Stop Polishing an Empty Tomb

Have you ever accomplished a major goal, something you're, like, super excited about or super looking forward to? And when you get there, it's like, is that it? Welcome to the show. Tired of the hype about living the dream? It's time for truth.This is the place for tools, power, and real talk. So you can create the life you dream and deserve your ultimate life. Subscribe, share, create. You have infinite power.Hello there, and welcome to your ultimate life, the show created to help you live a life of purpose, prosperity and joy. And do it by serving and creating value. With what? Guess what?Your favorite topic, your own life, your experience, the things you're really good at, the things you love to do. You know, the stuff you have powered through and toughed it out to win.And you know that you could help people with it if you could just get in front of the right people. Well, that's what this show's about. Create, purpose, prosperity and joy. The ultimate life, I call it. I live it, I love it.And do it by serving with your divine gifts, talents, and your life experience. How cool is that? All right, so today I wanted to talk about what I just said.You know, you finish a project or you get that promotion, or you're sitting in the corner office or you've had a year or two or five or ten at the C. In the C suite, a big run, you're like, there. You got it. All the things you imagined. And all of a sudden you're like, is that all? Is that all there is? This is it. I can buy anything I want.The car, the house, I'm here, I'm there. If you felt that, let me tell you what's going on in your heart.The ache in your heart is not always trauma or unresolved conflict or pain or something like that. Often we think of, well, you know, there's some unresolved childhood trauma or the wounded inner child or all of that language.And we wonder why it doesn't go away when we accomplish those things that we want. And I want to tell you why that is. It isn't because you didn't. It's a double negative.It is not because you didn't accomplish the things you set out to do. You did. And you have every measure. The money, the position, the 10th floor, the 50th floor, wherever you are and wherever you're sitting, you did it.You got it. And the thing that's left isn't an accomplishment vacuum. It is a spiritual hunger. The ache that we have isn't left, isn't always.In fact, it most often isn't leftover trauma or leftover pain or unresolved conflict or any of that. It is a spiritual hunger. And here's the purpose of today's show. The hidden ache.When you have outward success, we're going to talk about where that comes from and more. More importantly, how to. How to get rid of that.How to have that deep, real satisfaction that feels like what you thought it should have felt like when you got the goals you wanted. The pro part of the problem is we've got the wrong goals, the wrong metrics, because we think when I have this certain amount of money, certain.Certain car, certain positions, certain titles, certain acclaim, certain number of people reporting to us or, you know, saying how cool we are, when I have this, then I'll have that feeling of worth and validation.Now, I don't know how many CEOs or CFOs or COOs or C suite people you have talked to intimately and deeply, but often there is the feeling that something is missing. And it comes from an innate knowing that you were meant for more or they were meant for more.If you're talking to somebody else, there's an ache beneath the achievement. And the reason is you're spiritually undernourished.You have accomplished all the material things you wanted, and no amount of material things is going to feed the spirit and the nourishment that it. That it needs. Okay? Because you're giving it the wrong nourishment. Here. Here's a. Here's a phrase I want to say.I'm going to aim this mostly at men, although women sometimes feel this too. I'll aim this at men and hear this. Anyone else that wants to hear it?Those who keep proving themselves, you who keep proving yourselves, and you feel something missing, well, here's the truth. You're not crazy, you're not wrong, you're not lazy, you're not weak. But you may be profoundly undernourished where it matters the very most.I know that so deeply and intimately because I was that. Here's the. Here's the people. You built the business. You carried the pressure. You held the crap together.You fed all the people that needed to hang on you. You got stronger, you got sharper, you got rich, you got more articulate you. And you got all the respect you wanted.And you still feel the quiet ache. Sometimes the ache is not lack of strategy, but the spirit is hungry. Now hear this. A lot of people are externally impressive and internally underfed.I say that boldly because I was that guy for decades, ticking box after box after box. Improving things. You can build a powerful life and still not possess bedrock peace in your heart. Achievement can hide hunger for a long time.And I want to address that today. Here's a bunch of common explanations. When you feel it, okay?There's some leftover trauma, or there's hormones, or your mindset's wrong, or you have burnout, or you have nervous system dysregulation. That's a real popular one going around right now. And it's nice language.You know, polyvagal theory and dorsal vagal shutdown and a bunch of other stuff that's all real, but it doesn't fix the problem. It just gives us elegant language. It is also not lack of strategy, lack of accomplishment, lack of optimization, or lack of the next breakthrough.It isn't any of those things. Well, then what is it? Sometimes all of that list of things are real.And you need the right help and the right framing and the right tools to handle them.You know, I struggled with depression for decades, decades, 35 years that I know of, clearly and untreated and powerfully messing with my life in multiple ways, including addictions. And, you know, the list is long and you've heard some of it before. But the deeper issue was doubt about my self worth. But it's law.And it was loss of the order of things, getting things in the wrong order. Have you ever done that? You know what a problem is and you go for the easy stuff first instead of the most important stuff.It comes from the neglect of your spirit or your energy, self, energetic self, whatever you want to call it. It's living from the outside in that's deadly and painful.And it's trying to solve eternal hunger with temporary inputs, with the inputs from this frame. Money, claim stuff, acclaim. Not claim, money, acclaim stuff. Physical things. You know, you know the drill.Because if this is you, you're already raising your hand knowing what this feels like. We've.We've become really sophisticated at diagnosing the body and the brain, but we're embarrassingly poor at understanding or identifying a starving spirit. What if the ache is not a defect, but a signal, a wake up call, an invitation?What if the problem isn't that you need more intensity, but better nourishment of a different kind? What if you're not broken? You're just doing things out of order? Now, to go on, let's. Let's get something clear here.I keep using the word spirit and let me be clear about it. I'm not talking about going to church on Sunday, although maybe you do that and you can still have that feeling.The spirit, you can call it whatever you want, is the energetic being inside of us that gives us life and animation, right? One moment a person can be alive and the next moment the spirit, the energy, the energetic soul.The spirit leaves the body and the body's dead, finished, lifeless, just like it was a minute ago, a second ago.But it's not the same because the life force energy, if you're a scriptorian, it says the breath of life that has somehow left and you know, at the instant that it is. So there's a. There's two parts of us.We're a physical skin bag, you know, and a physical body with parts and brains and nervous systems and neurotransmitters and all the rest. Heart and digestion and all, all the pieces, right? And there's an energetic analog that's the same, the same. It animates every cell.It fills us, okay? The spirit is not created from chemical processes, from food and synapses and so forth.There is an energetic, energetic presence in us that is the power beneath all of that, the fundamental breath of life, as it were. And you know that, especially if you've ever seen anyone pass away, it's an instant thing.It isn't that the body stops functioning and therefore life is gone. The spirit or energy leaves and the body stops functioning. So since that's true, the core distinction is the body, we know a lot about that.We eat, need certain things in the body.We need sleep, we need water, we need sunlight, we need movement, we need breath, we need strength, we need recovery time, we need nutrition, we need good stewardship. All those things are important in the body.And if you talk in more modern psychology, language, you need nervous system regulation and breath schemes that allow your nervous system to reset and handle all of the different parts of your. The multiple and amazing parts of your body. But those are all still the physical things. We can get them out, we can look at them under a microscope.But no one's ever been able to look at a spirit or the energetic essence under a microscope. But we all feel it. Like you and I both know exactly what it feels like.When you're not looking at the door, someone walks in the room and you can feel not only that someone entered the room, but their emotional state. Somebody's angry, somebody's really happy. You can sense that. And it is not just micro expressions and heavy, heavy, know, powerful observation.You can tell without seeing or hearing you also can tell that when someone's telling the truth or not, you can feel the energy of truth. So there's. And we don't really understand how that works. And it's a little woo woo and weird. I get it. But it's there. And you and I both know it.And you've experienced it and felt it.Maybe you've had some powerful spiritual experiences where you were very ill or you had a near death experience, or you had intuition that simply could not be explained. Someone told me once that they thought intuition was, you know, keen observance of complex patterns. It is all that.But it's way past that to call, to limit intuition to keen observation of really complex patterns, including, you know, breath and movement and micro expressions and pauses and cadence and everything to limit it to that. Wow, how limiting. All right, but here's the thing. We need to honor all those things that our body needs rest and reset and safety, right?And all of it. But the. The spirit doesn't eat protein. It doesn't eat protocols.It doesn't eat saunas or cold plunges or posture work or gym pictures or, or psychedelics or expensive retreats. It doesn't feed on performance language. That isn't the food for the essence of us.You know, what is truth, Love, forgiveness, reverence, stillness, prayer, silence, which is not the same as stillness. Courage, service, surrender, holy, honesty. And even speaking those words makes me emotional obedience to what is true and real.And I don't mean obedience in a negative way like you got to do what I say. The the body is a temple, that's for sure. But the spirit is the fire in the hearth. Most people do not expressly and intentionally feed their spirit.And that gets especially noticeable and dangerous when you're pushing yourself physically or intellectually or career wise or, or accomplishment wise.You know, the next promotion, the next hundred thousand that year, the next million, the next million followers, the next step, the next, the next, the next. We so easily and deeply neglect the energetic essence.And those that list truth and love and forgiveness and reverence and prayer, we forget that we brush it to the side saying, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Except sleep is a physical need. But we say the same thing. I'll do that. When I've accomplished all this stuff. And you know what happens?You accomplish all this stuff and neglect the energetic food and spirit, you're already spiritually malnourished and maybe even on life support. That's the core of what's missing when you accomplish the goal and yourself. The Essence of you.And I reach for my chest and my heart area, because that's where you feel it sometimes it's in your stomach, but it's in this central area, torso area of the body. So if this. If the body is the temple and the spirit is the hearth or the fire in the hearth, then it's no wonder if there's no fire.Polishing the temple is just obsession. And so I want you to hear the.I'm going to spend the rest of this episode talking about how to remedy that, because you, you and you alone can remedy that. It can actually feed your body intravenously. Believe me, I've been in the hospital where I was fed for weeks intravenously.Nothing went in my mouth for weeks. Intravenous food, Intravenous. And stomach tube. Boy, that was a circus. We had to try five times to get that tube down the stomach. That was not fun.Okay. But anyway, they can feed your body all kind of nutrients and medications and everything else.No one has figured out at all in any way, shape or form how to intravenously feed someone's energy or spirit. You can't solve a spiritual hunger with a physical protocol. You can't do it. You can set the stage.So meditation is a physical practice that can move into the spiritual if you let it.But meditation alone, which is sitting still and, you know, concentrating on something or emptying the mind or letting thoughts pass all, all by itself isn't enough to feed spiritual hunger. So you can, in your body, and you know this already, build a savage physique. You can lead a company. You can make millions. I've done that.You can have a beautiful family. I did that. You can be admired. You know, this list sounds like a confessional almost. You can be articulate. You can be externally disciplined.And you can add to that list as many things as you want.And you can still maybe dread the quiet, fear, real stillness, ache in the center, avoid truth, Feel listless under the image and live as an impressive fragment. You can do that, all of those things. But why? You can succeed so hard, you almost disappear. So let's fix that.Because this is about getting things in the right order. Because here's the truth. The spirit was first. We existed somewhere before we came here in this body. And the spirit will outlive.So the spirit is eternal. We're having a momentary existence in this place, in this, you know, container right here, right now. The spirit was first. It is eternal.It needs and feeds and lives on different things. And it is the most important to take care of, because it is the foundation of everything.Now, let me ask you some questions, and this won't do you any good unless you answer them honestly. So I'll give you a chance to. To think about this deeply, okay? And please do. What part of you feels hungry after all of the visible winds?I want you to think about that. What, where and when do you feel empty? Even after all the visible success?As a personal example, I remember vividly coming home from a very successful day or week.Success in terms of accomplishment, in terms of recognition, in terms of cash, going into my study, closing the door and staring at the wall and saying out loud, I don't know who the hell I am. You can wind me up and send me downtown, and I can do all the right things. And when the lights go out, I am empty. I do not know who I am.Now, that may be an extreme version, but any little version of that is the same thing. If you're not really and deeply satisfied with your life, I would ask why. I hear that. I hear that all the time. Literally.I have accomplished all these things and I still feel empty. I still feel like, here's a good one. I'm made for more. Well, you are. All those things are true. Hands down, period. No questions, no hesitation.You are made for more. You're made for spiritual greatness. The financial and physical greatness you may achieve is on top of that.But if you build on top of a hollow chamber, it's still a hollow chamber. You're decorating an empty tomb. So one of the most important things to understand is what comes first.The spirit, energetic part of us existed first, it will exist later. And if we live with a year, a day, a month, a decade of neglect because we're so busy polishing the outside with appearances, with.With cash, with possessions, with relationships, with all the things we think we're quote, supposed to do, we're still polishing an empty tomb.Now, I'm not going to be able to, and I wouldn't even if I could tell you what you must do to feed your spirit, because activities affect people in different ways. I can tell you what I do to feed the spirit, but more importantly than what I do, it's the order. The spirit is first, all the time, every day.Or we're doing it backwards, right? If you put your shoe on and then try to put your sock on, it doesn't work, right? You can't do that.Yet we do that all the time when we run around without socks. In the context of feeding the Essence, the foundation, the power. First.You know, David Hawkins in his book Power vs. Force, and, oh, there's the other one. I can't remember right this minute, but he talked about that universal connectedness.And from that came the idea of, you know, muscle testing and being connected to the universal truth and knowing intuitively what things are right and wrong. That is spirit. Some people call it the conscious unified field. If.If I am not or you are not tapped into that at every moment on purpose, the signals get lost, the signals get weak, and we make lots of mistakes and have lots of empty feelings, no matter how much success we have on the outside. Conversely, you can have a very small amount of outside success and be deeply happy and connected on the inside. You see that all over the place.I have. Can't tell you how many. I was just talking to somebody the other day. Somebody's been a guest on this show and on LA Talk Radio.He talked to me about having been in the Himalayas and meeting with people that don't have very much by worldly standards. But they're happy, they're helpful, they're joyful, they serve you. They give you the shirt off their back. They're just that way. And they feel joy.Why are they magic? Are they a different race? No, they feed the spirit first. They feed the spirit first and live in that truth. And so my.One of the goals that I have for this show today is to call that out directly. I don't care how much money you have. I don't care how much you've accomplished if you don't nurture your spirit first.Every day you're polishing an empty tomb, and you're going to have that feeling of emptiness. But you don't need to. So let me share some things that I do and in hopes that there'll be ideas for you.But you're going to have to discover everything yourself. So I just said a minute ago, you can succeed so hard you almost disappear. So here's some distinctions I want you to just think about.I am not operating or speaking in any way in condemnation of excellence or achievement. On the contrary, I extol excellence. I admire excellence. I read books and watch movies and hear stories about excellence.And I see what behaviors need to be modeled. I am reordering what excellence really means, because a polished, empty tomb is still a tomb. I'm not saying the body's unimportant.It matters very much. Money matters. It allows you not only to live comfortably, it allows you to serve others. It allows you to make A big mark in the world.It allows you to fulfill big ambitions. Yes and yes. But if it is done without the spiritual foundation, it is empty and lifeless, period. The structure you build in your life matters.All those things matter. But they don't answer a spiritual question. They don't. They miss the point. So here's some questions for you to think about deeply.I mentioned the first. First one. What part of you is still hungry after some visible win? What is that?Where do you feel empty and something's flipping, missing even after a big visible win? Answer that on paper. Write it down. Where do you keep adding to your life that doesn't quiet the ache?I'll give you a funny, silly example that I used to do. I used to buy cars. There's nothing wrong with buying cars and having them. I know.I have another friend who has a lot of vintage cars and collects them and so forth. But if it's. If the addition of things to your life isn't based on a strong spiritual foundation, it's not going to quiet the ache.Another thing I used to do is buy jewelry.I had a great big gold chain with a tri 18 and 22 karat gold dragon that was, you know, 4 inches long and made out of tri color gold, rose gold, yellow gold, white gold, you know, and had a platinum ring and another tricare, you know, tricolor gold and all kinds of jewelry. Because I thought it proved something. Now there's a whole story about all of that and what happened later and everything. But that's not time to tell.Today isn't right now a place. But anyway, I used to have him do all that exactly in this to try to fill the ache, prove something to myself and others.So is there some place in your life that you're still trying to prove stuff? Another accolade at work, another promotion, another $50,000 a year, another 100k, another 200k. The number doesn't really matter.You just keep adding it because it's trying to prove something and it doesn't work. It doesn't quiet the ache. What if the deepest problem here isn't the effort because you're absolutely powerful and matchless on the effort?What if the deepest problem is the order of things? Spirit first. Okay, so let me talk about several things, because this is where this meets the. The rubber meets the road with this principle.This principle of doing the right things first matters in leadership. It matters in matters in fatherhood.If I'm talking to men or parenting fathers and mothers, it matters in marriage and relationships and it matters in business because it keeps all of those things grounded. A spiritually or energetically underfed person becomes reactive, image managed. You know what that is? Do I look good?You know, maybe it's clothes, maybe it's look, maybe it's whatever, approval dependent. You need the next hit of approval to feel good. You're undernourished. You can become intensity addicted. Maybe you know someone like that.Adrenaline junkies, intensity addicted. You become unable to rest in truth and just be completely satisfied with no aches and no yearnings and no longings. Sitting in truth, real truth.You can't be at peace. There's always something nagging at you.Another thing that happens if you're spiritually underfed is you can be very powerful in public and feel uncertain or downright miserable in private. You know, I'd said earlier I used to do that.I know that what that creates is it creates a leader without a bedrock leadership that is situation dependent and flops around here and there. But there's no bedrock. And people, believe me, people can sense when you're grounded. It creates a marriage without real intimacy.And I'm not talking sex, I'm talking real honest sharing and intimacy. And having failed at three relationships, I know what that's like.And having Now a wonderful 20 year invincible relationship, I also know what the truth is available to us. It creates big business success without consecration. Meaning there's no purpose, there's no driving passion. And it creates money without peace.Why would you want to live like that? You don't need to. Starting today. And I'm going to give you some ideas here in a minute. Many leaders are absolutely not lacking performance.They lack a governing center. And if the governing center is greed and more money and looking good, you're dead. Spiritually, energetically.So if the spirit again is underfed, all the external mastery in the world becomes elegant compensation. I want you to think about that. And if you think I'm speaking harshly. Oh well, here's some thoughts for you, okay?You can become formidable and public in public and terrified in private. I mentioned that. And without a bedrock, every storm feels way bigger than it should. So I'm not making the body wrong, I make.I'm trying to get you to organize the hierarchy differently. If the spirit is starving, the rest of your life will be crushed. And that's really sad. And I'll tell you why.If you look around the world today, in North America especially, but this is also going on in the UK now. Joy and I live in Canada, but we're Dual national U. S and Canadian. So we pay attention to the US and it looks to me like the U.S and to some extent Canada and certainly the United Kingdom is embroiled in absolute turmoil because it doesn't seem to be a moral center. You've got two groups that are insisting they're right and the other people are the most evil things that have ever walked the earth.And none of the things that are being said make any sense at all. There's just a bunch of name calling and a lot of effort to force other people to agree with you or me or whatever.And when dialogue is even attempted, then it immediately devolves into name calling and rage that seems to come from if you don't think like I do, then not only are you wrong, but you're stupid and evil. There is no moral center. A real moral center can allow for differences, allow for conversation, allow for compromise and cooperation.Okay, we can work together with people we don't agree with and not be disagreeable or hateful or negative or angry or worse yet, you know, wishing death upon them or chanting, you know, whatever obscenity that is simply not required. And it all comes from lacking love.It all comes from living without love, thinking that somehow you are righter than everybody else or anyone would think that. I'm not saying you specifically, although maybe this is you. And if it is, own it.If you're running around thinking you're right or than everybody else and everybody's wrong because they don't think like you do, you're infected, your spirit is undernourished, and you're at risk of dying energetically. Love is allowing.Love is letting people be right where they are without making them need to be where you are, otherwise they are somehow bad or broken. Now, I said I'd mention some things that I do spiritually and I'm going to go back to that list that I had earlier. Truth. I always speak truth.I am my word. I speak only truth. I do what I say. I am who I seem with no camouflage, duplicity or guile.And I don't mean in an arrogant way to tell you what to do, but I. I am truthful and faithful to my own self. I spend a lot of time in stillness. And I don't just mean quiet and I don't just mean alone, although those things help.But in quiet meditation and reflection, the purpose of that is to connect with the universal field, with the spirit, with the divine, to commune with God. You can call it whatever you like, but you know what I Mean, I spend a good bit of time in prayer as a dialogue with the divine.Consequently, I quiet my own wants and what I think and listen and guess what the divine speaks, impressions, ideas, thoughts that come with absolute peace and clarity for my behavior, actions, direction and focus, not to tell you or anybody else what to do, think, or any other, you know, inflicting of my ideas on yours to offer suggestions, but to live in tolerance, love and peace. And consequently, I live in that purpose, prosperity and joy that I talked about earlier, but it has not always been so.I have gone from the completely the opposite end of the spectrum to where I am now. And that is the path that I help people who want to walk. And what I notice for myself and for others is that when you walk that guess what?You make more money. What? You make more money, you have more peace, you have more purpose. You feel connected to a larger purpose.And the prosperity, not just of money, but of relationships and of feeling is oh so glorious. And just absolute joy.I spend a lot of time in prayer, and I don't mean rote behavior that means nothing but true communication with understanding that there are greater things than us as humans, certainly greater than me, any of us. We're a footnote in a footnote in a footnote in a molecular fraction of history. What if you and I could connect with the intelligence in all that is.We're not just running around saying, okay, I, you know, we're all connected, we're all part of the divine, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then I'm gonna go do what I want. What if we live in that connected place? And what if we regularly access that? That feeds the spirit like crazy.You know how I know? Because every time I do it, not the body, the essence of me is energized and it feels full of love and truth. You know what it wants to do?Go serve God, go lift, go bless. And in the process, guess what that does? Builds my business, builds relationships, creates clients and adds good to the world. But we do it backwards.We just do this backwards. And so my. My mesh it mission and message today is to let's get the order right, shall we? The spirit was first, the body is second.The spirit's gonna outlast and outlive the body anyway. You know that, right? I'm 70. Body gets old. Gonna croak one of these days.Hopefully not tomorrow, but whenever, when we feed the spirit first, however you define. I keep using the word spirit, Energetic, being, essence, soul, call it what you like, but feed it. Feed it.Truth and Stillness and silence and love and forgiveness. Feed it those things, then it will support you while you take care of the body and the money and the commitments and the outside things. You are not.Remember, you are not just a body by any stretch. You are. You're a spirit in a body. You're an eternal being having a mortal experience. You were before and you will be after. Here's the danger.I want to restate it one more time. If we keep trying to feed the spirit by just paying attention to the body, the ache will remain.And what I mean by that is any optimization protocol you have for the body, gut health, brain health, heart health, meditation, all of it, if it is not done in a way that allows for connection and feeding of the energetic foundation that was before and after that supports everything, the ache is going to stay. Because we're missing the true point.If we remember to love ourselves enough to feed the spirit first every day, not just once in a while as an afterthought on the weekends. That is indeed you. Don't forget to breathe. So don't forget to feed your spirit, the equivalent of breath.Now, if you have Questions about that, yourultimate lifepodcast.com There's a contact form there and I invite you to use it for three reasons.If you have questions about what I've said today, ask me, because I can show you and teach you, if you want it, how to have a robust and full and joyful spirit all the time, no matter what's going on. If you want help creating that for yourself, let me know, because I can help you do that.I did it the hard way and the long way, and I still had a lot of help. But now that I live there, I can see a lot of ways I could have compressed time and done this better and faster. So that's the first invitation.The second is if you have a story about your own transformation, your own growth, your own choices that have let you feed that spirit the essence of us. I want to hear it and I want our audience to hear it.So I'm inviting you to reach out with that contact form atyourultimate life podcast.com and tell me about the story that you have. Let's share that, because all the stories of success we can find, we need.And the third invitation is if you know someone who has a story or would want, you know, has a desire to share powerful truth. I love those people. Because my goal to reach 300 million people is isn't just with my message, it's with yours.Each one of you and the people you know. So if you know someone, or if you have a story, or if you need help, let me do that.Don't choose to live another minute with a malnourished spirit and that broken ache in your heart that's there no matter how much we win if the foundation is not fed. I love you. I'm here to serve, serve you and help you move forward to live your ultimate life. Right here, right now.Your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you. Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything. Everything.If you want to know more, go to kellenfluekegermedia.com if you want more free tools, go here. Your UltimateLife CA Subscribe Share. Sam.