Exploring Missing Conversations That Heal The World With Robert Strock
The most important things are often left unsaid. Such is the irony of life where people miss so much because they fail to go deeper. Robert Strock fills in the gap with The Missing Conversation podcast, where he explores complex issues that continue to persist even as the world seemingly contains all the information and answers. From hunger to terrorism to immigration, and everything in between, Robert covers it all to provide, like the name of his other podcast and book, Awareness That Heals. In this episode, he joins Chad Burmeister to take us to the origin story of his passions and his mindset around living the best life he can for himself and the world moving forward. He then talks about the mission behind the Global Bridge Foundation and reflects on our ability to be significant with our wealth and make a greater impact. Follow Robert and Chad as they bring important conversations forward.
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Exploring Missing Conversations That Heal The World With Robert Strock
I'm with someone cool who lives probably in the same neighborhood as my best friend, Eric, and that is Robert Strock. Robert is in Santa Monica, California. He's the author of Awareness That Heals. He's also running two shows, The Missing Conversation, which I'm sure we're going to dig more into and The Awareness That Heals Podcast.
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Robert, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here.
I like to help our audience get to know who you are by relining the tape and going back to your earliest childhood memories. We're unfiltered by the world at that point. What do you remember? Where did you grow up? What was your passion? What'd you think about when you were a kid?
I was always a bit of a stranger in a strange land. I was raised in Boston, Massachusetts area. To me, it was so obvious that it was about loving and being loved. Also, at that age and all the way through, death and dying were part of my awareness of like, "What does it mean that we're alive? What does it mean we're going to die?" It was pretty obvious in my original family and outside watching commercials that I was a bit abnormal. To love and be loved was pretty well contradicted by a very wholesome caring mother who was a bit angry at times. It was like, "Why are you being angry?" I remember thinking to myself, "What's the point? Aren't we here to love and connect with each other?" For me, friendship, loving, and being connected was always the reason why we're alive. It was only many years later that I realized that was not normal.
Missing Conversation: The natural separation between the rich and the poor is a setup for war, to set up having defense departments, to set up alienations with terrorism.
The show that I told you about, The Chosen, at the very beginning, when they're rolling credits, they show all these gray fish going around in a circle and all of a sudden, there's a blue one. The blue one flips the next blue one. Finally, there are six. It goes to thirteen and then it goes, “Credits are over.” As a blue fish in the pond, you are going against the grain. "What is this? What is it about love? I thought you're supposed to be a micromanager, be strict with your children and all of that." It's like, "No. The opposite is a pretty good approach. That's why."
It was the tone of voice. For example, hearing an angry tone of voice was so alien to my system. I was like, "Why wouldn't we just be nice to each other?"
Thinking through how that ties to what you do, there must be a strong connection between then and now.
It's very simple. When you want to love and be loved to have a career as a therapist and to last half of my life be running a foundation, it was the natural outgrowth of where it was. I remember, when I would date or meet a woman, she would say to me, "I don't want you to therapize me." I say to her, "No. It was a pre-existing condition." It's been natural to ask you, "How are you doing? Do you need any support? How does that make you feel? How can we take care of what you feel?"
For me, as a therapist, I'm more oriented toward guiding to your own best efforts, your own best views and living your own best views. Feelings are in a secondary role. Core essential universal needs like love, compassion, and strength were central. It's not that feelings aren't important but they're clues to what we need. That became that end of where I went. As the world has been showing signs of global warming, falling apart, class divisions, terrorism and nuclear threats, it became clear that being behind four walls was a little bit too limiting.
Tell me about where The Missing Conversation fits into all of this.
The Missing Conversation is what I'm presently involved in. It's going into themes like homelessness and regenerative agriculture. We're talking to the state officials and local mayor's offices, trying to combine those two themes of having the unsheltered be trained in regenerative agriculture. A lot of people might not know what that is but what that is not tilling the soil, which allows carbon from the atmosphere to be pulled down into the soil.
It's part of the Paris Peace Accords. One hundred and ninety-eight nations signed on to that. Those two seemed like a marriage made in heaven. Our first show is with Gabe Brown, who is consulting for 23 million acres in the United States of converting traditional farming to regenerative agriculture. We moved from that theme to psychopolitics, which is the underlying of politics. Not in a partisan way but what is it that keeps us stuck in fighting against each other. I'm not only talking about current time. I'm talking about throughout history and the realization that no powerful countries have ever cared significantly about the poor.
That natural separation that occurs between the rich and the poor is a set up for war, having to have defense departments and alienations with terrorism. The Missing Conversation dwells on that. There's also an immigration reform plan that's included in there, a reevaluation of psychology and how it needs to relate to the world as it is in 2021, not adjusting to it but helping be a part of caring for it. Also looking at spirituality and how spirituality needs to be grounded in revealing a human being there and not just settling for beliefs or a vague kind of faith but grounding it. How do I deal with my own humanness? How do I deal with my own suffering, and my own situations that are difficult? How do I use my faith, my trust, and my wisdom to be able to care for that inside myself and for the situations that I and others are facing?
There are so many smart people in the world. There's so much technology that's coming out with AI under the hood. One would think that with world hunger, the poor and everything you're talking about, we get to the point where you can start to solve some of those challenges and take them head-on.
The horribly sad thing like homelessness in California is not a matter of things being solvable just because of AI. They've always been solvable. The issue is that wealth is a God unto itself. With that, the poor or not being given the opportunities to be who they are is going to set up a conflict with humanity forever. AI is going to make it easier for sure. One of my early icon idols in college was Buckminster Fuller.
Buckminster Fuller had something called World Game, where it was looking at the whole world. If we use the world's resources and what our motive was to have everybody have an opportunity to survive and thrive, what would we do? He figured out years ago that the whole world could be living to be upper middle class in America if they decide to cooperate rather than fight. He finished it with saying, "No one's going to leave and start to listen to me for 50 years," which is 2020. He predicted that survival was going to be threatened in 50 years and that was going to begin the listening on the part of mankind but it was not only solvable then.
I remember going to Paris, speaking of the Paris Accord, and seeing tapestries on the wall, the political backstabbing that goes on, even in a tapestry from hundreds of years ago, they showed this one king who poisoned all his people. He made it look like he didn't do the poisoning. He's sitting there with a little piece of blood on the end of his finger on this glove. They're explaining it through the headphones. You're like, "Do you mean backstabbing happened even back many years ago?"
That's why the emphasis in Awareness That Heals or in The Missing Conversation is how important it is that we face our challenges because if we don't, that's exactly what's going to happen. We don't admit our own anger, our ambition to be number one, our competition, our insecurity. We don't admit these things that it's going to go into our subconscious. We're going to act it out by backstabbing or by believing that America is the best country in the world by far and end of story or our party's going to be the best by far.
That makes me think of you, as a person, are so complex with all the different thoughts that you have and your mannerisms. Here's an interesting story you'll appreciate. I went to an arcade with my brother because it was his birthday. That was arcade games from the '70s and '80s. I played Tron and as if it was yesterday. It was so hardcoded into my psyche that I knew all the plays and my brother apparently didn't because he was like, "What are you talking to do all this?" All of those things that are built into our mindsets, you have to be able to go inside, pause the tape, pull it all out, and understand at a fundamental level. What's the system that you're playing in your brain? Why are you the way you are before you can move forward?
Hopefully, there's a sense of realizing that we think we are who we're conditioned to be but those are standards that pre-existed probably for thousands of years. If we don't separate out, what does my wisdom tell me? How does that fit with getting married at a certain time, having kids in a certain way, having ambition for success, being sexy, and being young, versus is that what your wisdom tells you or is that what society has told you? Are you thinking for yourself? Are you pausing? Asking yourself, what does my wisdom tell me? What's my best self telling me? What's my relationship to God telling me? What's my relationship to the deepest trust I can imagine telling me?
Have you heard of a neurotheologist by the name of Dr. Jim Wilder?
No, I haven't.
He's here in Colorado. He came to the firepit months ago. I was starting to write a kid's book on making good choices. In doing some study, I called my mom and asked her. She gave me some good ideas. I asked our CRO and a couple of other people. Nobody had the same answer. With Dr. Wilder, I go, "While you're here, let me ask you this question." He goes, "I have a book. I can give it. It's in my car. It's on making choices. I'll give you the book." Long and short, he said, "In the Old Testament, there are 613 laws that people had to pay attention to. There was no way to consider all 613. It's an infinite number of choices when you're looking at between option A and B. There's way more than just A and B."
I said, "How do you do it? What's the trick?" He goes, "There's the, what would God do? What would Jesus do?" I got it. It's a higher level of thinking but the one that stuck with me was, what if you made a decision based on optimizing for the end of time? For every decision you make, you do your best to optimize for 100 million years or whatever it is, it makes you play a bigger game and dig deep and understand, "What is my unique fingerprint and my God-given talent that's required in the game of life in order to optimize the entire planet earth and the future of planet earth?" That's fun stuff to think about.
In my world, we're saying a very similar thing. What would you do? How would you be if you were your best self or you were your most wise self? Isn't it fun to contemplate that? Isn't it obvious that everything else is a daydream? It's not that we should be that way. It's that we get to be that way if we can lessen or eliminate most of the aspirations that we're raised to believe in. I think I'll be one step less than my best self. That's what I aspire to. I haven't heard anybody say that. I think I'll be one step better than my best self. By best, I don't mean achieving self.
Missing Conversation: What if you made a decision based on optimizing for the history of time?
It doesn't mean driving a Ferrari. It means, are you in the lane doing and being? I've met this woman who won the lottery in the '80s. She was up at a bar in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. A friend and I were skiing together. We go to this restaurant, listen to some live music. She's there standing at the bar. We're like, "What's your name?" She goes, "I'm the owner of the bar."
She confesses that, "I won the lottery for $4 million in 1985." We're like, "How'd that work out for you?" She goes, "It was the best thing and the worst thing that happened to me. I got divorced. All kinds of stuff happened. Everybody asks me for money. I paid a lot of people a lot of money through psychology to be able to deal with that kind of cash." I said, "Let me guess. You learn to just be in the moment." She was like, "How'd you know? Yes, that's the answer." That's a $40 million person who owns a bar and lots of stuff.
There are many ways to be in the moment but to really be in the moment, it means not letting conditioning run you and staying in an ongoing inquiry of, “How can I be my optimal self? How can I be my wisest best self? How can I take care of myself and everyone else around me as much as possible? Not get grandiose but do what I can do, be who I can be.” That means smiling at the person that's handing out your food at the supermarket to every little small thing.
We're putting an app out called 77Pray. It does put you in the routine. You do rely on a little bit of the computer pop-up. The idea of it is to get you in a habit of asking and connecting with your creator. "God, this is a great day." You're praying that it's going to be a great day. "Thank you for your blessings." That's it. You go through your day and then by the end of the day, my favorite thing is, "Your will be done. Whatever you need me to do, I'm in the passenger seat. You're driving. Show me the way." When you get into that routine, it's amazing what becomes illuminated.
That's still happening. I had goose pimple rushing. When you get to ask that question and be in that prayer, it gives right then and there. It gives you energy. It allows you to feel at home. It's one of the hardest things you got to cross to certain people where it's not that you should do this. It's that you get to do this. This is allowing yourself to open to the source. You're given to. It has its natural enjoyment, reward and it's passing it on to others.
That's what happens. The pop-up comes up and it says, "Have you shared the app with someone yet?" You can either post to Facebook, LinkedIn or you click the button in Google or iPhone, and it auto-fills, "I thought of you, Robert. Check out this app. It's from me to you personally." We think this thing has some serious virality that could go to it. I've been following the source. I'm like, "How much money do you need me to spend on this? God, I'm going with you."
We've talked a lot about pretty deep topics so far. This is a lot of fun. I'm enjoying it. Everybody has a challenge in life. If you're doing 70% foundation, 30% work and you said the 30% work is all foundation too at the end of the day, so it's 100% foundation, there has to be something that gave you a slap upside the head. "Are you paralyzed? What happened to you that caused you to go to the level that you're going?"
At one level, I was in this direction before it happened but then I had a kidney transplant years ago. It wasn't the kidney transplant. It was the medications that I have to take throughout my life. For the first six months after I had the kidney transplant, I slept an hour a night for six months. The next five years, I slept 3 and a half hours. I was in an endless inquiry of how can I try to be chemically balanced? It was obvious that the transplant medication that my body was receiving as if was speed.
I had to chemically balance myself through a lot of experiments. Fortunately, it was in my field. Years ago, it is somewhat miraculous. I found a chemistry through trial and error having a root canal and using a little bit of pain killer. It allowed me to feel better than I had since before the transplant. I said, "What if I use a tiny little dose of that? Almost like a small sample of it. I wonder if it would do that." I went through ten years of hell where I was so exhausted, depressed and anxious. It became clear at that point. The only thing I still had the capacity to do was using my will and my wisdom and to be able to be empathic for others in the moment.
The moment I was done with them, I crashed. It was like I was borrowing their body. For ten years, I was completely wiped out. Then I realized, "I'd always evaluated myself based on how do I feel. That's a terrible barometer because I have no capacity to feel good." I can still be wise, helpful and use my will. It reminded me of Viktor Frankl and the work that he did, coming out of the Nazi prison camps, being an inspiration for all the people there, using his divine will and then making a whole psychology based on it.
That allowed me to develop something that I call friendly mind, which is friendly mind, friendly wisdom. You don't have to be friendly if you're so wiped out in a trauma, chemistry, hormonal imbalance or DNA issue but you can still be wise and you can still have your mind be an instrument of wisdom, God's light, whatever you want to call it. I was able to guide myself, even though I felt like crap. That is a vast understatement only. In the last years, I've been able to have my mind be an instrument in that way to a large extent. I feel good. Every day, there's immense gratitude. I wasn't able to feel gratitude because I couldn't feel anything that was positive unless with somebody else.
It makes me think of the mothers out there who have large families of 8, 9 kids, which happens occasionally. Every nine months, they're having the next newborn and they're up all night. I bet the empathy with the mothers is pretty big for you too.
As a matter of fact, I have a story of a mother that couldn't go more than two hours but she had the means to get replaced and get somebody that was high-quality person to help serve her. At the end of it, I gave the caveat that there are a lot of mothers that don't have this option. For them, they have to do exactly the same thing. It's right on point.
If I have a cigar at my firepit, if I have a glass of scotch, my Garmin will hit, your heartbeat is unusually high. I know the combination of those two. It's a certain tipping point. I can know to your point about chemistry. It's not usually the first glass of scotch. It's like one and a half maybe. It's probably one of the third. It's somewhere between the third and a half. I looked down, boom and then beep. At that point though, my brain gets into this level of slowing down or something and being able to see things in such a deep way.
I was watching The Chosen at the firepit on my phone. I understood to a level that was off the charts. A lot of people run their lives in a certain pattern and they don't take the time. That's where meditation can slow you down, help you tap into that. What's nice is once you've done that for a period of time, you can go back to your normal fast life and take inventory of what's going on around you at a much deeper level.
No question. Meditation gives you the chance to know what it means to be in the moment. One of my meditation teachers used to say to me, "Start off right at the beginning with your favorite music song so you touch your heart while you're meditating." I always liked that. Also, that meditation can be wherever you are. While you're walking in your car, you can walk in a way that every little step you feel your foot hitting the ground. You feel the muscles. "Am I putting my ankle at risk of twisting it? Am I strengthening the muscles I want to strengthen? Do I have a weak part of my body? Am I being careful for it?" It applies it all throughout our lives whenever you can.
Sheryl Lynn is the Founder of this new company called JOYELY. They've brought this thing called the Chair of Joy that's life-size. It will hit the ceiling. It's so big. Maybe not quite but it's white with gold on the edges. You sit in it. She stacks joy basically and says, "Think of a moment when you were happy." It's like, "When my son was born, my daughter was born, and I was married." When you start doing that, the endorphins or whatever it is in your brain go amazing.
Her goal is to bring that all around the country. They're going to do one at Disney World and tell people that, "If you carve out one minute a day, three times a day, you'll change. People have 68,000 thoughts a day and more than half of them normally are negative.” If you can consciously think, "That sucks. How do I change the color of my river from red to blue, blue to red, yellow to green, whatever colors it is? Let's change the thoughts that are in it."
In order to implement that, somebody has to be curious enough to want to pay attention to what's going on. If you want to pay attention to what's going on, it's very natural and organic that if you put it into your experience, whether it's joy, peace, trust, love, or compassion, any of those repeating for a while starts to become more monopoly. It becomes a new way of conditioning yourself to be your wisest, best, most compassionate self. Anything we can do to establish new kinds of rhythms, a new Pavlovian response. Every time I go a four-letter word to say relaxing, I think of the most gratitude thing that's happened to you, return to the moment and how do you implement.
Tell us about the foundation. Seventy percent of your life is committed to it. What's it all about? What's your mission? How can people get involved perhaps?
Missing Conversation: Meditation gives you the chance to really know what it means to be in the moment.
It's the Global Bridge Foundation. Our major project is to try to have homelessness scalable by using tiny homes, which costs about $30,000 a unit, versus building apartment buildings or buying hotels and motels, which is the main strategy and then dividing it in a number of different optional ways. Number one is we're rezoning that allows for zoning to be happening for homeless programs that are best for the city or the state so that NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard, doesn't dominate the neighborhoods and the state.
The city officials would say, "We're going to do all the safety precautions possible. We've decided this is the best location for a homeless community to be able to gather. We're going to separate out these homeless communities so that they can have the dignity of having a shower and a kitchenette in their own little units for $30,000 rather than $550,000 in California. We're going to have the zoning, make it so that it can't be kicked out. We're going to target different communities within the homeless community so we have vets, single women, families, under unemployed, people out of jail, people that have serious mental illness, people that are addicted to various things. We have specialists that are going to treat every situation."
That's our main passionate project. On top of that, we're also interacting with about ten other foundations and a whole bunch of other areas that have to do with class imbalance, that has to do with global warming, that have to do with self-sufficiency for people in third world countries. We're doing all of that. We're bringing regenerative agriculture, which you can down to above ground in the cities to schools as well.
A colleague of mine who's on my board in fact knows the founder of Tiny Homes. They even bought TinyHomes.com but then he also knows the founder of 3D Printed Homes. They're both manufactured in different ways but then it’s to deliver low-cost homes. I'll bring Paris up again because I was there years ago with my whole family. I remember driving from the airport to wherever it is we went in the city. There was a whole series of tents that looked high quality. They were in rows. I even think there was probably a mailbox with multiple mailbox places. It didn't look smelly. It looked well-kept for these rows of tents. Those aren't even $30,000. Those are $800 for a tent facility but very similar concept that, "Why can't we face this challenge head-on and go fix it?"
One of the amazing things is one of the people on my show is the founder of what's called The Housing Innovation Collaborative in Los Angeles. They have 75 manufacturers of tiny homes. It ranges from 120 square feet to about 600 square feet and made out of everything you can possibly imagine in locations. They take you on a tour through each manufacturing facility to show the options. There's an abundance of ability to go to scale with tiny homes.
An interesting story you'll appreciate. Robert White is a friend of our family. He's also part of the show. He's graduated 1.3 million people from his mindset courses over the last decades at different companies. They went out and he said, "Class of 200 people, go meet somebody on the street that you don't know and have a conversation with them." One person went out and met Art, who was under a bridge, a homeless person and brought him back to the class. Art sat through the rest of the class. It turned out Art was a cool person because he became the number one head trainer of that entire organization out of 72 different trainers or something like that.
When you give people the level of dignity that you're talking about and set up the system correctly, those kinds of stories can probably come a bit more commonplace. They may be very happy with the 120 square foot home with dignity. That's brilliant. To your point, it doesn't matter if you're left or right. Do you believe in humanity? If you're a Christian or you believe in God, whichever God you believe in, you probably want goodness for all people.
I love your story because it demonstrates the biggest prejudice and rationalization about people that are homeless or people that are poor, which is they're lazy, they don't care, or they're addicted to drugs. There's a percentage of that but there's also a percentage of that in the wealthy. That misperception is the ultimate rationalization of why the opportunities are not shared and also the deep root from my vantage point of why "civilization" has been against itself and fighting against itself because it's competing rather than cooperating. Rather than seeing the interconnectedness, it’s seeing the strength in separation.
It's that illusion of having greater strength by being more separate and having more savings from myself. I'm not against wealth. What I am against is wealth being the answer or being the dominant part of the answer. It's so important of wealth insignificance. To be able to be significant with your wealth is a gift for everyone.
There are more billionaires, certain multimillionaires and companies that are becoming unicorns more than ever. I have to have hope that if there was only one unicorn years ago and then there's 50, I don't know the exact numbers but I read an article and there's a lot. I know some of them. Eric Yuan at Zoom video, I worked with him at Webex. He's a nice guy. Henry Schuck, who runs ZoomInfo is a multi-billionaire. These are people who have a solid head on their shoulders who want to give back. That's where this thing gets resolved from normal people who want to provide significance to their community. The government can't solve these problems. It's what I've found but you could certainly need to do your best to try. Private-public partnerships are how this gets resolved.
In psychopolitics on The Missing Conversation, the whole thrust of it is that in my experience, I have more heroes in my life than I've ever had because I've gotten to play in that field. About 10% of the wealthy people are understanding and living significance. I don't think it's going to take a lot more than that to change the momentum because as we find each other, we cooperate, we expand, and 1 plus 1 equals 3. There are a lot of heroes that are coming out all over the world. In the foundations, let's say in my little world, I have 50 heroes. I would say years ago, I had about five. There are incredible amount of people that realize there's no sacrifice in generosity.
In fact, that's all a lie. If you want to do the truth, it gives you that positive impact on your family, yourself, everything that you do and your quality of life. Fast forward to say 3 to 5 years from now, you're looking back, and you're back on the show. "Robert, it's great to have you here again. What happened in the last years? It sounds like you've made a huge impact in the world." What do you tell me if we're back on the show years from now?
The first thing I would say is it doesn't even feel like it's me doing it. It does feel like I'm being helped. Almost everything that I'm doing and those that years, I waited for a response to be guided. It isn't esoteric even. It's practical and a little bit quiet. I ask a question, what would be the optimal way to handle this situation, so it benefits everyone? I wait and then a response happens. I'm talking to you. I'm waiting for your question and then waiting for a response to happen.
I would say that I feel lucky. I do feel like I'm good but I feel like it's much more than I'm fortunate to be raised in a country that's not at war. I do not have to fight for my survival. I have my basic needs taken care of. What else would a 70-year-old man want to do than this? How could you not do it? I would say that I feel like I was lucky, grateful, and I stayed on course but I can't take credit for anything because I've been given too many opportunities to take credit to Nazi. It's part of the interdependence gist of it.
A personal question, I've had the signs lately. It's Africa like, "You got to help people in Kenya and Uganda." At the same time, there's this whole America first thing over the last little while and then people at home and veterans. How do you make a decision? You're helping people in the homeland but you're probably also doing things in other countries. Is that the same thing? You just listen.
For sure, it's just listen. What listening has brought me to was I started in third world countries, Africa, India and then move back more home. I guess you would call it by. I'm out of the closet. It's like whatever way $1 can be best spent. That's with the foundations. How do we optimize every dollar on the effect on the quality of human life? I'm a little bit preferring America to get it together, especially when there's so much struggle, suffering and danger. It's moving a little bit more back because of the amount of division that's showing itself up but that's part of the thing. In the listening, you see when things were going well, it was more like you can get ten times the benefit in the third world country. Our country badly needs it.
We've got some deep wounds that need to be resolved. Robert, who I told you about, he's helped 18,000 person companies. A company is like a person, a country is and a city is. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You have to heal. Nobody seems to be taking that problem on. They all want to pull the doll from all angles and it's not healthy. I was part of a doll pulling exercise for a few months in 2020. I don't want to be part of that. It's all about love like you said, love and be loved.
When we started the foundation years ago, we started off with microfinance week. We went to India and met the four largest programs in India in microfinance. With one of the programs, for lack of better words, I hated the guy. I disliked him. He was talking about he went back to America and he looked at Walmart and McDonald's. "How do we scale?" What he did was he went to the other microfinance organizations that didn't have his scale. He basically said, "I can offer the same thing as you for 3% less." He took advantage of all the people that had already got all this work that he took advantage of.
Three years fast forward, it turned out that it closed down the whole microfinance system because women were feeling such pressure. There were 30 women that all work together and were co-responsible. They were feeling such pressure that there was a suicidality rate through the charts. They froze the whole system and his foundation got closed down. Microfinance was our very first initiative that we got involved with investing and giving. Foundations can also invest, which is all a beautiful thing called Project Related Investments, where you can use capitalism the way it should be used and naturally would be used, which is how do we use our freedom to benefit everyone? Not how do we use our freedom to benefit ourselves or our family?
Last question because we've already hit on it a little bit. You never know the answer that you're going to get, but this one is an important one to me personally. What role does faith play in your life and in the journey you've been on?
When I hear faith, I immediately hear the innumerable amount of words. I hear God, trust, compassion and love. I look at Jesus's life as an example and how did he live. I look at being honest about your own personal issues or the challenges your face. Faith is basically a tuning fork for where the vibration or the frequency of my life wants to live. It's like a musical instrument and a sound that has a feel that can give you goosebumps that it can bring you to tears. It does bring you the joy and a deep sense of fulfillment.
There's a friend of mine, Julie "Juju" Christopher, who's in Arizona. She's a gypsy in her level of understanding and frequency. She's died and gone to heaven and came back. I was there and my son came with me. We had a retreat with twelve people. Almost everybody went to bed because it was 10:00. There's Juju, the drummer guy from Atlanta or Florida, me and one other guy so four people in the room. It was as if we had a front-row concert ticket to Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. He's sitting there drumming on the desk. She's playing the guitar and singing songs like you would hear in Barcelona. It's as if I was in heaven right there because of the pitchfork tune.
I set the room up to match the mood. There were these two horses that were on the mantle. One was black and one was white. I put them looking at each other. One looked a little angry and one looked a little more peaceful. It was a yin and a yang kind of an experience. To your pitchfork sound conversation, it's like for that hour and a half, it was going to be fifteen minutes. It almost closed down 3 or 4 times but it couldn't because the universe was like, "No. This is an open window. Keep it going." Most people don't have the 4 of 12 that had the foresight to understand that such a powerful human being was in our presence to be able to deliver that moment. It's there all around you every day. That's what most people don't get to.
There needs to be that beginning question of, how do I open, how do I find peace, some equivalent questioning, some kind of prayer, or meditation to open the door. That statement of, "If you go half, God will meet you more than halfway." That is so evident that the longing is inside us. It's just a question of whether we can be quiet enough to find it in the longing.
It’s open the door and knock on the door. When I did 77Pray kickoff, we said, "If there are 77 people who are signed up for the first rev and we all invite 77 other people, that's 5,929 personal invites." I'm a math guy and a conversions guy so 10% conversion, that's 590. You go 77 to 600 about a 10X, then the 6 goes to 10 because you dropped 90% but if we can keep going 10%, 10%, 10%, I believe it's going to be one of those when you're a kid, you send the letter and it says, "Put your name on the bottom of this sheet and send it around. By then, you get $1 back." This thing's going to help people knock on the door.
It's exactly that kind of existential, pure prayer that's so contagious. It's the same thing as COVID, except in reverse. It's a totally contagious wonder and childlike love. That's an adult love and a child love put together. What's least understood is this aspect of there being no sacrifice, whatsoever. It is all a gain of quality of life. Who wouldn't want more of a quality of life if it was understood?
Also, once you figure it out, I think of someone like Kanye West. He seems to have made the tip. He envisions a stadium of people. Half of them sing metal and half of them singing Kumbaya but it's like, "We're all together. We're all blue fish in the blue and gray fish idea."
I have a client to be unnamed that made a connection with Kanye West and experienced him in that unseen way by a lot of people. The heart, the purity and the longing as being such a deep place inside him.
This is an amazing conversation. Robert Strock, thanks for encouraging me to broadcast live on Facebook because this is the first time I've done that. You've already changed my life forever. I only met you for one show.
It's been a joy. It's been fun. Goose pimples arise spontaneously. That's always a good sign.
Thank you so much. God puts people in the room together for a reason. It's clear that you're going to make an impact. Keep up on our little app because by the time it gets into the thousands, we'll be able to redirect. Our whole goal is just like you. How do we maximize the $1 return for the glory of God is what it's about in honor of my grandfather? Robert Strock, if they want to find your show, The Missing Conversation is a great one and Awareness That Heals is your other show.
It's on Apple Podcasts.
Thanks for joining the show. I had a headache and it's gone. Thanks to Robert. I'll catch you next time.
Important Links:
The Missing Conversation - Apple Podcasts
Awareness That Heals - Apple Podcasts
About Robert Strock
Robert Strock has nearly five decades of experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, and humanitarian and has developed a unique approach to communication, contemplation, and inquiry. Recently, he authored and published Awareness That Heals, an expression of the powerful tools that Robert has developed over a lifetime of inspired self-exploration. Robert is the founder of a thriving counseling practice for business, caregivers, leaders, and those in the entertainment industry. His hundreds of online videos, blogs and guided meditations are shared with therapists, psychology students, social workers, caregivers, and seekers of their own inspiration.
Twenty years ago, Robert co-founded The Global Bridge Foundation whose mission it is to contribute to the creation of a more compassionate, just, and peaceful world that honors the dignity of all beings. This foundation is a part of a united effort to support systems for global change and economic inequality. The foundation addresses these issues in partnership with many other prestigious global organizations including Acumen Foundation, The Buckminster Fuller Institute, International Medical Corp, and numerous microfinance organizations.
