Scott DeLuzio: [00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome back to Drive On. I’m your host, Scott DeLuzio. And today my guest is Christopher Maher. And at the age of 22, he was a Navy SEAL and one of the fittest people on the planet. But despite his. Peak physical condition, he struggled with the impact of stress on his physical, mental, and emotional well being, and through a journey of relentless self exploration and healing, he developed a comprehensive system for total physical, mental, emotional, and Spiritual healing and integration.

And we’re going to talk about that and how service members and veterans can learn from these experiences, uh, in just a minute. But, uh, before we get into that, Christopher, I want to welcome you to the show. I’m really glad to have you here.

Christopher Maher: Thank you. I’m happy to be here in the show serving them

Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, absolutely. And so,

Christopher Maher: a fellow veteran.

Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, like, yeah, likewise. I’m glad to have you here. And [00:01:00] I, I feel like, um, you know, anytime I have veterans on the show, which is, you know, quite frequently, um, you know, you and I started talking a little bit before we started recording here, um, spoken in person prior to this. Um, but it’s almost like there, there’s this, this instant connection between veterans.

Uh, you start to, um, you know, just, yeah. Have that kind of commonality and different bonds, you know, maybe different branches of service, but there’s still some shared connection there. And, uh, you know, we kind of just start flowing with the conversation pretty naturally. So, um, Let’s get back into your story here.

I’d like to start maybe by talking about your journey from being a Navy SEAL to your current work and with what you do now.

Christopher Maher: Oh, that’s like, that’s a very open question.

Scott DeLuzio: I like to keep it open, you know, so that way you, you can kind of flow with it how you want.

Christopher Maher: you know, my journey in the military is unique [00:02:00] because I lost my mom when I was seven years old. She committed suicide. And at the time there was. You know, this is 1976, there was no concept of mental wellness, and she had, had an event that occurred where someone broke her boundaries, and she was a very sort of righteous person and moral, so she started, um, sharing all over town what happened, and she got put into a, a psych ward, and they gave her electric shock therapy. Until she agreed that that didn’t occur and signed some paperwork. And so, um, so I was growing up underneath her care and she was very interesting because she was a bit militant, [00:03:00] right? But then she would flip into like super, super sweet and then back to really militant. And I didn’t know at the time, you know, she was attempting to protect me and she was doing this from a place of love and care.

All I knew is I was scared of my mom, like you didn’t ever want to do anything wrong around her. And so after she died, I bounced around in foster care for a while. And, um, I think after about seven months, seven and a half months, I got an opportunity to go to boarding school. And, you know, the name of the school is Milton Hershey school and Milton Hershey school is run a bit like the military in the sense that you wake up the same time every day.

So it was, uh, The later parts of school, I wa...