Why You Feel Anxious All the Time — And What It Means for Your Awakening

What if your anxiety isn’t something to fix—but something trying to wake you up? 

In this raw and deeply honest episode, Joe Mittiga unpacks the real reason you feel anxious, overwhelmed, and stuck in your own head—and why the answers you’ve been chasing aren’t where you think they are. Instead of masking the noise, Joe reveals how anxiety is actually a powerful signal pointing to deeper emotional wounds and an invitation to heal from within. Through personal stories, real-life breakthroughs, and practical tools, you’ll learn how to stop fighting your thoughts, understand the root of your inner chaos, and begin a true awakening process that leads to peace, clarity, and self-connection. If you’ve been feeling like something is off, like you’re constantly battling your mind, or like there’s more to life than this—this episode will hit you right where you are and show you a new way forward. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

If you felt lonely, isolated, disconnected, with an empty feeling inside and just yearning for more, knowing something is missing, then this podcast is for you. So here's your host, Joe Mittigau.

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Hello and welcome to We. My name is Joe Mittigga, and I'm the host of the We Podcast. Well, it's great to be with you here tonight. I've got an amazing topic that I think affects a lot more people than we really know, and it's a topic around anxiety. And we're going to talk about it in detail today. And this is going to be one of those conversations where at the end I'm going to share my story. And unfortunately, some of the stuff I share here is a little uncomfortable, I have to tell you. It's a little embarrassing at this point, as I remember how crazy I used to be. But like I've said in the beginning, I'm going to be as open and as honest as I possibly can. And I'm going to share with you how the anxiety in my life used to just absolutely dominate me. It did. Now that's been a while, and I've done the work, and I'm happy to see I'm on the other side of most of it. Though I hope that the message I share here today relates. And I hope you say to yourself, gosh, if this guy can make it through some of the darkest things that that he's sharing on this podcast, so can I. And I really just want to be open with you. I want to be honest with you. I want to be intimate with you. And I want you to do the same with yourself. So, first off, I want you to hear from the beginning that if you feel anxious, if you feel anxiety, if you feel like, you know, your life is a little crazy and you can't slow the voices, please know you're okay. I mean, you are. I know it's super uncomfortable, but there's nothing wrong with you. And I need to start there. So let's dissect it. Let's kind of get into it. So I'm going to ask you the question: have you felt anxious lately? Or are you the person that just can't seem to quiet your mind? Are you that person that no matter how good things are, sometimes the craziness in your head just kind of takes over and the voices go rampant and everything kind of gets louder, and you know, you just can't calm yourself? If that's where you are today, or sometimes, again, I'm going to say to you, I get it, I do. And please understand there's nothing wrong with you, and you're certainly not an isolated case. The statistics of the percentage of people that truly experience anxiety on a daily basis is pretty extreme, quite honestly. And the challenge is, though, of course, is that society's solution for anxiety is not really where the source of the anxiety comes from. And that's what we're going to talk about today. That's the awakening part of this particular episode. So the name of this episode is why you feel anxious all the time and what its meaning is for your awakening process. And for some of you, you don't feel anxious all the time, and that's good. For others, you do. And wherever you are, in the all or the nothing, or for most of us, somewhere in between this episode's for you, because we're going to talk about it. We're going to talk about the source. And what I want people to understand is the importance of kind of healing this in yourself so you can help others, because the extreme places of anxiety is where people build those voices from I'm not good enough, something's wrong with me, the world's out to get me, I can't do anything right. Nobody likes me to, I hate myself to I want to kill myself. And the real challenge in today's world, the I want to kill myself voice. There are street drugs today that cost five dollars, and two or three of these drugs can kill somebody in a moment. So on the serious side of anxiety, there's a solution. Now I'm here to tell you the answer, even though you hear the voices in your head, the answer is not in your head. It's not. The answers are in the emotional side of yourself, the darker parts of yourself. That I'm going to talk about how we give a voice to the deeper sides of self. And I always like to start off with describing the concept of the we and why I call each individual human in a process, in the awakening process of moving from the mindset of a me to the consciousness of a we and what that means and how that relates into this topic. So the we, every human being, regardless of man or woman, black or white, a religious person, a spiritual person, a Catholic person, or agnostic, it doesn't really matter the who or the where or the how. It just matters if you're human and you're breathing and you have a consciousness. Honestly, whether you understand it or not, each of us are created from a we position, a multidimensional position. And the concept of we're created in God's image, what does that mean? It's not the physical us, it's not the physical body us, it's the spiritual essence of ourselves. And that's really the best way to kind of define the we in each human is the human side of self, the actual person. I'm a white guy from Atlanta, so the Joe talking, the divine part of me, the part of Joe that is created in God's image, the divinity in me, and then the inner me, the inner child, the wounds, the hurts, the emotions of the past, and the glories of our today and everything in between. So the we is made up of humanity, divinity, and inner self. And why is that important? Is because from our human perspective, if you really ask yourself the question, what is anxiety? Like what is it? What not what causes it? We'll get to it. But what is anxiety? How do you know when you're anxious? And from an energetic position, anxiety or being anxious is kind of a vibration of can't slow down, things are moving fast, kind of scary, kind of out of control. The voices start amping up in your head. There's this constant state of angst, a constant state of something's wrong, a constant state of non-serenity, the opposite of serenity. And so very often, though, the technique of healing ourselves by changing our mind, the whole positive affirmation concept, the reason it doesn't work for most is because the source of the voices, even though you're hearing them in your head, the source of the voice is not in your head. And that's why I am not a proponent of the new thought approach to healing, because the healing of the voice by changing the voice in your head doesn't heal the reason you had the voice in the first place. And let me say that again. Understand one thing that any voice that isn't a glassful, self-loving, calm, serene voice is not a voice of your divinity. It's not a voice of your humanity, it's a voice of your angst, it's a voice of your pain. And that's where we're going to talk about how we heal it and why it's there, quite honestly, so that there's a solution so we can do the it differently. The awakening part of this process and what it means for your awakening, actually identifying the angst isn't the awakening process. That might be an awareness process for you. You might not know that if you can't calm down and you're nervous all the time and you're afraid of tomorrow and you always are predicting a doom for tomorrow versus and a gloom for today. All of those concepts are kind of categorized in the anxious position or the angst position. If you're a parent, there's a lot of angst associated with the raising of kids, the concern that something's going to happen or something's wrong with them, or someone's going to get them, those voices. And so, from a position of awareness, you may or might may not even know you have the voices. So if you're in that place, I'm sorry to be the one to break the news to you, but 98% of humanity has glass empty voices, depending on how loud, how frequent, how intense is depending on the real challenge from the anxiety position. But most of us have some type of glass empty voice. I always like to say, quite honestly, until you're walking on water, you probably have something to learn and a place to grow. The red flag to growth, a lot of times is in the voice that's causing you angst. And those voices that cause angst, the repetitiveness of the voice, not a random, gosh, I don't like things, but it's the repetitive over and over and over, consciously or unconsciously, that eventually wears us out and eventually amps up our nervous system in such a way to where anxiety and a state of I can't calm down becomes people's normal. The challenge, of course, we live in a society that has an instant gratification delusion as solution. So I don't know the names of the drugs, but I know there are many drugs that are given to people to slow down their brain. Now, I'm not here to tell you to stop taking your drugs. I'm not a doctor in any way, shape, or form. But I want you to step back for a second and say, if you have to take a drug to calm your brain, how about if we find the solution of why your brain is not calm in the first place? And that's what this episode is truly about the solution to doing the it differently, the awakening process. And spiritual awakening, what is it? Spiritual awakening is the idea, the understanding that you start bringing light to darker parts, you start doing the it differently. And the it in this case is the solving of the voices. We start awakening to a new way of doing things. And that's what spiritual awakening is. And then living from that position, right? That's how we eventually change life, change our life. Well, the anxious part, when you use your anxiety as a red flag, not an end point. And you use your anxiety or the disconnect or the discomfort or the uncomfortable feeling you have a lot, if you use it as a red flag and seek and find a different solution when you see and feel the red flag, that's what awakening is. That's the awakening part of what we're going to talk about today. So typically, what happens, and most people, they hear the voice or they feel the uncomfortable feeling. And instead of looking inside themselves, most people's brains are saying, Well, if I just had a new house, I would feel better. Or, you know, that job of mine is the source of all my problems. Or my partner, my wife, or my husband, or my mom, or my dad, or my brother, or my kids, if they were just different, then I would be okay. There's always a new something outside of you that if it was different, you would be okay. That's the old style of solution. It's called codependence, but that's the old style of solution. And that style never addresses the source of the angst. And the source of the angst is what's causing the anxiety, which is causing the uncomfortable feelings, which is causing the repetitive glass empty voices. There's something in you, then the solution is in you, not out of you. Another way a lot of people they approach their own internal angst is the thought of they have to get rid of something or change something or find something different or find someone new. Some people will say, I need to get rid of my wife. She's the all the source of my problems. I need to get rid of my debt. If I was debt-free, then I would feel better. I need to change the old, get rid of someone or get rid of something. And both of those concepts are outside delusions. As if I change my outside world, my inside world will feel better. Well, folks, that isn't how it works. Outside answers are not, you're in, do not cause inside solutions. And that's when you get that, when you really understand that. When I heard for the first time, when I'm being critical of somebody else, there's one finger pointing out and three fingers pointing back. When I heard that and I said, You mean to tell me? And I was talking my therapist, her name was Marian years ago. I said, You mean to tell me every critical voice I have that I'm judging someone else outside, there's a hurt in me associated with that? She said, Yes, Joe, that's exactly what I'm telling you. I remember my reply. It was no reply. I just acted like I didn't hear it, to be completely honest with you, because when I first got into that concept, now we're talking 25 years, probably 30, more than 30 years ago, actually, because it was pre-sobriety, I just couldn't, that was just way too much information for me. I wasn't awake enough to really digest it. It wasn't for another 10 years that when my next therapist named Nancy brought that same concept up to me, that's when I started to really understand that if I'm critical of my outside world, there's an inside angst that's being acted out. But if I stay in the outside world with my awareness and my actions and my action steps, I'm abandoning the inside angst. And that's where I want to help give you some techniques so that you can hear the voices and understand that the voices are a red flag. The solution isn't in the voice, the solution is in the reason you have the voice in the first place, which moves us into the inner sense of self. So if you go back to the we, you have a human self. Well, your human self is made up of male-female. The male side of your human self is your mind and your body, the female side of your human self is your spiritual and emotional. Well, from the human self position, the mind position, that's in your humanity spot of the we. When your mind has all of these glass-empty, negative, hurtful, hateful, judging, shaming, guilting voices in it, the reason your mind is like that is not because there's something wrong with you, and not because there's something wrong with your head or your mind, it's because there's an emotional hurt in you that is the source. Years ago, I can tell you, in my therapeutic days of discovery, I never was trying to change the voices in my head. I was always seeking solution or answer to why I had the voice. And when I found out that each glass empty voice or each guilt-based voice or each shame-based voice I had in my head was sourced. The reason it's there is a hurt little kid. I call the inner self a little child, an inner child, that made more sense. So I could seek solution. Now, where anxiety ends up kind of paralyzing us isn't the random little fear, isn't the random, oh, my 16-year-old's driving for the first time, so I'm concerned. Or I didn't quite make my quota this week, so I'm a little concerned for my job. Or I told the fib to my wife, and I'm concerned she's gonna get married, she's gonna get mad. That is not anxiety. Anxiety happens when your voices, your perspectives, your literal description of life is an ongoing repetitive voice and feeling that is uncomfortable, that is angst-billed, that is vibrationally unloving. That's what anxiety is, that's what being anxious is. Is there anything wrong with you if you're anxious? No, nothing wrong with you. And I hope you can hear me. I'm gonna tell you some stories here in a little bit. And I'm I wish you could see my face right now. I can't believe I'm gonna tell you the stories I'm gonna tell you. I literally, if you could see my face, it's probably red. And I haven't been like this in a while, but I'm gonna do it. Why? Because if I can heal from where those voices used to take me, anybody can heal. And let me caveat: if you're that person right now and your voices have buried you, and your angst and your fear has paralyzed you, and you literally feel so dark and so empty, and have so many hurt voices, get help, get help, professional help. And if your professional person, your professional guide, guidance person puts you on some type of medicine to support from me, a person who does not take medicine, but know from me, if your professional is prescribing medicine, take it. Absolutely without question, take it. And in addition to taking your medicine, let's heal wide. Let's don't stop at taking the medicine. Let's take the medicine if you have to. And I'm talking to the I'm talking to the minority here, quite honestly. I'm talking to the most vulnerable, because most of you aren't on medicine for anxiety. But if you are, it's okay. I wish I could have been. I didn't even know about medicines back then. They probably didn't have the medicines 35 years ago when I'm going to describe my voices that they have now. So please know I'm not anti-anything, I'm pro-everything. As long as your spiritual position is let's use my symptom as a symptom, not, and the solution isn't fixing the symptom. I'm not here to help you fix a symptom. I'm here to help you heal the wound that is causing the symptom. And as we go deeper, that's where you have to have the spiritual awareness and spiritual growth. The growing part of spirituality is learning how to solve things differently. The old sense of self is I have an angst in my head, let's fix it in my outside world and wonder why my outside world never feels like it's ever fixed. Well, because the answer isn't in your outside world. But that was the old method. Then the new thought movement came in and said, Well, you know what? We don't have to change the outside world. We're just gonna change the thoughts, positive affirmations, and focus in. And I'll tell you, if that's working for you, keep doing it. If you're 20 minutes into a conversation like this, It probably is not. And if you're at a place and you're getting ready, I've got another podcast that I really want you to listen to. It's called Spiritual Awakening Feels Lonely. Eagles Fly Alone. If you're this far into this, make sure you check out that episode also, because it talks about the real awakening process and how lonely it can be because it's so different than anything you've done before. So the spiritual awareness says time to solve things differently today than I did in the past. Spiritual growth, the growing part of your spiritual path, is learning the techniques that allow you to change the it, change how you do your solving position. Old way of doing fix the outside world and nothing really gets fixed. It's like chasing the tail. When you become aware that your outside world is the mirror, not the source, your head and your voices are not the source. They're the reflection, they're the voice, they're the symptom. As you realize your voices in your head aren't the end result, they're the door that opens you to the end result. And you understand that's where awareness comes in, spiritual awareness. And then learning how to do it different is where we spiritually grow, literally. The technique that I used when I got to when I started realizing all the voices is I would write them down, literally. And it doesn't matter what the voice is, any glass empty voice that repeats itself over and over and over and over in your head, it needs to be written down. And that isn't dominant, non-dominant handwriting. That's not inner child discovery work. That is wound-based glass empty voices. And when you write a voice down on a piece of paper, it cuts the power of the voice in half. I was literally just talking to a woman today that she's been on an awakened path for the past couple of years. And she was in church the other day, and her pastor was talking about a technique that they use. And she says to me, She says, I'm starting to understand that the fears I have in my head aren't really in my head. The voice is in my head, but the fear is in my belly, the fear is in my heart. And she says, So what do I do, Joe? I said, Well, write down the voice. Write down what you're hearing in your head. Write a list. And that list is non-judgmental. You write it all down. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, small or large, and give yourself some time. And no, you might have to write a couple. The first time I did my voices, I'll never forget. You know what my first voice was? Because my counselor Nancy taught me this. She says, Joe, write your voices down. You know what my first voice was? I don't have any voices. Literally, that was my first voice. I filled 12 legal sized pieces of paper, 12, 18-inch long paper. And that was just the first time I did it. Why? Because I had so many voices. Why did I have so many voices? Because I had a hurt little kid inside. So the way we change, the way we approach our anxiety now, the way we're waking up in today's world and doing the it differently. We're doing the discovery process differently. Is when you hear a voice that's a glass empty, a hurt-based, shame-based, guilt-based voice, instead of letting it roll around in your head and double and triple and quad itself, start writing them down. Have a piece of paper, have a pad and pencil, have it close to you at all times, so that when you hear the voice, instead of acting as if the voice isn't there, instead of doing the old solutions, well, I've got this voice, let me calm it by changing my outside world. No, let's calm it by healing the reason it's there. But the way you calm it long enough to be able to get to the reason it's there is you write it down. And then after you write it down, eventually you need to tell somebody. Truly been doing this work for 25 years. You need to have a group that can support you because when you write it down, not sharing it still doesn't bring light to the voices. Now, does that solve anything? No, but it starts the multidimensional process. And what does that mean? When you're writing down your voices, the voices that are being written down on a piece of paper are your glass empty voices. The part doing the writing is the glass full you. So there's a glass full you writing down the voices of the glass empty you. So literally in that exercise, you're identifying two aspects of yourself, two aspects of the multidimensionalness of yourself. And the reason it's so important to literally share with somebody else is because as you're sharing the voices with somebody else, there's a humility that kicks in that literally allows your spiritual sense of self to kick in, to come in, to come forward. We walk out of the paralyzing, toxic shame and guilt of there's something wrong with me, and my voices are so hurting, and I'm a bad person. When you're able to share the voices with somebody else, there's a humility that starts kicking in. And quite honestly, this is where from your human possession, right? This is where literally your humanity sometimes has to draw on the strength of your divinity to be able to have the courage to share your deepest, darkest voices with another person. Because typically those voices, they're embarrassing, quite honestly, because none of it makes sense. They're all toxic, it's just not comfortable to share, and that's okay. It's not supposed to be comfortable. If it was comfortable, everybody would do it. You've made it 29 minutes into my podcast. And I hope you're visiting, by the way, wepodcast.global and signing up and leave me messages. I really want to get to know people. But keep visiting my website, wepodcast.global, and sign up for our email list because we're going to be doing live events where people can ask me questions and I'm gonna be guiding people one on a group, doing these things in group. So, you know, I'll be part of that support for you. But it's not supposed to be easy. You've made it 30 minutes into this conversation right here. Please understand if you can make it 30 minutes into one of my podcasts, you are a true spiritual warrior. That's not fiction, that's fact. Why? Because the truth is, most of what I share on these podcasts is not about the airy fairy, everything's freaking wonderful position of spiritual growth. Why? Because a lot of spiritual growth is not freaking easy. It's not, and it's not supposed to be easy. That's why it's called growth. It's not called a just poofo, it's called growth, the growing process. A lot of times you have to go through the emotional side of it, you have to go through the scary parts of it, you have to go through the awakening process. What the hell? If we were already everything was great and wonderful and loving and full and one with God, you'd be that person walking on water, you'd already transcend. Until that happens, the growth part of the process is not easy. That's why, truly, I hope you find different episodes on my in my show, like spiritual awakening feels lonely. Now, who the hell ever talks about that? Anyone that I see out there in the world just tells me they never did it, they're not doing it now. When all you talk about in spiritual awareness is that, oh, there's one with God and everything's a freaking cloud. That just tells me they haven't done it. Period. Am I making those people wrong? No, I'm not. But we are the generation of change, we're doing the it differently. Why? Because humanity's waking up, whether we want it to or not. Humanity as a consciousness is evolving into something different. That's why so many people are waking up. But the waking up process to the spiritual aspect of yourself has an emotional component that can no longer be dismissed, it can no longer be pushed aside, it can no longer stay in the shadows. It can't, because if it could, we'd all be walking on water and everything would be great. Anxiety wouldn't exist, depression would go away, everybody would be floating, more money than month, all things would be wonderful, but they're not. Why? Because your external world mirrors the depths of your internal world, also. Well, the depths of your internal world are the source of why you have the unloving voices in the first place. And the awakening process of your spiritual path is the process of understanding that the source of your voices is not the voice. The source of the voices lies in the darkest parts of yourself, which lies in the emotional sense of self, the inner sense of self from the position of the we. Remember, humanity, divinity, inner self. The inner self is a multidimensional array of emotional components of yourself. Some of them are doing great, but some of them aren't. Some of them are doing wonderful and they're joyous and happy and free. But some of the aspects of the depths of yourself are not. They're hurting. And any voice, how do you know when you've got a hurting inner self? You hear the voice in your head. Now, does it sound like a little kid? No, it won't. It just sounds like a critical, nagging old man. That's what my voice sounded like. And when I tell you what my voice is done in a little bit, you're gonna see how freaking nuts I was. Why? Because I was hurting. Now, did I know that at the time? No, but that's why I keep saying it over and over. Just because you have anxiety or you feel anxious, there's nothing wrong with you. Nothing. Now, if you need professional help, get it. And while you're getting the support of professional help, start doing the techniques of writing all those voices down. Is that the end? No, it's barely the beginning, but it's all part of the awakening process, it's all part of the unfolding process. When we become aware that the voices in our head are the consequence, not the source, then there's a sense of hope because you're going to get to the source. The source is an inner part of yourself. So literally, for me, when I started to do this whole process and it started to come become clearer and clearer for me, is where I started to understand that for every voice in my head, there's an inner part of me that has a hurt. Well, how do we heal the inner self? That's the dominant, non-dominant handwriting. The shame-based, guilt-based, anxious-filled voices, those are just what I call first-step voices. Those you just write out, bullet point. After you tell somebody those voices, then those voices are going to calm down long enough. And typically those voices are attached to an external action. Good friend of mine that I've supported for years had a voice that basically shamed him into I have to go take care of Sally because if I don't, I'm a bad boy. I'm a bad man. A good man goes and takes care of Sally. I said, John, no, Sally's a grown woman. Your good boy isn't helping her. So John's voice in this particular case was a glass empty, shame-based, guilt-based voice. What does that mean? It was telling John, John, if you don't take an action of rescuing another person, you're a bad man. Shame-based voice. Take the action or you're bad. That's a shame-based voice. What happened when John wrote those voices down? John stopped rescuing Sally. So what happened? Now John has to sit his ass on John's couch, and instead of acting out his I'm a bad boy, he had to feel the emotion associated to why a part thinks it's bad. That's what we're going to talk about next. Because literally the depths of ourselves, where this all starts, is because when we're kids, for me, I was born in the 60s, I was raised in the 70s, I was a teenager in the 80s. The whole idea of spiritual awakening and emotional support and honoring of self and listening to feelings, it didn't exist. Literally, the big boys don't cry. I was raised by a traditional Italian man. And his whole mantra was respect your mother and discipline. You show no emotion. Any emotion meant you were weak. And did he was he trying to hurt me? No, he wasn't. But that's just what he believed. That's what he lived. Was it right or wrong? It was what he knew of the day. Now did that support Joe emotionally? No, it didn't at all. Zero. I'll give you an example. I hit a home run. I'm 11 years old. What did my dad say? Run faster. Run faster. I'm like, what? What did I want? I wanted him to say, wow, Joe, great job. I'm sorry I couldn't be there, but I heard you hit it a mile and you did fantastic. No, he didn't say any of that. He said, run faster. You don't want people to think you're fat and slow, do you? Now, did he sound like that? No. My dad was always calm voice. But did it feel like that? Yes. Now, was he trying to hurt me? No. Did he? Yes. On purpose? No. But was there still hurt? Yes. What does that mean? Look at where my good boy was. Okay, let me see something. So I'm playing baseball by myself. No one teaches me. I hit a home run, but I still can't get my father to celebrate me. Well, then I really must be a bad boy. Perfect example. I go right down a list. I had hundreds of them. I say all that because the source of the voices in your head is an abandoned part of you in your heart, the inner child for Joe, the inner sense of self is where your heart are the hurts of your past that are in your heart today. And why do I say that? People that the past is the past. Yeah, no shit, Dick Tracy. But does that mean the wounds of your past still aren't affecting your today? No. The wounds were in the past. How do you know they're affecting you today? Unless your mind is effortlessly blank, effortlessly clear, effortlessly no glass-empty voices is if you're there, I'm not talking about going into meditation and umming yourself into silent voices. I have a different approach to that, anyways. I'm saying if you don't have the voices, then sure, the wounds of your past aren't affecting you today. And by the way, people that have to meditate to calm the voices, why? Why? Well, Joe, what's wrong with meditation? Nothing's wrong with meditation. I'm asking you, why do you have to use meditation to calm your voices? Why are your voices not calm as a normal? Hear me? Why are your voices in your head not always calm? Are not there? Why are there voices in the first place that we have to calm with meditation? Why? Wounded child, a wound inside. Why do we have to do positive affirmations to change the approach of the glass empty voice? Why do positive affirmations exist? Because you have negative voices in your head, glass empty voices in your head. Why? The whole concept of positive affirmations. Why do we have to do it? If you had no voices, you wouldn't have to do it. Well, you have to do it because the wounds of your past are affecting you today in the glass empty voices in your head. And if you're not aware of those glass empty voices, I promise you those glass empty voices are guiding the car. It's the glass empty voice that said, wife number one needs to go because wife number two will be better. It's the glass empty voice that says, It's my job, it's my boss's fault that I hate my job. The glass empty voice says, Well, if I just had more money, then I'd be okay. So every one of those glass empty voices that look at your outside world and say, I'm just gonna change my outside world and I'll be okay. How's that working for you? If it worked, you wouldn't be on this podcast. Why doesn't it work? Because the source of the reason you have the glass empty voice isn't in your head, the source is in the emotional hurts of your past. Well, how do we get there? How do we get to those emotional hurts? A, we have to know they're there for the first place, and that's why that's why this podcast, right? Why it's called feeling the anxious all the time. And what does it really mean for your awakening process? Well, if you use your anxiety, the feeling of being anxious, and you say, Oh my gosh, what this man just said on this podcast is I'm nothing wrong with me if I'm anxious all the time. There's nothing wrong with me. I that Joe said that on the podcast. Okay, so I'm hanging with him there. And then he said, Well, the reason I'm anxious all the time is because I have these voices going on in my head all the time. So I can kind of get that. And then I'm not really sure what he said about what I do with the voices. Listen to this episode over and over and over, and that's okay. That's why I put them out there to help people and tell others about this podcast so they can be helped too. But what do you do when you hear the voices all the time? You write them down, you write the anxious voice down on a piece of paper. A lot of them. And you might have to write them again and again and again. And then he said there's got to do something more. I'm not sure what it is. Well, listen again. Once you write them down, then you have to tell somebody else. No, Joe, I'm not gonna tell the other person. No, that's way too embarrassing. Well, if you don't tell anybody, then there's no real awakening. If you keep at least it's better to get them out of your head, so let's start there. But if you're afraid to tell somebody, that's where you approach, you ask for strength and courage from your divine sense of self. Your divinity will give you the courage you need to have the humility necessary to heal the voices by telling somebody else. And why do we need to tell somebody else? Because when humility starts cracking. Us open by sharing our most embarrassing things with somebody else, then the embarrassing voice lessens. And when the embarrassing voice lessens, becomes less, then the action step it's trying to make you do, which abandons your inner child, abandons your wounded sense of self, you stop abandoning yourself by your actions, your external actions into your world changing. And that's where we get into putting a light to the darkest parts of yourself. That's where the inner work, the deeper inner work in the inner sense of self begins. And that's where dominant, non-dominant handwriting is a technique I used for years. Now, I have to caveat. If you are being guided to go deeper and deeper and deeper in yourself, find help. Get somebody who can help you. There are millions of professionals. That's what they do as a living. They support people into the depths of themselves. I had a counselor, a therapeutic counselor for 20 years, three different women. They were all elite professionals. The last woman I had was a therapist for 43 years. I used her for six or seven, Perla Wall. Perla was amazing. I was Perla's last client, 43 or 44 years. I thought that is a real honor. Why? Because you're going to need it. You start being guided into the depths of yourself. It's one thing to identify the glass empty voice in a first step and share it with a friend. It's another thing to start putting awareness or light, shedding light on the darkest parts of yourself, the deeper emotional parts of yourself. That's where therapeutic support is so important. It really is. And I would highly suggest it. I will. Now, if you don't want to, great. Dominant, non-dominant hand, pray for strength and buckle up. Why? Because as you give a voice to the darkest parts of yourself, the deepest parts of yourself, the awakening process spiritually is bringing awareness or bringing light. What is enlightenment meant? The bringing of light to parts that are dark. Typically, the only reason a part is dark in you is because it's buried under all the voices and all the addictions and all the craziness. That deeper part for Joe is the inner child. Well, as I did dominant, non-dominant handwriting, hey Joe, how are you? Little Joe, how are you? He would write and he would answer with his left hand. My book that's coming out here in the next couple months called Filling the Void, it's in a child book on how I filled the emptiness inside of me by giving, doing that technique of giving a voice to the depths of myself. Now, the great news about giving a voice to the deeper parts of yourself, it feels pretty cool in the beginning. It feels like I'm in an answer, it feels like I'm finding solution, it feels like everything's gonna be okay. And then bam, emotion comes. Ouch, is all I can tell you. So buckle up. The only reason you have voices in your head, because you've got suppressed emotion in your heart. Those are absolutes. I'm not making that up. I lived it for years. So does everybody have to heal and emote the depths of themselves and have a great life? Of course not. No, you don't. And though, if that's what you're being guided to do, make sure you have help because you're gonna need help. You just are. Why? Because it's not meant to be done alone. It's not. Does everybody go into the deepest parts of themselves? No, of course they don't. I did. Look at the look at my podcast, the one that talks about seven-day a seven-year modern day monk. Yeah, seven years. Are you going there? No. The 85% of the reason it took me so long because it wasn't support. I started this process pre-internet, literally, pre-cell phone. I'd be buried in silence, no one around. All I would do is spin. That isn't how it is today. That's why we are the generation of change, development and growth and discovery and support is everywhere. You can go through it much faster, much gentler, much easier today than I did. And if I can make it through, you can definitely make it through. So before I go into my stories, let me kind of repeat the process, the spiritual awakening process that happens in the emotional discovery position. Basically, we are a spiritual being. You are a spiritual being. You are created in God's image. Well, why don't we live it? Okay, Joe, I'm spiritually God. Me and God, we're one, right? Well, my life sure as hell doesn't seem like that. My wife doesn't like me, my bank account's empty, I can barely make enough money. Or you want to have an even harder place. I launched my kids, I sold my$20 million business, I've got a beautiful house, and I feel vacant and empty. I'm not sure which is worse. I'm not really sure. At least the person with no money can bitch about the bank account being empty, and that's why they feel like crap. The person that has more money than month and has friends around them and they're still empty. I have more empathy for those people, more compassion for those people because they typically got that way from some type of entrepreneurial position, either accelerating in a job or entrepreneurially developing their own. So their typical answer when they exit one is to start another. But the passion of the second one will never be the same as the passion of the first. I have a whole episode on moving from gratitude to grace. If you're that position right now, listen to my episode, Gratitude to Grace, because gratitude is a launch point, not an end point. Grace in giving back. Have a whole podcast on that. I'm going to be doing an entire presentation on that. My Project Smile World. Visit ProjectSmile.world. That's my nonprofit. Because of my following of my divinity, not long ago, a billionaire out of Dubai just visited my two caregivers. I saw videos of 80 kids that I've been supporting now for over a year. They all have beds now for the first time. These kids had never seen a bed. Well, now they have beds. Why? Because a year ago I followed my divinity and it just unfolded. That's a whole podcast. The awakening process from emotional healing, the awakening process, what that means to spiritually awake is that you use the strength of your divinity, the all that is, the divinity that's in you as part of your we to give your humanity the courage and ability to go deeper into your darkest spaces. Why? Because if we didn't need additional spiritual support, we'd have already done it. We'd have already healed it. It would already be over. You wouldn't have the voice in your head now. If it was just as easy as saying, okay, voice in my head. If it was that simple, everybody would already do it. It's not that simple. It's not. And that's why there's a spiritual awakening process in the emotional healing of self. Now, the difference between emotional healing is embracing the darker side of the depths of you. Personal growth is a whole different concept, all kind of tied together. Personal growth is more how your adult sees your adult. Emotional growth is about bringing awareness to the depths of your emotional side of you. And truly, where you gain the courage and strength and ability and awareness to be able to embrace the depths of yourself emotionally is through the spiritual essence called you, the divine you, the we part of divinity. That. So spiritual awareness, we realize there's a new way to do the it, we realize there's a new way to heal, and it's inside, not outside. When we become aware of that, when we become aware of something new in the growing process, that's spiritual awareness. When we start learning techniques that integrate in your divinity to embrace your emotional sense of self, that's called spiritual growth. You're getting better, you're growing, you're becoming more advanced, you're becoming more equipped, you're becoming more available by adding a divine sense of yourself in the quest of healing the darker parts of yourself. And then spiritual awakening, the awakening part of your spiritual process. The awakening is when you become aware of a deeper part of yourself that you didn't even know was there. And then you bring awareness to it, which is light, the enlightenment process. You bring awareness to that deeper part by the dominant, non-dominant handwriting. And when your non-dominant hand is, I want to talk about the spiritual component, the awakening component of the process, and the awakening component of the self-discovery process, what spiritual growth is, what spiritual awareness is, what spiritual awakening is, what is it? And basically those parts of self, when we learn that there's a new way to do the it, that is spiritual awareness. When we become aware that we can do something differently, that's spiritual awareness. When we learn how and we integrate in and we take the action steps necessary to truly do it differently, that's spiritual growth. When we start integrating in our spiritual sense of self, that's spiritual growth. And the awakening process is when we become aware of a deeper part of ourself, we awaken the deeper parts of self. We become aware of the deeper parts of self. And enlightenment is about bringing light to the deeper parts of you. So in the entire process of emotional growth, how your spiritual growth interacts with your emotional growth is that literally you have the availability to integrate in your divinity as a guide, as a strength, as giving you the courage needed to embrace the depths of yourself. And that's where spiritual growth happens as a consequence of emotional seeking and emotional healing. And why is all that integrating so much? Is because today in society, society is literally waking up, the feminine side of self is awakening more and more every day. And it's in that awakening process that we literally have to integrate in both sides of the feminine side of ourselves for there to be a true solution. Well, that true solution, what's in the feminine side of self? The spiritual aspect of you and the emotional aspect of you. So the way we get rid of the voices aren't just spiritual because the voices are there because of an emotional angst that's in your heart. So we use the voices as the red flag to then become aware that there's a deeper part of us that needs light, our love, our awareness. And it's in that quest, it's in the seeking of the deeper you that you literally can grow and you spiritually grow. So I want to explain, and I say all the time, unless the majority, the mass majority of emotional trauma of the past was because of abandonment and neglect. Now, the parts of trauma of the past that aren't really categorized into neglect and abandonment are sexual or physical abuse or betrayal. So, but for the majority, for the majority, the mass majority of angst of our yesterday is based on abandonment and neglect. And what does that mean? So, in my world, the reason my voices were so big as I became an adult, but is because in my world, both my parents were around. I was raised by two parents. I was raised in the 60s, born in the 60s, raised in the 70s. And abandonment is when there's one or both of your parents who aren't literally around, they're just not there. So in my world, abandonment was my dad. My dad was, he had two jobs. I had a dad, but he was never around. He wasn't at my baseball games, he didn't come to school events, he just literally wasn't around. So there was a void where dad was supposed to be. There wasn't. I had no dad. So my abandonment issues as a kid were pretty severe, pretty big. Now, neglect came more from my mother. Now, my mother was always around. She cooked, she cleaned, she took care of me, she made sure I did the dishes, she made sure I did my chores, she made sure I did my homework. She was always there, but emotionally she was not available. Now, does that make her wrong? No, makes her normal. Why do I say that? Because the mass majority of people in our yesterday, literally, the embracing of emotional sense of self wasn't even a thing, it didn't exist. You literally couldn't do it, you didn't do it, you didn't know to do it. So the neglect that I was, which wounded me, if you will, in the past was more from my mother. Now, of course, my dad neglected too, because he just literally wasn't around. But there were two very distinct different things. So I want to share with you how those experiences kind of created a world in me that I acted that out and I lived it forever. And the spiritual process of emotional growth, going from spiritual awareness to spiritual growth to spiritual awakening, also happens in the emotional side of things. Now, personal growth is more where the way you see yourself as a as an adult, as a person. That's personal growth. And if you got a lot of hurt in you, then your personal growth is gonna be lower. It's gonna you're gonna see yourself differently, less value. But from a spiritual and emotional position, how they connect together is the more aware you become of the hurts in you, the more you can use the spiritual essence of yourself to give your humanity, your adult self, the strength and courage needed to embrace the depths. And that's where true healing happens, as the deeper parts of yourself are able to write, which brings awareness, enlightenment to those parts, and then emote, which truly heals those parts. So I want to share some stories with you on how I used to act out my stuff all the time. And I had so much, so many voices, and my addictive nature was very, very high. We had a pretty cool connect, and for whatever reason, we went our separate ways. And the rage that I felt a couple two or three or four weeks later, when I saw her at a bar with another, come to find out later that this person was just a friend, it wasn't even somebody she was dating. But the voices in my head were so big, I charged out, I grabbed the kid by the neck, she's screaming at me, you're crazy, you're nuts, you're crazy. And she finally calms, but the voices in my head are just saying over and over, if she just is with me, then I'll be okay. If she just sees me, I'll be okay. Now, literally, I'm choking her friend almost into submission. The bouncers of the bar come out and say, they were friends of mine, Reese. Reese says, Joe, you gotta go. The cops are coming. And I hand Reese my wallet. Dawn and her friend take off. My voices go crazy. Now we're drunk, it's the middle of the night. So my voices say, you know what? If she just sees me, she'll want, she'll calm down and she'll want me back. If she just will be with me, she'll calm down and she'll want me back. If I can just be close, think about the insanity of that voice. It kept saying it over and over and over. So it came up with the solution because I couldn't find him. The solution was I'm gonna break in. She still lived with her parents. She was 21. I was 24, 25, probably. And the solution was I broke into her parents' house, middle of the night. These are the voices. But she, if she just sees me, she'll want me back. And I break in, I go up, I fall asleep on her bed. She comes strolling in, whatever time, sees me uninvited in her bed. She screams, she yells, she runs out. You're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy. I went to jail, breaking an entering. Now you would think that the voices would calm down. No. The judge says to me, son, if you come within 500 feet of her, you're going to jail. Now you would think I'd stop calling her. Did I? No. Why? Because what'd the voice say? If she's just around me, if she just sees me, if she can just be close to me. So what was the voice trying to accomplish? If another person was next to me, with me, sitting with me, laying with me, holding me, then I wouldn't be abandoned. As a little boy, it was me with me because I had no dad around. How that acted out in girlfriends later, if they were just around me, I'd be okay. Now, when they were around me, I wasn't okay. I always made them wrong, I always criticized, always whatever. I was the one that would push them away, but then I'd want them back. I'd push them away, then I want them back. So the craziness of my voices, literally, were my abandonment voices were so big. And the solution was I just need her to be around me. If she's around me, I'll be okay. I wasn't okay. And that whole experience was eventually how I'm sitting at my mother's house later in the spring, water comes out of my eyes, and I say the infamous words, I need help. And I eventually got into therapy. That's where I met Marion. That's where I was introduced to the inner child. Years later, move forward years later, I was connected to another girl. Now, this is probably four or five years later, and we did everything. She was a good

unknown 1:06:00

Friend.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:01

We were really genuinely connected. We were so connected because. Oh, that's right. We did drugs the same and we drank the same and we like sex the same. Now think about the insanity of we were so connected. She was my soulmate because she smoked marijuana like me. Literally, that's what my voices would say. She smoked like me. She's my best friend. Those were my voices. And she liked to have sex like me. That's what my voices would say. Back then, I lived in the belief that sex equaled love. So a neglect and abandonment issue with this particular female, as long as she was around me, I didn't feel abandoned because I wasn't alone. And as long as we were doing things together, like smoking, drinking, and having sex, then I wasn't feeling neglected because sex equaled love. Well, that was perfectly fine until such time as I got sober. And then as I got sober, I couldn't drink and drug anymore, so I had to say goodbye to this person. And but for years later, my voices would say, I wonder what Susie's doing. Gosh, I wish I could see Susie. I wonder what Susie's doing. I should go see Susie. I bet you if I went and saw Susie, she'd want to have sex with me. I should see what Susie's doing. I wonder what Susie's doing. I bet Susie's doing great. Susie, Susie, Susie, Susie. Now you have to understand, I hadn't dated Susie in over two years. Susie was on her second boyfriend at this point. Susie wanted nothing to do with me. Did my voices care? No, they didn't care at all. Why? Because back then I believed that sex equaled love. So my neglect was because I never got emotional support from my mother, right? I never got Joe, I love you from my mom. I never got Joe, I'm so proud of you from my dad. I never got emotional support from my family. So that's where I caveat our kind of switched sex equals love. So I wasn't pursuing emotional support, I was pursuing sex because sex equaled love, and love meant I wasn't being neglected. So think about the insanity of that voice. Susie wanted nothing to do with me, but my voices would say over and over. I wonder what she's doing. I wonder if we could get together. I wonder if we could have sex. She's dating somebody else, and I know they were interactive, but did my voices care? No, I didn't care at all. What eventually happened was I wrote out those voices, and eventually I realized much later that sex and love have zero to do with each other. Now, hopefully, you might be able to make love with somebody that you love. You might have be able to have sexual interaction with somebody you love, but having sex has nothing to do with being loved. Zero nada, they're nothing to do with each other. But when the sex was removed, what did I feel? I felt neglected, I felt rejected, I felt abandoned. Did I know that at the time? No. Why? Because my solution wasn't go inside and find the awareness of my little kid and let him feel and let him grieve and let him heal. My awareness was let's go have sex. Let's go find Susie. Let's go see what Susie's doing. So my awareness of the day was outside in the solution, not inside. Eventually I got to the bottom of that. The last story I'll tell you was much later. I mean, I'm now, oh gosh, 35, 30, 34, 35, somewhere in there. I meet a woman and she was dating somebody at the time. And I reached a place where I emotionally support a lot of people. I really do. And this person was no different. Well, at some point, and this person never, not one time did she ever indicate that she wanted to like be a personal friend. I was an emotional support for her, which was fine. But my little kid, this is now I'm connected deeply with my little kid. And my little kid, I would journal and write and a lot of emotion. This particular person told me that she loved me as a friend. She was meaning it as a friend. But did my little kid hear it as a friend? No. My little kid heard really for one of the first times, I love you. I never heard I love you from my parents. My parents were not I love you people. My mother showed me she loved me by her attention, but she never said it to me. And my little kid got completely attached to this young woman. And for 22 months, every day, my little kid would say, but she said she loved me, but she said she loved me, but she said she loved me over and over and over. This particular female was she's beautiful. At the point, at this point, she's in her upper 20s, early 30s. This happened over a two or three year period of time, two-year period of time. And she was getting out of a long-term relationship, started dating people. My voices were so big, my ego was so big. One time she meets a person on a plane and they have a little thing together, they get together, and my voices are so massive because my little kid keeps saying, But she said she loved me. My little kid, since she said that, got attached to this concept of love, which is the opposite of being neglected. Again, seeking outside for the solution that I'm literally driving my car to go to her house to bang on her door to make myself look like a complete fool because my voices were so powerful. Now, did I? No, but for the grace of God, I swear to you, my car pulled off into a Kmart parking lot. That ages me a little bit. Kmart doesn't even exist anymore. And I grieved and I grieved and I grieved. What loss of neglect. That type of experience happened three times for me with the same person. The voices in my head were saying, but she said she loved me. She said she loved me. She said she loved me. This girlfriend had four different boyfriends over that three-year period of time. She never, ever indicated that she wanted to be in a personal relationship with me. But did my voices care? No, they didn't. Why? Because the anxiety of the voice that is caused by the voice, the repetitiveness of the voice, over and over and over, you become powerless to the behaviors. So why is writing the voices down so powerful? Because when you write it down, it cuts it in half. When you cut it in half, then you don't take the action. In this particular case, with this last female, I'm in my mid-30s. I'm literally acting in action of driving to her apartment, knowing I was going to look like a fool, but I didn't care because my pain was so great. Instead of looking like a fool, my car pulled into a parking lot. I sat in the middle of a parking lot and grieved. The depths of a child. That's why I say, buckle up. If you're going into the depths of you, you need support. And I had support. I would call two different times. One time my car went there. The other two times I called my counselor Nancy. And instead of acting out, I shared the voices and I got to my grief. I became aware of the voice. I asked for help through divinity and support. And then the awakening process, I let the voice emote, and then eventually I healed. Literally, we all have anxiety. We all have the repetitive voices. We all sometimes feel like the world is taking us down. And the answers, though, aren't outside, the answers are inside. Today, I can honestly say I'm one of those guys that doesn't have many voices. Am I walking on water? No, not yet. Do I plan to someday? Yeah, it's on a goal list. And I say that jokingly, but I don't have the voices today. I don't have the fears today. I don't. If I'm ever blessed to have a woman in my life, I'll give her my overflow from a place of grace, not a place of wound. I'll give from a place of love, not a place of need. I don't have the voices that are plaguing me and call it causing anxiety and causing shame and causing. I don't have the voices anymore. Why? Because I've taken the time to get to the depths. And I'm telling you, if I can go from where I went, trust me, you can do it. Anyone can do it. I say it all the time. I'm not a teacher, I'm not a preacher, I'm none of those things. I'm not a therapist. I'm a guy. I'm a guy on a path. And I'm on the same path you are, or you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be listening. And my hope to offer you today is that if you walk through the same techniques that I walk through, you can get to the same place I'm living today. And I could go on and on about the amazing life I have, but not because Joe's special, just because Joe's been on an enlightened path for 40 years. I'm practiced at all of this. And the more practice I become at it, the easier it becomes, easier it becomes, the grander life becomes. Creating a global podcast because millions and millions and millions of people, just like you and me, are waking up. Why? Because humanity is waking up. We are the generation of change. We truly are. And the change that's happening is from the inside out. Our solutions are inside us, not outside us. The voices are the red flags, not the source. The intimate availability of relationship that you can create inside yourself is the answers to the grandness creating outside yourself. Your external world is a mirror, not the source. And from that new place of awakened awareness, all things are possible. As more and more people are awaking to the possibilities of healing the depths of themselves, as more and more people are creating support groups and 12-step meetings and one-on-one places and podcasts like this, the world is waking up faster and faster and faster. But what are we waking up to? We're waking up to the understanding, the spiritual awareness that our answers to our pain are inside. Our communion with our divinity is in us, and living it is what goes takes us from living from gratitude to grace. As you live your divinity, that will naturally be remembered in you as you embrace the depths of you, because they're both on the same side, the feminine side of yourself. As you live from your divinity, that's how we change the world. Thanks for being here. I know episodes like this can be challenging. I hope you made it all the way through. I hope you listen to my other episodes, especially spiritual awakening can feel lonely. Eagles fly alone. I promise you, if you made it this long into an episode like this, you're not only a spiritual warrior, but you are a true eagle. And the alone part of the eagle causes autonomy, and autonomy causes oneness. Together, we're coming together and healing the world. Together, we're awakening to the grandness called divinity inside. And together we're literally changing how we see ourselves, how we see the world, and together we're healing humanity. One smile at a time. Thanks for being here, everybody. I really genuinely appreciate your support. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:00

And I look forward to my next.global and pick up a free copy of Joe's gift. And join us next time for the We Podcast.