إن الحمد لله نحنده ونستعينه ونستغفره ونتوب إليه ونعرضه بإعادي من شهور أنفسنا ومن سيئات عمالنا ويحله الله فلا مدلله ومن جدل فلا هاليا له وعشدوا لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له وعشدوا أن سيدنا محمدا عبده ورسول يا إله الذين آمنوا تقول الله حقا تقاته حقا تقاته ولا تبوتوا إلا وانتوا المسلمون يا إله الناس التقوا ربكم بلدي خلقكم النفسه واحدة وخلق منه وخلق منها زوجها وبكتل منهم رجانا كثيرا ولساءة واتقوا الله الذي تساءذون به والأرحام إن الله كان عليكم رقيبا يا إله الذين آمنوا تقوا الله وقولوا قولا سديدا يصلح لكم عملكم ويوفلكم ضلوبكم ومن يطع إله ورسوله فقل فازا فوزا عظيما أما بعنوا فإن أستقل حديث كتاب الله وخيرا هديوهد وخيرا هديو محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم وشرط أمور محباتها فكل محببة بلعة وكل بلعة بلالة وكل بلالة في النار الحمد لله الحمد لله الذي أنزل على عبده الكتاب ولم يجعله إوجاء الحمد لله الذي هدانا لهذا وما كنا لنهتب إلا أن هدام الله الحمد لله رب العالمي رب العالمي our praises due to Allah the Lord of all the worlds our praises due to Allah who has guided us to this path and we would not have been able to guide ourselves and not Allah guided us our praises due to Allah who has revealed the scripture unto his slave servant and has made no crookedness therein الحمد لله we are winding down the season of the Hajj many of the Hajj have returned most if not all have returned from the sacred priests and as the month winds down and the Hajj season comes to an end and we enter the new year by the first of Muharram we do well to reflect on the character the figure who really is at the center of the rituals of the Hajj and that figure is our great spiritual patriarch إبراهيم عليه السلام وإبراهيم peace be upon him إبراهيم عليه السلام إبراهيم is described in the Quran many different places إيش مان شديد ايونيك لائق or perspective on an aspect of his character his religious and spiritual significance peace be upon him so we begin reflecting on just a few points related to Abraham peace upon him based on what Allah تعالى mentions in the Quran so Allah تعالى describes Abraham إبراهيم عليه السلام إن إبراهيم كان أمة قانية لله حليثه ولم يقوم من المشركين شاكرا عن عمي اشتباهه وهداه إلى سراط المستقين إبراهيم عليه now will just say an umma just a literal repetition of the Arabic phrase إبراهيم عليه was an umma إن إبراهيم كان أمة قانية لله was devoutly deeply obedient to Allah حنيفا he was naturally inclined towards manufism so the innate nature that we've all been created with the propensity to recognize the oneness of God this innate quality was extremely strong in ibraheem ولم يقوم من المشركين he was not amongst the idolaters شاكرا عن عمي he was deeply appreciative and grateful for the gifts of his Lord اشتباهه he was chosen or he chose him وهداه إلى سراط المستقين so time does not allow for us to examine these two verses for me سوف نتحدث about two things first the umma إن إبراهيم كان أمة قانية this means several things او افسيزتوه of the meanings here one is a leader so umma alith meem meem is the same who is from the same who derived from the same who as imam alith meem meem imamun um alith meem meem إبراهيم كان أمة and as our exemplar we should all strive to be leaders فار too many Muslims are content with being followers and it would be one thing if many of us were following the best of what other traditions other ways had to offer but often times we follow the worst we follow consumerism materialism nationalism many of these isms that are tearing our world apart we follow right along a leader sets a sterling example a leader sets an inspiring example that inspires others to follow them so people who are inspired to follow Ibrahim's example of monotheism and as a result the great fakes the monotheistic fakes of judeism christianism islam are all inspired at their root by Ibrahim it takes courage to be a leader it takes courage far too many people just go along to get along just follow the leader someone else's lead if they dress this way the Muslims dress that way they wear their pants falling off their rear end you'll find a lot of Muslims running around with their pants falling off their rear end if they have a baseball cap designed to shade your eyes but they turn it backwards and they're squinting because the sun's in their eyes you'll find a lot of Muslims with baseball caps turned around backwards squinting because the sun's in their eyes if they throw spandex on the women so they're naked without being naked you'll find a lot of Muslim women running around in spandex trying to halalify it some kind of way just going along to get along if they throw up these characters running around in skinny jeans you'll find Muslim men a fair number running around in skinny jeans can't even do salat properly but gotta go along to get along Ibrahim was a leader and we should endeavor to be leaders and one of the principle qualities that is required for leadership is courage شجاعة is courage Ibrahim was courageous and if you look at the descriptions of Ibrahim and other courageous individuals in the Quran you see often times the courage is a function of their youthfulness because youth don't have anything to lose so a lot of times the youth will take a courageous stand because they're not worried about who's going to pay the rent or how I'm going to pay the car or what about my future I might get on somebody's list no a youth often times because they haven't lived long in the world and therefore they haven't become deeply entangled in the world they are very easy to display courage in situations that someone who's much older will hesitate and be hesitant so this youth won't courage we have a tradition that's called the tradition of Futua so the courageous young person who is self-sacrificing who is willing to sacrifice for others who is willing to jeopardize their own personal interest for the sake of others so Ibrahim is described as a fatah as a courageous young man so when the people came and they found that idols had been smashed قالوا من فعلها فعلها بيالي هتنا إنه لمن امباليمين so they saw them so who's done this to our idols verily this is an oppressive wrongdoing person قالوا سمعنا ثتا يتكورهم يقالوا له إبراهيم they said we heard a young man قالوا سمعنا ثتا يتكورهم يقالوا له إبراهيم he's known as Abraham so he had the courage to smash the idols and smashing idols is a courageous endeavor because a lot of times people have a lot of things invested in their idols we know the idols of the courageous there was a lot of business invested in that there was a lot of tourism to use a modern term that was invested in that there was a lot of revenue that was invested in those idols there was personal security that was invested in those idols there was a feeling a sense of stability that this is the tradition of our forefathers they worship these idols and by assuming and taking on that worship ourselves there is a sense of continuity and a sense of stability it takes courage to go against that we have to have that courage brothers and sisters the idols before us nowadays particularly in this country they're not the idols of wood and stone like the people of the Quraysh and other Arabian tribes were worshiping they're the idols of the self which is brilliantly or we should say is fittingly captured in this era of the selfie myself I'll make sure I look good enough for this picture that I take myself selfie selfie نفسي نفسي the worship of the self and Allah تعالى warns us افرايت من تقدر إله و هواه have you not seen the one that takes his very inclination as his guide whatever the whims of this soul suggests he's ready to follow that it takes courage to challenge that because in challenging it it can challenge our entire identity our entire sense of self and a lot of people don't have that courage because they might end up in no man's land or in no woman's land without the normal supports they become accustomed to but that position of insecurity is the first step in conquering ourselves as our school is مخالفة حوات عينو دواتي أبوزي نفسي is the very essence of your cure is the very essence of the cure because the nefs wants us to stay in the comfort zone to stay in that comfort zone to enjoy that warm and fuzzy feeling and when it's challenged and when it's made uncomfortable that's when we begin to overcome it the nefs are the items of our day of racism and look how persistent this idol is in our society if anyone looking at the events of today and it's not just a one-sided affair just white racism there's racism on all sides you find people from many different sides there's racism in the Muslim community that's an idol that we have to have the courage to smash and we have to have the courage because in doing that we might go against the prejudices accepted and acknowledged or unaccepted or unignored of our parents of our relatives our friends our neighbors our coworkers but this is an idol that has to be smashed if this country is going to fulfill its full potential America will never feel live up to its full potential until the idol of racism is smashed never and it's a consistent and enduring problem that we should be as Muslims endeavoring to shine a new light on it and although the very fact that we have many different races and ethnicities in this congregation doesn't indicate that those races and ethnicities are always coexisted in a harmonious fashion the fact know that many cannot be on race as Malcolm X know it when he went to his hajj and Malcolm was not a stupid person to see how Islam had that power as Arnold Toynbee know it in his discussion of Islam in western civilization two things Islam can offer to the western world a solution to the race problem and to the problem of the toxicians look at our country we're being inundated with alcohol inundated with opiates we're the market for cocaine we drive all those murders in Mexico they're killing each other to see who will control who will have access to the American market of illicit drugs of cocaine and marijuana that's the driving factor between those 100,000 deaths in Mexico but what percentage of Muslims there are Muslims that drinking but what percentage it's a small percentage that have a drug problem an alcohol problem that's the power of Islam and that's the power we can offer to our fellow citizens but we have to have the courage first of all to believe that it works secondly to implement it within ourselves and not be like the person a poet pointed out that عارن عليك يدفع عظيمه don't condemn a characteristic and then you engage and embody it yourself it's a tremendous shame upon you for you to do so and we can go on but you get the idea we have to be courageous people brothers and sisters the coming period in the history of this country is not a period that will be kind to cowards it will not be kind to cowards and a person might think they can live through their cowardness but as they say a courageous person dies one death and a coward dies 100 100 times every day so it's choosing a dignified death or it's choosing many undignified deaths and situation after situation after situation that calls for courage Abrahamic courage Mohammedan courage we don't stand up now I'll make it easy now I'll give us Taufiq now I'll give us Tessir in the Ibrahimakan Ummah the meaning of Ummah is a moral a compositoria a repository of moral qualities in other words Ibrahim or Abraham combined within himself qualities that would be epitomized amongst the various members of a national community so this sister is known for her truthfulness this sister is so honest this sister is so courageous this sister is so faithful this brother is so trustworthy those qualities that epitomized in different individuals were combined in Ibrahim to an exalted degree they were combined in him and so again we should strive to be a repository of lofty morals lofty character refined manners we should strive we should not try to get on the race to the bottom with everyone else there was a time in this country no one used foul language except people who were foul themselves four letter words as they said many of us who grew up in a bygone era in this country we would say something and we would get our mouths washed out with soap we would get physically disciplined when that was still legal to do and you couldn't get out of it what did you say boy I said gosh darn it I didn't say gosh darn it I know what you said my ears are working get over here and there was and it wasn't whole food designer soap it was ivy that's some nasty stuff it was live soap but that's there was a time people dressed in a dignified fashion there was a time if this mess didn't wear a church everyone in here would be wearing a suit everyone in here would be wearing a suit there was a time when people held doors for the elderly there was a time where people carried groceries out of the grocery store for someone not necessarily elderly maybe someone with a lot of children they're trying to manage I'll take your groceries you take care of the children where people thought of each other now we have philosophies of life that are dominant that encourage selfishness and it permeates throughout our entire country from the top to the bottom people thought of others people consider others before they thought about themselves there was an altruistic spirit now we have the likes of Ayn Rand arguing and many people agreeing that altruism is a human weakness and a despicable characteristic and you have people in the united states congress who are saying we shouldn't be assisting poor people who are saying we shouldn't have any mercy for people who aren't necessarily born here but came here as children and therefore this is the only home they know they don't know any other home we shouldn't have any mercy for them people are saying we shouldn't have any mercy for people overseas whose resources we might have taken because we consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources people growing the bananas in the banana republic are suffering from potassium deficiency because the bananas in the banana republic are coming here gear around so we can eat them people growing tomatoes so we can have tomatoes in the middle of the winter on our tables aren't eating the tomatoes they're picking them and if they eat any of them they'll be fired and won't even have access to the meager wages that allow them to buy some crop we don't think about these things because we've been conditioned to only think about ourselves the kinwa craze everyone kinwa is healthy we never think this is not mine there's a major expose about 5 years ago in the new york times how the native people and the andes who grow the kinwa now since so much we went man they sell the kinwa which was a staple of their diet and gave them protein and everything they needed to get cash and they take the cash and buy white rice and now they're suffering from malnutrition so we have to think about ourselves and serving ourselves and having the whole world serve us and when someone stands up and protests we bomb them you can bomb the world to pieces but you can't bomb it into peace we have to have the courage we have to have the moral fiber we have to have the compassion the sense of mercy to say there's enough resources for everyone in this world to be adequately fed there are enough resources for people who are suffering in a place like bangladesh we see people suffering in houston and we're motivated to provide relief but we should there are neighbors but we don't consider the fact that at the very same time floods in bangladesh have inundated one third of the country just imagine all of the united states east of the mississippi river underwater one third of the country underwater the whole agrarian system washed away in floodwaters who's going to provide relief we have to be the people think of relief we have to be the people that have a global scope the financial markets are global the capital markets are global the resource networks are global why isn't our thinking global why is our thinking narrow and local we have to have the vision and that vision has to be fueled by mercy that vision has to be fueled by compassion that vision has to be fueled by a sense of responsibility to those who are less fortunate than ourselves even in our misfortune we're blessed even our misfortune we're blessed people in houston people are sending water they have fresh water you haven't read of too many people who are dying of thirst in a place like bowmont florida or bowmont texas rather where the whole water system was knocked out there was water in there no one's those people in bangladesh aren't going to have access to clean water there's food available people sending truckloads of food those people in bangladesh aren't going to have access to food those muslims rohingya muslims fleeing from the oppressive genocidal campaign in leon mart or burma they're not going to have necessarily access to fresh water or food anytime soon we have to have the compassion and especially the young people and the courage of abraham and the moral substance of abraham to begin working and dedicating their lives to putting the institutional and structural mechanisms in place to see that people all over this world can have a chance at a dignified living starting with our own country but looking beyond the shores of our country ما الله تعالى give us توفي ما الله bless us with strong morals and strong character ما الله تعالى bless us inspire us to build as one of the poets said about that courageous young person ليس اللهم صلى الله عليه وسلم ليس فتا من خالح كان أبي ولكن فتا من خالح أنا ذا من خالح one who said my forefathers did this and that a lot of us like this all the Muslims we did this and we did that and we built the Taj Mahal and the Hamra Palace and we built this and this and that and we had this great civilization and this great empire that stretched from Spain to the wall of China ما شاء الله that sounds very good what are we doing now what are we building now what are we contributing now ليس فتا من خالح كان أبي ولكن فتا من خالح أنا ذا a courageous young person is one who stands up and says here I am we have to have that courage to say here I am I'm not perfect I have my flaws but I'm willing to stand up and take responsibility despite my flaws in spite of my shortcomings because if I don't who will if I don't who will so in conclusion just to be appreciative a lot of us we're not appreciative because we do the opposite of what our great spiritual masters have instructed us to do they instructed us to look up to those above us in religion and look down to those beneath us in the world in other words look up to those who are better than us in religion so we can be inspired I want to memorize the Quran I want to study the prophetic biography more I want to have the ability to benefit from the Quran like that brother that sister I want to know the Arabic language I want to have the character the patience and the refined qualities that I observe in this brother this sister so it's inspiring us to do more and look down on those beneath us in the world who have less than us why because we're appreciative as we said if you're in Houston and your house has just been destroyed up to the four foot level above four feet it's salvageable and you're blessed to have insurance not everyone is and you have water and you have food you have a shelter to go to despite the hardships despite the difficulties of that situation we're not trying to minimize the hardship the difficulties involved in that situation but if you look down at those people in Bangladesh who don't have a shelter who don't have food who don't have potable water all those people in India or Nepal whose landscape have been ravaged by floods then you say what you said how do we not praise the lord I'm doing good even some of you might have seen the guy in saint martin that hurricane almost drift you look at the satellite image of all these islands before and after green before brown now completely defoniated completely wrecked they're in a man in a mess smiling and laughing but he was really cheerful and the reporter was like how can you be cheerful he said I still have my life I have my life so he's appreciated شاكرا لأمي ألداود الشقور ألداود الشقور ألداود الشقور وقليل من عبابي الشقور oh family of god embody in your actions faithfulness faithfulness goes beyond the tongue wish it be an embodiment of sugar despite the situation or the phobia or the this or the that or the other we have our day we have our lives we have food, we have potable water we have shelter we have family we have friends we have community we should be an embodiment of sugar وقليل من عبابي الشقور and very few of my servants are truly thankful because they look up to those in Dunya oh I don't have a Lexus I don't have a Tesla well you have a Mercedes you should be happy you have a Lexus but I want an electric car that doesn't make noise when it pulls up look at the man who doesn't have a car so you can thank Allah you can have a car no matter what brand it is الحمد لله it gets you from point A to point B الحمد لله but too many of us who are inundated who are Allah's talents blessings flow over us we're not appreciative because we're looking up to those above us in Dunya and I don't have my house is only 10,000 square feet they have a mansion that means over 20,000 square feet I should have mentioned I work harder than they work you should downsize from your 10,000 square feet قليل من إبادة شكور you know what شكور is إبادة شكور إبادة شكور and إبادة شكور is a camel that gets fat from very little grass that's an ideal camel as opposed to a camel eats all the grass for the other camel and he's still skinny but the شكور is the camel he eats a little and gets fat real easy and nice and plump that's شكور in other words a person who's appreciative for the smallest blessing they're overwhelmingly appreciative for the smallest blessing you know those people right you loan them $5 just have a lot here but you need $100 I only have $5 this $5 is going to be like seed money it's going to have the barakah I'll get the other $95 so easy that's شكور you get them a little bit overwhelmingly appreciative then you know the other person right you give them $100 then they say you could give me $1,000 just $100 that's all you ask for I know about you man you're sitting on millions man come on you know you can do $1,000 you only need $100 I know that's before I ran into you no شكور but the other $5 out of this $100 oh mashallah you like a maze you still got $95 to go yeah that'll be easy now because the barakah is in the first of the gift and mashallah Allah says if you're thankful I'll just thank Allah tonight when I go to bed that's شكور very few of my servants are truly thankful we should be overwhelming we should be being with thankfulness we should be joyous people people moving around we should be joyous people خل بفضل الله و برحماته يفرحوا و قيروا مننا يا جمعون say in the grace of Allah and in His mercy in this let them rejoice it is better than anything that can gather from this world so you don't have anything from the world but your life in your life your recipient of the grace and mercy of Allah Ta'ala of Almighty God you have everything you should be joyous و الحمد لله رب العالمي و صلى الله عليه وسلم و على آله و صحمه السلام الكثير أقولوا قوي هذا و استغفر الله لي و لكم و ليسائر المؤمنين يقول استغفر الله استغفر الله بله رب العالمي و الصلاة و السلام على سيد المرسنين إن الله و ملائك أتأهوا بصدول على النبي يا آقي يخلدين آنبوا عليه وسلم و تسليه إيه ما الله مصلي وسلم أبارك على سيدنا محمد و على آله وسلم و تسليه الكثير أقول so brothers and sisters rejoice be thankful be courageous be Abrahamic have that youthful courage and if you are young in age be young at heart so everyone is eligible may Allah bless us may Allah bless all the other people who relate to Abraham as their patriarch other faiths may Allah bless us to come together to shine the light of good on this world may Allah bless us to come together to realize that Abraham peace be upon him that we have a mission we have a mission and it's a good mission it's a mission of caring and sharing it's a mission of guidance and direction it's a mission of challenging those persistent idols that continue to erode and undermine our future viability not just as a people as a species may Allah give us taufi may Allah give us Muslims and Muslims may Allah give us


What if Chainsaw Man's small details didn't exist? Well, before I answer that, why don't I talk about how the small details make Chainsaw Man a cinematic masterpiece? And that's because they make Chainsaw Man feel realistic. Yes, I believe that Chainsaw Man is realistic than every other anime out there, and it's because of the small details. And also one big reason is because it's only 12 episodes. If it was a 24 episode season like every other anime, then Chainsaw Man would be... Mid. Absolutely Mid. But since it's 12 episodes, maybe put an extreme effort into each episode and just add a detail after detail to the point where the small details are what makes the anime feel like it's not an anime. No need to f*** from ambient noise to just details, to lighting, to voice acting. Voice acting? But that's not a small detail. Well, yeah, but no. I still want to talk about it, because it's different, and I like it. I like it that much that I'm going to talk about the ambient noise. How often do you hear background music in Chainsaw Man? Not often, but when it plays it goes hard and it fits well with what Mapper are trying to show us. But what does this have to do with ambient noise? Well, when we aren't having any background music, we get ambient. Well made ambient noise that feels so realistic. Take a look at this scene for example. So we're in a hospital after the fight with the Bat and Leech Devil. No music, just ambience. It does not need music. They don't want to make it more emotional, they want it to feel realistic. What is it like when you're in a hospital? Is it filled with background music? Nah, I don't think so. It's like this.  You can hear the cars outside, air conditioning, doors to other rooms opening, equipment being placed down outside the room, other people speaking in the halls, helicopters landing on the hospital. You can hear all of this when you're in a hospital. You can open your eyes now. All of that sounded natural, right? In other anime it would just be the beeping from the machines, or some soundtrack in the background. But Chainsaw Man doesn't need music for every scene. It can work perfectly fine with ambience. You probably didn't even realise that there is this much ambience noise in the show because it just works way too well. Sorry, I'm really, I want Pepsi, I'm really, I'm sorry, I'm trying to get a bit of a mucusy throat and that means I might be getting sick and I usually get a summer cold. I'm going to do the right thing by drinking Pepsi instead of water. Anyways, where was I? Details. Is that really who it was? Going deep hurts the throat, who knew? You can see that in every shot of the anime there was more Ford put into the tiny details throughout the show. Like for example, in the final episode on top of the train, they did not need to add that many power lines and poles and all that just jazz, but they did and it looks too good. My throat still hurts from before, I don't know why I did that. Mapper adds in them extra details to make it look more realistic, but like nah, they must have done some funky stuff to this scene because each building that goes past is different. They all got their own markings, designs and all that just jazz, like wow, absolutely astonishing. I already know that Mapper was aiming for making Chainsaw Man realistic, but they seriously just pushed the boundaries of what they can achieve even further away, away. It's like that throughout the entire show and I love it. The attention to detail that has been put into it is just the best I have ever seen. Hands down the best, but do you know what else makes the background details look even better? The lighting.  We all know the lighting is good in this, but did you know it was this good? Wait, what happened? What do you mean what happened? Look at the eyes. All details that get implemented into the lighting just makes it that much better. Like, oh yeah, so much better. No, but seriously, if you look at the eyes, they actually change in the light and that's absolutely phenomenal. Another great example of the lighting is an episode 7 with Amino and Aki in the diner. The natural light coming in from outside is gleaming through the massive window. The shadows emitting from the window frames and the chairs are all consistent. The way the shadows go around their food bowls has curvature. The way how the colours from the table and chairs are bouncing off onto the roof so there's some red smears up there, and the way that the buildings outside are also getting affected by the light. All of this in one shot. Like what the fuck? How? Why? Huh? It's just insane how much time got put into the lighting. It's just consistently phenomenal throughout the entire show and I'm like wow. But you know what else is consistently phenomenal throughout the entire show? The voice acting. They did this thing where they were like nah nah nah, sound real.  Which is terrifying when you hear the screaming from the background characters when the devils are around. It's terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.  And this right here is my favorite voice acting scene in the entire show. Feel the fear. So yeah, I'm pretty sure Mapper got inside everyone's heads, turned off their anime filter for when it came to the voice acting because it's just too realistic and it's scary. But it's great. But because of the voice acting sounding realistic, I believe that that is going to make this anime become the go-to anime for noobs. Because these noobs will feel connected to the characters for how realistic they sound in act, and then they're going to die.  But the reason why I believe they are so good is because Mapper only worked on 12 episodes instead of it being 24 episodes. So if my math is correct, that means twice the amount of effort it was able to be put into each episode. And I seriously believe that because of them putting more effort into the small details, that Chainsaw Man has become a cinematic masterpiece that feels more realistic than any other anime that I have watched. The dust particles that are leaking through gaps, the clouds that are moving in the sky, the people on the street who are actually moving, the details on the faces when it's a close-up, the scuffs and scratches on the middle of the elevator, the brift coming from Denji when he's against the Bat Devil. All of these have been put into the show by amazing workers who have made it so much more realistic with their time and dedication. So that's the answer for the question. What if Chainsaw Man's small details didn't exist? It would be mid. Absolutely mid. Like astonishingly mid. And because of that, it makes me want to have animes be at 12 episodes each season. It's just so they can put more effort into each episode and just make it feel so more realistic. But nah, that will never happen. By next time you see small details on an anime, just remember that someone's hard work and dedication made that shot just that little bit much better so you can have a better experience. Have a great day. Peace.


Hey, everybody, this is number 68 in the series. Oh, it says it right on the screen. I think I would know that. Hope everybody's doing OK today. We're going to wait for people to start to file in. Let's see here. I assume it's working. Let's put the chat overlay up so you guys can talk to each other as usual. Show me 15 people, then 0, then 13. OK, here we go. So anyway, just somebody give me a heads up so that I know that you can hear me. I assume it's working. I think I have this all worked out by now. OK, my glasses are no longer dark. I literally ran in from outside. My glasses had turned dark from the sun. So I might get a look like I'm wearing sunglasses anyway. So welcome, everybody. Today we're going to talk about why accepting anxiety. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Hey, Kathleen, what up, GBG? So working from Facebook, yep. Just a quick reminder, if you're in the Facebook group, you're only going to show up as Facebook user. That's unfortunately just the way Restream does it. So I won't see your name. Sorry about that. But if you're coming from anywhere else, I should see you. Hey, B, what up? Billy, what's going on? Today we're going to talk about why accepting anxiety or whatever word we want to use. Tolerance, floating, surrender, whatever.  And it was prompted by a thing that I posted on Instagram late last week. And I literally did get a ton. Now, this is an influencer thing. And I'm going to call out all the influencers. I got so many DMs. I will tell you if I only got four. In this case, I really did get the last count was like 17, which is a lot. So there's a lot of people wanting to know, OK, can you explain this quote? But when an influencer says, all you guys have been asking about, a lot of times, it's just a thing they want to talk about. So I promise I will never do that to you. Anyway, user works, hypercontra at Chris does too. I will not call you hypercontra at Chris. I'm sorry, I ain't doing it. So anyway, today we're going to talk about why accepting anxiety is so hard to learn. And honestly, so hard to teach from somebody like me and I think other working therapists, I'm headed that way. I'm not a therapist yet, but other psycho educators and digital creators in the mental health space will tell you that this is one of the hardest things to teach. It can be somewhat frustrating because we don't have good words for it. And we have to resort to things like metaphors and analogies and examples. And it is my contention that if Dr. Clare Weeks was working today, she would probably have revised her words like 10 times. If she had the internet and she had instant feedback like I have the benefit of having, she would have probably changed her words quite a bit because she would have found the same frustration that we do when you get a lot of feedback from people. It's pretty much like, oh, this is really hard to teach. And it's really hard for people to get their brains around. So I just definitely want to say, if you are struggling to kind of get your brain around the idea of accepting anxiety or tolerating it or surrendering to it, it's not just you. It's pretty much everybody. And we're going to go through a couple of reasons. I actually even wrote notes for today, which is pretty rare. But I actually have a couple of notes so that I make sure I hit some important points today. So we're going to talk about that. Anyway, Becky is here from Twitch. We have our Twitch representative, which is always great. What do we got? About 60 people or so in the room. This is cool. I think we usually top out around anywhere from 90 to 100. But this is pretty cool. So let's talk about this. One of the core principles in recovery, at least the way I teach it, and based on my theoretical orientation, and we can trace it all the way back to the beginning days of CBT, and we can talk about Claire Weeks, and we can go all the way back into Stoic philosophy and Buddhism and all that stuff. Acceptance, or the fact that you have to learn to stop fighting it, is one of the core concepts. It's probably in that top three for sure. It might be the top one, to be honest with you. Like the natural thing is you want to fight your anxiety, but we are solving this problem, if you want to call it a problem, by learning to not fight it and not resist it. So the universal word that gets used all the time is acceptance. I like to use the word surrender to it. Josh Fletcher likes to use willful tolerance. Like everybody has their own words. Claire Weeks did say accept and float. So like everybody has their own stuff, right? And we have to stick to that principle. Like this is one of the core principles in recovery.  So it's all of those things. And it also goes counter to like a state of mind that in acceptance and commitment therapy and act, we would call it minding instead of this. So there's thinking and there's minding. It's minding as like an active problem-solving state. We're going to go over that. But it is one of the core principles of recovery. And it is one of the things acceptance and allowing and surrendering is one of those things that I think people struggle with the most.  So often people will try to do it this way without actually doing it this way, which is nobody's fault. This is just a really hard thing to grasp and really hard to do. And keep in mind as I go through this little lecture before we get it to comments and everything that one of the things that I wrote down is the best way to learn how to accept, float, surrender, tolerate all that stuff is to just try doing it. There is inherent in all of this a leap of faith that requires trust in the people who came before you. I 100% understand and I try to honor this every day. If you are following my words or anybody who sounds like me, we have to all understand that you are choosing to trust us like I trust a doctor weeks when I read her books. If you have a therapist, you're trusting your therapist. If you're watching people who came before you on the recovery journey in the online community at large or in the Facebook group or whatever, you're trusting them to not steer you wrong. So you're trusting us to send you into direction where you must do really hard things, but you're trusting that we're not telling you to do actually dangerous things even though you feel that they are dangerous. But baked into this whole thing is we could talk about words and books and videos and explanations and metaphors and analogies and examples, but in the end you only truly learn how to do this when you add, you mix together that leap of faith, willingness to take the leap of faith and courage. That is the only way that you ultimately actually understand acceptance. So anybody who's watching who's maybe further down the road would probably corroborate that, at least a variation of that. And I say this all the time, one of the paradoxes of all of these things is that you just don't get it until you do it. You're never ready to do it until after you do it.  So let me put the quote up on the screen so that you guys can see what I am talking about because if you missed it, this is what I put up. So let me hide the caption because clearly I'm hiding the quote. So this is the quote that I put up. This is from a book on acceptance therapy that was literally written by the guy that sort of invented it, Stephen Hayes and a couple of it, Kelly Wilson and Kirk Stroll. So a couple of his frequent collaborators who were part of the sort of the Titans of Act, ACT acceptance and commitment therapy. A lot of people ask me about this book because I do a bunch of, I put up a bunch of quotes about this book on social media. I would not expect you to buy this book and I would not even necessarily suggest it. It's really a textbook. And believe me, the sections on relational frame theory, I've reread seven and eight times and I still look at the whole thing. So this might not be a great book for an end user, but I quote this book a lot. So this quote is when acceptance is linked to this kind of problem solving mode of mind. Remember I talked about the difference between thinking and minding? It is not acceptance at all. That might be one reason why acceptance appears to require metaphors, exercises and shaping to be learned rather than instructions simply to be given, which is huge that last bit of the quote there rather than instructions to be given is pretty much huge. So let's get rid of that. I will put the caption back up again and let's get into that. So in the quote, they're talking about the state of like a problem solving state of mind. That's the thing that we would call minding. I'm minding now, which is I'm actively, you can't stop thinking, we don't have to control that, but we do get to control where we go into problem solving mode. And sort of the default state, well, before we get to that, let me give you the first point. So I'm gonna get to that in a second, but let me back up. One of the reasons why acceptance is just so difficult to learn and on the other side, difficult to teach is because it is literally based on doing the exact opposite of what every instinct in your body wants you to do. So if you have kicked around online and tried to find all different ways to manage, regulate your anxiety and prevent it and avoid triggers and do all those things, you know that they're the preponderance of advice when dealing with anxiety problems like panic disorder or gorophobia would be to try to teach you how to get away from it or how to manage it and do things like manipulate your vagus nerve to try to keep it from happening and get away from it. It's all based on the idea that the state of being anxious is a problem that you'd have to pathologize and either cure or somehow fix. And one of the basic premises in acceptance and commitment therapy and act is that not all human states should be pathologized. We don't have to fix every state that we have that we don't like just cause it's negative or just cause it might be a state that we don't like to be and doesn't necessarily we have to fix it. So we wind up in a situation where it scares you so damn much it will convince you that you're in danger and the idea of acceptance is exactly the opposite of what you may have been told in other places and exactly the opposite of what your own instincts are screaming at you to do which is save me get away from this stop it. I have to stop this. This is going to drive me crazy.  It's gonna give me a heart attack. I'm never gonna sleep again. I'm gonna have a psychotic break. Those things get so loud that the idea that you have to just accept all that and possibly enroll the dice to let those terrible outcomes happen is very, very, very difficult for any human being because it goes completely against common sense and sort of survival and preservation instinct if you will, right? So that's the first reason. And as a teacher, it's really hard to teach acceptance because to be completely honest with you people ask me all the time, like how come you only have say 10,000 people on your YouTube channel? How come you don't have an audience of millions? Well, because this is a really hard product to sell. This is like trying to sell ice in the winter. It is not easy to sell the idea that you have to drop all that resistance and just let these horrible feelings happen to you to learn from them. And you've seen me in debates with people who will disagree with me and other people who do what I do wind up in those same debates and that's fine. Healthy debate is okay, but it's hard to learn because it's exactly the opposite of common sense and it's hard to teach because it's exactly the opposite of common sense. And many, many people will encounter content like mine or books like mine or podcasts like mine and immediately lash out at me and say, you are lying, you've never had a panic attack, you don't know how it feels. This cannot be right. F you, I'm out of here. Like you should not be allowed to say this. So I get that every day. So the second thing goes back to the quote, right? Which is the quote talked about being in a problem-solving state of mind. That is that thing where we decide that if it is something that makes me uncomfortable or scared or frightened or I feel vulnerable or uncertain, I have to fix that. I need to fix it. I have to fix this. I must manipulate it. I must fix it. I must solve the problem. And really and truly, when you are in a total state of surrender, acceptance, tolerance, floating, whatever word you like resonates with you, you are abandoning that default response, which is to go into fixing and minding mode to try to solve the problem. Now, this is a tough one because I think it's really nuanced. And a lot of people who even will say, okay, I get it now, you'll get it intellectually, but it really takes a lot of repetition. And sometimes it takes your therapist pointing out like, I appreciate your commitment, but look what you're still doing. Look what, look at the resistance you're still showing. Look at this that you're still doing. We often will intellectually say, okay, cool, I'm gonna totally surrender, but we are still almost involuntarily for a little while till we start to get some feedback and we start to get some experience under our belts. We are still going into it with like, okay, cool, I'll totally accept it, but you're still trying to solve it. And that's also what makes it really hard because not only are you abandoning sort of the drive for self-preservation and safety and comfort, but you're also going against that default response of the mind to try to fix adverse problems. This is why the internet is completely loaded with happiness hacks and gratitude and like the idea that you can totally engineer your emotions to only live a life of positive vibration and abundance.  Like that is terrible advice, but we are in many ways conditioned and that drive for comfort and self-preservation sort of leans us toward trying to fix all these problems. We are literally saying, but you have to really and truly stop trying to solve it. So by show of hands, if you want to, and I'll come back and get the questions by the way. So don't sweat it, I will come back and do questions and comments, but by show of hands, how many of you have said like, okay, cool, I'm gonna accept, I'm gonna float, I'm gonna surrender, but you still know that you're hoping that when you surrender it's a way to fix it and make it go away. It's not a problem if you are doing that, if you're still doing that now or if you've done it in the past, everybody goes through that, everybody goes through that. Yeah, like I know, I get it, I have to accept, I'm gonna float, Dr. Week said it, Drew said it, Josh says it, Kim says it, Jenna says it, but you're still hoping, oh, if I do it this way, that means it'll go away faster, it means it'll stop. So see everybody's jumping in with like, yeah, like me, me, me, it's an almost universal experience, guys. So don't judge yourself negatively, don't get down on yourself because I went through that too, we all did. It is really, really hard to abandon that frame of mind. And I think for me, when I started by saying, keep in mind as we go through this discussion that part of acceptance only comes to experience, it really took letting go again and again and a little more and a little more and a little more and then finally at some point it starts to dawn on you, like, oh, she really meant, Dr. Week's really meant, let my hands shake uncontrollably, she really meant, let my legs go totally to jelly, Drew really did mean, like go ahead and have a heart attack and die. That is so hard to ultimately accept and you can't do that until you roll those dice and you start to feel like, oh, that they really, really meant that.  They can't possibly mean that, right? But we do and it's really hard. That's why it's so hard to teach because like people will push back all the time. Yeah, but what about? Well, and when I push back on your pushback, it's because yes, you really do have to abandon the idea that you can mentally protect yourself or do some sort of mental navigation and gyrations to change the state you're experiencing. So that's the second reason why it's really hard to understand and learn acceptance and really hard to teach. But here is, here is the prop to me, the number one reason why that last part where you do leap and you do fully surrender and you do begin to experience what full acceptance and surrender feels like is that there are no steps for that. So the quote, when Stephen Hayes wrote the book and Strohsel and those guys and Kelly Wilson wrote that book, actually though that quote was from a different research paper by the way, that was from a guy named McMullen. Then anyway, so when that quote was written, they're literally talking about the fact that we run out of words to give you, we run out of steps. There are no steps to being brave. There are no steps to letting go. There are no steps to taking a leap of faith. I talked about this over and over and over. You did a podcast episode, I don't even know when. I've lost track of them all at this point. Cult is the anxious truth and anxiety recovery program. So if you can go to my website, the anxioustruth.com and search all the podcast episodes. I went into detail on that one, whereas at some point we literally run out of steps to give you. And that's difficult because when you're trying to get it and you want to let go but you're just too afraid to let go, you will almost instantly come back to me or whoever, your therapist, your group, whoever. And say, but how? But then I get really scared, so how do I do that? And none of us ever has, we run out of steps. At that moment where you choose to be courageous, where you choose to roll the dice, where you choose to take a chance, where you choose to take that leap of faith, there are no steps. I can't give you steps. I can no longer give you instructions for that. So this is why we wind up resorting to all kinds of crazy metaphors and analogies and people say all the time, like how do you keep coming up with these? Well, because there's like a zillion people in the community here and everybody thinks a little different, feels a little different, has different experiences. And so I might use one metaphor on Tuesday that hits for 15 people and a completely different metaphor on Thursday that hits for 35 completely different people because everybody does things a little bit differently and they're, you know, everybody's thinking and conceptualizing things a different way. So there are literally like, I probably use the word literally a lot here but in the therapeutic community, like a couple of months ago, I had one of my therapist friends on a Saturday morning, send me a link to a PDF. It's like the latest version because we just keep adding to it of like the big book of act metaphors. There are so many of them. And any therapist that's involved in like that type of intervention and act type intervention, that's based on acceptance on surrender, on floating, on tolerating, on inhibitory learning, which is like you don't try to save yourself and you wind up okay, even when you don't feel okay. Anybody who's doing that sort of stuff, we all run for those metaphors and those analogies and those examples. And because we're just trying so hard to find words for things that there are no words for. So if anybody in the comment section right now thinks that they have a way to give somebody steps to be brave.  I'm not a diver by the way. And I'm gonna jump into a pool from that third and I'm terrified to do that.  And then when you get to the point where I am on the platform and looking over the edge, the last step is jump. And when I say, but how do I jump? You will have no more words for me. You will have no more instructions for me. Like just jump, I can't tell you anything else. Close your eyes and jump. That's not an instruction. That's a suggestion, but you'll run out of words for me. So I would urge you, if you're struggling with the idea of surrender and acceptance and tolerance, think about trying to teach a friend or a family member or me or anybody. Go ahead and try to think how you would teach me or somebody how to jump off a giant, high diving platform if they're scared to do it. You know that at some point, you would have to say to me, I don't have any more words, dude, I wish I did, but I'm out of words. So that's where people like me sit. And that's why, in the quote that I put up on the screen, I'll put it up again in a second if you guys want to see it again, but that's why acceptance requires experience and doing and actual practical application to learn how to do over time. Because your surrender, your allowing, your floating, your acceptance in the beginning looks very different than it does in the middle of your recovery and toward the end of recovery. Like what I do now looks very different than what I did those first few times, I allowed myself to make a right on route 347 and panic on a six lane highway, right? So that's kind of what I wanted to talk about. And I'm gonna keep coming back to the idea that acceptance, surrender, tolerance, is a thing that you only know how to do after you take a chance, roll the dice, take a risk, give up, allow the horrible thing to happen and then learn that like, okay, this is how we do this. This is what it feels like. It feels terrifying, but even though I didn't save myself, nothing bad happened to me and that's the lesson that acceptance and surrender and tolerance teaches us. And then over time, when we add a bunch of those experiences together and we put them in different contexts and different places because we want a wide range of experiences in which we are afraid and we surrender, then we start to learn like, oh man, I'm super capable of handling this thing that for so many years or months, I've declared off limits, no way, no how, no way, no how. And I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that that applies to everything that you fear in this disordered state that we're talking about. I'm never talking about learning how to not be afraid of truly dangerous things. Never, never, never. I cannot say that disclaimer enough. There is in no way am I saying like, hey, go do truly dangerous things and just learn not to be afraid of them. Like fear serves a purpose. We want fear, it keeps us alive. This is just fear that feels every bit is real but it's completely misguided. That is always so, so, so important to remember in the context that we're all dealing with here, right? So that is, you guys want me to put the quote again? I don't care if it'll help or not, but let me know, I'll put them up there. So let's go through the comments here and I'll see everybody is doing. What are we doing? 22 minutes, that wasn't bad. This is a big topic. I literally had to write notes, like notes are rare, but so this was a big topic and I appreciate you guys hanging in there with me. I think it's an important topic. I really is, is one of the hardest parts of recovery. Sure, Penelope Cruzify, always one of my favorite screen names there. I will put that graphic back up again. I need a producer. I need somebody like in the truck, like with the levers and stuff, like in a football game. So this is the quote, we'll leave it up for a second while I read through the comments. Again, the book is called acceptance commitment therapy. It's like the third edition of it. Don't buy this book. You can buy, I can't tell you not to buy the book but I would not recommend that you buy this book because it is a textbook through and through. It is slow reading. It is meant for therapists and practitioners. It's not meant for end users. So I'm going to look through the chat for a second while I hide behind this quote. Get a stream deck.  That's cool. On my gadget guy, I would like a stream deck 100%. Stream, this is, I use restream and restream just let me start to use multiple cameras too. So one day I really want to have a reason to show you something that's on my desk, like top down. Maybe we'll do like something with a book just because I want to use the gadget. Anyway, let's hide the graphic. I feel silly hiding that. That doesn't make any sense to me. So let's go into the chat and see what we got here. I see Sonya is here. Hello Sonya. And by the way Sonya, you are very generous. Just to say thank you very much. It is difficult to wrap. I'm going to put some stuff on the comments. You guys are killing in the comments. I do not know what this background is. I think it's coffee beans. I think, I hope it is.  That's what I said. It is super opposite of what everybody wants to do. And it's why people like me do not have giant audiences because we're selling ice in the winter that nobody wants to buy. But you are right. So correct. Thank you Becky for pointing that out. I know this is a big one. So Kathleen, thank you for mentioning this. Particularly bad flight the other day. My husband said I just need to be better at being okay with my own death. This, so there are certain things, and I'm glad you put this up there. This is the ultimate acceptance right here, right? This is the ultimate acceptance is like you need to be better. And by the way, that's a great quote from your husband for sure, give him a big fist bump for me on that one. But that's the ultimate one that everybody say, how am I supposed to accept death? Well, in every one of these instances, I would say, well, what choice do you have? You literally have no choice. There is a difference between accepting death and treating it as if it's happening right now. That's the difference. So somebody I saw a comment go by before like, but acceptance of death is just so hard. Well, in the end, you have to understand the difference between like, well, I accept that someday I'm gonna die. Maybe today is it, I don't know. I mean, I hope I see you guys two Mondays, but I don't know that. So I can accept that that is a harsh reality of every human life that has ever been and never will be. I mean, unless Ray Kurzweil is right, and we're gonna download ourselves into machines, I don't know. But you have to understand that what you are stuck on in terms of accepting death is trying to, you're treating it as if it's happening right now or might happen sometime in the next five minutes or an hour when you have no idea, when none of us has any idea when that's coming for us. So you get stuck in the whole like, cool, good job. Dual fist bump. So we get stuck in that cycle where we begin to treat death like it's an immediate thing right now. And that's different. So I don't wanna die, but I've accepted the fact that someday I will and I don't know what day that is, but I don't have to always treat it like it's happening right this minute because it's not happening right this minute. And I have no idea if it's gonna happen in five minutes. And in the end, in very rare instances, could I even stop it anyway? So that is the reality. So just understand that you're feeling like, well, if I accept death, it means it's gonna happen. Well, it's gonna happen anyway. So not accepting it is absolutely to be super cliched. Like it's useless because then you're just ruining the life that you have before it does happen. So it's really hard to do that, but I get that. I question my health, as we guys watch me scroll through the comments is always so exciting, accepting is so hard to continue to question my health and how everyone is wrong. I'm really sick. That's always how I get stuck, yeah. So again, the first thing that I told you that makes this so hard is it's the opposite of what you wanna do. And for people, I hate everything you said, but I accept it, touche. But for people with health anxiety, you are literally accepting, you're the opposite. For you, I have to remain vigilant about my health all the time and I must treat it as if every doctor and everybody I've ever seen is wrong. I can't take the risk because what if they were wrong? I gotta make sure, I have to make sure. So for you, acceptance is, I'm not sure. It's possible that 62 doctors have been wrong. It is possible. The odds are not zero, they're 0.0001% that 62 doctors are wrong. But if you listen to the podcast episode I did on health anxiety, just go to my website and search for health anxiety. You will see that I frame that as a uncertainty intolerance disorder. It has nothing to do with your health. It has to do with, I can't accept anything more than 100% certainty. So maybe that helps. Mustard rain, I always love the name. Williness is a precursor to acceptance. That is true. That is 100% true. If you are not willing to surrender, you won't surrender. But that's okay, because sometimes it takes a long time for people to get to being fully willing. You might be intellectually willing but not emotionally willing, which sounds all like woo-woo. But I think there's truth in that. And I believe that some of that involves consequence. Like if I don't have enough consequence then I'm not gonna be willing. Like if I am backed into a corner and I have nowhere else to go with this, I am out of options. This is my only choice. I become a whole lot more willing to roll the dice and like take the leap of faith. So sometimes acceptance only comes when you reach that level of willingness that Mustard Rain just talked about. And sometimes you only reach that level of willingness when you have exhausted every other option. Some people think their options are exhausted earlier. Some will hang on like hot death to every possible other option that there might be before doing it this way. And that's okay, I would not blame you if you're doing it that way. You think you're protecting yourself, I get that. So another one of those show of hands, like how many people is in 100 of you in the room right now? How many people are you listening right now but are also keeping one eye on other things? And I'm not saying that I'm better than the other things or whatever. How many people are listening to me right now, listening to my podcast, reading the books that I write and also hoping that celery juice is gonna fix it. I don't know, I always pick on the celery juice because that's okay. Everybody kind of does that, waving, sure, I get it. And again, so Mustard Rain, who brought up the willingness thing only when you have exhausted all the options and you see like that's not helping me, then you get that sense of willingness that leads to acceptance. So I appreciate this. This is thank you for the feedback. And that was a great comment by the way. Trying to help my daughter through anxiety and panic a lot. Thank you for being a good mom. That's hard and it's hard. We don't wanna watch our kids struggle. So I get it, hang in there. Cheer for her, don't comfort her and don't wrap her in bubble wrap, cheer for her. So let's see, had to take the, okay. Always gotta put a comment from Bethany up. I had to take that leap too. I told myself, what do I have to lose? I won't be any worse off. And that is exactly the thing, the consequence, right? So at some point it's like, this can't get any worse. And one of those, I always, I know I'm always sending you guys on Wild Goose Chases to old podcast episodes, but one of the more popular ones I ever did was that one where I said, I think it was called the thing that nobody wants to hear.  Like it took me getting to that point before I was willing to like go all in. Like that's it, I was all in. I mean, I was already down the road, but that was a moment where it's like, that's it. I knew all the things, but I wasn't really totally putting into practice until I hit the point where it's like, nope, no more. So, Julie, you don't have to apologize for being busy at work. It's okay. It's okay if you're watching the replay. It's all right, can't do anything wrong in one of these. And there's no reward until you do it. That's another huge one. I don't know what's up with Restream where like the caption is only half the screen. I don't know what's up with that. Yes, it will. These stay on a replay. If you subscribe to my YouTube channel, there is a playlist called Recovery Monday. All of the old live streams are in there. You can come back and watch them anytime you want. So GBG is right. There is no reward until you do it. So that's another thing that sometimes just reading about this stuff. Now, I talked about this in the Facebook group last night.  I promise as soon as I get a chance today. But I talked about that. Sometimes just thinking about it, watching videos like this, commenting, asking questions. Let me go read another podcast. And there's never a reward for that. The reward only comes in recovery from the actions, which is a shitty deal, but it's the deal we have. Let's see here. It's okay. I think we need to recognize that some people do need extra help because the pain from the anxiety has pushed them to the point of, I'm sure that this continues. I'm sorry, Jen. I know that it cuts you off, right? I'll see. Yes, that's true. Everybody is in different situations. People who are dealing with chronic health conditions or chronic pain. Yes, those things make it harder. There are things that add wrinkles. There are things that make it more challenging. I always want to acknowledge those things, but I also really feel so strongly that I also have to push back a little bit and say, that can become a trap. We have to acknowledge, like, well, I have more obstacles here that I have to work on. No problem. We can cheer for you. We can acknowledge that. We can validate that. But at some point, we run the risk of getting into like, but I have these extra special things, so therefore I must be so slow and so careful and never ever ever push myself that I never actually get better. So that is a hard line, like it's a tightrope act in a little ways. So I always try and give both sides of that. But that's hard because in a social media context like this, when I don't know you, I can't say specifically how hard you should push yourself and not, but I just see too many people that get stuck with like, well, I'm specially broken because I have these other things so I should never push myself and then they wind up stuck. So we gotta be careful about that. Let's see here. She's such a little fighter. That's great. Okay, I get it. For those of you who I'll put this up on the screen, if anybody is dealing with kids in anxiety, again, if you go to my website, just search for kids or search for Dr. Jackie. Her name is J-A-C-Q-U-E Bogdanov. She did an episode with me. She's a therapist that specialized in treating kids and adolescents. And we talked about that. The rules are generally the same, by the way. Most people would be amazed. I was amazed. I was like, it's gotta be different, right? She was like, no, it's definitely not different. We just have to take into account the developmental level of a particular person. So a 10-year-old doesn't have the ability to conceptualize the way a 40-year-old does. So we have to be mindful of that, but the rules are pretty much the same. Anybody who's working on helping their kids with this, my hat is off to you. So let's see here. Oh, we got another church person. I think the hardest part is when you get better at accepting then it all falls apart. Okay, let's pop this out here. And then it all falls apart again. So I will always challenge this. This is the setback thing. It all fell apart. It all went out the window. This is where you hear me say things. I can, some people hate this because it sounds accusatory to them. I'm not accusing you. I'm not blaming you, but I'm pointing out your power. It all falls apart is I was scared enough in those moments that I reverted back to my old ways. I couldn't roll the dice because the fear got, I defined it as too much, too much of a risk, and I went back and chose to do my old things. And then I got stuck in that cycle. So that is what all falls apart actually is. And it's so important to put your brain around that, not because there's blame there. Like, oh, you did it wrong. Of course you did it wrong. It's not because you did it wrong. It's just that you're really scared and you went back to the old way. You weren't willing to jump across that next fear line, if you will, like the line that fears draws in the sand. You hit one and you ran away. That's okay. Recognizing that is like, oh, so I don't have to just sit here with my fingers crossed and my toes crossed and I hope that somehow I move forward again. I can actually just start doing what I was doing that was making me better. So that's, you have power there. You have power there. Recognize it. Let's keep going. Okay, see the rest of Jen's comment here. Jen, those are terrible experiences you went through. I'm very sorry that you had to lift through those experiences. I'm never gonna comment on I needed help in pharmaceuticals, totally fine. Personal call, nothing wrong with that whatsoever. We need to be careful about, okay, see that's you actually answered the question already. We have to be careful about how far we push ourselves. We just have to be careful about assuming that you can never ever push yourself. Listen, this is an unpopular thing, but even people who have lived through horrible traumas and horrible experiences, ultimately, if they wind up moving past those things and to a recovered state, not that we can ever erase the past, but when they get past those things, anybody will wind up telling you that, yes, at some point I had to push myself into places that I did not think I should possibly go. So you just have to be really careful. I don't wanna belay with the point because I don't wanna sound like I'm arguing with you. I respect your experiences and I'm very sorry that you had to live through that. So let's see here. No, Billy says, so just do it even if you have to white-knuckle through it. No, I will tell you that if you are white-knuckling through, that's not helping you at all. So white-knuckling is what we call it when it comes from gripping the steering wheel so hard that your hands change color, right? And actually, I was told the other day that that's probably not a very culturally sensitive term to use and I probably shouldn't use it anymore. But yes, that means you are just gritting and I'm fighting through it because when you white-knuckle your way through things and that's where you wind up with like, I'm doing all the things, but I'm not getting any better. If you are, again, let's do another show of hands while there's so many of you still here, how many people are doing the things? I do the things, I'm doing my exposures that you don't avoid, but you are gritting your teeth, hanging on like hot death, pushing through as quick as possible. And when you get out of the challenge, it's like, ooh, thank God I made it. Hope I get to take six days now in the house before I do that again. Very common, yeah, white-knuckling is not a thing that helps you because the lesson that you learned from just gritting your teeth and pushing through it is that was horrible, I should have never done that. I barely made it, oh, I made it, I survived, I don't know how you lose the lesson that says, even if I let go, I still did it, right? So that's why you'll always hear me say to people, like, stop saying you made it, you did it, and you were always gonna make it. So that's sort of the white-knuckling thing. And again, white-knuckling is a thing that indicates I'm not accepting and I don't have that full willingness. I wanna do it, but I wanna do it, which is better than not doing it, don't get me wrong, as opposed to saying, no way I'm gonna live my entire life on the sofa, you've decided to try and challenge it, which is amazing, awesome, brave, and like certainly commendable fist bump for that, but we haven't reached the full level of like, oh, I'm gonna let whatever happens happens. So the thing I posted yesterday, was it yesterday on Instagram? I don't know, over the weekend, recovery is going from what if to even if, and so white-knuckling gets in the way of learning the lesson, even if I feel a thing, I'm okay. Hopefully that helps. Oh, this is good, sorry, I can't see your name. When I was surrendering, I didn't wanna feel things, but that is not surrendering. So yes, most people, I made a video on the Facebook group years ago, you're never gonna find it. I can't even find my own videos there. It's one of the reasons why I kind of hate the platform so much, but one of the things that it was an old admin, a lovely woman who's not in the group anymore, she at one point was beside herself and said, but if I do that, if I accept, if I do the Claire Week stuff, then I'm just left with these symptoms, these sensations and these feelings. And I made a video saying, yeah, that's exactly correct. Because remember that accepting and tolerating and surrendering is not a way to make it go away. It's a way to intentionally put yourself in contact with those internal experiences that you do not wanna have. So the object of surrender is to fully feel the things. So I love this comment because many people will find, well, I'm doing it now, and now it's worse. No, no, you're just choosing to feel it instead of shield yourself from it or gloss over it or use sandpaper to take off the rough edges. When you fully surrender and accept, you literally are like right up against the sandpaper, the nasty sliding across the pavement of exposures.  You bleed a little bit, I'm using metaphors here. And most people are like, oh, then that must be wrong. That can't be right, right? If I'm doing a thing, it's not making me feel better, it's making me feel worse. It's making you feel more. And it brings us back to the second point of why acceptance is so hard because you think you have to solve the problem instead of allowing it and stop seeing it and stop saying it is a problem. So, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, this is a good question. How do I not wish that it goes away? Everybody will wish that it goes away. Everybody does. You can't stop wishing that. So see why this is so hard? This is so hard to tease sometimes and I get why it's for you guys sometimes it's so hard to learn and grasp. Nobody is saying people will often misinterpret acceptance and surrender and all that stuff as you have to just not care. No, you're gonna care.  Like if I have a panic attack today, which I always will say could happen, don't know, maybe I will later, who knows? I don't want to. Like I care if I have a panic attack, I just don't care as much as I used to.  You just learn through repeated experiences that you don't have to care so much. You don't have to protect yourself so much and you don't have to hope so hard. Like, and then over time that sort of changes. So that relationship with I hope it goes away starts to change. Like, I really hope it, oh my God, I hope it goes away.  I really wish it would go away. Turns into like, I don't need it to go away. I still want it to go away, but I don't really need it to. I'll be okay, cause I know I'm gonna be fine in an hour. See the difference? Like it changes over time. You don't just flick a switch. There's no switch that says you just, you stop hoping that it goes away. It doesn't happen though. You can't do it that way. So, let's keep going. Thanks for the inspiration. You're very welcome. I was going out of town, tried so hard to accept, but felt like I had to turn around even though I was already there. It's always a felt like, right? So pop this up on the screen real quick. Again, sorry, I don't see your name. I was going out of town, I tried so hard, but it felt like I had to turn around. Felt like is, felt like is death in this game, right? So I always say things like we should, we have to eliminate feels like or felt like from our vocabulary if we can. It felt like, it felt like I had to turn around or else, I don't know what. When you finally come to see your anxiety symptoms, is that a true game changer? Yeah, let's see here. Yes, Shane, good question. When you finally come to see your symptoms as irrelevant, is that true change? Sure is. Whether anxiety is there or not, you'll continue to pursue your life based on your values. Values is huge in ACT. Like if you know anything about ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a lot of it is based on like, I'm gonna move away from making choices based on fear to making choices based on what I value in life. So yes, things change. Like over time I start to learn that I don't have to care so much about how I feel and that gives me more room. So when all you care about all the time and you treat it as so important is how you feel, what your body's doing, what your thoughts are doing, what might happen in five minutes, you literally have no room to do anything but try to hang on like hot death. When you stop, when you stop seeing that, oh, I have to care so much about this and I have to fix it and prevent it and get away from it, you suddenly have room to move it. You get wiggle room and like, that's where your values can start to come in and things start to change. You make decisions all differently. Great, great, great question. Great, great, great question. Yeah, this is a good one too. So thank you for this comment.  Doesn't happen. Now this is a shift over the last 20 years, 25 years or so in the way we sort of approach these things. I approach these things, I would say. People who are a little bit more into, you know, we would call the third wave or the next wave modalities or whatever, would say that, yes, that's true. You do learn through experience that 99% of the time, the irrational outcome that you feared, a heart attack stroke going crazy, whatever, suffocating because you feel short of breath, doesn't happen. That is 100% true, you do learn that but you also, there's that other part of it that matters more these days. Like, well, no matter what happens, I will find a way to deal with it until the day comes that there's no more dealing because that's my last day. This is tough.  How many people got freaked out that I said that? But that's kind of the way everybody lives their life and that's the way a non-disorder person would live their life. I will handle whatever I can handle until I can't handle it anymore. But you're treating things now that you can handle like you can't.  So tough one, right? Okay, it's true. It is human nature to not want to feel awful. So thank you, Sonya, for bringing this up because that's another misinterpretation. One, I have to learn to just not, because there's a couple. One is that really frost me. Oh, I just have to not care. No, I went through that a couple of minutes ago. You can't just turn off the caring switch, right? You will care. And the second one is this because some people will hear like, are you telling me I have to feel like this for the rest of my life? So the way to get better is to feel horrible until I die? No, no, no, not at all. But you have to be, and I've done, I did a stream on this I don't know, months ago, whenever, that misconception, but another paradox, these are paradox all the time, is that you have to be willing to feel that way and only then do you stop feeling that way. Does that make any sense? It doesn't make sense because like, wait a minute, I have to be willing to feel, well, if I feel this way, I can handle it. Then you stop feeling that way, but you have to aim at the first goal first. It is critically important that you aim at the first one, which is I am capable of feeling this way without hitting the panic button, without hitting the eject button, without calling it a nightmare, right? So that's the, you gotta get there first. Cause if you try to leapfrog that and just go to, I feel better, you will be sorely, you'll be frustrated over time. Setback I talked about, Mike, so hang in there. You're making choices to go back to the old ways. So what were you doing that was moving you forward, go back to doing that again, even when that's scary and hard? That's super simplified, but that is the way you deal with a setback. Just start doing the things that were getting you better. You've modified that in some way, shape, or form. So you gotta look at that. This is great, love this. Wow, I'm only halfway through the comments. I'm never gonna get through all of these because I ran out of time very shortly. That's why I do my exposures when I'm at the highest anxiety. Guess that's when I take the leap of faith. That is when exposures are actually the most valuable. But see this, this decision this person made right here. Sorry, I can't see your name. That's willingness. This is willingness and acceptance at play. That's what it looks like on a practical level. Cause you're right, those are the moments that you learn the most. Let's see here. I mean, I get it. I don't want to see, we don't want to see Jason in the speed up, maybe that's probably not me. Listen, I didn't say it, you did. When I'm having a good day, Heather says the thoughts of acceptance, acceptance seems easier when you're having a good day, but the comment I just put up about doing exposures on the most anxious days, that addresses that completely. Anybody can go do challenging things when we feel great cause then it's not a challenge. The trick here is to do things where we're not feeling great. And I do understand that for Heather, she says the thought of going crazy can be overwhelming. Anybody else in the room, we can insert a bunch of different stuff in there. The thought of insert your fear is overwhelming. So for Heather, for you, it's the thought of going crazy, but there's 10 of the people in the room right now that would tell you it's death or that would tell you it's harming their children or do something really embarrassing.  That's a good perspective to have. Oh, that's my scariest thing. So then you'll treat it as special because it's scariest to you, but it's just another thought. Acceptance takes mass courage, it does. It really does. There is 100% no doubt about that.  This is the thing that I'm doing with Jenna. I don't know if you guys are following along with me and Jenna Overbaugh. I think it's on the 19th of May. We are doing a workshop on approaching anxiety courageously because that is the part that trips so many people up, even in the acceptance thing. So I should probably put up a page for that, but I don't know. If you go to Jenna's site, I'll put up something at the end, but you can check that out because that's the thing we need to talk about more for sure. Let's see. When you no longer have to actively surrender. Yes, yes, this. We no longer have to actively surrender. You're doing it right. Because surrender just becomes a default. Right now the default is push it away. For me, the default is like a, and people who get into the recovered state, the default changes. Yeah, Carol, it kind of is. Feel the fear and do it anyway. But so the third thing that I was gonna say, the third misinterpretation is I'm just supposed to not care. I have to feel this way for the rest of my life and just do it. People think that recovery is a Nike commercial or it's like this. There's like a pop psychology book that was really popular. I wanna say in the 70s or 80s, I'm not sure when it was written. Yeah, kinda. It is kinda like that. That is true. But anybody who wants to roll in here, and believe me, I've had a few of those people, you're saying just do it. It's just do it. Just man up. Like you are missing all of the new ones. Could you imagine that somebody would spend eight years of my life and wrote and spoke hundreds of thousands of words over hours and hours and hours of my life just to somehow pad the phrase, just do it. It's definitely not just feel the fear and do it anyway. Monica wants to know how I accept the no air feeling with acceptance. My breath should not even be concerned. I'm so hypersensitive to it. You can't run for yourself. Go ahead and suffocate. Like I know that sounds insensitive and cruel but like you need to hear somebody say that to you. I used to do the same thing. I would walk around all day long trying to fill my lungs up to here. I was desperate to get a feeling of full lungs. Go to my website, the anxioustruth.com and search for breath or breathing. You will see a podcast episode that I did on that. And in that situation, I have to take a leap of faith that says even if I do not fill my lungs completely, we'll get enough air. So your acceptance is the leap of faith as I'm gonna stop trying to get such a deep breath. I'm gonna stop trying to make sure that I'm breathing when I let myself suffocate. Super scary. That sounds crazy and super scary but that is really the path. So, and again, remember that for you, you'll say it's a short of breath feeling. That's the worst, but there's 93 other people in the room and we probably have 25 different things where they would say, no, no, no, that's not the worst. I literally at one point had somebody say, I would pay to have gastrointestinal problems because that would be way better than heart fear. And I've had other people say like, I would pay to have heart fear. I'm afraid I'm not gonna make it to the toilet. So you see what happens there? Let's see here. I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom because I'm literally running out of time at this point. I control the circus. Oh, you are right. Thank you. I picked the coffee beans on purpose because the last time we did coffee and alcohol, you're 100% right. Thank you, babe. Hey, Kelly, good to see you again. I have a big cycle that I can't escape. Yeah, it is, this is true. I can't argue with this. You cannot practice death. That is 100% true. But you can practice living as if you are not dying right now. That's really important. I'm gonna scroll to the end. I'm sorry, guys. I'm gonna miss a bunch of comments, but I gotta hit it. I see a perfectionism thing. Okay, what Bethany is saying. So David, what Bethany is saying to you is 100% correct. Go be reckless. Like for you, your challenge, your leap of faith is I might do it wrong. And even if I do it wrong, I'll wind up okay. So you perfectionism will drive you to say, if I do it wrong, that's a disaster. That is, I can't allow that. I was like, go ahead, go be reckless and do it wrong.  You will see a podcast episode I did on living recklessly, parentheses, not really. So, because it feels like you're being very reckless to be imperfect. But you're not really. And in time, you learn like, oh, that wasn't reckless at all, even though you thought it was. Okay, I think that's it. Yeah, this one, right? I get it, man.  And the default for almost anybody that feels short of breath is to try to fill your lungs and expand your rib cage and get air so that you literally feel it at the bottom of your ears. Like you want to fill your lungs all the way up to here. But that is not cool because at the moment that you're super anxious, the muscles in your chest are constricted because muscle tension, anxiety, and here's news, your rib cage is bones.   Your belly. So that's why I talk about belly breathing and diaphragmatic breathing because you can expand your belly. So again, go search for the breathing episode. I talked about all that stuff. Diaphragmatic breathing is not a panic shield and it's not a cure for your anxiety. But if you deal with air hunger, taking a leap of faith that just pushing your belly out and filling your lungs at the bottom where they're supposed to fill, that won't feel right. It will feel like you're not getting enough air. It will feel wrong. It will feel dangerous. Try that. Try that. And you suddenly discover like, oh, check it out. My body's got plenty of oxygen. Who knew? Also, well, I don't want to go into it. There's a whole bunch of breathing stuff but sometimes it's because you literally you're inhaling too much, too much inhale, not enough exhale. So exhale longer than the inhale. Anyway, that's it. All right, so we are good to go. Thanks guys for coming by. This was a good one today. Great comments, great questions. We had a huge audience. I think we popped out about 110 people, which was amazing. I think that might've been a bit, nah, there was one that was a couple that were bigger. We've gone almost an hour. This will stay. So all of the extra goodies, if you wanna, if you're new to this and you're new to the channel, welcome all the extra goodies beyond this and my social media posts are on my website. Just go to the anxioustruth.com, the books, the podcast episodes, all the old stuff is there, workshops and all the good stuff that you wanna check out. Just go there, it's all there, right? And then this will stay in the Recovery Monday playlist on my YouTube channel.  I don't know how Twitch goes, but whatever. I don't do these every Monday but I do them every other Monday. So I'll be back not next Monday, but the Monday after we'll do another topic. Hopefully it'll be as fun and informative as this one. We're out. Thanks everybody. Take care.


Fedora 36 is amazing release, and I've talked about it a couple times now on the channel. But what happens if you're not on Fedora 36 yet, but you've been living on Fedora 35 for a while? How do you update? Well, there's a couple of ways of doing it, and that's what we're going to talk about today. So, let's go ahead and jump in. So, I have here a release of Fedora 35, and we can tell that it's Fedora 35 by opening up a terminal, like so, and doing cat, and then this path here. And it's just going to tell us we're using Fedora release 35. And I'm doing this just to prove to you that I'm going from 35 to 36, but it's, you know, it's easy to do. So, here's what you have to do in order to update. Now, like I said, there's two ways of doing this. The first way is to do it via the GNOME software application, or you can do the terminal application. So, either way, the first thing you should do is update your system. And the easiest way to do that is to do so through the terminal, at least in my opinion. You can update via GNOME software as well, but it's just easier to do it this way. So, what you'll want to do is do sudo dnf upgrade, like so, and then dash dash refresh. Okay? Like so, and then enter your password. This may take a while. For me, it won't take very long because I've actually already done this once. I wanted to do that off camera because it did take probably about four minutes or so in order for me to actually get it updated. But if you routinely keep your system updated, this actually won't take very long. So, now, you're free to choose the direction you want to go in in terms of updating. But first, you should do a reboot. So, do a sudo reboot, like so, or you can use the menu up here, whichever you want to do. It doesn't really matter, but things that were here already, we'll just do a reboot. And you may see a splash screen that says it's updating, or you may not, depending on if you had any updates to do. And then it'll reboot. We'll come across here and enter our password. And now, if you want to use the gooey way of doing this, you open up Gnome Software, click on Updates, and you'll see this banner here that says Fedora36 is available. You'll hit Download, and you'll let it download, and then it'll ask you to reboot your computer, and then you'll be done. You'll be on Fedora36. Now, that's really simple, and it really wouldn't necessitate a video being made. So, I'm just going to cancel that and show you the little bit more complicated way of doing this. So, just in case you want to update through the terminal, you can do so. So we'll open up the terminal again, if you can spell terminal, which I apparently can't, and I'll zoom in so you can see. So the first thing you'll want to do is do this. So sudo dnf, and then install, and then dnf-plugin-system-upgrade, like so, enter your password. Now what this will do is it will update or install the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade tool thing that they require for you to have on your system in order to actually move from one version to another. And it may or may not already be installed for you. For me, it was already installed. I didn't have to do anything, but if you don't have it installed, this command will install it. You may have to hit yes one time during the installation to confirm the installation choice. So, here's what you do next. You do sudo dnf-system-upgrade, like so, and then download, and then dash dash release, v-e-r equals 36. Now here there are some rules for upgrading Fedora. You can move from two versions behind to the most current versions. So if you're still running Fedora 34, you can easily go from 34 to 36 using this method. If you're on version 33, it probably won't work for you. They always suggest it's only two versions of Fedora that you can upgrade between. The other ones you'll have to go, so if you're on 33, you then have to go to 34 before you could do an upgrade to 36, if that makes sense. They do say that it works sometimes, but they will not support you in the forms or whatever if you go three versions using this method.  So once you've got this typed in, hit enter, and it's going to ask you before you continue, ensure that your system is fully upgraded before running dnf-refresh-upgrade, which we did do, and we're going to go ahead and hit yes here. And this will take a little while. So I'll cut the video here and come back when it's done. At a certain point, it will probably ask you if you're sure you want to do this. Hit Y, hit enter, and then it will install all the stuff that it needs to install. As you can see, the number of packages that it needs to install is in the high thousands, almost 2,000 packages. So it will take a fair bit. So again, I'll cut the video here and come back when it's done. A few moments later, once it's done downloading, it will ask you if something else is okay. In this case, it's asking you to import a GPG key. If that's okay, again, you hit yes, and then it will import that GPG key. Okay. So once this is done, the next thing you'll want to do is do dnf. System dash up grade. And if you can spell up grade and then reboot. Now, this is actually going to require pseudo. Why they don't tell you this requires pseudo here. I'm not sure, because you're just going to get error if you don't do it with pseudo. So we'll do this into your password again, and it's going to reboot. And then somewhere along the way, you'll probably find a splash screen saying that it's updating system. Yep, just like this, it will take a little while. So again, I will cut the video here and come back when it's done. A few moments later, once that's done it, I'll actually go ahead and reboot again, and then it will log you into your display manager here or bring you to your display manager and you'll enter your password. And now if we open up a terminal again and run that same command we did at the beginning, so we'll see if we can scroll up enough to do it right here. We'll now see we're on Fedora 36, just like magic. So that is Fedora 36 with all the cool bells and whistles. So if you wanted to change it to dark mode and you could do that. So we'll go into the settings application here just to show you that it has the dark mode and we can do that. And we actually get the brand new wallpaper. So there is Fedora 36. If you have questions, you can leave those in the comment section below. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you can do so at Linuxcast. You can find me on Pate on Mastodon as well. The link will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. I'd like to thank my current patrons, Robert Sid Devon, Patrick Fred Kramer, TriDevil, Antoine, Maglun, Jackson, I'm Jules, Steve A. Sebrega Linux, Garrick, Samuel, KB, T.D. McKeefe, Andy, Uncle Bona, Gary, Ross, Mitchell, J-Doug, Carbon Data, Jeremy Sean, Odin, Marnie, Eduardo, Art, Sino, Elliot, Mislav, Merrick, Cam, Dash, Lee, Peter, Cruisible, Dark Manusix, Primus, Kim, Ardoch1, and Philip. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.


Tuesday, November 8th, Election Day 2016 is right around the corner. Follow along with this Election Day guy to make your plan to vote. First, confirm that you're registered to vote. Next, find your polling place where you'll vote on Election Day. Then, make a plan for when you'll vote and how you'll get to your polling place. Polls are open from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. If you're in line by 8 p.m., you will be able to vote. Also, make sure you know what you need to bring to the polling place. If you've never voted at your current polling place before, or if you're a first-time voter, you'll need to show an acceptable form of ID listed here. An ID without your photo must have your address on it. Lastly, if you have any issues with the polls on Election Day, you can call your county voter registration office, or 1-877-VOTES-PA. Have more questions? You can visit pa.gov.slashvoting for more information. Have a happy Election Day!


If helping other people made you a saint, then no Gates would be a saint. Then Carnegie and Morgan and Rockefeller would be saints. The great entrepreneurs and industrialists in Korea would be saints. Because they helped other people. They changed the world. They made the world a better place for millions and billions of people. Businessmen are saints.