Jonathan Chia is the co-founder of Reality Center, philanthropist, trauma work practitioner, director of photography, and an army combat veteran.
When trauma happens, we now know that it stops the neuroplasticity growth. And oftentimes if people don't get any help, it just becomes their identity. And that's when it starts affecting. When you're in fight or flight mode, 24/7 days a week.
When you integrate the trauma through intentionality mindfulness, it becomes growth. One of the contributing characteristics of PTSD is ontological Shock. Post traumatic stress does lead to post traumatic growth through work.
After getting out of the military, he started his own creative agency and production company. He provides therapy every single day for people dealing with deep trauma. He says staying busy, staying inspired, surrounding yourself with an amazing team is key to success.
The fine line between escapism and staying busy is very blurred, especially for high achievers like you. To me, healing means improving our well being so that we can become the best versions. Even us, as practitioners and people that are making new technologies, we're seeking to continue to heal ourselves.
A lot of kids of the Vietnam vets almost had some issues or in depression because their dad never spoke to them about these things. The very body of armor they created to protect themselves is the barrier that are limiting their connections with their loved ones. And that loneliness is the root of depression.
Jonathan: Why is change possible? Because any sort of change requires recalibrations of your reality. When you're put in these extreme situations where it's either sink or swim, I think that's when you'll find the best of yourself. If you can really sit with that discomfort and move through it, you can change.
How do you get unstuck emotionally? How do you take off the trauma armor?
Jonathan Chia is the co-founder of Reality Center, philanthropist, trauma work practitioner, director of photography, and an army combat veteran.
Jonathan's therapeutic efforts with the veterans and PTSD communities have been covered by LA Times, Fox 11, Groomed LA, LA Weekly, and Stars & Strips, to name a few.
Jonathan lost 16 of his military battles in Iraq and lost two of his best friends and nearly 100 combat veterans in his unit from drug overdoses and suicide after returning home. Jonathan and the Reality Center team are working actively with the Department of Mental Health and Veterans Affairs Hospitals to expand their therapy effort, which utilizes proprietary bilateral biofeedback sound wave technology, across Los Angeles and beyond to treat those suffering from PTSD.
Expect to learn about why it's important to take off the trauma armor, how cannabis treats trauma, Reality Center's proprietary sound wave technology, the power of post-traumatic growth, how to get unstuck emotionally, and more.
Let's get this started.
Keywords: PTSD, PTSD Treatment, Post-Traumatic Growth, Reality Center, Therapy for Veterans, Laurence Fishburne, Cannabis Healing, Bilateral Biofeedback Sound Wave Technology, Unstuck Emotionally, and Discover More.
Sponsor: https://www.realitymgmt.com/
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Show Notes
Jonathan’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanchia00/
Reality Center Website: https://www.realitymgmt.com/
Reality Center Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/realitycenter/
LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2023-02-17/tripping-without-drugs
LA Weekly: https://www.laweekly.com/the-reality-center-shifting-the-reality-of-mental-health/
Fox LA: https://www.foxla.com/video/1224036
Groomed LA: https://groomed-la.com/reality-center-2/
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Discover More is a show for independent thinkers by independent thinkers, with an emphasis on mental health. Are you looking for practical mental health insights? Let’s get this started.
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Thank you for Discovering More with us!
When trauma happens, your nervous system takes a snapshot of that trauma and stores it somewhere as electrical signals in your body. The good things that happen to you make you feel happy and excited and inspired. But the negative electrical signals, if you have that suit of armor on as we talked about, and you just bury those electrical signals wherever they were stored in your body deep down inside and you don't let those flow, you don't talk about it, you don't right about it.
It'll start actualizing and the stuff wrong with your body most of the time, stress and anxiety, not sleeping, but on one side, cancer. Welcome to discover more. My name is Benoit Kim, an abstract thinker turned aspirational psychedelic psychotherapist.
Today's conversation with a combat veterans turned trauma work practitioner will teach you how to get unstuck emotionally by learning how to take off the trauma armor. Jonathan Chia is a co founder of the Reality Center, philanthropist, DP, and an army combat veteran. Jonathan's therapeutic efforts with the veterans and PTSD communities have been widely covered by La Times, Rolling Stones, Fox Eleven News, and La Weekly, to name a few.
Expect to learn about why it's important to take off the trauma armor, reality Center's proprietary biofeedback sound wave technology, the power of post traumatic growth, how to get unstuck emotionally, and much, much more. Before the episode, here is the sponsor of the week. I am always on the lookout for cutting edge healing modalities and I want to tell you about Reality Center.
Reality center is a wellness therapy facility based in Santa Monica, California, and it utilizes proprietary bilateral sensory resonance technology that the cofounder Don Estes published in 1990. Their sound wave technologies activate the same parts of the brain which get stimulated by deep meditative and psychedelic states, except this experience is entirely substance free. As a result, this elevated state creates brain heman sphere, synchronization and rapidly resets your nervous system.
It is also known as hemisync in neuropsychology and this helps with nervous system dysregulation, which causes sleep disturbance, anxiety, depressions and other health challenges. Last month, I tried out their cutting edge modality and wow. Speaking of discovering more mental health, go visit their website@realitymanagement.com,
that's realitymgmt.com, or email them at info@realitymanagement.com to book your first session today with the $50 discount.
Now please enjoy my deep dive with a fellow army veteran and plant medicine practitioner, Jonathan Chia. Discover More discover More is a show for independent thinkers by independent thinkers. Jonathan, as a veteran, I thank you for your service on and off the battlefield and welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, brother. I think there's a lot of cross sections with veterans or even our parents who are immigrants because I feel like a lot of our older generations, they have to create and build up calluses to protect them from lifelong wounds and trauma with immigrations, refugees or wars. I usually reference that as the building up the suit of armor, right? That when that first traumatic thing happens to you.
You put on that suit of armor so it never happens to you ever again and your hands are up. And it's good to be to have that suit of armor on, to sort of be on a high level of awareness, but most of the time not. And that's when it starts affecting.
When you're in fight or flight mode 24/7 days a week, year after year, that's when it starts having a very big toll on your body and it starts out as stress and anxiety, but leads to things like cancer. And I feel like oftentimes what allowed us to feel safe with the suit of armor metaphorically is a very same armor that prevents us from seeking help when you need it the most. Absolutely agree.
So what does healing mean to you, Jonathan? And why is this such an important topic to you? I think some of the most important healers of these modern times and especially that are pushing these new movements aren't really doctors and nurses clinicians because they're working every single day, they're dealing with all the people's problems. And oftentimes you don't get to go and moonlight and just go and try all the new things that are coming out right. You're pretty much a couple of years behind from what is the new modern science, right? And this is why I tell people veterans are such a pivotal piece in this new modern mental health movement, is because we went to war.
Most of us in this post 911 vets from three to nine, we got back and most of us were on 100% disability or we were using our GI bill to go back to school. And it was at the time where cannabis was rising up and finally removing that first layer of stigma where it was just everybody was talking about it in their homes. Coming off the opioid movement, I think it it helped a lot of people.
But when veterans get back, we sort of had a little bit of time to moonlight and try some of these new modalities, starting with things like yoga and meditation and sound baths, but leading on to equestrian therapy and hanging out with wolves that have been rescued at wolf rescue or golfing with meditation. All these amazing things that are experiential based, but they're also community based. So you're telling your story, you're talking to other people, you're hearing what worked for other people have been some of the best routes for healing, especially for veterans.
I think word of mouth stays as the best timeless marketing avenue because word of mouth comes its trust and proximity as much as the modern marketing machine starts up with for psychedelics and how it's been for cannabis, it's not the silver bullet for everybody, right? And that's why we encourage people and we'll tell people to come into the center. This is not for everybody. This is not the silver bullet.
This is just a tool, and a toolbox of a bunch of tools that are out there. And hopefully when they come into the center especially, that they're inspired to go and try some of these other things that are in the toolbox that are at their disposal most of the time. So you're saying there is not a single blue pill that will magically eradicate all your problems and concerns and stresses? You mean red pill, but not often.
It's a cocktail of a bunch of different things that become your lifestyle and your habits on a daily basis. And oftentimes I think the coolest part is just the journey. You trying these things that you never thought you would ever do.
I had a woman from Texas in there the other day, just went through a divorce, and she looked at me and she says, I don't think I'll ever do psychedelics. I said, why? She was like, oh, just how I was raised and how I grew up and what my friends think. I said, what if it actually helps you? So I think a community is a big part and component of your mission statements, who you are, the grassroots campaign, the initiatives you do in La and beyond.
I want to ask you this very vast questions, and please take this where you see fit. Can you speak to the power of grassroots effort and why the power of people must be at the center of all changes? And the reference I want to make, as we spoke briefly before recording, is Operation Outreach is an initiative that started by the Veterans Administrations in the 1970s and 80s after a lot of anti war Vietnam veterans, combat veterans. Who came back who were often distinguished and they started to advocate for shell shock or PTSD, which was known as neurosis and hysteria at the time because hysteria was originated from females back in the that ultimately allowed in.
The 80s for the entire departments of veterans, administrations and psychiatry to officially recognize PTSD as an actual mental diagnosis based on post traumatic stress. And that was all possible because of the grassroots campaign. I think it all starts with a small story, oftentimes somebody that's had an amazing story of change.
Then when they start telling that story, it starts inspiring other people, and oftentimes in the cannabis industry. I'm on the board of the Veteran Cannabis Group, and some of the best videos to change hearts and minds are the videos of with the pistol in their mouth about to commit suicide. Then that one thing was the catalyst that changed their life.
Then you have their family, their friends, their coworkers to back up that it completely changed their lives. You can't deny those things. At the end of the day, you can't make a commercial saying those things didn't happen from a pharmaceutical standpoint or whatever.
Lobby is trying to hush some of these plant medicines do you feel like the power of plant medicine and cannabis? We can go into cannabis a little bit deeper is as we talked about, where aside from Colorado, California, Washington states, cannabis remains to be still highly controversial in a lot of regions. And I don't use the term marijuana because it implies a stigma against the Hispanic community, historically speaking. Thank you.
Thank you. Right? Yeah. When I first heard cannabis, I thought, what a pretentious terminology? And actually learned because it's a medical term.
But just a quick reference. The history of illegalizations of cannabis comes down to historical and socioeconomic oppressions against Hispanics historically in the United States. Like, can you just talk about bro stroke or in details? Why is it so effective? Why it can be a life changing substance for so many when utilized intentionally and mindfully? Yeah, I think with cannabis, once again, I'll start out that it's not for everybody, just like psychedelics or other modalities.
But when you go through trauma, once again, your body's in this heightened state. It's basically turned on, flipped on, fight or flight mode. And cannabis allows you to get into that parasympathetic, which is the more relaxed and inspired mode.
It allows that trigger to be turned off a little bit for some people. And when that trigger is turned off, you can also sleep better. Most veterans get pretty bad sleep because our nervous system is heightened.
We have hyper arousal. We have racing thoughts. We're checking things, making sure things are secure.
Right. We just continue with our training pretty much. It's really, really hard to shut off.
And it's good sometimes, like I said, but oftentimes not when you're just with your family at your house. And so when trauma happens, your nervous system takes a snapshot of that trauma and stores it somewhere as electrical signals in your body. The good things that happen to you make you feel happy and excited and inspired.
But the negative electrical signals, if you have that suit of armor on, as we talked about, and you just bury those electrical signals wherever they were stored in your body deep down inside, and you don't let those flow. You don't talk about it, you don't write about it, you don't work out, you don't do modalities. You're not on this mission.
It'll start actualizing and the stuff wrong with your body most of the time, stress and anxiety, not sleeping, but on one side, cancer. And so cannabis is one of those modalities where it's safe, it's effective, it's very cost effective. Almost anybody has access to it for the most part.
And it can quickly take you from a sympathetic mode to the parasympathetic with almost little harmful side effects, maybe that you want to sleep a little bit or you're hungry. And especially on the ingesting it side, which is the more medicinal side to take things, because obviously smoking things can affect your lungs. And so the more technology gets better, to process and refine.
And the better testing gets, the safer it's going to be for you, ultimately at the end of the day. And education is a big thing that we do at the Veteran Cannabis Group is going from city to city, throwing educational events, trying to partner with people. Like the last one we did was in Phoenix, Arizona.
I threw like a 24 hours cannabis educational sort of social party out there. But I partnered with the American Legion in downtown Arizona. They're very receptive.
Partnered with weed maps. And so Weed Maps gave me a bunch of money to throw the event. I just gave it to them, and I said, why don't you create a safe space so when I leave here, you guys can have meetings every Wednesday or every Saturday, and you can bring in all the local cannabis people, entrepreneurs.
And they can educate these veterans on where to get it, how to use it, how to do things themselves. And that's what we've been doing for the last six years. Pretty much.
I think the best way I heard about the ability for cannabis to integrate certain insights because psychedelics as a reference is like strapping a GPS system on a rocket ship. You know it's going somewhere, but you have no idea how rapid acceleration is going, whereas cannabis is driving like a faster car that you know it works. You're traversing further into the healing missions or healing journey and I think it allows you to integrate and retain certain insights.
Not as powerful as psychedelic does, but as you said, it's a more mellow and manageable experience for many because psychedelics is very intense and THC is just one part of the cannabis plant that we're investigating and using right now. We're in clinical trials, 125 veteran clinical trial for CBGA for sleep, right? And they'll say if you move the needle a little bit, maybe we can get it approved for actual veteran access through the VA on the federal level. And so the people that we were working with, they wanted to take THC up the hill and we said, hey, let's use this non psychoactive compound, let's see if it helps with sleep and anxiety and let's try to get that across the finish line first.
And let's start small grassroots to tie this back into the grassroots. Let's start small the little grassroots, let's do some clinical trials, let's get some big partners and let's move that into the back door and that'll open the door for other cannabinoids, other testing, other funding for that stuff that will eventually lead to THC hopefully being funded at the federal level. We're really good friends with Dr.
Suicily who got the $50 million grant from the DEA to do cannabis research. But the powers to be have been trying to sort of chop her out the legs at every turn from the banking system to the trial data not coming out. So there's definitely a lot of people that don't want plant medicine to come into the forefront of people's minds in modern medicine.
That's actually the perfect segue and also grassroots pun intended. Grass but excuse my dad jokes, but can you tell me more about digital therapy and the technology that Reality Center become well known for through La Weekly? A lot of the media coverages lately. I'm not asking you to create a neurobiology class per se, but just some of the proprietary information without the proprietary reveal, but some of the bilateral sound wave, how that replicates EMDR effect and anything in between.
Yeah. So, the reality center in Santa Monica, California we are a sensory wellness center. It's basically a multi sensory music therapy center is basically what we do.
And we use proprietary light, sound and vibration that we've synchronized together. And we have multiple different form factors from sort of portable massage tables to our flagship device, which is the Wave table. That's a fluid filled mineral bed with really big transducers built in the bottom.
There's transducers to your feet. We put a transducer at your heart. Then we put headphones on you, then Led lights over your face.
And the Led lights allow us to synchronize your brain hemispheres hemisync. And the synchronized vibration allows our clients to feel something sometimes for the first part in a long time. And the music allows you to sort of go on this sometimes spiritual, but maybe intense, maybe psychedelic like journey.
So what are some of the more remarkable transformational experiences? I know the word transformation is diluted in 2023, but some of the experiences you've witnessed, either from a skeptic to a believer or just seeing some very profound healing process unfolding in real life. I think since we opened the doors in January of last year, we were creeping up on probably around maybe 1000 people. Through the doors, I've seen a gauntlet of amazing transformational journeys.
And the wild thing, it's within half an hour, an hour each time. But one amazing story that really sticks out. We had a sheriff who was 30 years on the force, lost her husband, was actually murdered on the force about six years ago.
And she came in very guarded, had that suit of armor on and had a really good session. She was relaxed. That's the first layer of what we do.
And she revealed to us afterwards that since her husband died, she's never felt him. He's never came to her in a dream. Feathers never fallen, birds never landed on her shoulder.
She's never got a sign that his energy is still out there. And that's when people are still attached to the grieving process, when they just feel like they're gone and they're not there anymore and they're not with them. But that's not true.
We know that. And so after she was telling us that, we all go home. And I'm telling my fiance about the story the next morning.
And she also told us she hasn't slept through the night in the last six years, not one time. And as I'm telling my wife this, she texts. I see texts from her, and it's all, like, exclamation points, and I've never seen, like, ten rows of exclamation points before I actually got to the text part, and she said, Jonathan, you're not even going to believe this.
I slept through the night the first time in six years. Not only did I sleep through the night, I dreamed. Not only did I dream, I dreamt about my husband.
And I saw him, and he looked happy, and he said, I love you. And I'm, like, trying to get the rest of this out, reading the text messages and telling my fiancee, and I'm just, like, in tears, like, trying to get the rest of the story out that we could give somebody something so amazing in a short amount of time and exactly what she needed, right, to sort of calm her heart. And oftentimes when you're grieving, you maybe drink or you do drugs and you run to these other things that are going to temporarily make you feel better, but ultimately it makes you feel worse when all that stuff wears off.
And that's what's so cool about the Reality Center, that you can go to these places without having to do anything. You just lay there and the only thing you have to do is breathe and think of happy things and those times with that person, and maybe it can take you there and put you right back next to them. And another story sort of playing on that.
A veteran that comes through quite often for treatment and has recommended a lot of amazing people that have came through that really needed it. He lost one of his best friends on a mission that he was supposed to go on. When that happens, especially as a military operator, you feel the deepest guilt that maybe you should have been there and not them or what you have done to have them still be here.
And oftentimes you're just looking at pictures of their family that are trying to survive years later, and you're just like your heart is just still torn that maybe they could have been here. So that happens with a lot of military brothers and sisters that we have that survivor's guilt that we could have done something differently that day. And so I remember as soon as we started the session, just tears willowing all over.
Then I hear him go, Billy, is that you? And I'm like, It's just me in the room with Billy. Yeah. And I'm like, we got Billy in the room with us today.
And I sort of understood what was going on, that he was talking to one of his buddies. And I ran outside and went to go ask his wife. I said, hey, who's this guy? And she was like, that's his buddy, that he lost on a mission years ago that he deep survivors guilt for.
And after the session, he's just talking to him clear his day during the session. And after the session, he sits up. I go sit next to him like I do after most sessions, and he's crying, I'm crying.
And he's like I bring his wife in to give him a hug, and he goes, Babe, I saw him clear his day. He goes, that mother. He wrote USA in red, white and blue with like a sparkler or something.
And he got to be next to his buddy and to tie that all back around. When you feel their energy, especially having, like, survivors guilt or having some your heart torn that it was your loved one, it lets you let go of that a little bit and sort of get a little second time back and appreciate those times that you had with them and lets you just let go and shed a little bit of that. That's beautiful.
I appreciate you sharing as suicide prevention is one of my specialty concentration as a veteran. And as you know, the suicide prevention landscape has been largely scant and unchanging the last few decades, which I think your work and many of the great advocates and people out there are doing amazing work. And I do see hope because it comes down to hope.
And survivors remorse is very, very difficult because Dr. Brandy Brown, her idea of guilt versus shame, where guilt, when unaddressed over time, becomes shame. And shame is identity based and guilt is action based and shame is hard to unlearn and unprogram, whereas guilt, you can move through it.
We my team wrote a ten page paper for an accelerator to get into the VA. It was called Mission Daybreak. And it was how our they're basically calling upon technologies, entrepreneurs to help stop suicide, right? Suicide prevention technologies and therapies and as we were writing that paper, we realized out of our research that the reason why veterans are committing suicide isn't because of their incident itself.
It's not because I saw my budy blow up or I had to shoot and kill somebody and take somebody's life. Why I'm committing suicide, it's when you get back, it's the prolonged exposure to those symptoms. And the symptoms are start out as stress and anxiety, then lead to not sleeping.
Then everything just starts sort of going downhill from there. And so that's why even the people that are trying to tackle sleep in the veteran community or people that don't sleep, you can't tackle sleep unless you're stopping the stress and anxiety and the hyper arousal and all those things that are stopping you from sleeping. So if you just try to tackle sleep in the beginning, it's not going to be effective if you're not taking out these couple few and that's why our technology works so well, is because it stops in moments.
Your stress and anxiety takes you from fight or flight to relaxed. And once again, the reason why most ailments with people, especially in America, is due to stress and anxiety. I don't want to put a percentage on it, but a very, very high percentage.
And especially with Dr. Mark Hyman's research with Foo fixed with the GI gut brain connections, like stress is single handedly the biggest predictors for future health index and outcome, because, as you said, stress leads to cancer, sleep issues, anxiety, depressions, heart disease. Delicious.
It's a very non exhaustive list. It starts putting pressure on everything, your mind, body, soul, your organs, your relationships, your family, everything. And like IBS irritable bowel syndrome, the number one contributing factor is stress, period.
So it's very difficult. And of course, capitalistic America, stress is constant recently with all this mass shootings and atrocity just happening way too frequently. Right.
But I think that's why it's important to do the work, because suffering is part of life, and we have to take ownership above our health and to get better, feel better, so we can show it better to the ones we love. Yeah. Most things that you're going through right now and in your past happen for a very specific reason, and that's to change you or forge you into the person that you're ultimately meant to be.
Yeah, I agree. Pain teachers, we're on the same frequent wavelength, so pun intended. So I want to geek out very briefly.
So I want to talk about post traumatic stress and post traumatic growth, which is what you just alluded to, right? When you integrate the trauma through intentionality mindfulness, it becomes growth. And it's very profound. Every single amazing folks out there, they've gone through some atrocities and difficulties, but they're able to reforge who they are and become this evolved version.
And of course, we're not here to say, oh, trauma is good for you. We're not saying that. But clinically, post traumatic stress does lead to post traumatic growth through work.
So one of the contributing or attributing characteristics of PTSD is ontological shock. Ontology is a study of reality or perceptions of that. And the reason why a lot of veterans have PTSD is because ontologically, they're shocked from the shattered reality of the war zone into this day to day civilian life.
And the skill set you learned, the security premise, everything you learned, the skills that you cultivated are no longer relevant in this day to day. And it's hard for people to reintegrate their realities into this reality from the warfare. And Psychedelic also utilizes ontological.
Shock. This is shock that a lot of people experience. Eric bad trip.
Right? Because their reality is literally shattered by this powerful molecule. I'm sharing this because I want to ask you about your own post traumatic growth that you've gone through, because every stories and every responses you're sharing, I sense this homage that you're paying for the veterans and the battles that you lost on the battlefield or outside the battlefields. And I feel like every grassroots campaign you're working towards, you're paying homage to these people you care deeply about.
So what has been your post traumatic growth journey looking like? Personally, when I first got out and I moved down to California, and I was just so inspired by just arriving in Los Angeles and just being free, it's like I just got out of jail, like a little bit of that type of feeling, right? I was just, like, happy to be down here. I moved here with $40 in my pocket. My dad gave me a couple more bucks after he moved me down here, and he said, this is your second chance, don't fuck this one up.
And I didn't take that for granted. And I hit the ground running. I used my GI Bill to go to digital photography school at the Orange Student of Orange County, and at the same time, I started grabbing my camera and I started acting as paparazzi and shooting celebrities in Hollywoods on the weekends.
Nonetheless, I've been here since 2009. I've worked with everybody from Kevin Hart, Kim Kardashian, Mark Cuban, Justin Bieber, and even the President of the United States. And so I've had a really cool career as somebody that didn't have to work for anybody.
For the last 13 years, since I got out of the military, I've been sort of freelance, got to pick my own jobs, and ultimately opened our own creative agency and production company with my partners Tyrone Raj and Benji Tucker. And we just started working with Impact Brands. And that's really when I started getting back into the service based side.
I definitely, in the beginning, did a lot of drugs and did a lot of alcohol during that growth time. And I fucked up a lot of relationships, I burnt a lot of bridges. I did a lot of things that I wish I didn't do, that if I can ever go back and fix those mistakes.
But ultimately, that's what forged me into who I am today. Our mistakes we learn the most from. And so to answer your question, I think staying busy, staying inspired, surrounding yourself with an amazing team.
I work with my best friends every single day, so there's not a day that goes by that we don't talk to each other. I spend more time with them almost than I do my family. And so when you're building things, especially startups or things in the entertainment industry, it's a tough road.
And so there's going to be long nights, low pay, until you actually get some traction and you start doing something big. And when that ball starts rolling, other people can jump on board, right? You can open yourself up for funding or more influential people to come and help you out and be a guide and help propel your company. So ultimately, what inspired me is being here and doing exactly what I'm doing and.
I'm a little bit too old, I feel like, to be back in a startup. But if I wasn't doing the therapy side, like, we have to run the business side with reality management technologies. But I'm in there providing therapy every single day for people dealing with deep trauma.
And I think that's one of the now being back in a tech startup and especially in the times we are right now, I mean Google wanted to this is between us and this podcast, but Google wanted to come and visit us and pick our brains the other day, like ten of their product product managers. And I looked them all up, they're all from Yale or Harvard or Stanford, and they're like, okay, we want to get 2 hours of your time. I said.
All right. Cool. And we'll do sessions, then we'll talk about what we do here.
And I was like, what's your guys budget? And she goes, we don't have a budget. You know what's going on with Silicon Valley? I said no, I don't. Please educate me.
And I said, well, at least just pay for, like, a 30 minutes session. We'll charge you, like, $150 a person times your eight people. I think I sent them a $1500 invoice, and they said no.
Wow. So as much as I want to have Google in the house and use that as, like, clout and hey, Google's visiting us today, picking our brains, I have a level of where I have to put my foot down, right? New levels, the devils. So I do want to press you a little bit harder, not just because I'm a psychotherapist, but because you walk the walk, you talk the talk.
I want to contextualize this question by saying that staying busy, staying inspired, those are very effective strategies and coping at the same time, especially in 2023. The fine line between escapism and staying busy is very blurred, especially for high achievers like you, who are doing a lot of multifaceted cool things for the sake of impact. So on a deeper level, how do you ensure that you're not just escaping from some of the emotions and some of the skeletons in the closet, so to speak, versus staying inspired for the sake of propelling more and more momentum for the sake of impact? I think it's sort of like a 360 holistic view, how you have to look at everything, right? You have to look at your community, who you're interacting with, your your family life, your work life, your job, what you're doing on your healthy life, what you're eating, what you're doing for workout, what you're doing for your mind.
And I think that approach is the best, right? Most people, they have some toxic relationships, but they work out every single day, right? And so some things are it's the yin and the yang always. But I think having a balanced life, right, if you work hard, you have to make sure you cross off those couple of weekends with the family and at home, or time for yourself, right? To get a massage or sit in the sauna, whatever. But even us, as practitioners and people that are making these new technologies, we're seeking to continue to heal ourselves.
I want to know the best things on the planet for longevity, happiness, abundance, how to manifest things. We're students of the game still trying to figure out those next things because ultimately we got in this business to heal our own selves. To me, healing means improving our well being so that we can become the best versions to show up to the way we're most proud of family loved ones, right? That's what healing is.
Healing is relationships, period. And I think it's a very relevant topic, not just because of suicide, not just because of the veterans, but as you know, veterans who are plagued by PTSD, their families and their loved ones also suffer with them. I'll go into an interesting topic that after being in this veteran sort of modality space for a long ten years, I ask a lot of people a lot of questions, especially with the Vietnam veterans, right, the shell shocked generation, why specifically talking to the kids.
And most of the time the kids are a little bit older, like they're like 50 if they had kids when they were like twenty s. And none of the Vietnam vets is it's rare that the Vietnam vets spoke about their trauma or what happened, like the visceral things quite often. And I asked the kids of Vietnam veterans how many times they've talked with their father or mom about those situations and they said never.
And so the Vietnam veterans holding all those things in the inside, thinking they were protecting their family by not telling them. It really put their kids in a weird juxtaposition when they want to put their father most of the time, or mother up on a pedestal and they want to tell these stories of what their dad did. Because if somebody goes to war in your family, that's some cool shit.
And you want to hand those stories down throughout the family. And those are like proud moments that somebody put their life on the line, left their family to do these things for whatever country they were fighting for. And it really created this weird thing to where it made a lot of kids of the Vietnam vets almost had some issues or in depression because their dad never spoke to them about these things.
It's a really crazy revolution to see time and time again. Even if you feel like you're withholding that information, it'll start actualizing physically, right? So dad is stressed out, dad is irritable, dad's angry. And oftentimes a lot of the Vietnam vets, we're a little bit smarter these days.
We don't take all the pills that they give us. We sort of know better because of the opioid cris but a lot of the Vietnam vets, they didn't have really much education about what was going on. So they went into the VA, they just hand them a bag of pills and they just been on 2030 different pills for the last 1020 years.
Well, when you take a bunch of pills, especially opioids or things like that, or steroid stuff, it pretty much stops the flow of your body. It's really hard to use to do a bowel movement. And so if all that is just bacteria and that stuff is just being stored in your gut, it starts making you angry on the outside, it starts creating stress, it starts creating anxiety.
There's no flow, basically. And so when that happens and you're tensed up, full of anger because all these things are just stuck inside you, you start being different to the people around you, right? Most of the time, people in your family. Hey dad, can you move that truck? No, I'm not going to move the truck today.
Right. It's easier to get irritated if there's no flow going on. One side is speaking about it, but the other side is like literally the flow of your body happening from hydrating to having good bowel movements, right? And if all that is stopped and all that is working, and especially in your gut, it's just creating this toxic atmosphere in that area.
Very sadly, the very body of armor they created to protect themselves is the very much barrier that are limiting their connections with their loved ones. It's the thing that will ultimately stop growth and kill you, right? And that's when trauma happens. We now know that it stops the neuroplasticity growth.
And that's the stuff that's in charge of new happy thoughts, thinking about the future, being happy. You look at the Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump when his trauma happened. He's wearing the same bandana, the same pants, the same shirt, the same necklace when that trauma happens and it just basically fuses your identity.
And oftentimes if people don't get any help, it just becomes their identity. You're stuck, right? And that's what we call cognitive rigidity. When you take the same path towards hellfire, even though you know it's not the healthiest to drive towards hellfire, you're invariably going to drive towards hellfire because that's the rigidity that established.
That reminds me of a famous mental health adage called the opposite of expression is depression. What doesn't gets expressed gets depressed. And as we know, in terms of a very big part of grief counseling, a big part of a PTSD or depression therapy is creating a space for you to relive and recount and share the stories that you've been suppressing and repressing for so long.
Because when that happens, you feel like you're alone. You're walking this path of life, this complexity of life all by yourself. And that loneliness is the root of most depressions.
And that's why I think me, as like a practitioner I resonate with a lot of people because I ask a lot of people, how much do you know about your therapist? And most time people say, I don't know anything about them. I don't know if they have kids, I don't know if they're married. I feel like when they're in school, they were taught to sort of silo their feelings, their personal life, all these things.
That's what they were taught. Clearly all for the client's sake, right? But I think that's doing a detriment to you, being a therapist. I think you need to share a little bit about yourself so that person can open up with you deeper.
I'll start out with just rattling off, just my childhood. My parents were divorced. My dad was an immigrant.
My mom was a hippie waitress. I was add. I was dyslexic.
I was a dentist, a menace in school. I went to war and received all this trauma. Lots of my friends died.
And inside some of my story, whether it's Don or tyoon or Benji, whatever our reality managers are doing, somebody can pick out a little. When we tell our stories of our trying to heal ourselves from our trauma, it makes them open up, and they can pick out a little part that's them, and they can latch onto that, and we can communicate about that and go back and forth. Then they can be like, oh man.
And like you said, oftentimes people feel like they're alone. Like, whether whatever happened to them in the childhood, everybody definitely thought that was the they were the only person that that was happening to. You know, whether if you dealt with immigrant parents or you were poor or you got bad grades, they're like, man, everybody else is getting good grades, and I just get bad grades.
Everybody else has an amazing life, and I just have a shitty life. And that's what you think because you're not communicating or you're not smart enough to articulate in your community surroundings at that time until you get older and you want to talk about this stuff because, you know, it needs to come out to make you feel better. That's what I think what community is.
It's a space that's shared by many that you see a piece of yourself within. And I think that's what humanity is like. Wow, we're all creative of the same genetic makeups, different zip code, different skin color, sure.
But we all eat the same way, sleep the same way. Some people don't sleep, but we all die the same way. And I think it's all about seeing a reflected versions of us and some other people's stories because stories will always outlive all of us.
And when COVID happened, yes, it was really tragic for a lot of people and caused a lot of, you know, closed a lot of businesses and and messed up a lot of stuff. But also the sort of silver lining in COVID is for the first time I saw people started talking about their trauma, and especially on social media and especially celebrities. And so during that when everybody was shuttered in and you had this talent to talk, especially in front of the camera, it lit up those people to start talking about their mental well being.
They were like, well, the world's going to end. I might as well let everybody know that I was addicted or my parents were divorced, or I grew up with this trauma. And hats off to a lot of the celebrities and sports athletes that spoke up, shared their stories, and sort of busted this whole new modern mental health movement wide open.
Reminds me of Doug Shepard from the armchair expert. And of course, he was on many movies, and of course it's also a fine line between virtual signaling and all the Hollywood people doing Hollywood things. But he was very honest.
I think one of the first celebrities talked about his relapse during the pandemic, actually after ten plus years of sobriety. And of course, that comes with a lot of pain, but of course, vulnerability, strength is an idea by Brennan Brown, and it's been over applied in 2023. But I do feel like if you're feeling authentic enough to feel called to share what you share, it's going to get resonated.
Because I think a lot of people's fear, because fear is the primary emotions. Anger is almost always a secondary emotions. With the dads and the veterans we talked about, they fear that, oh, nobody cares about what I have to share.
Nobody cares about my stories. You won't know until you try, because there's 8 billion people out there. Yeah.
Every year I go to this where all the top CMOS go each year. And most of the time it's in the Long Beach Convention Center. It's called worlds.
All the top marketing people go and a lot of amazing people speak. And there was this one woman that spoke one time. She was sort of pretty bad childhood raped and molested, and they put up the data numbers.
And after that she tried to get all these bills basically approved in politics. And they put up how many bills that she got passed. Then they put up pretty much from Obama to up, and now and she passed about like ten times more bills than all of those politicians.
Wow. And so to tie it all the way back to that, grassroots, the story of the why is the most important. And when you can change hearts and minds with your story, your personal story, that's when big change can happen, when people are highly motivated to get things done, that's when I've seen the most effective stuff get done.
And it all starts with grassroots. It's not coming from the top down. Right? Right.
Yeah. Power of Why by Simon Sinnick popular idea. By Apple beat all the other stores.
Why, what, and how. Right. I love simon? Yeah, he's great.
One of the greats, for sure. So you're telling me that stacked PowerPoints with statistics and numbers and facts don't change people's minds? I think those are good tools too, because at the end of the day, I have a lot of people that said, I'm not coming into your place unless I see the data. I said, just read genuine stories of people pulling out their hearts and minds of the effects of the treatment that they've done with us.
And you can easily see if somebody's if you're from the streets like me, you can easily pick out if somebody's lying or not and being genuine most of the time, especially on reviews. So that's a perfect question to ask you to segue into what you just said, power of why you're going through some just rapidly expansive period and chapters in your life with personal growth, family growth, business growth and everything between jonathan hall has your power of why shift and evolved over time. As we embrace and as this psychedelic movement is becoming more apparent and helping a lot of people in a short amount of time.
The cool thing is we're embraced by the psychedelic community and all these other all these other people that are recognizing the work we're doing because all of our work, when Don Nestes first came up with these ideas of sensory resonance, the world wasn't ready for it for a long time, right? Tony Robbins bought the first bed from us 20 years ago. That's cool, right? And so our team has been at this for a long time and at the forefront, but a lot of people tried to not let it go anywhere. Stifle it from governmental agencies to pharmaceutical companies, and it stayed in maybe the truth seeker, the burning man world, sort of like 1% of the world that have been privy to all these things for a long time.
And we had to take it to the opposite people. Not saying those people didn't need it, but we had to take it to the veterans, the LGBTQ community, the foster youth, and we knew that that had to be the catalyst for everything. If we can start at ground zero with the very toughest cases, everybody else will follow.
And that's why we started with veterans. My community, I do a lot of stuff in that community, so it was easy for me to create partnerships. And the first partnership that I created was with my boy Colin, who's the CEO and founder of Veterans Walk and Talk, who is a guerrilla peer therapy group that meets a couple of times a week in different national parks, different hikes, and does hikes with about like 25 to 100 other veterans.
And he makes all the Psilocybin himself with him and his lovely wife Cookie, and they hand it out for free. And so you can go on a hike for free with 50 to 100 other veterans get free psilocybin micro doses and start that first journey. And so when we had like 25 slots available and we're like, let's run as many veterans as we can to this day, we have an eight bed set up where we can bring eight beds at the same eight veterans or people at the same time.
And we sort of do a sensory ceremony. We do a little 15 minutes breath work in the beginning, 15 minutes guide to meditation. Then we do an hour on the beds, then we'll do like a half an hour to an hour integration, what everybody experienced on the way out.
It's cool to go by yourself, like on the wavetable on sort of our rocket ship device, but it's definitely amazing to do a shared experience with people you love. But another thing it's cool to do with people you don't know to see how connected you can feel to somebody during this experience that you just met. It's cool because the original genesis or the power of Why was community based and the evolution of it is still community based, but the community just getting bigger and bigger.
And Colin, he is cool because you told me about him. I looked him up and I know that I think he was sick or he was not able to attend the walk. I think a couple of weeks ago and he did a PSA and a lot of people stepped up to deliver those substances.
And I still made the uncompromising commitment to make these walk despite his absence. And that is really cool. And that's what the military is about, right? You go down, that person is right there in your next steps.
And our boy Manu and some other people stepped up and just seamlessly and stepped up for them and let Colin deal with his family, that they so much like, selflessly give so much of theirselves. They need to take care of their family for once. And everybody was there to back them up.
And that's when you know you really have something, when you can step out as the co founder, the CEO and it's still functioning flawlessly without you. So hats off to them on that one. I'm thinking about tragedy and triumph because I think you embody that really well, right? Touching in line with the post traumatic growth we talked about early in the conversation.
What are some of the not tragedies but challenges and obstacles you've witnessed as one of the co founders at Reality Centers? And flip that or coincide that with some of the potential growth and triumph that you see. Because as we talked about, I think challenges often come with growth opportunities. If you can capitalize it mindfully intentionally.
We're a small team at Reality Management Technologies and the center. Those are two different businesses and we have a lot of work to do with both of them. And I think some of the challenges now and obviously working at a tech startup and a service based side and to grow fast is funding.
Right. We want to affect as many people as possible. I wish I had a blank check that just paid for everything that we needed to pay.
And I had an open door policy book your appointment 24 hours, 48 hours out. And nurses, doctors, clinicians, first responders, people that qualify as low income, could come into our center and receive treatment for free. Ultimately, that's the thing.
And as we grow right now and we're working on projects in Idaho of their wellness center, right? We get to do our own thing inside there. So we're building out in Ohio, amazing 90 acres. We're building out in Idawild, it'll be cool retreats, but more reality centers.
We're looking at Vancouver for one of our first cities to expand to. And obviously after the La times article dropped, we get a million calls of people wanting to franchise, partner, interview us, whatever has happened. And we're just trying to be mindful of our businesses at hand, of our family and of our own personal time.
And so along with capital, we can't cut ourselves in half and have ourselves do other jobs, right? We wear a lot of too many hats already. And so I think onboarding the people that are going to be like us, that are going to represent us when we have to be flying around the world and as we expand this thing that we're doing, I think that's going to be one of the challenges. I think it's going to be a fun challenge because we just don't have that much time to go and recruit because we do something that's very specialized.
And so it's not like I can just send you instructions to do what we do. You have to be very hands on with us. You have to basically train with us for six months to a year.
It's just like when it comes down to the running, the sessions, we're neurologically DJing somebody's mind, body and soul. We just don't hit the button. All things are changing depending on who the person is and what we're reading from them.
And so you have to be very empathic. You have to be very intuitive, you have to be very as I would say. You have to be from the streets to be able to read people right and their emotions and what they're going through.
And you have to have an amazing story from yourself so they trust you're, a person that's qualified enough to be giving them this information and walking them through this maybe spiritual journey, changing their life. And so you have to speak with enough base and confidence in your voice that they feel like they're going to change. I'm asking in part about this challenging question is because a lot of people in 2023 with Glamorized social media, they often only look at the glamour of it and they don't really see or appreciate the behind the scenes, the grit, the blood, the sweat and the tears.
Because I'm in a smaller parallel process where the podcast has grown a lot. It's been top ranked recently, and a lot of opportunities coming. Congratulations.
Thank you. I appreciate you saying yes to this podcast because I know you're bombarded with a lot of email inquiries, but I share that because it's important for us to contextualize the challenges that come along with growth. Because just like post traumatic growth and healing, they sound cool, but healing isn't fun and rainbows and peaches and sunshine.
It comes with grits, commitments, discipline and consistency. Sounds it's a trope, right? But showing up when it's easy, that's easy. Showing up when it's hard, that's hard.
That's why consistency is hard. And so when you're a therapy center like ours, and there's a massive amount of trauma being shed, talked about, thrown around, if you don't do the smallest things to clear that energy from physically in the space to your own mind, things will start going wrong and you'll start noticing things going haywire. And so you have to do a lot of work to sort of purge all that stuff that fills our environment on a daily basis.
Yeah. There is a quote in mental health, they call it, every clinicians and practitioner is undiagnosed patients if you don't work and deload and debrief and destress and actually heal as well. And so we're learning that we have to do a good amount of work on ourselves and especially, like, with our families to integrate our learning experience.
What's going on? There's many days where yesterday who's there? Lawrence Fishburn morpheus himself in the center. But that's what to answer your question, that's what people see on social media. They don't see the seven sessions of people just were completely breaking down, crying, getting super emotional that we had to hold space for before we had that little interaction in that amazing time with Brother Lawrence.
Yeah, that's cool. Congrats. By the way, morpheus.
I know it's almost like a sign that you're about to break out of The Matrix very soon. Did the vocal analysis on them, and I did the wavetable session on them. And in our sessions, after you lay down and all the lights go out and you have the headphones on, you have a microphone that you're talking to us on two Way, your reality manager, right? And so we're behind a desk with a million controls and amplifiers and our computer programs running.
And I have you close your eyes and it's pitch black in there. And so I start walking you through a guided meditation. And I was doing my best.
I was trying to bring my best, like, deepest baritone, deepest voice to Morpheus hymn. And I think if I graded myself, I would definitely give myself a strong A for my guided meditation with him. And he had an amazing experience, and he'll be somebody that's coming back every monthly.
He's in his healing journey. He said he's doing acupuncture. He's doing massage every single month.
He's doing his meditation, and he's like, he saw our tuning forks, and he's like, I just got a set of those. I was brought mine in. So he was like, he's in it.
He's in that flow right now. So he was a perfect person for my boy Jimmy to introduce us to, to come by the center and have an amazing experience. All that battles in the Matrix must have taken a lot of toll on his body.
It was so hard not to make a Matrix reference. Our team literally met prior, and we're like, all right, guys, no Matrix references. I'm like what? How do I not make a Matrix reference? But it was an amazing time with him.
And out of anybody that could have came to the center, he's definitely top on the list. And a pretty cool story that I got to tell him that my buddy Colonel Arnold Strong told me. He said, do you know that Lawrence, when he was 16 years old, he lied about his age to go film a movie, Apocalypse Now.
And I recounted this story with him, and he goes, I was actually 14, and it was Francis Ford Coppola. And so he was in the jungles across the pond when he was 15 and 16, had his birthday party on set in the middle of the jungle on a Francis Ford Coppola movie that he lied to get into. Wow.
Yeah. And he played a I think he played a Navy sailor in that movie. So it just tied it all back to the military thing.
Beautiful synchronicity. Wow. I'm in the manifestation business, right? We make manifestation software and hardware, and so we're always looking for those things because we're always trying to learn and create data sets from those things.
Like, how do you create it? Right. And that's why when you walk into the center, we built, I think it's one of the only worlds like digital simoscopes. It's reacting to all the sound in the room.
It looks like a crazy fractal mandala. It's moving depending on what you say. So when you walk in, we're having a conversation, and we say and we explain what it is, but we also say that's what's happening to the water in your body when we run your session, it's restructuring the water.
Your body. It's creating harmony. Your body's 80% water.
Right. And they go, oh, my gosh. I didn't know that.
And so it's just to show people mentally how powerful their words are and what they mean and the butterfly effect and the effects that happen because of what they say, because the book the Secret, thinking something over and over and just thinking nothing about it will help manifest it. Thinking something doesn't do shit. Right? Maybe besides cause some inner turmoil.
It's not until you speak it into existence, I tell. You that I want to buy a red car or I want to start this new business or I want to date this girl or I email it off to somebody and they're like, hey, I can help you do that, right? That's when it really starts manifesting. And that's why at the Reality Center, we focus on vocal biometrics.
We study the voice. A lot of people study the brain. The Brain Institute, some people study the heart.
We study the voice because we believe it's the best biometric. It's a combination of how you think your brain waves and your heart, right? And when we can synchronize those two, that's when a lot of very special stuff can ensue in our sessions. But a lot of the key theme is surrender because you have to say things in accordance with your belief.
Also detaching and surrendering to the natural outcome that flow, the flow. And that's all being in flow state. And that's basically how frequency works, right? Two things are vibrating at that same frequency.
They will attract to each other and connect. If two things have dissonance, they'll just pass each other like they don't even know each other. And that's why oftentimes you see these amazing groups, people to come together, and then it forms this ball.
It's because they're vibing at that same level, right? They're speaking the same things. They're thinking the same things. They want the same things.
They're looking at the same future together. And that's why they just attract themselves. It's not by accident.
It's by this grand design of our creators and the architects and yeah, it's cool because that requires resonance and that really requires, I think, comes down to trust. And I think you are able to establish a safety net at the center, especially for veterans, because trauma comes down to this feeling that the world is unsafe. Why? Based on the pattern? Why? Based on the data points.
Why? Because look at what happens. And I feel like you're able to collectively with your team establish a safety container where even skeptics like the sheriff you alluded to earlier to come in, maybe a little quick psycho education. She came in with her gun.
She's like, where do I put my gun? And I could tell she's got that suit of armor built up, right? And I had to totally take her from that really conservative, not thinking this was going to work thing and totally flip it on her. Yeah, quite literally a body of armor in her case. Can you share some of the beliefs that you have gone through that you changed over time, through this work or anything in between? So when I came back, I was like pretty conservative mindset still, right? I was still military, like, hardened.
And your mind blocks you from going to these certain places, right? It's not that you didn't believe in them. You just didn't know about them, right? And you weren't taught about them. I grew up Catholic, going to Catholic schools my whole life, and that was the existence of my spirituality, right? I got into martial arts sort of a little bit later on in life, and that pulled me to the spiritual side a little bit.
But I didn't see or it's not like I saw the ghost with my own eyes yet, where I was like, yep, there's ghosts, right? And so it's not until I got out and I think because I was successful hitting the ground running here, that gave me a little bit of edge and a little bit of bass in my voice where I thought I knew everything. So it wasn't until I met my partner, Tyrone Raj, that we were living together. We were running a creative agency and production company.
We're on set every single day. And I have sciatica from being a machine gunner carrying a tremendous amount of weight on my shoulders every day. And every Thursday or Friday, we were just newly living together.
And every Thursday or Friday, he would, like, go somewhere in the Palisades. And I don't know what he was doing. He was like, doing yoga, but I was sort of, like, making fun of them, like, oh, you're going to go hang out with your yoga people? And he'll finally one day, he's like, dude, I don't even do yoga.
I don't know what you think I'm doing. But then he's like, one day he goes, Turnover. And so I lay over on the couch and he pulls my shirt.
And about, like a few moments later, I felt my back burning like a tremendous warmth sensation. And I turn over. I'm like, Are you touching me, man? And he goes I look at his hands.
His hands were like 2ft above my back. He was doing Reiki on me. And that is when he chipped a little bit away at me and sort of pulled the veil up, actually trying yoga for the very first time and trying to be more mindful, even like when I took a hit of cannabis.
Try to be mindful and intentional with that, right? So all these little things that ultimately Tirune taught me was one of the biggest catalysts to me, like, going deep down this rabbit hole. And I was still hard, and I still had my suit of armor on for a long time until they just kept on chipping away. And one day, I always referred myself as a warrior, right? And he's like, you're not a fucking warrior anymore, man.
You're a healer. And that's when I realized who I am now, right? When we were at war, you definitely wanted me next to you. But now, if you're trying to heal or whatever you want to call it, or you want me next to you too, it's once again another macrocosm that you went from this place of stuckness being stuck in that war zone, this identity of warrior, to now.
You became unstuck and became more fluid and you were blossoming to this new caterpillar, this new identity. Yeah. And back to back to sort of like the post traumatic growth is.
I chose to use everything that I did at war, all the people that died, all the traumatic things that I went through, all the good and bad things that I did as my superpower, right? That's what powers everything I do now. I know. That was like, a very powerful time in my life.
People look up to it. People love hearing those stories. And when you're a veteran, that's the one thing you do got right.
What you actually did, the sacrifice that you did, the selflessness that you did, the honor, things that you did, you have something for the rest of your life that only a very, very small amount of people did. And that's what you need to use your superpower. And that's when you see these veterans doing amazing fucking things.
That's what they're doing. They're drawing all their strength from all of their trauma deep down inside and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and just kicking ass. I think your story speaks to change, and I think your healing process and the missions you do with veterans and other help seekers also speaks to change or a capacity for change.
A, why is change possible? Because change is always hard. Doesn't matter what age you are, because any sort of change requires recalibrations of your reality. And that could be hard, but it's a big question.
Take this all you may, but tell me about how you view change and everyone's capacity for change. I think with me, everything was almost forced change, right? Was addicted to drugs and alcohol. It's either go to jail or go to the military, right? Live this fucked up life, existence, or go to the military, make something of yourself.
Then you go to the military, then you go to war. It's either a shoot or get shot at, right? Get out of war. Move here with no money in my pocket.
$40, $40, $40, $40, and a slap for my dad. It's either don't eat, don't have a roof over your head, or make something of yourself. When you're put in these extreme situations where it's either sink or swim, I think that's when you'll find the best of yourself, that's when you're going to see you performing at the highest level possible, because you're in survival mode, right? And ultimately, us as human beings, we're amazing.
We can shift on a dime. We can pull 180s or three hundred and sixty s and end up back in the same place trying to change. But that's the cool thing, is one of the toughest things probably to be is a human being right now.
And if you're still alive, many aren't. And the ones that are living, you got something in you. Yeah, I resonate with that.
I got some goosebumps where I think a humans Are Amazing one of my favorite YouTube series growing up is Humans Are Amazing. YouTube series that are no longer popular but like the malleability, the neuroplastic ability of our brains, our bodies, our ability to reform, reforge, adapt and improve is quite amazing. That's why I'm spiritual, I believe in the ground architect or God that I believe in.
It's just so meticulously designed and it's such an optimal machine that's regenerative because machines are dead and we're all about regenerative health. But I do feel like with you Jonathan, I echo the sentiment where a lot of us will not know our limits until we've been tested by life that stress testing or getting reality tested by life. And if you can really sit with that discomfort and move through it, I think we'll be often surprised by the capacity and the potential that we all have.
If you're listening to this right now and you're going through something that's really rough, just keep going. You'll make it through it and you can change at any given moment. The main thing is you have to be all in.
Like you have to be willing to throw everything on the line if you want to turn your life around and ultimately lead an amazing healthy life with great relationships. And many are limited by the circumstances, of course, right. We are the generation being the most successful each year.
It should keep on getting better and better and our kids should be more successful than us. And it's really cool both of us coming from immigrant parents to have this profound impact on what's going on now in society and having a voice and sharing our story. Because the first pillar to healing is community and we are the seeds of our parents of sacrifice.
And yeah, I just want to put that on a giant messaging board that a lot of people feel limited or scared by opening that first pathway but by opening that first door, infinite amount of doors open up. But that to create any momentum requires the first actions. Thermodynamics every action has reactions but to incite reactions you need the action, right? And actions comes from dealing and from believing yourself.
So I resonate that very deeply and that's why being forced put in those situations, you don't always volunteer for those volunteer for change, right? And ultimately when you get put in those extreme situations, you don't know that you're going to change on the other side but ultimately you do and you're like, oh my gosh, I survived it. I'm alive and even better than I thought before. There's so much there.
So before I take a nap after this to warm down my brain, this is a red carpet moment. Where can people connect with you further? Check out the reality center. Of course I'll include all the information in the show notes.
Yeah, our website is realitymgmt.com. Easy to get a hold of us anytime. Our instagram is reality.
At Realitycenter, my instagram is at Jonathan Chia pretty easy to find me and become friends with me. Please reach out anytime, especially if you're a combat veteran or any veteran for that matter. Families of veterans, first responders, doctors, nurse, clinicians, people that work in this world are industry partners in here.
Reach out to me and oftentimes I can get you a free demo or give you a tour and show you what we do. But if you're out there and you're listening to this and you have anybody that's going through an immense amount of trauma, that they've tried everything and it's not working, and they want to try something new that quite possibly might work for them. Send them to us, introduce us, and I'll be free to jump on the phone, email, text, anytime with anybody that wants to start making that change with us.
And any Google executives who are willing to pay, maybe send them your way too. Yeah, they got to pay. But yeah.
I really appreciate for your time today and for everything you shared. Thank you, brother. Thank you so much.
I've seen a couple of your podcasts and it's amazing what you're doing. You have a great select group of guests and individuals and obviously yourself. I wish you the best in your practice moving forward and all the success in the top 100 of podcasts.
Thank you so much. I didn't share the ranking earlier, but thank you. Shout out to Josh in the producer booth and the team that's expanding as well.
And to all the viewers, if you're watching this on YouTube, I ask you to share this episode with one friend, one friend only. If you're listening to this on audio on platform, I ask you to leave us a five star review that really helps us to get us continue to chart it to reach more people, because I really also believe in the work we're doing on this podcast on and outside of my clinical practice. And as always, I thank you for joining us this week in this week's Train of Discover More.
I'll include all of Jonathan's information in the show notes below, and as always, hope to see you again in the next week's Train of Discover More. Thank you for tuning.