When Growth Feels Like Death

Listen to an expanded conversation between Bart and Sunny around this newsletter:

What if the biggest lie you have ever been told… is you are who you are? 

What are your views about life? About yourself? Your community, your religion, your politics? Are they true? Can you say, with absolute certainty, that they are? Were they born from your soul - or were they handed to you?

And what happens when life puts something in front of you that forces you to confront those beliefs head-on?

We just watched a compelling show on Netflix called Sacrifice, created and hosted by mentalist Derren Brown. You might know his more controversial piece The Push, which was later pulled from the platform. In Sacrifice, Derren sets out to see if he can psychologically manipulate someone with deeply ingrained biases to take a bullet -literally give his life - for a complete stranger.

To do this, he interviews dozens of people before landing on Phil, a young man from Florida with strong illegal immigration views. Phil feels passionately that people who enter the country illegally should be deported. He doesn’t know the true premise of the show. He thinks he's part of an experiment involving a surgical implant and an app to enhance decisiveness and courage in his life.

What follows is a carefully orchestrated journey of subconscious rewiring where Derren is gently leading him down a path that should ultimately result in him being willing to die for a stranger. At one point, Derren manipulates Phil’s brain to not to feel pain. Phil literally puts a huge needle through the skin on his hand and feels… nothing.

In another powerful scene, Phil participates in an empathy exercise developed by a New York psychology professor. Phil was told this exercise would “recalibrate the app.” He’s asked to sit silently across from a man of a different race and just look into his eyes for four minutes. Phil started crying and was deeply moved by the experience. He stated he felt like he was looking into the other man’s soul and that he somehow seemed to “already know” him. At the end he actually asked the guy if he could give him a hug.

We won’t spoil the ending, but the show opened the door to powerful conversations about identity, anxiety, belief systems, and control.

When Belief Clashes with Love

We recently heard the story of a young man (no relation to us and we don’t even know him), twenty years old, who came out as gay to his family. The reaction was swift and devastating. This family comes from a very conservative religion and it totally upended their life and their relationship with their son. He was still living at home, so they gave him an ultimatum: read your scriptures every day, no social media, no going out with friends, say your prayers and pray for inspiration and guidance, get your testosterone and your blood levels checked to see if something is “off”, and stay away from his younger siblings… or get out of the house. 

He told them to f*ck off and walked out the door. And he hasn’t spoken to them since. In fact, he told them to never text him again.

They’re bewildered. They don’t understand what they did wrong. They believe they were loving him the best way they knew how - within the boundaries of their beliefs. But the truth is, the belief system was doing the loving for them. And when beliefs are wielded to regulate someone else’s humanity, it stops being love. It becomes control dressed in religious clothing.

What’s underneath that kind of reaction? Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s anxiety. And sometimes, it’s the deeply buried need to feel in control of a world that refuses to fit in the boxes we were handed.

On the flip side, Sunny’s sister’s nephew came out as gay. Same religion, and arguably the same background. But instead of running from it or trying to control it, they listened. They tried to gain understanding. They attended conferences, read books, and were willing to gain other points of views. They rallied around him and he is still very loved and very much a part of their lives, and they fully accept him for who he is. 

Your Life Is Not What It Is. It’s What You Think It Is.

Perception is not just how you see the world - it is the world, for you. Perception is either your prison or your portal.

A friend of ours, Den Lopez, recently sent us a podcast episode by Frank Kern. The episode is called, “The Magic Question That Makes Everything Easier.”

The question from Frank was related to business in his episode, but it’s really such a great question for life in general. The magic question is simple: “What is the specific outcome I want from this?”

So many of us attend meetings, events, or even just wake up in the morning and go about our day doing the things we know are on our list. We know what we’re supposed to do. But do we pause to ask what we actually want the result to be? Frank was astounded to find that when he asked the question to different people who would meet with them over and over again, they didn’t know… the first time they met, that is! 

Let’s return to the earlier story. Let’s put beliefs aside for a second. Forget the doctrine. Forget the emotions, the anxiety, the fear, the shame. Ask: what was the specific outcome that family wanted with their son?

Because here’s the truth: you can’t control another person. So the only two outcomes that were ever on the table were:

(1) Maintain a relationship with him, or
(2) Lose it.

When viewed through that lens, the answer becomes startlingly clear. Had that question been asked - truly asked - perhaps the path would have looked very different.

When Reality Breaks the Script

What about when someone leaves a religion? Has an affair? Quits a high-paying career to pursue a dream? What about when a divorce splits the family?

These moments aren’t just logistical changes. They’re emotional earthquakes. They challenge the script we’ve written about how life should go.

But again, ask: What is the outcome I want?

If it’s connection, if it’s love, if it’s presence - then that old script may need to burn. If you’re clinging to control more tightly than you’re clinging to the person in front of you, something in you has become more loyal to belief than to love.

And when that happens, the story you inherited starts to steal your life. Take authorship of your story and start to realize your perception is just that… your perception. Because there is way more truth out there in the world than whatever your subjective beliefs are. We, as a couple, have experienced this over and over and over again as we have stepped up as a couple to challenge the beliefs we were handed - from tattoos, to religion, to friendships, to our partnership.

The Grief of Growth

Confronting your inner stories isn’t a light decision. It often feels like death.

More often than not, it’s going to cause your nervous system to go into shock. Sometimes anxiety rises through the roof. Sometimes you feel that massive push of resistance inside of you that feels like a wall that refuses to be broken… (that is a sure sign your inner belief system is fighting you), and sometimes it will feel like a “fairy tale” you staked your whole identity on has just crumbled to ash, and the grief “reality” brings will be temporarily unbearable.

But that’s expansion. That’s growth. That’s becoming in its fullest sense of the word.

A seed has to fall down before it can grow into a tree. It has to die, it has to cease being a seed in order to crack open, sprout roots and become what it was meant to be. An eagle doesn’t learn how to fly without falling first. And we don’t become who we’re meant to be without shedding who we were told to be.

Especially those of us who are here to play full out in our lives… we must do the same. To live wide awake and to write our own script means we must be willing to let the old versions of ourselves die.

To grieve them.

And then… to rise.

Life Updates:

• Not too much going on this week as event prep is still under way! Kinda starting to feel like a broken record here! Our event is pretty much SOLD OUT and we cannot be more excited to welcome our new tribe to Idaho!

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