Playing Injured
Playing Injured reminds us that life challenges us all—athletes aren’t the only ones who play hurt. Whether it’s setbacks or unexpected curveballs, our response defines who we are and how we grow. This podcast explores the universal journey of resilience and perseverance, inspiring listeners to face adversity head-on.
Ranked in the top 2.5% of podcasts globally, hosts Josh Dillingham and Mason Eddy—entrepreneurs and former collegiate athletes—deliver over 100 episodes featuring diverse voices. They explore mindsets, uncover strategies, and motivate listeners to thrive and play through anything.
Playing Injured
Redefining Identity and Embracing Self-Compassion with Samantha Hart (EP 129)
Samantha Hart shares her transformative journey from identity crisis and addiction to embracing authenticity and self-forgiveness. Through personal stories, she explores the power of action and healing in overcoming cultural conditioning and inner criticism.
• Discussing identity and societal expectations
• The impact of addiction on personal growth
• Turning pain into purpose through life experiences
• Courage as action rather than absence of fear
• The journey to self-forgiveness and compassion
• Embracing uncertainty and listening to intuition
• The importance of vulnerability in healing
• Creating a life aligned with true self
You can find Samantha Hart on social media as Dr. Samantha Hart and explore her insights further!
Follow Playing Injured on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/playinginjured/
Welcome to another episode of Playing Injured. We have a very special guest, samantha Hart. She is the founder of Strong Heart Fitness, best-selling author of her book Breaking the Circuit, and a speaker and life coach. Samantha, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Hello Josh. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you.
Speaker 1:I'm excited as well. So obviously I put some titles on you. But kind of going through all of your social media, going through other podcasts that you've been on, you have so many different facets to who you are. How would you describe who you are Right? Who is Samantha Hart? How does she spend her time?
Speaker 2:who? You are right. Who is Samantha Hart? How does she spend her time? It's funny.
Speaker 2:I spent so much of last year from a business perspective trying to figure out the answer to that question, and even the way you introduced me is such a pivot from the way I have been identifying myself, if you will, as a professional for over a decade. So there's a shattering, if you will, of decades of growing up in a house where getting your degree equals your worthiness and finally having doctor in front of my name and being able to lead with that. And then not that I'm not still a doctor of physical therapy, and not that that work does not bleed into life coaching, because of course it does. If you're coaching somebody who wants to improve the quality of their life, movement is a part of that, and if it isn't, it should be, and I have an expertise. But to dismantle my identity from doctor of physical therapy such that I got comfortable saying speaker, life coach, author, founder, and and you know funny that when we say hello and we introduce ourselves, we're introducing ourselves based on what we do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:As opposed to who we are. So you asked me who I am. I am a sober woman. I am a mother trying to figure it out. I am a soul seeker. I am a thought leader. I am a cycle breaker.
Speaker 1:That's deep. Yeah, that's deep. Talk to me about that, because you just talked about breaking a whole cycle last year. Right, yeah, being a doctor, education was big in family and your family. Right, being a doctor, I'm sure it was a big accomplishment. I'm sure when you got it, I don't know how you felt, did it feel? How you thought it would feel? You know, all these things that are external, that we feel like will make us feel better if we obtain it right, instead of kind of the internal work of understanding who we are and what is unique for us, who are we and what path should we take in life? Right, how did you break that cycle?
Speaker 2:Well, wanting to be in entertainment as a young girl, but growing up in a house where my mother's word ruled and what she felt we should be doing with our lives is the cookie cutter cultural conditioning that is bestowed upon us in capitalist society, which is you get the degree, you get the boyfriend and the husband, the house and the car and the kids, and it's a surefire way to a stable life. So I will say, because I dabbled in the arts at the same time as I dabbled in drugs and alcohol, which quickly became a cocaine addiction that almost killed me, School felt so safe and when I went to physical therapy school it did feel like the truest thing to me at the time. If I were to go into academia, the truest thing was singing and dancing. That I knew.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But second to that, it felt like a really good fit. So when I graduated, I was so proud. I was so, so proud. And then I was met with the reality of the healthcare climate and how broken it is, and I was watching PTs treat four or five patients at a time, not make anybody better and also not make any money at all compared to the debt that we're in from graduate school, and I was like, no, this is not, this is not it.
Speaker 2:So I quickly set on a path, within a few years of working for someone else, to start my own practice and for a long time it was this cash-based whole body, whole person practice where a lot of people would find me after they went to traditional therapy and paid their $30 copay and got 60% better. And they were like I want to get a hundred percent better. And as somebody who grew up loving to dance, thinking about wanting to be the very embarrassing grandmother at 95, who's literally dropping it like it's hot and wanting to know who that person was going to be that was going to keep my body conditioned to do those things, I was like I'm that person for you. I am going to be the person who gets you from 60 to a hundred percent and I was able to create a business because I was filling a need that wasn't being met. And if it was being met, it was being met by trainers and Pilates instructors and yoga teachers, but I had a doctorate. So it was an easy sell to say to someone you know what. You could go to Equinox and pay $1,500 for a 12 pack of sessions with a personal trainer who got their certification in three weeks or three months at best, or you could pay me, and I would find out the rates that were comparable, and charge a similar amount, which was significantly higher than what I was making working for someone else, which, by the way, was $33 an hour for three years straight, with no raise as a doctor.
Speaker 2:And at the same time as I was building this business and identifying as Dr Hart, I was gathering time in sobriety. I was living through some really hard shit and going into these 12-step rooms and hearing stories of overcoming adversity and resilience and grit. And then I'd come back out into my clinic with these ordinary folks, many of whom were high net worth, and I was noticing their own emotional cycles of dysfunction not at all a heroin or cocaine addiction, but an addiction to work, or self-denial, or self-pity, or thinness, and I thought this is soul sickness and I want to treat this. But that's not what they paid me for and it bothered me. It bothered me and and because I was a practitioner that spent an entire hour with people, which was which is still unheard of to this day to get an hour of a doctor's time unless you're paying for it I was able, to a certain extent, to meet the person where they were at emotionally, because I had to do something about the thing that was going to get in the way of me curing their knee pain and, at the same time, it wasn't completely in the scope of my practice. So there was like an itch inside of me that I couldn't scratch and I would dream about going back to school to get a psychology degree. And then I thought, oh God, I'm not doing this again. You know I mean no way. No way, the debt and the time commitment, and but that I was. You know that's how much of an urge I had to treat the soul side of health and wellness.
Speaker 2:And then, on March 13th of 2022, I lost my sister to a drug overdose and it was full stop. I am no longer Dr Hart, ever again in this world. I am no longer just a person who is an expert at the body, and whatever I do next and wherever I go next, I'm bringing all of me and everything I've learned from the spiritual side. I spent all this money and I spent all this time getting this degree and building a practice in Santa Monica, by the way that was successful for 10 years, very hard to do, and now I'm walking away from it identity collapse and building something new.
Speaker 2:But what I really mean by cycle breaker and what I really want people to know when we say you know who we are, no matter how big my dreams are. I want to speak on stages. I want to sell out stadiums. I want to be the girl who 12-stepped the world. I want to cast the widest net on who I can help. That's amazing, but if everything ended today and my life was cut short, I still did the hardest and bravest thing that I could ever do with my life, which is break the cycle of addiction, mental illness and chronic emotional cycles of dysfunction that has run in my ancestral heritage for centuries, and I cannot think of something better to have done with my life than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, breaking a cycle. That was learned right. And then also, too, you get, you know, examples of past generations before you which create some type of beliefs about you, about yourself, things you might have in you interpret it. That happened, but you saw it a different way or you perceived it a different way about yourself, right? And so I actually you know, I was going through kind of your Instagram and when you said courage, bravery, right, I think about action, I think about actually taking a step, right.
Speaker 1:And you said a quote and you'll you'll remember this when I say it you said you cannot think your way into better acting, you have to act your way into better thinking, right, so many folks especially when they're having addiction or they have these beliefs we spend so much time thinking about getting better. Oh, as soon as I move here, then I'll get better. When I get that new job, then I'll get better. When I get this gym membership, then I'll get better. We think about getting better, we think about growing ourselves, as opposed to just putting action behind it, which takes courage, which takes bravery. It is scary, right. So when you talked about bravery, you talked about courage. That was like the first thing that came up in my mind is putting action behind it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's, it's. I love having these conversations because, well, first of all, I'm going to nerd out because, on a brain level, any, any conversation you go into your brain is literally going to be different at the end of it. I don't know what you're going to ask me and what you're going to say in response to what I say. And then it makes me think about what's what is coming up for me while he's talking, not such that I'm plotting out my answer. That's what I used to do when I was so anxious and it was all about me and what I was going to say. Now, when I speak, it's about who I can help. It's not about me, it's about you, it's about your listener. It's so cool to dynamically change and push our brain from a neural network perspective. And when I hear you say that, I think back to how I became brave. If bravery is taking action, if that's one version of being brave, then what is required to get out of the thinking mind and into action Because again, we can say it but what is required to act? And, spiritually speaking, I was absolutely stuck under a pattern of living which was if I can just control things outside of me? Back to what you said at the beginning of this talk, then I'll be okay.
Speaker 2:And I learned that it was deeply ingrained and I tried it well into recovery because I had a lot of evidence that that worked until it didn't. And so my marriage started falling apart. And then, when I tried to control him and I was sure that if I said or did the right thing he would forgive me for all the times I cheated before we got engaged and married that if we went to therapy and we both did 12 step programs, that our marriage would be okay. I was so sure because when I wanted to go get a doctorate, I did X, y and Z. And then I so sure because when I wanted to go get a doctorate, I did X, y and Z and then I got the degree. When I wanted to get the job, I applied and I had my interviews and then I got the job. When I wanted to find an apartment in New York city, I I got into you know, a bartending job and made the cash and got the. I could do all of these things, watch me go. And then it didn't work. And when I slept on couches for months and months and months and hit spiritual rock bottom where a girlfriend in recovery was like if you're not ready to leave this marriage, you can't live like this. And I signed a lease at 30 years old in this marital separation.
Speaker 2:Just bankrupt five years, physically sober, spiritually bankrupt, this woman came into my life and said what if we do the steps on your marriage? Because the thing is, the only action I was taking up until this time in my life was what can I say or do to make this person love me again so that I am okay? That was the only action I could take. The idea of taking a different kind of action it was unimaginable to me because I was running on a program that my nervous system had used, and used very well, to survive a very tumultuous growing up, and I didn't know any other thing to do besides take action in that way. So that's the other thing, right, like bravery and action taking. We're only going to be able to do what we've been exposed to doing and what we're hardwired to do, and it's going to work until it doesn't. And then when it doesn't.
Speaker 2:So if you have a pain point in your life, whether it's like everything's good but romance, romance is killing I can't find the person. I'm doing all the things I'm trying to manifest my partner. I'm doing all the things I'm trying to manifest my partner. Then there is some pattern around relationships that you have been in that's probably been very unconscious, that isn't working anymore. It's causing now more pain, more harm than it is helping you. The pain, the discomfort, the frustration is a wake up call to going okay, what's happening here and what is really going on spiritually that I need to unblock so that I can open myself up to miracles in this part of my life, and then the action I might take from a more healed place is going to be different than the ones I've been taking over and over that haven't worked.
Speaker 2:So in my case, I did the 12 steps around my marital crisis and when we got to the ninth step, which is making an amends, this woman said have you ever made an amends to yourself? And I hadn't. Now, what does this have to do with action? Everything, in my opinion, in my experience, everything, because I was a person who ran off of self-ridicule. The voice inside my head that was the loudest said this is what you get for what you did to him. Tough shit. The only action you get to take is begging and pleading and convincing so that this works out, so that you're okay, cause you're a piece of shit and you cheated on him, and this is what you get for what you did. There was no other option of action because I had so much shame and such a lack of worthiness that, until I gave myself permission to forgive myself for what I did and who I was, so that I could look my marriage squarely in the eye and see it as something that was deeply unfulfilling, that I actually didn't want and didn't deserve, there was no other action I could take.
Speaker 2:When I started the process of more compassionate self talk, the miracle is that I heard my intuition. She started to be a different voice that I was interested in listening to. How did I know it was a different voice? It sounded nothing like my critical voice. It was not loud, it was not obsessive, it was not mean, it was calm, it was curious, it was clear, it was compassionate, often very simple. It was clear, it was compassionate, often very simple, and when she started to speak up, I took action in the direction she was nudging me, and then my life started to change.
Speaker 1:So we want to talk about bravery. The bravest thing we can ever do is forgive ourselves for shit. We've done that's. I mean that's huge, because I talked about action is and, like you mentioned, it's action that can. You're gonna take some type of action. Which way is it going to serve you or not?
Speaker 2:is the action coming from a loving place or is it coming from a punishing place? If it's coming from a punishing place, watch out. Yeah, you're going to hit the wall. You're going to hit the wall. Maybe not for five more years, but you will.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you talked about you know, in a way, you know how can I get this person to love me, what can I say, what can I do, almost in a people pleasing form of fashion, right.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I've been there. I mean, I grew up it was about people pleasing. How can I shape shift that? And that's why I value authenticity and vulnerability so much now, because growing up I wasn't very vulnerable and I wasn't very authentic, because I always wanted to be in that mode of being perfect and pleasing people, pleasing right, Until you kind of change those thoughts right or those beliefs and start to act in a different way. And, man, it's so huge that you said that bravery, forgiving yourself. Why do you think it's so tough to forgive yourself? I know that's a deep question and it's probably everybody right probably everybody.
Speaker 2:Right, it is. Um, I think, as someone who's a hardwired perfectionist type a, I think we run on our ability to perform and part of what seemingly gets us there is that push, come on, do better, try harder. And so there's this again potential identity collapse at the thought of well, if I don't do that, will I actually achieve the thing? I mean, who am actually achieve the thing? I mean, who am I without that edge? Yeah, and when you have a stack of evidence all around you and also we're so deeply culturally conditioned that the more things we have, the better we are, and if how you're getting those things is by criticizing yourself into perpetuity. But you got the thing, then everyone tells you how fabulous you look, how amazing your life is. Why would you give that up until you have a dark night of the soul and I say this all the time that perfectionism is so great but it collapses with matters of the heart. So if you want all the shiny things and you want to be mean to yourself on the way there, you'll get them, I guarantee you'll get them. But you won't feel good. And then if someone you love betrays you or dies suddenly, what are you going to do? Are you going to beat yourself up about everything you should have said or done you can? How's that going to make you feel? Who are you going to help from that place? You're going to drown in regret and shame. And guess what you're going to want to do more of? Get those external things Escape, because the self-ridicule will be unmanageable when it comes to those big life events.
Speaker 2:I don't know that we're taught this shit. I mean, I've met almost no one who grows up in a house and has a blueprint for how to navigate life's hardest things, which is also why I'm on the mission. I am to take the universal principles of the 12 steps and make them applicable living, because at some point every single one of us everyone who's listening is going to go through something that there's no clear pathway through and it's going to hurt like hell because there's going to feel miserable. Everything that worked to get you those shiny things is not going to work, with a dark night of the soul. So you can wait until that happens to try and cultivate a more compassionate self-talk. You could do the work now, when things aren't as hard. You could spend the rest of your life speaking to yourself that way. But then you're going to need to numb that pain, and it might not be with cocaine, like what I used. It might be with sex scrolling work.
Speaker 2:But how do you want to feel when you get to the end of your life? How do you want to feel? How do you want to say you've lived? I bet you will wish that you didn't spend so much time beating yourself up. That is not the goal of anyone's life. You know, I'm going to spend most of my day telling myself I'm a piece of shit and that I should lose weight. Nobody fucking signs up for that. Yeah, but it's tricky. We don't have a culture that embeds in us. Love who you are fiercely and ferociously first, and then go out and do God's bidding. That's not what we're taught. In fact, the more broken your vessel is, the easier it is to sell you shit.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then we come out into adulthood and some shit hits the fan and we're like I don't even fucking know who I am, let alone know how to love myself. Through this it's backward, Everything is backward. Life is an inside job. Happiness is an inside job.
Speaker 1:We don't get taught it, like you said. So how can people, you know, folks can't even be aware of when they are shaming themselves. You just think this is a regular voice. It's just, it's just it. Oh, I need to lose weight. Every time you go to the mirror every morning, it's a negative self-talk, right? Every time you, you know, something bad happens.
Speaker 1:I know for me, and I can be vulnerable and say that I'm somebody that loses things. Often I go to a place forgot I forgot my iPad, go to another place oh, I forgot my key to my place, and I don't realize that I forgot my key. Until I get there I'm like, oh, my goodness, I am such an idiot. These are things that that happen, right. And I get frustrated with myself when these things happen, when I'm moving so fast and I've had to kind of reverse it and say, no, hey, no, this is not who you are. You know, you have a lot going on. Your mind is going from this place to this place. Let's just go back and go grab the iPad, and next time we'll start to be a little bit more present, right? So these are just things that we can start to correct in real time. They'll happen. That first thought might be uncontrollable, but that second thought you can change it quickly so that it becomes muscle memory moving forward, exactly, it becomes muscle memory moving forward Exactly.
Speaker 1:So that's just an example, right Mm-hmm, our inner critic, right Walk me through that People ask me so much.
Speaker 2:You know, when I was doing that 12-step work and we got to that ninth step, you know people want to know how did you do that? How did you go from three decades of beating yourself up to this woman proposes this question. You know, have you ever forgiven yourself? And now and now, what, here's what, what, here's what. First of all, in that time in my life that was about, I mean, not including the eight months sleeping on multiple people's couches before the six-month lease but it was months and months of a deep depression, in sobriety. So, even as I was doing the work, even as she asked me that question every day that I woke up, I was so sad and so scared. When she asked me that it was a shattering of a belief system that I didn't know had a noose around my neck. The belief system was this is how you speak to yourself, this is how we get shit done, this is how it looks, this is how it feels, this is how it works. The shattering of that belief system, number one, was possible because she gave me permission and number two because I was in enough pain to want to blow it up. I was like well, this shit. I might have believed this up until this part of my life, but this voice that's telling me I deserve this shitty marriage is fucking killing me. It's killing me and I don't want to die. So if that's true, that means I need to stop using it.
Speaker 2:Great, now what? This is? An obsessive train of thoughts that goes by and, as you said, you can't control the first one. What it means is I started to turn the dial up on my awareness of the thoughts in my head, so it became like an experiment. Okay, for the remainder of the day, I'm just going to try to notice how I'm speaking to myself. Step one this is every spiritual teacher and methodology on earth you must have consciousness around the thing you want to try to change, especially if it is a longstanding habit that you want to break, especially if it is a long standing habit that you want to break. So I started to pay attention and then, much like you said, I would notice the critical voice and I would say, okay, well, I know how that story ends If I keep speaking to myself that way. It ends in an apartment, in a broken marriage, where I feel depressed and miserable every day. I know that. So I can just feed that voice and agree with her and sort of double down on that she's right and what she said.
Speaker 2:Or I could say huh, if I'm trying to become a person who forgives themselves for what she did, then what would I say to myself? Because they're two different things. If I'm a person who doesn't forgive herself, then I'm going to keep saying this is what you fucking get, piece of shit. So if I forgive myself, I can't say that I have to say something like wow, this is the craziest thing you've ever navigated sober, this is the scare. You have absolutely no idea what the future of this marriage is going to look like. But we don't know how, we don't know when you're going to find your way forward, and right now you just need to do the next right thing. You just need to go, you know, take a warm bath. You don't need to know the outcome, you don't need. But you, you, you definitely don't deserve to keep feeling bad.
Speaker 2:I had to kind of dream up, and I think it's important that it came from me. I had to dream up what I would say instead, and then I had to practice saying it. And then, if that softer side of me had an idea for something I should do. I definitely had to practice doing it, because saying is important. All this stuff rewires the circuitry in our brain if we practice it. So we want to talk about changing ourselves. This is the science of real change. It's practice, practice, practice, practice, practice again and again, and again and again.
Speaker 2:The other thing, though, about the action taking. So, for example, it was in this time period of the marital crisis that my intuition said hey girl, hey, you're broke as a doctor and you might want to start your own thing, because there's this whole need in the healthcare climate that isn't being met. And you can meet that need. You should start asking your clients where they're going when they get discharged. She said that to me, so I did so.
Speaker 2:I asked them, and they said oh well, yeah, I guess I was just going to hire a trainer, but I'd rather work with you. So then I said great, do you want me to come to your house once a week? We'll do strength and conditioning Eventually. I got fired for this, by the way. But why is the action taking so important in this behavioral shift? Because taking action from a loving place results in self-worth. I now have proof of concept self-worth. I now have proof of concept. Holy shit, I just spoke to myself in a kinder way, took a suggestion from that kinder part of myself, did something and I had a win. I have proof that something good happened when I don't shame myself and I feel good about it.
Speaker 1:Damn, is this what my life could look and feel like yeah, and then you continue to do it.
Speaker 2:Correct. I have been in deep communion with my intuition, which I now call God, for I'll be 16 years, sober next month, so 11 years. She is the guidepost of every decision I make. Every time I am out of sorts, I go right back into my thinking mind not so much my critical mind, I mean I have really arrested her in her tracks. I I have taken away so much power from her, but that's because I acknowledge why she's there.
Speaker 2:She's always there when I'm in fear, when I feel powerless, when I feel great bouts of grief, like losing my sister, which I want to talk about, something you can't control she'll show up. She'll have a whole bunch of suggestions about what I could double down and do, how thin I could get, how I could obsess over escaping the life I'm in to go run off with someone else, cause maybe then I'll feel alive because I feel so dead inside. She'll make suggestions to try to protect me, but they're not in my best interest and I know that. So I wait for the whisper of my intuition, for the whisper of my intuition. I can always feel the difference, and that's the thing when people ask these questions. You know, how do you know? How do you know, this is really important that we also try to embody this. It's not just a cerebral thing because as a dancer, I just a cerebral thing because as a dancer I I'm always checking in with my body and our body is always speaking to us. So if I'm in fear and I'm ruminating and obsessing, because my controlling mind is showing up to the party and she's most likely going to say if you don't fucking do this, it's all going to fall apart, if you don't do this, you're an idiot, and it makes me physically feel tight, constricted, anxious. There's a physical manifestation of that because really, on a nervous system level, it's fight or flight. Physical manifestation of that because really, on a nervous system level, it's fight or flight. It's like, oh, my shit's getting real. We got to fucking arm up, suit up, get ready to go to war. They're coming Right.
Speaker 2:And that's not it, that's not God, that's not intuition, that's not your most loving, patient, compassionate self, it's not, because when that part of you shows up, it's the opposite, it's a parasympathetic state. It comes in stillness. So the people listening who don't know how to be still, who are afraid to sit still, you're the ones that need it the most because you're missing out on your God-given intuition, your instinct, the thing that you have, that you were born with, that you exercised as a kid and that at some point got silenced. You got to know what that part of you has to say, or you don't really fully know what you need and want in this life. So you got to pay attention. It's not just your head, it's your body, it's your gut, it's your heart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, it's a few things you mentioned. You were talking about your story and how negative self-talk, right? Or you know that inner critic. You say you knew that story right. And a lot of times a lot of folks are afraid of the uncertainty with the other way right, the positive way, the way that's more self-loving. They don't know what that is like.
Speaker 1:So we continue to have that inner critic or we just want to stay comfortable in this behavior because we know, we know where that story is going to go. Yeah, you know. Hey, I'll bounce back and then I'll, you know, sabotage and then I'll bounce back and I know how that's going to go, right. But if I actually go this way, I really don't know how that's going to go. And so the action is important. But also to being uncomfortable with I mean being comfortable with uncertainty, right, it can be tough, and when you feel, when you're still and you are able to just spend time alone with no distractions and no social media, and you're able to just, like you said, hear the voice of God, it's something about that. Even for myself, that first 10 to 15 minutes of being still, I got all these thoughts going on in my head and it's so uneasy and it's so uncertain going on in my head and it's so uneasy and it's so uncertain, and when you just continue to sit still, all of a sudden, things get calmer.
Speaker 1:Things start to slow down. I can hear that voice talk to me and show me my real, authentic version of who I am, as opposed to authentic version of who I am as opposed to, maybe, what I've built up. Right, I don't know, you just said it. You know I feel like uncertainty, and controlling what we can is kind of a another stage of growth.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I there's of growth. Right yeah, there's in adjunct to the way I've reinvented the 12-step process so that it resonates with me. There's so much spiritual literature that I read constantly in a personal growth podcast that I listened to. And there's this guy, David Guillaume, who's a Kabbalah master, and I recently heard him on Lewis house podcast and he talks about certainty beyond logic. And he talks about certainty beyond logic and I do think that one of the scariest things about going into recovery initially was the God-centric nature of it and that I grew up in a house where if you believed in God, you were an absolute fool and the only person you could count on is yourself. So there's a lot of people like me who have very sort of atheist upbringings and or heavily Christian upbringings where there's a punishing God, that come into the rooms and hear that and are like hell. No, because it undoes everything that you learned that kept you safe, and unless everything has fallen apart in your life where you are primed to go has fallen apart in your life where you are primed to go, I will take any suggestion to turn this around. You're going to run, and so that was me in recovery like running from doing the work. I stayed abstinent but I was running from any sort of spirituality and I can say safely now that probably the greatest gift that I've been given in recovery is to learn how to be comfortable in the not knowing. I mean, that's what we're talking about and every, every human on earth is going to experience uncertainty. And so what? What are we going to do when it shows up and you know, when I started to do step one on my marriage and it became step one in AA is like you know, I'm powerless over alcohol. My life has become unmanageable. At some point we get it. You know, if you drink again you're probably going to drink to excess. You might buy a bag of cocaine, you might end up overdosing and dying like probably not a good choice for you. But then what about the business of living? What does that step mean about the business of living? In my case, with the marriage, right. That step mean about the business of living, in my case, with the marriage right. Wait, what if I say I'm powerless over my husband and trying to change his mind and the past and the future of the marriage? And and when I try to exert power over him, my life becomes unmanageable in the following ways I have my. My peace of mind and worthiness is completely contingent on him. I'm constantly anxious about the next right thing I'm going to say to him to change his mind. You know, and the list went on, and so that's like that was like the beginning of step one.
Speaker 2:But the second part of that, which is what we're talking about, is, if that's all true, if every day that I wake up cause now it's not the marriage, it's sending my children off to school, so they're going to be a fucking school shooting, am I going to get into a car accident? Am I going to where's the scroll of the list of things every 24 hours that I'm powerless over, and when I'm trying to obsess about it because it's not going my way, and how bad that makes me feel. Okay, I can see how that makes my life unmanageable, but then what do I have real power over? What can I change? So something as simple as I'm stuck in traffic.
Speaker 2:When I'm someone who loves to be early and that is true for me I don't show up on time. I show up early. Now I'm on my way to an important meeting and there's a fucking traffic jam and I'm going to be late. What I want to do is curl up in a ball and scream and honk the horn and bring out my best inner New Yorker and flip everyone off right. That's going to make me feel terrible. It's not going to get me there sooner. That's going to make me feel terrible. It's not going to get me there sooner. So I need to radically surrender.
Speaker 2:There's literally nothing I can do about this. What can I do? Well, okay, let's start with the logistics. I can call the person who I'm on my way to see and just communicate. Hey, eta, was this? It just increased. Do you still want to have the meeting? Uh, if so, I'll be. I'll be able to be there at this time. So sorry about the inconvenience. Cool, and then I'm stuck in the car. So do I use it as a time for moving meditation? Do I keep the music off? Do I roll the window down? Do I just really witness what's coming up for me? Uh, do I call a friend that I miss, that I'd like to check in on? Is there someone who I could call, who might need my help, who I can serve by just being a listening ear? Is there a podcast that's going to give me new insight into how I'm thinking and behaving and living my life. Every day we have an opportunity to practice admitting to some extent what we cannot control and really honing our skills over what we can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Letting go. Let just let go of what we can't control, because that's the things that make us anxious. Right, the things that we can't control. That we try to control other people other people's opinions of us Right. That we try to control Other people other people's opinions of us right? These are things that we can't control, that we get anxious about, as opposed to just saying, hey, I can't control it, let go and let me focus on what I can, and then you start to like you did list a bunch of things.
Speaker 1:That's right. Put your energy towards, as opposed to this, right, yeah, do you have you looking at you? Right, you're you, you, you are, you feel very authentic, very real, very various different facets right, you are in the arts. Right, also a doctor. Right, these are so many different facets that you have. On the way of doing all these things, have you struggled with, with the opinions of others, right? Has that been a struggle for you?
Speaker 2:Oh God, yeah, right. Has that been a struggle for you? Oh god, yeah. Uh, I think for sure, when I was actively pursuing dancing and singing. This is when I had, you know, my addiction was active. I had no spiritual template for getting through life, and so the rejection of that industry, the compare and despair, was so acute and really insufferable, which is another reason why choosing academia for a time felt so good, because I knew how to thrive in that environment. And I think there are layers and layers of letting go of what the outside world thinks, and none have been as profound as losing my sister and, in the wake of that, whatever shackles were still around me about what I deserve to do, based on when other people gave me the green light to do it they broke off, so this whole.
Speaker 2:you can't start a podcast yet.
Speaker 2:Nobody knows who you are. What are you doing? Writing a book? You're not a celebrity. No one's going to buy it. That's another form of comparison. I've got to be this before I can do that.
Speaker 2:And now I'm not saying I'm free from it, right, Because here I am talking to you, you with big, huge dreams of being one of the greatest public speakers of all time. There is an element of that that is so out of my control. In fact, as we speak, I've been waiting for almost two weeks to find out if I booked a speaking gig, a paid speaking gig. I will be lying if I said I haven't been thinking about it every day. Am I going to get it? Are they going to pick me? I want it bad, but the difference is because of how much work I've done on myself.
Speaker 2:The truest part of me knows this to be true. If not this, then something else. If not now, soon. I know in my bones that I'm going to be sharing these messages to audiences on stages. And if that's true, if I have certainty beyond my logical mind because my logical mind is looking for evidence really You're going to sell out stadiums. How do you figure? How do you figure that's going to happen, Sam. But if I have certainty on a soul level, on a gut level, then it doesn't actually matter if these people say yes or no, because I know where I'm going. I just don't need to know how or when or what it's going to look like. So are all the other parts of me creeping up and going. Are they going to pick me? Are they going to pick me? Are they going to pick me? Of course, yes, A hundred percent. But so much more of me is like it's all good girl, you are in the running, your name is in the pot In January. It's all happening In divine timing. You have evidence of this in your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where it never went according to your plan Ever Nothing if you look back, ever and it was all good.
Speaker 1:Might have been even better right.
Speaker 2:That's right, and so I'm the freest that I've ever been from that place, and I think loss can teach us how to live more fully and more freely If we're brave enough to face the pain of the loss, and that is what it is doing for me. But I would be lying if I said it doesn't affect me. Of course it does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:We don't graduate from our spiritual curriculum here on earth. We just have more opportunities to learn the next layer of healing and growing. That's it.
Speaker 1:Just the next layer, the next growth. I love that. Where I mean, I can't believe how jam-packed this episode has been. I feel like we've talked a lot, right, about so many different things, and I think the main concept is stillness, awareness, consciousness, understanding that we all have struggles. Right, we all have struggles. How can we have the courage to look within and take action from a loving place, right? Where can people find you? Where can, where can folks continue to follow your story? I want to, um, I just want to give you a shout out because I feel like you know you are very vulnerable, which is a superpower, right, Especially in today's world where we want to just show our best self. Everything has been perfect, Um, and you've been able to help a lot of people, um, with your vulnerability. Where can people continue to find your journey, hear your story and, um, follow what you have in?
Speaker 2:the future. Yeah, I, I'm pretty much the same across all social media channels. Which is Dr she put it in her name, guys Dr Dr Samantha Hart, h-a-r-t-e. So Instagram is probably the social media platform I'm the most active on and you can just DM me. And if you go on my website, which is the same drsamanthahartcom, you can book a discovery call the same drsamanthaheartcom. You can book a discovery call. Uh, you can click a link to get sent to the amazon page and get my book and just learn about all the things that I'm doing.
Speaker 2:Andi think you know we spoke at the top of the conversation about the two biggest passion points and they're coaching other people in this container that is uniquely curated for where they're at, and what that means is, you know, the perfect client wants to do mind, body, soul work with me, and having the doctorate is an amazing asset to being able to create programs that are based off of science to get the person fit to be doing the physical activities that they really want to be doing in their life without injury. But spiritually speaking, I use the 12-step process on whatever the pain point is in the person's life. It doesn't have to do anything with addiction, whatever the pain point is in the person's life.
Speaker 2:It doesn't have to do anything with addiction. You feel trapped in a job or you're having trouble finding a stable friendship and you're stuck in some cycle and you're not even sure why or what it is or how to change it. And that kind of work is so meaningful to me. It lights me on fire. It really makes me feel like I've taken my pain and repurposed it, because I think the gift of pain is what we do with it and if we can use our pain to help the next person that's suffering, then it's not in vain. It really feels not like it was worth it, necessarily, but like it matters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it gives it purpose right, it really does. Yeah, yeah. And you know what I made a mistake. I meant to say Dr, dr, samantha Hart, even ina, right, I made a mistake.
Speaker 2:I actually think it's really great that you did it. It's so on topic with everything we talked about. I mean it's just epic.
Speaker 1:No, I love it. Well, dr Samantha Hart, I appreciate you coming on the show. This is a very powerful episode, so I appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me, Josh.
