Christopher Maher: Episode 350

Transcript

[0:00:39] CH: Welcome to Author Hour. I’m here today with Christopher Maher, author of the new boo, Free for Life: A Navy SEAL’s Path to Inner Freedom and Outer Peace. Today, Christopher travels the world, teaching people how to find freedom in their body, brain and nervous system. But first, he had to find that freedom for himself. In this episode, Christopher talks about his journey from Navy SEAL to would be Olympian and what the breakdown of his physical body taught him about his emotional life. With this, Christopher talks about his transformation from a give it your all kind of guy to someone who understands the importance and gifts of slowing down. In our conversation today, Christopher explains how it’s in this place of slowing down that we can access our instinctual knowledge and with this, that the greatest changes for the better in all aspects of our lives occur.

[0:01:36] NVN: Let’s start by telling me a little bit about your background is a Navy SEAL and aspiring Olympian.

[0:01:41] Christopher Maher: Well, that’s interesting story isn’t it? You know, to go into this, I went to SEAL training in 1991 and that was right after the gulf war occurred and it was an intense experience, you can imagine. I was meeting with someone last night who is my commander of my first platoon. We just started going over stories about the intensity. And when I was there, I was young so it was great opportunity for me to really stretch myself. I wanted to find something in the world that would push me physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically. And the only thing that I could find that would challenge me that much was SEAL training and I went there and graduated, took me a bit longer than others and I went into the SEAL teams and I worked hard and it was very different than I thought it was going to be. It was no nonsense. and when you’re in SEAL training, I think you're imagining something from like the movies, and then when you get to the seal team, there’s a really big wakeup call and suddenly it dawns upon you that I’m in a community where you’re never allowed to make any mistakes. Because if you make a mistake, it could cost lives.

[0:02:59] NVN: That’s a lot.

[0:03:01] Christopher Maher: It’s in sort of an intention out of pressure and it was a great time to build camaraderie. I went to a boarding school growing up in Hershey, Pennsylvania and you know, when you leave an environment like that and you move out into the real world, out of that safe bubble, life is very different. And being in the SEAL teams that go in through seal training, it reminded me a lot of the boarding school that I went to. It was comforting in one way, right? But it was a lot of pressure in the other and it was good, there’s a lot of good guys that was a lot of really great opportunities to grow as a man. Let’s see it this way, I began to move through my right of passage and understand what it was to show up to produce, to provide, to be consistent and to honor your word because you know, in the SEAL teams, if I learned anything, I learned one thing, we always get the job done. and so there’s an intense amount of confidence in that and when I was complete with that experience, I decided I wanted to get out of the military and go back into school and start training for the Olympic trials. and what I didn’t know is that everything that I learned in the SEAL teams was everything that was going to keep me from getting to the Olympics.

[0:04:24] NVN: Interesting, break that down for us?

[0:04:26] Christopher Maher: Well, when you’re in SEAL training and the SEAL teams, your capacity for work is so high. I could work form 4:30 in the morning until midnight every single night no problem. But when you’re moving into being an athlete, you can’t work that hard, you can’t work that way. So, when I went to practice with my coaches, every event or every practice to me was a race and I was going 110% every second. Because when you're in SEAL training, part of the process is you work together in a boat crew, okay? With six other guys and your job is to beat the other boat crews so that you can get some rest. and I was in a boat crew that had guys that were really high performers, so we won all the time. I had trained myself to win at everything and I was winning at practice, but I was losing on race day because I had used up all of my vital core energy. So, when it came time to put in on the line and perform really well, I didn’t perform well at all and that was really frustrating. because look, I’m thinking, “my god, I have this amazing body, I’m incredibly strong, I’m very disciplined. I know how to show up, I’m honoring my word, I arrive to practice early, I give it my all and how am I finishing last in these races? This doesn’t make any sense. How could I be running slower than I did in high school?” So, none of that made any sense to me and of course, because I had that give it all attitude, I didn’t change my strategy, I kept going with the same strategy, give it your all and it will all work out. But the truth is, that strategy was incorrect. And I was left upset, confused and so I decided, “well, hey, I’ll just work harder.”

[0:06:29] NVN: Oh boy. Sounds reasonable.

[0:06:33] Christopher Maher: Yeah, that will be the key, right? Instead of like, a six-mile run on Sundays, I’ll run 14 miles on Sundays. And then I kept getting these overuse injuries so every two or three months, boom, I’d have another injury and then I would start training again, I would have a decent race and then boom, I’d have another injury. And it was this vicious cycle that I was stuck on. MY coaches, they were applauding me because they could see all the effort I was giving. But I don’t think that they understood that I was tapping into every ounce of energy that I had to produce that much at practice. And it would have bene a much better strategy for me to be the way that I was when I was in high school, show up for practice, have a good time, race hard on Saturday. And I would show up, work, overwork and then fail on Saturdays. I went after that again and again and again until my body started to break down and have some real problems. That Olympic hope, down shifted to an Olympic dream and it down shifted to frustration, agitation, irritation and hopelessness.

[0:07:50] NVN: So, you were talking about how you had this give it your all attitude. And obviously, you’re pretty extreme example of this, but I feel like this is something in society that’s programmed into all of us, it may manifest for other people in different ways, maybe it’s working themselves to the bone at the office or something less extreme and physical, but it seems to me, getting rid of that programming would be incredibly difficult?

[0:08:23] Christopher Maher: Yes, it was very difficult. Because what happened is, see, when I was going through SEAL training and I was in the seal teams, I didn’t realize that underneath, my body was changing, I didn’t realize I had become extremely dense physically. So, I had lost my range in motion and I lost all of my power. What I gained was endurance. So, I traded flexibility, high range of motion and speed and power for endurance. So, I could go and go but then I couldn’t turn it off because my body was locked into an inappropriate stress state and I only knew how to manufacture more stress. So, the more stress there was, the more comfortable I felt so I felt after 14-mile run, I felt better than I did after a six-mile run. So, when you go out into society. Say, you work for Fortune 500 company and you’re a CO, I mean, what do they call them?

[0:09:21] NVN: CEO, that’s it.

[0:09:22] Christopher Maher: In the military, we call them CO’s.

[0:09:26] NVN: Same thing, different environment. I follow.

[0:09:32] Christopher Maher: This CEO wants to have a successful business, right? He’s under the pressure to produce and so now, he makes everybody in his team over produce. And everyone in the team is being paid a substantial amount of income and so they’re not going to feel good if there’s not fair and equitable exchange. And so now, they start over giving and overdoing to be able to feel good about receiving what they’re receiving and that’s very difficult to breaks that because once you get a taste of a measure of success, you're chasing a dragon that you’re never going to catch.

[0:10:08] NVN: Yeah. As you tell your story, it strikes me that there seems to be a mirror between what was happening physically in your body and what was happening to you emotionally. Like, I hear stress on both levels. Can you talk to me about the correlation there and how you’ve come to see that?

[0:10:28] Christopher Maher: Well, here’s how I experienced it. I realized that at some point, whatever was in my body was in my life and whatever was in my life that wasn’t working was happening also in my body. So, when I began to change, when I began to shift and de-stress and de-tense and de-distort and detox, what happened is, I expanded emotionally and I have more spaciousness inside of me to connect, to relate, to consider other people’s perspectives. There was more room inside of me to be in the receptive mode because once I was in SEAL training and then the seal teams and in training for the Olympic trials, I was stuck in the initiatory mode, right? The protective mode. and the more dense my body was, the more I was locked into a protective state. The more I opened my body, the more receptive I became to everything and everyone around me.

[0:11:22] NVN: That’s fascinating.

[0:11:23] Christopher Maher: I mean, this is where the theory of relativity is brilliant because it applies to everything mechanical in the universe and human beings are based on structural mechanics. And so, the more dense I became, the less receptive I became, the more I knew the way and as I began to open and to stretch and to relax and to deepen and to create more space inside of me, the more receptive I became. And as I became receptive, life spoke to me, I didn’t tell life what to do. Life said hey, “I want you to go over here.” And go okay, “I’m going over there.” When I would follow that deep intuitive sense, I would meet the next person who would be able to help me get to the next level of where I wanted to go and so then my focus shifted from, “I want to be an Olympian to I want to know love at its greatest measure.”

[0:12:21] NVN: That’s a massive shift.

[0:12:22] Christopher Maher: Massive.

[0:12:24] NVN: So, talk to me a little bit about that transition and what that looked like for you?

[0:12:28] Christopher Maher: Well, so one of my buddies that I was in SEAL training with and then the SEAL teams with, this guy named Jeff Higgs. He’s a black belt in jiu jitsu, black belt in judo, very masterful in yoga. I mean, every discipline that he studied, he’s mastered. I mean, a very amazing human being.

[0:12:45] NVN: Just your run of the mill guy.

[0:12:47] Christopher Maher: yeah, just your run of the mill guy. He came over to the house and he brought a yoga mat and a juicer and we went to do yoga for two hours and I sat there frustrated the whole time because I couldn’t get into one position. Not one. Now, I was fitter than him. If we went outside and we were going to r un or we were going to swim, whatever, I could outwork him but there was no way that I could get into any of this position. At that moment, I began to realize,” oh, this guy is healthy and fit and I am fit and unhealthy.” That was a very tough pill to swallow. I mean, very tough pill to swallow. Imagine, here I am on, I’m living in California. It’s 1999, okay? And I don’t know what a yoga mat is.

[0:13:35] NVN: Yeah. Not exactly the image that most of us have conjured up in our heads.

[0:13:44] Christopher Maher: I know what the weight room is, right? I know what starting blocks are, I know what lunges and plyometrics and all those kinds of things, training. But I don’t know anything about opening my body and getting my tissue healthy. He helped me and he helped me realize that, “oh, I need to turn things around quickly.” But the most difficult part of that, to be honest with you was reaching out for help because I was suffering inside, I was in pain but I didn’t tell anybody and then, as I started to open up, I got in a car accident and the car accident pushed all of that discomfort into the middle of my hip socket and I could never get away from it. And so, then, I needed more help. So, he guided me to work with some other people, some Rolfers and then I got into [inaudible 00:14:31] and then I got into the Egoscue Method and acupressure then acupuncture. Anything alternative. I mean, it made sense to me. It made a lot of sense to me. So, they were telling me they were going to be able to take me a mile and I didn’t realize until I worked with somebody and I got instantaneous permanent change that they told me I was going to be able to go a mile, but they were only taking me a foot. But I was happy for that foot because at the time, I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that you could actually experience instantaneous permanent change. And once I got a taste of that instantaneous permanent change, I never looked back. Like literally, the next day I was like okay, that life is over.

[0:15:16] NVN: Wow. When you’re talking about change, are you talking about physical change, emotional change? Give me an example of one of those feet that you’ve stepped forward?

[0:15:30] Christopher Maher: Okay, I’ll give you an idea. II went to see this guy who lived in the hills of San Jose. He worked on me to let’s say, four to six hours a day for four days, okay? When I first went there, I had pain at every single joint. Within an hour, all the pain that I had in my body was gone. Now, I had just spent tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours. So, you can imagine, on one side, I’m extremely happy that I have this relief in my body. And simultaneously, I started to get upset inside because I thought, “they told me they were going to take me a mile, they really didn’t even take me afoot, they took me an inch.” This guy, he said he was going to take me a mile and he took me a thousand miles. That was very powerful for me. But the most important part of that story is, when I went to the airport to fly from San Jose back to San Diego, people were bumping into me at the airport and I had never had that experience of people coming right into my boundary and sort of knocking me over. Because once I went through SEAL training and the SEAL teams, I had an extremely intimidating presence. Inside, I still felt like a teddy bear. But outside, people’s experience of me was very different and I didn’t know that there was this intense vibration coming off of me. So, when I sat on the plane and people were engaging and approaching me, it was a very different experience. So, I thought, “whoa, something’s happened.” It’s like I had been unplugged from the matrix and I was in a completely different way of relating with the external world. So, I go to teach my Wednesday night class. I walk over, I tell the ladies I say, “hey, whatever you want to do tonight, we’ll do. Figure out what do you want to do for a warm up, meet me back here in 15 minutes.” And they were looking at me like dogs that are confused. Their heads tilted to the side and they are looking at me like, “who is this?” And at the time, the way that I worked is I was retroactive. So, I would be in an experience, but I wouldn’t realize what the experience was all about until maybe two or three hours later. Sometimes two or three weeks later. Sometimes two or three months later. So, my orientation to time was retroactive. Now suddenly I am driving home after the class and I am like, “oh, my god, now I understand why they were so confused. I wasn’t telling them what to do. I was asking them what they wanted to do.” So, I shifted from initiating to being receptive and they had never had that experience of me and I hadn’t had that experience of myself but I was so retroactive, I didn’t even realize in the moment that I was being different.

[0:18:21] NVN: This is really fascinating stuff and what is most fascinating to me is your story about being on the plane and realizing that people are just interacting with you in an entirely different way.

[0:18:36] Christopher Maher: Oh yeah and I was receptive to it. I didn’t realize that I had become closed off to it. So that was eye opening. Well it happened to be that in September, I went back to homecoming. I went to a privately well-endowed boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania named Milton Hershey School and I went back to homecoming and I was talking to people and they were in mid-stream of our conversation they were walking away and I was like, “hmm?” Now, this would be what, eight months before I went to see this guy for the first time, okay? So, this would be in 2000, September 2000. I saw him in June of 2001. So, I go back to homecoming this year and one of the people who walked away from me, this young lady named Lisa Shockley, she came up to me and said, “I don’t know what you are doing but whatever you’re doing, you’d better keep doing it.”

[0:19:31] NVN: That’s great.

[0:19:33] Christopher Maher: And I thought, what is she talking about. So, I pulled her to the side, I said, “Lis, what are you talking about?” She said, “I don’t know who you were but you were not the kid that I grew up with.” And I was like, “oh my god, and you know inside, I wanted to get rid of the emotion. I could feel some tears coming but I was at an event so I kind of choked them back and I realized that in that moment that oh, okay, she gave me the message that I needed to hear. So I went back and I took everything that this guys is teaching me and I worked on myself five to six hours a day because then my goal was I was going to get back to the person that I was before I went to SEAL training and I went in the SEAL teams. Because when someone, Lisa has known me since I was seven years old okay? And she has seen my evolution and when someone who you care about that loves you and appreciates you and loves to be around you, can’t stand more than 60 seconds of being in contact with you and they just get up and walk away without any explanation, I mean it’s shocking. And then for her to hear the message to come back and she just initiated. I didn’t ask her, she came up and said, “I don’t care whatever you’re doing, you keep doing it,” And I was like, “oh,” so that was the next catalyst that got me to take everything that I was doing to the next level. So, I basically took SEAL training and all the discipline that I learned from there and I applied it to putting myself back together and getting back to who I was as an emotional being before I got cold and intense.

[0:21:14] NVN: The concept of discipline in that context is really interesting to me because I can see how what you shifted into required discipline, but discipline is so often associated with these ideas of rigidity that you are talking about trying to get away from. So, I have to imagine, that’s an interesting balance.

[0:21:38] Christopher Maher: Oh well, yes because I have learned that there is three forms of discipline, okay? There’s imposed discipline, where I went to the boarding school and they had a structure that they applied to produce an environment that was safe for everyone. So, we had what we call the merit system. And I was at this school, I had no choice. If I wanted to remain in the school, I had to do what they wanted me to do at the level that they wanted me to do it. So, that was involuntary imposed discipline. I didn’t want to be in the school, my grandmother wanted me to be there. So then when I left there, I went and I signed up. I volunteered to go to SEAL training. So, now that was voluntary imposed discipline, right? So, they are going to give me their version of discipline and then I had to learn self-discipline for my benefit internally versus discipline for external gratification, right? So, I went through all the forms of discipline. And the most difficult discipline was voluntary self-discipline for my internal benefit. I didn’t even know there were different forms of discipline. And so, once I got a taste of the instantaneous permanent change and then I got the confirmation from Lisa Shockley that I was moving in the right direction, I shifted. My discipline shifted from, “I want to be disciplined so that I can achieve,” to “I want to be disciplined because I want to feel.”

[0:23:14] NVN: Yeah, it is interesting. It sounds like a true evolution of discipline.

[0:23:19] Christopher Maher: A true evolution of discipline and then that shifted into another form or discipline, which is instinctual discipline. So, when I started learning all of these systems of self-integration, healing and personal development, I went in and I applied the conventional version of discipline. They said, “do it this way for this long.” Okay, then once I began to master these skillsets, I had a conversation internally with myself one day. And my inner self said, “hey, you need to slow down and you need to follow what I am teaching you.” Meaning I started to listen to my body as oppose to projecting from my mind onto my body what you need, I started to listen to what my body was telling me. So, instead of doing everything in a specific sequence my body would say, “listen, I want you to it this way, this way, this way, this way and this way.” And I was like, “yeah, but the book says do it this way” and as soon as I shifted into instinctual discipline, now I had the real version of discipline, right? I was connected to myself. I was listening to my body and I was connecting to my soul and now the way that I went and moved through the world shifted completely. And then I realized that, “oh, well I am really good at analysis yet I got a really work and focus on becoming masterful at being instinctual. And I realized the highest form of intelligence is instinct and feeling and the lowest form of intelligence is logic and analysis. Well my whole life, I have been rewarded for getting good grades based on analysis and logic. And now I had to basically take everything that I learned my whole life that says, “hey, this is what you have to do to be successful,” and I had to put all of it in the trash to begin to listen to my inner-self and to begin to trust the inner guidance that was coming from source for me and then my whole world changed. And then I had all the space in the world for everybody to follow their own version of discipline, their own version of intelligence, to move through the world the way that they wanted to because as I started opening and deepening my experience with myself, I stepped into what I call spiritual arrogance like I knew the way, right?

[0:25:40] NVN: Yes.

[0:25:43] Christopher Maher: No, no, trust me, I have been there. I can tell you I know the way now. And one day I started listening to myself, I was sitting around, I was watching people eat and they’re eating junk food. I was like, “how could they possibly put that in their bodies, what are they thinking? Should I go talk to them?” And then I heard this inner voice go, “hey, the path of one is not the way of another,” and I was like, “oh okay.” The path of one is not the way of another. And I was like, “oh, the way that I am doing things for me is for me. The way they’re doing them is for them,” and I don’t need to project my sense of reality onto them. I need to stay focused on what my body is telling me is right for me. Because in reality, I am not God okay? And I need to get off that overly moralizing position around food and exercise and rest and all the things that I learned and I need to stay inside. I need to stay connected to these instincts and let people do them. And if they come to you and they want your help and they’re asking then it is appropriate. But it is no longer appropriate for me to project onto everyone around me what I think is the right way. And then what happened is my very fixed sense of black and white, I started to have like a full range. I had black all the way on the right and I had white all the way on the left but then suddenly I had dark gray then I had medium gray, then I had light gray, right? And then that cascaded all the way over to where it turned into white and then suddenly, regardless of what experience I was in, I could access the color that was appropriate for that situation. As opposed to only having one way of seeing things, one outcome. So, my perspective shifted greatly and I was able to learn to meet people exactly where they were at and I no longer force them to come up to where I was flowing or over to where I was thinking. And that gave me a lot of freedom. It gave me a lot of breadth and it gave me a lot of depth in my personality and in my behavior.

[0:28:01] NVN: So, my last question for you with that in mind, Christopher. How do you apply that when you work with clients? Helping them find their own freedom. How do you find that balance between the answers that you have found and showing them how to listen to their own instincts to get to their version of this place that you’re at?

[0:28:25] Christopher Maher: This is great. This is for me, it’s the greatest tool of all. Intention drives everything. What I used to do before when I worked with this, “oh, I have all this information, I have all this insight, I have all these experience, they can lean on me and I can show them the way. Then suddenly, I woke up one day, was in the meditative state and I was having this inner conversation and then I heard, “hey, you need to be sure that they are no longer a passenger in your car. You need to be a passenger in their car and the way you’re going to do this is they’re going to set a very clear intention. And you’re going to help them and then I’m going to give you the down low relative to their intention. We’re going to put that beautiful mind that you have, we’re going to put that to the side and we’re going to let their intention be the drive, so that it’s a co-creative process.” And then when it became a co-creative process, it was wonderful. I mean, everything started shifting big time. Because now, I can spend 10% of the effort and I could get 10 times further because I was in alignment with who they were, what they wanted, with their clarity and I was letting their body dictate their energy, their emotions dictate where we were going, rather than project what I thought was right for them. And that created tons and tons of freedom for me.

[0:29:45] NVN: I love this pathway that we started this conversation by, this concept of giving it your all and then landed here where you realize that putting forth 10% was actually the way to be of the most service and the most effective.

[0:30:00] Christopher Maher: Yeah, one of my teachers, Rich Lipman, he’s always saying speed up to slow down. And then what I realized for me- it’s less is more. And then because I started to realize there’s this subtle energy. The gross dense energy that we’re used to like you know, your dining room table and then there’s that subtle energy and the greatest amount of change is available in the subtle energy. Exponential change can happen there.

[0:30:26] NVN: Perfect. Christopher, thank you so much for joining us today, this is an entirely unique conversation. And clearly, you’ve had an entirely unique journey, it’s fascinating to hear about.

[0:30:38] Christopher Maher: Thank you so much.

[0:30:40] NVN: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can find Free for Life on Amazon. A transcript of this episode as well as previous episodes is available at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service and if you’re feeling it, we love reviews. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.