that pushes us on to do more and be more with our life. That as we fill our lives with distractions that have so much more or less meaning and doesn't help propel us in the right direction, we choose less and we make it okay to just stay put and do nothing and pick up our phones because we don't want to deal with our mortality. We don't want to make the hard decisions. We don't want to make those choices. But if we don't make those choices, life will make them for you. I mean, if you spend your whole life filling your life with distractions like there will never come a time where you have to die, then you'll die and feel like that you never lived life and you never served your purpose. For me, that moment with the groundhog that would become metaphorical for things in my life where I unplug and I focus on myself in the mirror. And when I say that, I'm talking about from the external to the internal and figured out who I was and what I needed to develop in myself and things I needed to change in me so I could be a better person. And when I did that, I found that I started serving humanity more. more if we don't learn how to define ourselves then our distractions typically define us through your own selfishness seeing the world as only as far as you can reach my wants above other people's needs once we learn who we are we typically define ourselves through our choices and make better decisions spend time in front of the mirror Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments and or concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.