And I just got really uncomfortable in my body. And it was so telling, like, how much, as you're saying, like how the body does keep the score, how much gets stored in the body and how much you might think you move past things because maybe your attention is going elsewhere, but it's actually still there. And this is, again, another reason why we might choose to spend more time in our mind or do things that are more psychological or mental than things that have a degree of embodiment. Like you might be more drawn to numbers, right? It's the five community very interested in numbers, right? And that can be, all of these things can be embodied pursuits, but they can also be very, very psychological, very mental and very sterile. And you could go like, well, what's the big, why can't I just live my life like that? First of all, you can absolutely live your life like that. But as we said before, everything that you're doing is being filtered through what you're feeling in the body. Any conversation you have, any trigger from another person or from what you see on this spreadsheet or in your bank account, it's going to trigger something in your body. And if you're not attuned to that feeling in the body and able to move closer to understand like, what is this about? Is this fear that's arising a rational fear? Is it irrational? Is it because I have like a really complicated relationship with money that stemmed from when I was child that makes me feel like if I lose some money in my bank account, I'm gonna go broke and I'm not gonna have any resources and I'm gonna be on the street, right? Like this stuff can run super deep. If you don't let yourself go down to those layers and just react to the fear that arises, maybe you don't even feel it. The fear comes up so fast and it pushes you up into your mind and now you're just thinking of like, oh, I gotta shift jobs or I gotta do something else or I gotta go into like, if you're like me, like isolated mode, like don't talk to anyone, just like figure out this problem all myself. And now, you're not talking to your partner anymore, you're isolated from the kid. Like all these things that can stem from just a moment of something coming up in the body that you weren't aware of or you were running from that had this huge trickle effect. And I mean, the consequences of that can be massive. I mean, it can cause your life to take a totally different course, especially from one like intense experience that you weren't able to lean into. And so like there's a reason we don't do that. It's uncomfortable. Being in the body is uncomfortable, especially if you're holding trauma and that's where, you know, I think the intersection of things like trauma work and therapeutic work and psychology and even spirituality, there's a big intersection there with the fire movement, especially if you're interested, not just in like having more resources, but you're interested in like what that can afford in terms of like the life you might live and the happiness you might feel. I think the Dalai Lama said some quote around, you can have all the money in the world, but if you don't have inner happiness and you're living on the hundredth floor of some great building in New York City, you're just gonna see a window that you can jump out of, which is a pretty intense thing to say. But the main thing being like, you can have all this external freedom but still be imprisoned in your mind and that's not happiness and freedom.

Yeah, it is not happiness or freedom. That's for damn sure. And it's funny what you just said brought up something that I saw. I think I saw it on Twitter recently and it's more related certainly to the body part, which was somebody essentially asking the question, if someone, if you were offered a billion dollars to have, okay, you get a billion dollars, but you have to have a severe cold every day for the rest of your life, would you take it? Okay, this is so tangential and stupid, but like it's interesting, right? Like would you do that? I mean, I think there was a poll and there was something like 90% of people said no. Yeah, of course, right? Like could you imagine having a severe cold every single day but having a billion dollars? It's worthless

essentially. Unless you have some connection to that money that is tied to a deeper connection to your happiness, like let's say like a foundation and you see the impact that it's having and you're like, I'm willing to take on this pain because the meaning I feel by giving this money or even spending it for yourself, like I know is gonna be greater. But if it's just this like surface superficial idea of more money is happiness, then like absolutely not because most of the time what we're associating more money with is like a, it's corresponding to some felt sense of happiness and health is just one of those things specifically that you realize, well, there's that quote that a healthy person has a million wishes but an unhealthy person has but one. And this was actually the most significant insight for me that sparked, I don't know if I've ever talked about this on a podcast, but that sparked my whole spiritual journey. It was when I was in college, it corresponded, I got into meditation because I was trying to impress a girl, there weren't any real noble reasons. She broke up with me shortly afterwards. And so like the pain of that caused me to take it more seriously. But the really big aha moment for me was this thought experiment I gave myself where I said, okay, in life you can have, let's say you could have $100,000 like max and you're gonna be X amount happy or you can have X minus one happiness, just like a little bit less happiness but have $10 million. Which one would you choose? And I remember just so clearly, at least at that time it was like, oh, I would do slightly more happiness for 100,000 versus 10 million. And they're like, yeah, but you could have 10 million, yeah, but what is it about the 10 million dollars that I think is, it's like, well, it would give me a little bit more happiness but now you know that it's not giving you that. So, right. And so for my 21 year old mind, that was just a huge revelation. Again, said with the understanding that there might be more context and there's different ways you could use money that might impact happiness in a different way. But if you knew that if it was just money for the sake of money and not related to some movement and the happiness needle, then for me, it was just such a clear no. And that's what inspired this whole journey which was to figure out, well, if that is the key thing that I'm interested in, what actually is that? And how can I figure out what well-being looks like, what fulfillment looks like, what inner peace looks like and then build my life around that understanding rather than pursuing something else and hoping it leads to that fulfillment. Yeah, and that continues to motivate me to this day. And I still get sidetracked like money and other things are very sexy and seductive even with a lot of contemplative practice. But this inquiry becomes the pillar of what motivates and organizes my life.

Ah, that's incredible. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. For reminding me of it. Yeah, where do you think your 21 year old self had the wherewithal to make that decision in the thought experiment? Because I suspect there are a lot of 21 year olds, especially sadly, this is not like a, oh, kids these days but you're thinking about like the fetishizing, buying the Lambo's and things like this that you see in a lot of these and your Tate style horrible corners of the internet that aren't so small anymore. Like how do you think your 21 year old self had that wherewithal to make that, not to have the happiness minus, you know, X minus one or X minus whatever, but they just X essentially. Yeah.

I think a lot of variables that I can't take much credit for. I had supportive parents who always really encouraged us to ask questions and to pursue

what would lead to fulfillment

which again, like comes from not that we were like rich by any stretch, but having means where we weren't, we weren't in poverty. So that makes some space, maybe to ask some of these questions and to raise kids to that lens, not that it can't be done otherwise. But, and so like them consistently encouraging that not having this deep fear around not having enough money, although interestingly, I have siblings and they have a different relationship to money. So even with the same upbringing, but I think a lot of it happened. There was a, there was a confluence of a number of events in college that I think led to this inquiry. I thought I was going to go into finance and internships set up on Wall Street and we met with this billionaire hedge fund manager in New York Stock Exchange and he gave a talk and it just sucked the life out of me. And they just had a very clear recognition of, I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I know I do not want to end up like this. So there was some slow disillusionment with what I thought was going to be my path and what I thought was going to lead to fulfillment. And it just happened to happen at a young age and at a point where I was receptive and getting into meditation and my mind was just kind of a sponge for something new. And yeah, and I followed the thread. That's the only thing I could really give myself. The circumstances that led to it, who knows why, but there was enough of an interest there to follow and I took it deep. Well, then I have a type A personality and my type A personality said, cool, right? You want to make a bunch of money. Now let's just meditate 15 hours a day for six months straight in silence.

But yeah,

there was always an interest for me of like doing things with intensity and what happens when you do the right things with intensity and I wanted that new right thing to be this inquiry that I was very clear on was for me the most important thing, which was fulfillment and happiness. So I just brought all my intensity to that.

Yeah, I love that. Followed the thread, right? I think that's a cool way of describing what a lot of us like to do, wish we can do, hope we can do in our better selves, right? Is follow the thread. And I think about inflection points. Yours clearly was meeting that to whatever was billionaire or deck a millionaire and realizing, oh my God, this guy is either a miserable or just this whole concept is sucking the life out of me and would make me miserable, right? As opposed to, hey, this is what I thought I wanted. This is what is lauded in popular culture as being successful, right? Quote unquote, I think about my inflection point of going to work for one of the biggest accounting firms in the world and seeing it essentially collapse nine months later due to the Enron scandal. Muff. Right? Like, which was just a wild thing and it made me realize like how impermanent a job can be. Yeah. And that was the first kind of lead domino that led me to the financial independence movement because I

realized like, I need to take control of this. And what was the thread that came up there for you after on the heels of that that you were attuned to?

Yeah, for me, it was, it was about not letting my life be controlled by forces outside of me if I possibly could exert some influence over it. Was, okay, yeah, a lot of these senior managers and partners, again, one of the best, if not the best accounting firm in the world, they thought they had made it, right? They had made partner, they were spending all their money and they were living this incredible lifestyle. But they, many of them were living paycheck to paycheck on beannotes to me, but nevertheless, no matter how much money you make, you can spend it, especially on Long Island, right? Like, you know that, it can go real quick. And I realized very quickly, I simply cannot fall into that lifestyle trap. I can't, I have to build a life where there's a significant savings rate. And that means I've got to make hard decisions, right? Like, after Lauren, I got married, we left our family and friends, the only place we'd ever lived, essentially, and moved down to Richmond. Not that that was an easy decision, it wasn't at all. But it was the only decision for our future, in our eyes. It was obvious because we couldn't live where we both needed to work every second for the rest of our lives or else the house of cards would fall down. And luckily, I got that realization at 22. It was literally two months into my job. It was crazy, I was 22 years old. So yeah, I think that was the realization. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think, I always find it so fascinating, right, like you could call them, I spend a lot of time in spiritual communities, but they would call this like, you get a download, right? And so like, let's just say an insight of this needs to be done. The terror of that is, you genuinely don't know what it looks like in the future. Like the linear mind that wants to know, like what are the implications of this? You can kind of tell a story about it, but you don't know. And it can create a lot of fear for people. And I'm sure there's a lot of people hearing this and maybe at these inflection points in their own life. And it's one thing to listen to people who talk about those inflection points and then like kind of made it through the other side and are enjoying their life to an extent. It's another thing to like be in it. So I just want to speak to for anyone who's in it right now to know like, from being in it myself in my own way, in your circumstance, maybe totally different or harder, whatever it may be, like, I know how terrifying it is, how scary, how unfamiliar and how isolating it can be. And when I'm talking about following the thread, it is, I perceive it as one of the most courageous things you can do because they're going to be so many voices and so many people and so much in culture that's encouraging you to do the opposite or to do the safe thing or to do the right thing. And you're going to have your familial conditioning, you're going to have maybe conditioning from your partner or friends nearby telling you what to do. It is so hard to not give into that and to follow something that's often more subtle, more quiet, like a whisper in you that's saying, I'm being pulled in a different direction. And when I decided not to go into finance, I mean, I was three years into my economics degree that was paying a lot of money each year for and it would have just been easy to ignore this whisper of like, ah, that guy's just having a bad day and finance is going to be good, it's going to be good. And this is not to crap on the finance and I know a ton of people in this space who are super happy. But for whatever reason that happened and I could have pushed it aside, but I listened to it and it was uncomfortable to listen to it because I had a ton of implications to not do what I was doing. So what, you're going to like start exploring what happiness is? What does that even look like, dude? Like, where do you, you're going to be a therapist? How are you going to do that? You have one year left in college. And so what I recommend with these things is trust the insight and then just ask what is one step it is asking me to take. And for me, that step was having a conversation with my parents. Like they came into the city because I was on a school trip there. When we met with that guy at the New York Stock Exchange and I told them this experience and it was uncomfortable for me to tell because I didn't know how they were going to respond to it, but they met it and they were like, okay, this is interesting. And it allowed space for that to breathe. And then, simultaneously, the thing with the meditation started to come up with, my girlfriend was into it and I did it to impress her, but then it became more sincere and quirky. And I had no idea that I could possibly end up in Burma meditating with a shaved head for six months at that point. I mean, I was still throwing keg parties in my fraternity. And a year later, I was ordained as a monk medit, like there's no way to know what these things lead to. And that's the beauty of life itself, like the beauty of the mystery and these whispers that come through that we follow. And they're terrifying to follow because the ego mind doesn't like it. It wants security and predictability, but there's a different level of safety in following it, which is like you are connecting to the deepest aspect of you that you can. And if you just do that step by step, by step, by step, you will be protected on a deep level, protected in the sense of you won't abandon yourself, you'll have a self trust, you'll have a self respect, and you'll always feel that you are your own best companion. And if you can live a life like that, then the external world is gonna organize itself around it. You're not gonna get past the pain. The pain is still gonna be, there's gonna show up in different ways, but it's gonna show up within the container of correctness. The container of correctness being, you were connected to yourself when you made the decision to do what you did. So you fully opted in eyes open, and you know that thoroughly, because you checked, you asked yourself, is this right, is this true? And so you move forward, and then the pain that arises is like, okay, yeah, this is life, but I'm here on my own volition. I didn't get ushered into this, I didn't abandon myself, and now I'm dealing with this pain. I opted in on the deepest level. And that's what I mean by following the thread. And then where that leads is like, it's just not even your business. It's the universe's business, it's God's business, however you would characterize it. Your business is to be deeply connected, to listen on the deepest level you can, and just be ruthless with your connection to that, and the surrender to that. And that is really the only thing I'm interested in, in this life right now, and where that takes me, I'm just like, hands up, I'm here for the journey.

Wow, Corey, that was remarkable. And like you said, it would have been easy to ignore the whisper, and that was so beautiful to me, and that resonated deeply with me, and I would challenge everyone to really clue in on this, find those whispers, you can hear them. It's just we often ignore them, right? And then like Corey said, what is one step it is asking me to take? That one step, what's the next step? So look for that whisper. Corey, that is where we're gonna stop, because that is just such a powerful, powerful ending, and really challenge is not the exact right word, but it's the perfect challenge for people to take. We always look for actionable steps, right? And even though this is all internal, you can look for that whisper, and I think it will really be valuable. I just, I can't thank you enough for coming on. I definitely wanna do a round two, which will be a round three, ultimately, positive psychology, and you asked, what would lead to fulfillment, how to find inner peace, and what actually makes a happy life? We're gonna do that, but this is the perfect stopping point. So again, my friend, it was really good to see you, and where can people get in touch?

Yeah, thanks, Brad. Best place to follow along would be Instagram, at Corey Mascara, I have a free daily podcast called Practicing Human, and I have a free daily text I send out to people, just little nuggets, which has grown into, I think we have like 50,000 people who get those every day, and so that's totally free. If anyone wants to sign up, you could just text the word, choose Phi to 631-305-2874, and it'll just put you on. You could unsubscribe at any time, and there's no strings attached.