I Faced Pain on Purpose, Here's What It Did To Me

So last week I attended this crazy retreat where I consented to people beating on me (literally) and leading me through hyperventilation exercises as well as sensory deprivation and cold plunges among other things (like stabbing toward people with real knives). I'm not making this up. My good friend Erik kept bringing this retreat up, lead by a guy named Bob Gardner. It was pretty wild. Also… it was pretty life changing. Unfortunately, it was 'the last one' he has planned. And no, I don't think that was a marketing tactic to boost enrollment.

I got on a bus at the Salt Lake airport with a pen and paper 'eulogy' I had written about myself, as instructed, and waved hello to 30 complete strangers. We then read our eulogy to a few different people, swapping seats and they read us theirs. One of the guys I eulogy-swapped with was Nick. A dude in his mid 40's (like me), married, kids, etc. Nick is into disc golf and Nick and I were both a bit cynical about what we were going to. I mean, what kind of sadistic sicko charges people thousands of dollars, promising 'healing' through pain? I was ready with my safe word "Stop!"

I felt relieved now knowing Nick I had a friend equally skeptical about this whole thing. (more about Nick later)

First thing we did is burn the eulogy. 'But wait… mine's not all bad and I was sorta proud of some my writing' I thought.

The first 24 hours

The first 24 hours felt like a mini lifetime. It's the most densely packed transformative 24 hours I can ever remember experiencing. It's hard to summarize it succinctly. The first night there we engaged, voluntarily, in something Bob calls Stick Work, or Russian Stick Therapy. Here's Bob talking about it and showing it. It's basically using wooden sticks, whips, swords, fist pounding, antler horns, and other instruments to both unlock trauma in the body and simultaneously provide evidence to our soft selves we can handle painful things without any real threat to our survival.

I've never seen so many grown men sob in my life. Multiple people said "I don't know why I am crying right now." It wasn't a cry from excruciating pain. It was an emotional release like I had never witnessed before. The next morning Bob took us through a guided breathwork exercise that was equally intense and which surfaced, for me, a lot of emotion as we reflected on different stages of our lives. That session ended with a visceral imagined experience of meeting both our parents, when they were 5 years old 😭. The experience was intensely vivid for me, cathartic and healing, strangely real. Something shifted within me about my relationship with my mother in a way I can not describe.

Bob said something interesting as we sat and talked together about what we were experiencing. He said "We don't learn from experience. We learn by reflecting on experience."

The Prayer

The sensory deprivation part of the experience was 20 hours with no light, no sound, no food and no water. I spent part of that time sleeping, part of it reviewing memories from my life and their connected judgements and emotional weights. And part of the time praying.

In that darkness, stripped of all distractions, a prayer came to me. Not the kind of prayer I usually pray—asking for things, confessing sins, reciting familiar words. This was different. It was a series of 5 questions I found myself asking over and over:

• God, are you really there?

• Do you know me?

• Am I yours?

• Do you love me?

• Do you love me unconditionally?

The answer I got for all 5 questions was 'Yes' and then I felt a love for God. Then I reflexively remembered love is a verb and when I wondered how I could love God the words came to mind "Feed my lambs."

Feed my lambs. Not "start a ministry" or "preach sermons" or "fix everyone." Feed my lambs. The lost ones (that’s all of us). The searching ones. The ones asking the same questions I was asking in that dark room.

Living Life on Purpose

This experience left me wrestling with a question that's followed me for years. Last newsletter I expressed the idea dissatisfaction may be a super power we can wield to live a more meaningful life. I got quite a few email responses with feedback and thoughts. I loved it all. Thank you. Keep that stuff coming. Selfishly, it's one of the primary reasons I'm doing this: to have my thinking, my beliefs challenged, clarified, refined. One of the comments came from my friend Sam Eddinger, who I recently talked live with about his leadership journey. Sam asked me if I thought Jesus was dis-satisfied. That caused me to pause. Here was my reply to Sam:

Have you Settled?

I once asked a guy in my church when he sort of settled into his career path and stopped wondering, dreaming, hoping 'what he would do when he grew up'. He said 30. I'm 47 and I still don't know. No way am I content where I'm at. I'm grateful but not content.

Some would say this restlessness is ungrateful, that I should learn to be satisfied with what God has given me. There's wisdom in that—Paul did write about learning contentment in all circumstances. But I think there's a difference between gratitude for what is and complacency about what could be. Maybe the dis-satisfaction isn't a flaw to fix but a calling to follow.

Ray Dalio described the two stages of life as:

• Struggling and Achieving

• Savoring

I'm more free than I've ever been in my life. I have more financial abundance and time freedom than ever but I feel squarely in the 'struggling and achieving' stage of life. My best guess is I'll move more to savoring around age 68.

Where are you? No judgement here. I'm just curious. Is it a personality type to be restless, discontented, striving and yearning, almost painfully-so, for something better. Is it an addiction? Is it healthy? Is it what we are all meant to do here on this spinning blue ball?

What Happened to Nick?

Remember Nick, my cynical disc golf buddy from the bus? Two days after we got home, I got this text from him:

This is the same guy who was making jokes about "what kind of sadistic sicko" we were about to meet. Something shifted in both of us during those few days. We went from strangers bonded by skepticism to brothers willing to walk through whatever comes next together.

That's what happens when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to face pain, to ask the hard questions in the dark.

The Calling

I feel called to use my gifts and talents in the service of others. With the clients of my property management business this means making it easy to build wealth through real estate because good people use wealth to do more good in the world. That's part of my calling. Another part I believe is to stand for doing the right, harder, thing. Not to take shortcuts in life or business and hopefully inspire others to do the same.

The third part, which I am newly learning I believe, is to study the great minds, learn as much as I can, and share it with the rising generation of young men, many of whom feel lost in this cruel world. Feed my lambs. Maybe you're one of them. Maybe you know one of them.

There. That's me bearing my soul a bit. Here’s a confession. I’ve been worried about writing and sharing this. It’s not directly about building a property management business and part of me is worried I’ll let people down if I don’t meet their expectations (something I confronted at last week’s retreat). But to me, this stuff really is all about building a property management business, and work and life. These are root issues that drive our behavior and when we focus on the root we are using a longer lever, getting more out of life and doing more good.

I reminded myself I'm not writing to be liked by the masses. I'm writing to the one person, possibly like myself 10 years ago, that can benefit from a little glimpse into the future. The future of building something that matters for reasons that matter and done the right way.

So here's my question for you: What would change if you believed—really believed—that your restlessness isn't a flaw to fix but a calling to follow? What lambs is God asking you to feed?