00:00:08:08 – 00:00:27:17

Nick McGowan

Hello and welcome to The Mindset and Self-mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. And on this show, my guests and I unpack the stories that shape us, the lives that we lead on our path to self-mastery. So let’s not wait any longer. Let the games begin.

00:00:32:10 – 00:00:34:16

Nick McGowan

Hey, Lincoln, welcome to the show, man. How are you doing?

00:00:35:13 – 00:00:37:06

Lincoln Stoller

Very good. Great to see you.

00:00:37:16 – 00:00:52:16

Nick McGowan

Yeah, nice to see you, too. I’m glad that you’re here. Thank you for reaching out about the show. I was reading through your website and looking through some of the stuff that you’ve gotten into and I think there’s a lot that we’re going to be able to get into. But without jumping into your story, why don’t you give us a little bit of context?

00:00:53:06 – 00:00:58:01

Nick McGowan

Who are you? What do you do? And maybe something that most people don’t know about you? It’s a little odd or bizarre.

00:00:59:04 – 00:01:27:13

Lincoln Stoller

Well, I think I you know, we all think we’re sort of normal. And over the course of our lives, we start to realize that’s not entirely true. So I’ve started to realize, you know, a lot of the strange events that have happened to me are because I’m strange in other people’s eyes. I continue to think myself normal. I think the origin of my strangeness was my somewhat solitary childhood.

00:01:28:16 – 00:01:49:20

Lincoln Stoller

I had a brother and sister, so I thought I was kind of average, but they were ten and 12 years older than me. And my parents were also sort of over it. So they were sort of absent. Yeah, they were the opposite of helicopter. They were submarine parents. I could never quite figure out where they were and they didn’t pay much attention to me.

00:01:50:13 – 00:02:18:13

Lincoln Stoller

So I kind of wandered around. I wasn’t quite, you know, the wild child living in the woods, but I kind of felt I might as well have been. And that made me a kind of odd person because I was always reaching out to people and not entirely going on to their wagon. So that meant that you know, as kids were socialized in school, so that didn’t work very well.

00:02:18:17 – 00:02:49:10

Lincoln Stoller

I was rebellious and I guess my family made me a kind of adult for my age. So I, you know, didn’t really connect with my age group and of course, I didn’t entirely connect with adults either because I wasn’t one. And then, you know, I got involved with mountaineering, which I really liked because it was a strange bunch of people going exciting places and doing crazy things that were very emotional.

00:02:49:10 – 00:03:19:11

Lincoln Stoller

Right? I mean, full of fear and and exhilaration. And I did that for quite a while. And then I also wanted to be those intellectual pretensions. So I got a Ph.D. in physics, and that was interesting. The whole Ph.D. process is one of the few educational processes where you’re asked to actually do something, you know, come up to meet the bar of accomplishment rather than just fill in checkboxes.

00:03:20:16 – 00:03:53:03

Lincoln Stoller

And that gets very complicated because there is all sort of expectations and, you know, getting on line with what’s going on. And I still wasn’t satisfied with what I knew. So I was involved with travel and other cultures. And, you know, here I am like all of us thinking that I’m normal and that the world is strange. And I guess you have to say the world is normal because that is the baseline.

00:03:53:03 – 00:04:26:14

Lincoln Stoller

And I think I am coming to understand that I’m an emotional person, which is odd for a physicist. But then, you know, that’s why I’m not a physicist anymore. I’m a clinical counselor and hypnotherapist. And I do dream work and psychedelics, therapy and DreamWorks and psychedelics. And I write a lot about the subconscious and emotions because I have the intellect side covered.

00:04:27:10 – 00:04:48:17

Lincoln Stoller

So most people don’t know that I’m emotional because I’m so intellectual. I guess like I say, it all seems normal to me, but it’s really valuable to be a therapist because you start to see what other people really think. You know, you hear you hear their story ten times and then you start to wonder, how come they’re telling me this for the 11th time?

00:04:49:02 – 00:05:20:14

Lincoln Stoller

How come they’re not doing something about it? And you sort of at some point you get down to it, you know, in a way that you wouldn’t get socially, socially. You just hear their story over and over again. But as a therapist, you’re allowed to try. But even when I do, some people think I’m intellectual. So part of my current efforts is to sort of come out of the closet, which is an interesting metaphor because of, you know, the sort of gay trans whole thing about closets.

00:05:21:15 – 00:06:01:04

Lincoln Stoller

And I’m not into the gender fluidity of these days because I think it’s superficial. I’m into the subconscious closet, not the gender closet. So I’d like people to come out of their subconscious closet. I don’t give a shit about their, you know, sexual politics that’s incidental to me. And and I think people hide behind their gender politics like they hide behind their other politics because it’s one step out from the social presentation and okay.

00:06:01:16 – 00:06:24:01

Lincoln Stoller

But I want more with people. And so I’m trying to be more emotional anyway. Not like, you know, the question. One thing people know about me. Well, one thing you should know about me is that very few people know anything about me, so there’s not too much to answer. I have like a circle of three friends and I see them rarely.

00:06:25:04 – 00:06:32:00

Lincoln Stoller

And most people, you know, know me from my writings or, you know, podcast.

00:06:32:15 – 00:06:55:17

Nick McGowan

Mm hmm. So. Well, way to unleash a lot of things right there. Thank you for that. I think for the most part, it’s interesting where you’re saying, look, my my siblings were older and my parents were done like that. You were like they were just over it. And you know, that like I don’t know if that hit you early on or like subconsciously you’re like, they’ve checked the fuck out, they’re done.

00:06:56:09 – 00:07:11:09

Nick McGowan

But to know that and understand that and look at things differently, you kind of took that character for your own and you’re like, This is who I’m going to be. And I started to kind of roll with it. It’s even interesting that you bring up that people think themselves to be normal because yeah, I think for the most part you’re right.

00:07:11:15 – 00:07:31:01

Nick McGowan

I think a lot of people like you, you really talk to them. They’re like, Yeah, you know, I think I’m doing okay. I’m normal because it almost feels like they live at an average. Like things aren’t terrible. Things aren’t super awesome, and most people just live out of kind of normal. And it seems like you’re looking for a lot more than that and be able to have a lot more than that.

00:07:31:01 – 00:07:52:17

Nick McGowan

And a lot of people I think it really fucking afraid to be able to dove into that. So when you think of doing some of the deeper work, the subconscious work and getting into those conversations, how how do you see people actually going about that if they’re if they’re unsure of exactly what to move on first?

00:07:52:17 – 00:08:15:21

Lincoln Stoller

There’s the I don’t know exactly what the right aphorism is, but there’s sort of the metaphor of the moving train metaphor. You know, when you’re sitting in a train and it starts to move slowly and you look out the window, you’re not sure if you’re moving or what you’re looking at is moving, especially if you’re in a train yard and there are trains moving around you.

00:08:16:13 – 00:08:42:18

Lincoln Stoller

And the feeling that first comes to you is that you’re not moving and everything else is moving. And I think this is a metaphor for how people view the world. Our nervous systems try to root themselves in some sort of stability and see the world moving around us because it’s more useful to know where you are than where you aren’t.

00:08:43:20 – 00:09:08:08

Lincoln Stoller

And that extends to the way we think. So, you know, most people come to me, you know, and I’d say even socially, you know, to be is to be a friend, is sort of to be a therapist a little bit. And even when you’re just in social conversation, you’re looking at people like wondering, you know, who they really are.

00:09:08:08 – 00:09:42:14

Lincoln Stoller

And most people present their situation as them being rooted and situations moving around them. So part of my background is in neuro neurology, neurophysiology, neuro psychology. You know, the brain, how the brain works. And I think it was valuable that I spent a decade studying brain training, which is to say cognitive training, using the brain and looking at brainwaves.

00:09:43:00 – 00:10:08:04

Lincoln Stoller

And it’s not a very popular or a very deeply researched area, mostly because it’s sort of too complicated. You can do it easily enough, but knowing what you’re doing is hard. So what you see in that is very interesting because when you change a person’s brainwaves, you almost always get them to tell you that something’s happened in their world they don’t recognize a change in themselves.

00:10:08:16 – 00:10:33:22

Lincoln Stoller

So, you know, here’s a simple example of a person comes to you and they’re very kind of spaced out. You know, we recognize those people. They seem kind of dazed. They’re like they smelled too much pot or something. But for some people, that’s their normal state. They’re kind of a little slow on the uptake and they’ll tell you stories about how things came down on them that they struggled to get on with.

00:10:33:22 – 00:10:57:20

Lincoln Stoller

And and you get this picture that they’re kind of chasing after life, and then you can do brain training with them and you can speed up their attention and their reactive ness. And they will notice that they’ve changed. They’ll just say, Oh, the world slowed down a little and now I can catch the ball better. Or they won’t even say that.

00:10:57:20 – 00:11:18:02

Lincoln Stoller

They’ll say the ball was thrown more, thrown more slowly. They just people don’t recognize our own change, which on the flip side is that you don’t recognize your own deficiency. So the slow people don’t recognize that they’re slow, partly because they wouldn’t know otherwise. And you know, and this also goes like why to older people think the time goes faster.

00:11:18:22 – 00:11:49:16

Lincoln Stoller

Well, you know, time doesn’t go faster. It’s just them that are going slower or it’s their attention that is, you know, sort of clocking at a slower speed and I’m spending a lot of effort in trying to tell people to pay attention to their process of paying attention. So what I’m talking about, you know, become aware of how you’re aware, not what you’re aware of, but how you are aware.

00:11:49:23 – 00:12:26:18

Lincoln Stoller

I mean, sometimes it’s very sketchy. You know, if you look at a clock and watch the second hand, you’ll get a clear impression of how vague it is. You can barely keep up an irregular attention with anything. Your attention always drifts and your mind drifts and thoughts come in and out. And if you were to try to be regimented and focused and solitary in your attention, you can’t do it.

00:12:26:18 – 00:12:53:11

Lincoln Stoller

But it’s interesting. You can develop certain abilities. So if you’re a musician, you can develop the ability to keep time at the same time that you’re being creative and whimsical and, you know, flights of fancy. And another thing that I’ve done, which is useful and, you know, it’s actually gotten popular. Slacker up walking, you attach a rope to two trees and then you make it taut and then you try to walk across it.

00:12:54:01 – 00:13:26:00

Lincoln Stoller

That’s not that much different than, you know, staying upright or walking on the sidewalk. Well, it’s not it’s not qualitatively different. It’s quantitatively different. You have to be very focused on small movements at the same time that you have to be broadly aware of where the horizon is. So there are ways to develop other sensitivities to time and space through music, through balance, through physical activity.

00:13:26:00 – 00:14:02:23

Lincoln Stoller

And it becomes important when you start going into your subconscious and your emotions and the way you think. So if you still think that you’re normal, then it’s the world that’s weird. You haven’t really grasped the full range of what you can do. It’s very hard to appreciate your change of state of mind, which is why I work with Dream Work or, you know, the states of awareness and sleep and pre sleep and post sleep where your states of mind are a little more clearly changing.

00:14:04:06 – 00:14:35:00

Lincoln Stoller

So I tell people, you know, focus on your issues before you fall asleep. Then you’ll notice how it’s kind of difficult to get things into focus as you’re falling asleep because you’re sort of losing attention. And similarly, when you’re waking up, give yourself time. Don’t don’t be thrown into your wakeful state. You know, give yourself time to be aware of your change of state.

00:14:35:23 – 00:14:58:02

Lincoln Stoller

And after a while, you kind of wake up and you can feel yourself losing the images of your dreams. If you’ve had them. If you haven’t had dreams, you’ll feel yourself losing your sort of dreamy state of mind. And then try during the day when you’re supposedly aware to regain those dates, you know, to go back into a dreamy state of mind, daydream and give yourself time to daydream.

00:14:58:09 – 00:15:43:00

Lincoln Stoller

This is something I tell the people who have insomnia, which is a lot of people you might have listening to this who are high or high functioning people and under pressure of stress, they tend to have insomnia because they hold on to that stress and they’re not willing to let their problems rest for a while. And I say to those people who wake up at night, well, you know, be more cognizant about focusing on your problems now that you’ve woken up and then admitting that you’re going to stop focusing on them after a while, you know, you’re going to spend 4 hours fidgeting and tossing around.

00:15:43:11 – 00:16:04:01

Lincoln Stoller

You know, you’re going to spend 15 clear minutes, you know, aware and thinking about what’s bothering you. And then maybe you’ll get some ideas and you write them down. They were finished. And then you go back to sleep with the intention of letting it go, you know, be more intentional about how you’re managing your focus. And so this is what I got to know.

00:16:04:01 – 00:16:32:09

Lincoln Stoller

You remember where your question started, but you know something about focus. This is where I’m asking people to pay attention. And so there’s, you know, there’s focus in what you’re focusing on. There’s focus and how you focus. There’s issues of how much emotion you allow to rise up and you know who you’re speaking from. Are you speaking from an impatient point of view?

00:16:32:09 – 00:17:03:02

Lincoln Stoller

Are you speaking from a wistful or romantic, sad, depressed or aggressive point of view and realize that you have some control over this, or you should, but you don’t want to be tyrannical about it. In fact, you can’t be tyrannical because if you try to repress things in yourself, you can’t effectively, you know, they come back when you’re not, they sneak up on you.

00:17:03:12 – 00:17:05:02

Lincoln Stoller

There’s more of them than there are you.

00:17:05:10 – 00:17:34:08

Nick McGowan

Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting you bring up being aware of awareness and then everything else that goes around that. Even the activities of just taking that awareness of waking up in the morning, being aware that, hey, you’re still kind of in that sleepy state or being aware of falling asleep. I find it interesting there are times where I can sense that I’m about to fall asleep because I’m thinking weird shit, like just a weird thing where I’m like, Yeah, totally makes sense that the elf is sitting over there.

00:17:34:09 – 00:18:03:16

Nick McGowan

Cool. And it’s not like I’m fucked up out of my mind and trip and I’m just about to fall asleep. And when those things start to make sense and I’m like, No, it doesn’t make you’re about to go to sleep. Alright, cool. But being aware of that takes time to be aware of that. So if we look at the overall activity of being aware of things, it’s interesting that I think a lot of people miss out on their morning or evening being aware of stuff that helps you throughout the day.

00:18:03:21 – 00:18:20:09

Nick McGowan

Because when stuff’s happening throughout the day, like your meetings, the meetings, you got to go pick people up, you got to do this, get to do that, whatever the things are, we’re just being reactive for the most part because things are coming at us and if we’re not prepped or prepared to be able to do something with it, we don’t know how to be aware of that.

00:18:20:22 – 00:18:34:10

Nick McGowan

We’re kind of just being reactive and shit’s being thrown at us. So how do you walk people through that to be able to prep, to be aware of awareness, and then be able to actually have that superpower instead of having to deal with the shit just being thrown at them?

00:18:35:23 – 00:19:03:07

Lincoln Stoller

Well, you have to have some time. You have to give yourself some space. If you load your plate with being reactive, you know, fire putting out in all the time, you won’t have any chance to consider the world from anything but the point of view that’s coming at you, you know? So there’s a time for that, you know, you are needed for certain things and okay, hopefully you’re effective at it.

00:19:03:20 – 00:19:24:05

Lincoln Stoller

But of course if you’re not effective at it, you should deal with that. But in order to get a sense or a sort of a meta sense of who you are and how you’re being aware, you have to give yourself space to disengage from your perceptions, perceptions being what you think is coming at you and to, you know, see the elephant in the room.

00:19:24:14 – 00:19:47:07

Lincoln Stoller

So there are two ways I’d go about it. One is I, I ask people if they can to get in more involved with their dreams, which is a big a big nut to swallow so people can get involved with their dreams. In many regards. First of all, you might simply remember them. Even if you don’t remember them, you might remember how they left you feeling.

00:19:48:21 – 00:20:14:09

Lincoln Stoller

And if or to the extent which you have access to your nighttime dreams, I encourage people to start to understand them. And what you have to understand is that they are not narratives. People are always confused when they try to put them together in sequence and make sense of them. They’re not there to make sense and they’re not there to be put into sequence.

00:20:14:20 – 00:20:36:00

Lincoln Stoller

There are a bunch of associations that are falling out of your head or rising up from below, and it’s your mind that makes the narrative, you know, the elephant that’s in the taxi that is now in the clouds. And you’re trying to make sense of that. But the point is, in your reality, there are things that feel like elephants.

00:20:36:00 – 00:20:55:16

Lincoln Stoller

There are things that feel like taxis, and there are things that feel like clouds. You don’t have to put them together in any logical framework, but you should start to realize or recognize the things in the real world that trigger those. So what feels like the elephant and what feels like, you know, why does this fire feel like a fire?

00:20:55:16 – 00:21:17:17

Lincoln Stoller

Why does this event that you have to intervene feel so critical? What is it? What is it pulling out of you that’s causing you to be frantic or reactive? And what if you just threw it back and said, I don’t care? You know, it’s like Homer Simpson said, it’s not that I it’s not that I don’t understand you.

00:21:17:17 – 00:21:38:07

Lincoln Stoller

It’s that I don’t care about you. You know what other you know, we think that’s funny because I say, oh, well, that’s something a father would never say. But, you know, half the time our minds are off somewhere else and we don’t care 100%, you know, or we care in some other way, like, you know, why you’re bothering me and I wish I had some food or something.

00:21:39:21 – 00:21:59:15

Lincoln Stoller

So. So these associations are the things that I encourage people to pursue. So they are distracting, right? They take you away from the thing that’s right in front of you, but they determine how you’re going to think because where do your thoughts come from? You’re not really in control of where your thoughts come from. You just respond to you know, it’s like an automatic baseball machine.

00:21:59:15 – 00:22:16:15

Lincoln Stoller

They just your thoughts are just thrown at you and you’re trying to hit them and you’d say, Gee, we like it would be nice if they were good pitches. I could, you know, knock them all into the outfield. But you don’t really have control of the pitcher. The pitcher is your subconscious and it will throw you these curveballs that you miss.

00:22:17:23 – 00:22:45:14

Lincoln Stoller

So the thing is, instead of paying attention to the balls, pay attention to the pitcher. What are they trying to tell you with those strange balls that they’re thrown at you? You know, so you stop and you say, well, maybe it’s not about putting out this fire. Maybe it’s about thinking that it’s a fire or thinking that I’m me here and there, you know, and the position I’ve put myself into, you know what you know?

00:22:45:14 – 00:23:09:20

Lincoln Stoller

Well, you know, the way I raise my kids, I guess, is sort of like the way I wish I was raised is like total freedom. I let them do whatever they want and when they get fucked up, I say, Well, look at it, you know, why are you upset? And you know. Yeah, and it’s a strange world because kids on the Internet get thrown all kinds of crappy material.

00:23:09:20 – 00:23:44:15

Lincoln Stoller

Like like I know everything from pornography to, you know, things that are of low value material marketing. And what I did, I’m trying to end this right here. What I did as a as a kid was I watched television until I couldn’t stand it anymore because my parents weren’t there and neither were my siblings. And when I reached the point when I suddenly realized this is total crap, you know, 1950s reruns and game shows, I turned it off and I never turned it on again.

00:23:45:06 – 00:24:05:15

Lincoln Stoller

And I react to television like poison ivy, just like I can’t even be in the same room with a television. It just triggers me now because I spent, you know, endless years in those days, the TV days, which I can’t get back, you know? You know, you know, why can’t I remember what I did between the ages of five and ten?

00:24:05:15 – 00:24:29:06

Lincoln Stoller

Probably because I was watching television. You know what what total waste is like Librium or some sort of opiate anyway. So, so like to get out of that head is important, you know? And we think we’re in that head for some stupid reason, like necessity. And it’s not most of the time it’s not necessity, it’s just habit addiction that we’re talking about.

00:24:29:06 – 00:24:32:18

Lincoln Stoller

Addiction of thinking now. Addiction of addiction to your own ego.

00:24:33:17 – 00:25:05:08

Nick McGowan

Yeah. And your own ass kicking. I think certain people enjoy the beating they give themselves without having grace on themselves. Oh, it’s interesting that you have moved into throughout life the brain and then sleep and how it all relates to each other. And when you walk people through getting into sleep because it almost sounds like there’s a couple major pieces to it, there’s the priestly, there’s actual sleep, REM, you know, etc. and then coming out of that and like that whole that whole diagram.

00:25:05:22 – 00:25:24:13

Nick McGowan

But as you talk to people about getting into sleep and having their subconscious mind help them throughout sleep, what sort of tips would you give to somebody that wants to be able to start utilizing that as they as they start to go to sleep to tap into that subconscious?

00:25:24:13 – 00:26:01:13

Lincoln Stoller

I would say that emotions are key. People think that emotions are different than your intellect and that somehow your emotions, you know, they’re a different avenue or they’re a kind of a a swamp. And I would say that’s a misunderstanding. I say your emotions, summarize your thoughts. Your emotions are all your conclusions without any of your reasons. So it’s how you feel.

00:26:01:13 – 00:26:27:15

Lincoln Stoller

And then you sort of struggle to justify it. But it doesn’t really matter because it doesn’t matter how you justify your feelings. They’re going to be there anyway. And they were formed by your experiences and what you thought made sense, and then you’re left with the sort of nuggets that are your emotions. So I would say your emotions are the key to understanding how you where, where your thoughts come from, your thoughts come from, your emotions.

00:26:27:15 – 00:26:49:20

Lincoln Stoller

They don’t they’re not a template they don’t like. Stamp out your thoughts, your emotions. Don’t step out your thoughts, but they generate them in terms of how you pay attention. So, you know, you know, if you’re if you’re horny, then you will be attracted by whatever it is that arouses you. And you don’t have to think about it.

00:26:49:20 – 00:27:14:10

Lincoln Stoller

And if you’re hungry, you know, food will arouse you. And if you’re afraid, then fearful things will come to mind and your thoughts will follow along. So if you want to get a handle on your thoughts, go into your emotions and see what they are. Are you horny? Are you hungry? Are you needy? Are you fearful? And all the other things that you can think of.

00:27:15:10 – 00:27:54:20

Lincoln Stoller

And so I would tell people or I do tell people, but I don’t tell everyone because you have to work with what people are ready to hear. You know, they’re going to go in what direction they’re headed no matter what you tell them. So I would suggest to them that as they go to sleep, you know, as they’re sort of going into the veil of change that they review their feelings and that they try to call them up and be an ally to their feelings and stop being so dictatorial about saying, I’m going to think about this or I’m going, I mean, I should I should talk.

00:27:54:21 – 00:28:16:04

Lincoln Stoller

You know, I you know, I worry about money. I go to sleep. I say, I want money or I want success and this and that. And it’s like, hmm, well, what I really want is I want to feel good and I want to feel confident and secure. So what I really should be doing is thinking about thoughts that either make me feel confident, good and secure, or thoughts that don’t.

00:28:16:20 – 00:28:39:19

Lincoln Stoller

I say thoughts? I really mean feelings. Feelings that stimulate those kind of thoughts so that I’m sort of in the right ballpark when I fall asleep. So that rather than, you know, I want to be surfing the waves and not sort of playing in the puddles of my self-absorption because the waves of emotion are what’s going to drive the dreams.

00:28:40:15 – 00:28:59:08

Lincoln Stoller

And I would like the dreams to be consonant with my deeper needs. I think this as well. It gets complicated. Why don’t people remember dreams? How much of a dream do you remember? I mean, you should know or people should know that they’re dreaming about, you know, 3 hours a night and they’re remembering God, 30 seconds of a dream.

00:28:59:08 – 00:29:21:08

Lincoln Stoller

If they’re lucky, maybe a few minutes. So tremendous. Even if you’re good at dreaming, dream or recollection, you’re still missing 95% of them. So where are they going? You know, psychologist, they go or at least some psychologists think, incidental they do nothing. And that’s stupid because you’re right, your brain doesn’t waste all that, you know, all that power for nothing.

00:29:21:08 – 00:30:06:10

Lincoln Stoller

Most of your your energy goes into your brain, something, you know, like 95% of your glucose or energy creating molecules are spent in your brain. You’re not going to spend that, you know, dreaming about useless things anyway, getting in touch with your feelings, thinking about your thinking process. Oh, you know, I wanted to say this, just given your whole podcast orientation and the way psychology works, psychology mistakenly, in my view, separates therapy and coaching by saying therapy deals with your past, your trauma, and the issues that bother you and coaching deals with your goals and your future and your intentional actions.

00:30:06:10 – 00:30:19:11

Lincoln Stoller

And I say, Well, what a what a crock of shit. You know what person lives? A two different lives. I mean, it would be it would be Dr. what’s his name, you know, you know.

00:30:20:04 – 00:30:21:11

Nick McGowan

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

00:30:22:03 – 00:30:41:19

Lincoln Stoller

That’s right. Jekyll and Hyde. So, you know, we don’t want to live like that. And that’s a sick way to live. And and it’s true. People come to me with that sickness. They either come to me thinking they need therapy or they come to me thinking they need coaching. And, you know, I would love to get that idea out of their head.

00:30:43:04 – 00:31:14:22

Lincoln Stoller

But again, you got to work with what people, you know, you can’t go at a right angle to their momentum. You have to sort of say, well, okay, what in your dreams of the future and you’re dealing with your business environment, calls up your personal trauma and, you know, personality skills. And the other thing is, when you’re dealing when I’m dealing with a person who’s trying to reframe their past, I’m always trying to get them to focus on the future.

00:31:14:22 – 00:31:45:00

Lincoln Stoller

Like, what is why is this relevant? What is the purpose of this trauma? What is the lesson you can take? That’s positive? I mean, you mentioned that yourself, have some history of trauma and a lot of people with trauma and we all have some trauma, some a big drama, a struggle with what to do with it. You know, it’s like PTSD in the sense it’s bothersome and seemingly unhelpful.

00:31:46:04 – 00:32:03:17

Lincoln Stoller

And some people say, well, you got to go back and deal with that in detail. And I don’t really think so. I think you just deal with it as it’s useful. In fact, you don’t even the reason you don’t remember it is because a lot of the memories are not in a position to be useful at this point, and maybe they will be, maybe they won’t be.

00:32:04:01 – 00:32:24:16

Lincoln Stoller

And you don’t really care. I mean, you’re moving forward and you don’t really want to go back to the horrors of the past unless that would empower you. I mean, sure, maybe you could find it, you know, great sword that would, you know, cut through all kinds of things in the future. But and there’s the idea of gratitude and forgiveness where, you know, forgiveness is really not exonerating anybody.

00:32:24:16 – 00:32:29:03

Lincoln Stoller

It’s just forgetting the whole fucking thing. So it’s just not relevant anymore.

00:32:29:11 – 00:32:32:08

Nick McGowan

Coming to grips with it. Yeah, yeah.

00:32:32:08 – 00:32:52:07

Lincoln Stoller

I mean, in my case, my mother was sort of absent and I spent years and still spent time feeling rejected and neglected and part of my resolution is that I have to understand that she was just absent. She just was absent. It’s not that she didn’t pay attention to me is as she she couldn’t connect with the world, period.

00:32:52:07 – 00:33:11:02

Lincoln Stoller

And I shouldn’t get fucked up about that because like, that’s her problem and I can’t fix it. I was just, you know, there and I needed she couldn’t give and I didn’t understand because I thought it was normal. Right. I thought this was a normal world. Is this this bizarre cabinet of Dr. Caligari, world of mind?

00:33:12:19 – 00:33:31:04

Nick McGowan

Well, it’s interesting because you you kind of expect things as a kid where you in some ways don’t really have a right to expect things, but you expect that people are going to be a certain way because you see it outside of you. So if you grew up on a farm and your parents are nowhere to be around, then that’s just how it was.

00:33:31:04 – 00:33:53:12

Nick McGowan

And like, you never talk to anybody ever. That just would have been okay or you wouldn’t have been okay. You would have turned it into whatever you’re going to turn it into. I think sometimes we look around and go, Well, that’s weird. You guys have normal parents or you guys do normal things or you know, like you’re saying, you looking at it kind of the opposite of that, but it’s all the awareness, right?

00:33:53:21 – 00:34:27:14

Lincoln Stoller

I was very much benefited in my childhood by observing other people’s parents. That really started to show me that my world wasn’t there wasn’t really any normal because, like you said, you take your world for granted and these other people’s worlds. My friends were not like mine and I didn’t know of anybody at the time in my childhood whose parents I liked that much.

00:34:27:14 – 00:34:31:09

Lincoln Stoller

But, you know, they weren’t I couldn’t see any model parents. There were no model families.

00:34:31:22 – 00:34:33:09

Nick McGowan

Yeah, they all got shit they got to deal with.

00:34:34:04 – 00:34:37:00

Lincoln Stoller

Yeah. The less you know about them, the better they seem.

00:34:37:00 – 00:34:37:18

Nick McGowan

Yeah, exactly.

00:34:37:18 – 00:34:57:22

Lincoln Stoller

Ignorance is bliss. Yeah. Yeah, well, they all try to make it seem nice, but I don’t know if I was more insightful or I just spent more time looking, but I found these people pretty. Pretty damn weird. And I’m not even talking about the adult side of it. I’m just talking about as adults, they were probably really fucked up.

00:34:57:22 – 00:35:02:03

Lincoln Stoller

I mean, who knows? I didn’t. I’m just talking about the way they dealt with their kids.

00:35:02:10 – 00:35:21:21

Nick McGowan

Yeah. Oh, yeah. If that’s the only thing that you’re seeing. And now looking at it as an adult, you’d be like Shit if you were doing that with the kids. How the fuck were you with other humans and other people? Crazy. It’s. It’s interesting having that perspective and looking at things and just kind of looking at it from a third party perspective.

00:35:21:21 – 00:35:40:14

Nick McGowan

We’re just being a human watcher and just enjoying the utter chaos that people bring upon themselves at times and learning from that and then being able to do something with it. So I appreciate that you’re not only not only have you done something with it, but you’ve turned it into other things. You’ve turned it into passions that you have and some of the coaching or therapy that you do.

00:35:40:16 – 00:35:58:14

Nick McGowan

I’m right there along with you. I think it’s all the same thing. It’s just whatever people want to title it that helps them sleep, that’s fine. It’s about actually getting to the depths of stuff. So along those lines, what sort of advice would you give to somebody that’s on their path towards? Self-mastery?

00:35:58:14 – 00:36:34:10

Lincoln Stoller

Well, I think you have to decide what you want to do. There’s a certain amount of intention, there’s a certain amount of branching into are you going to be a materialist and take care of your basic needs and make them primary? Or are you going to be an idealist and try level up into a greater vision of what things could be and who you could be and, you know, we live in a materialistic society and the separation of church and state is kind of a reflection on that.

00:36:34:10 – 00:37:00:17

Lincoln Stoller

You know, state is practical, legal, material, financial, then church is spiritual and creative maybe. And, you know, that’s not what it’s supposed to be, but people sort of fall on those lines. And I think you have to blur those lines because as long as those lines are strong, definite, you’ll have a hard time crossing them and there’s no reason they should be mean.

00:37:00:19 – 00:37:27:16

Lincoln Stoller

As we talked about sleep, try to bring in the emotional content of your daily life and sit with yourself. You know, that may mean set some time aside because your context of life has not given you one. If you’re an executive, you probably don’t have anything on your schedule that says sit and meditate, you know, in isolation. But yeah, you should.

00:37:27:16 – 00:38:00:21

Lincoln Stoller

And, you know, I think that’s why people keep the door closed and they have secretaries to keep, you know, the noise down. But still you have to make the intention of being open. So this is one thing I do as a hypnotherapist. I almost always take people into a space where they don’t know what’s going on. So you understand that’s how, you know, you get into kind of a drifting, dreamy space and then you ask them to visualize stuff and then you take them into a place where they can’t see what’s going on.

00:38:01:07 – 00:38:23:05

Lincoln Stoller

You know, you fly up in the sky, you go around in a cave, you go underwater, something that doesn’t make sense. And I’ll do that sort of intellectually, since I’m a physicist too, I can always sort of talk, you know, science bullshit until your head is confused. And that’s a good place to be when you’re trying to find some new creative idea, because without confusion, there’s no novelty, right?

00:38:23:12 – 00:38:48:15

Lincoln Stoller

Everything is just ordered like a Swiss watch and generally you don’t want to do that because I don’t know. At least in our society, there’s a dearth of creativity. So becoming more creative, how do you be more creative? Basically by just giving your time to sort of fuck up and make mistakes and freely follow things that go nowhere.

00:38:49:20 – 00:39:15:23

Lincoln Stoller

And, you know, you’re basically just feeding fertilizer to your mind without the expectation. You know, as they say, you know, a good gardener doesn’t dig their vegetables up every half an hour to see how they’re growing. So you have to let this stuff marinate and ferment. So dreams do that. And the more you can get engaged with them and be resonance with them.

00:39:17:00 – 00:39:34:06

Lincoln Stoller

So what I do is like I try to continue into my day as much of the feelings as I wake up with. So if I wake up anxious or disquiet, I’ll let that be in my day and try to figure, Oh, why? Why am I having a good day? Why I’m having a bad day. Was things bothering me?

00:39:34:19 – 00:39:58:12

Lincoln Stoller

I don’t really get answers to those. I just want to give space. So this, this, this mistake that we can figure shit out. Well, you can’t figure shit out. You can only figure out very well formed problems. That’s what reason the logic do. But the important problems, the ones that are transcendent, they’re not well formed. Maybe they’ll never be true.

00:39:58:13 – 00:40:42:10

Lincoln Stoller

Maybe they can’t even be transformed by their nature. So then you have to be that kind of person who’s not well formed to be on the same page. So I, I get a lot of traction once you get somebody to a point where they’re thoroughly confused and they’re out of their element, then you can say, What’s the most valuable thing that’s happening in your mind and heart now that you’ve disengaged from all your plans and strategies and problems, and then find that personality and keep in touch with it so that it becomes your ally, you know?

00:40:42:10 – 00:41:08:01

Lincoln Stoller

And it’s not connected to any of your solutions and problems and histories and traumas. It’s transcended. It’s a higher self. And if you’re quiet and you’re not your usual, you know, bull in a china shop, it will be present or it can be present. So I think that answers your question, even though I don’t remember the question exactly something about how, you know, to transcend.

00:41:09:14 – 00:41:36:04

Nick McGowan

Along those lines, basically that as people travel along their path aiming toward self and ultimately discipline. So being able to use that is huge. And I think it also has the hint of what we were talking about earlier with the awareness and being aware of awareness. All of this doesn’t matter if you’re not aware of what’s happening. If you have no idea what’s going on, then none of it’s going to actually matter because you can’t do a fucking thing about it.

00:41:36:14 – 00:42:05:20

Lincoln Stoller

The last thing to be important is that being aware of awareness means you’re not really aware. Your way is the language is screwed up here. You’re aware of something that you can’t pin down. It’s a non rational, non reasonable, illogical form of awareness. It’s a perceptive, receptive and associative form of awareness. It doesn’t have a goal, it doesn’t have a conclusion and it doesn’t have a boundary.

00:42:06:12 – 00:42:17:06

Lincoln Stoller

It feels lost. And that’s where it that’s authentic. A lot of people don’t like feeling that. I understand that. But that’s the fertile territory.

00:42:18:11 – 00:42:30:00

Nick McGowan

Oh, what a beautiful way to end that like it. It’s been a pleasure to have you on. I really appreciate the time, appreciate the insight and wisdom. Tell us, where can people find you and where can they connect with you, please?

00:42:30:00 – 00:42:57:10

Lincoln Stoller

Yes, I’m publishing books. I need more subscribers to my free blog. Please subscribe to my free blog. It’s at my website. Mind, strength, balance. That’s all one word mind strength balance dot com. And there should be plenty of buttons and links to subscribe. There’s a free blog monthly and so forth. Please subscribe and go visit that and write me.

00:42:57:10 – 00:43:04:02

Lincoln Stoller

And there’s tons of writing and resources there. One strength balance dot com. Thanks.

00:43:04:02 – 00:43:13:10

Nick McGowan

Perfect Will. Thank you. I’ve looked through the website. Everybody go check it out and all that’s going to be in the show notes, too. So again, thank you, Mike, and I appreciate your time.

00:43:13:10 – 00:43:16:17

Lincoln Stoller

Thanks, Nick. I really appreciate it.

00:43:16:17 – 00:43:39:09

Nick McGowan

Another great conversation on today’s episode of The Mindset and Self-mastery show. So what did you think of the show today? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Check out the Instagram or Facebook page to join the conversation. If you enjoyed the episode, please jump over to iTunes and subscribe rate and leave a five star review. It helps us be found and helps others be healed.

00:43:39:21 – 00:44:00:13

Nick McGowan

If this episode opened your eyes, made you think or smile at all, then I’m sure it’ll do the same for your friends. Check out the show notes for more info from today’s episode and check out other episodes on the Mindset and Self-mastery show dot com as. Well, as our YouTube channel, just go to YouTube and look up the mindset and self-mastery show.

00:44:01:04 – 00:44:19:16

Nick McGowan

Thanks again to our incredible guests for being real, honest and vulnerable with us today. I’d like to thank our sponsors and most importantly, I’d like to thank you, thank you for hanging out with us today. Your support means the world to us. And with that, remember, your mindset matters and so do you.