In preparation for recording my first podcast episode with Randy Berlin, I reflect on the unexpected circumstances that brought us together in 2020 and the profound influence our collaboration has had on my life. What began as an opportunity I initially resisted became a turning point in my recovery, helping me recognize childhood trauma, understand recurring relational patterns, and begin reclaiming my identity. I trace the development of Get Unstuck, its initial launch in 2022, and the challenges that led us to set the project aside. Returning to this work in 2026, I recognize how much my relationship with life has changed. I now experience greater presence, joy, and capacity to share what I have learned. This reflection introduces the relationship between doing the work, practicing surrender, and allowing life to unfold.
| Primary Energy | Reflective, grateful, purposeful, and deeply aligned |
| Secondary Energy | Vulnerability, excitement, recognition, integration, hope, and creative overwhelm |
THREADS
1. Capacity Determines What We Can Receive
Summary
I am recognizing how overcommitting myself to survival and achievement left me without capacity for opportunities that genuinely aligned with my interests and values. When Mark unexpectedly appeared with an opportunity to work with Randy, I initially responded with anger and frustration. Looking back, I recognize that my frustration was partly directed at myself because I had created a life where there was no room for what I actually cared about. The opportunity was not necessarily the problem; my lack of capacity to receive it was.
Lesson / Teaching
When our energy is consumed by survival and overcommitment, even meaningful opportunities can feel like additional threats or demands.
Tags: capacity, survival-mode, overcommitting, self-abandonment, aligned-opportunities, emotional-awareness
Domain: nervous-system
2. Surrendering Control to Life’s Unfolding
Summary
My encounter with Randy coincided with reading The Surrender Experiment, which challenged my belief that I needed to control the outcomes of my life. I had constructed a specific vision of success around money, entrepreneurship, and achievement, and anything that interrupted that vision felt threatening. Randy’s unexpected arrival in my life challenged me to consider whether opportunities outside my carefully constructed plan might lead somewhere meaningful. By agreeing to begin with something small, I started experimenting with allowing life to unfold rather than insisting it follow my predetermined path.
Lesson / Teaching
Surrender does not necessarily mean abandoning intention. It can mean remaining open to possibilities that emerge beyond our expectations.
Tags: letting-life-unfold, surrender, control, serendipity, trust, aligned-opportunities
Domain: self-actualization
3. Recognition Unlocks a Different Life Story
Summary
When Randy told me I had been severely abused as a child, something fundamental shifted in my understanding of myself. Until that moment, I had largely interpreted my childhood through the belief that I was difficult, badly behaved, and responsible for the punishment I received. His recognition gave me permission to question that narrative and begin acknowledging experiences I had minimized or suppressed. This became a pivotal moment in my healing journey because I could finally begin examining my past without automatically assigning myself the blame.
Lesson / Teaching
Recognizing and naming harmful experiences can create space to reconsider the beliefs we developed about ourselves in order to survive them.
Tags: trauma-recognition, validation, childhood-trauma, shame, self-blame, awakening, identity-reconstruction
Domain: trauma-and-healing
4. Familiar Patterns Repeating Through Relationships
Summary
I am connecting the dynamics of my childhood with patterns that continued throughout my adult relationships and professional life. Growing up without the freedom to protect myself, express my needs, or establish my own identity left me accustomed to relationships where my needs were secondary. I repeatedly found myself overgiving, tolerating mistreatment, and attempting to help people whose behavior was harming me. Through working with Randy, I began recognizing these patterns as learned habits rather than evidence that something was inherently wrong with me.
Lesson / Teaching
Recognizing familiar relational patterns creates an opportunity to question behaviors that once felt automatic and begin practicing different responses.
Tags: relational-patterns, self-abandonment, overgiving, boundaries, people-pleasing, trauma-recovery, self-protection
Domain: trauma-and-healing
5. Doing the Work Creates Freedom
Summary
I am recognizing the connection between the healing work I have done over the past several years and my present capacity to experience life differently. Processing unresolved emotions, examining shame, recognizing relational patterns, and learning boundaries have helped me become more present in my body and less consumed by the past. I now experience joy in ordinary moments that I previously struggled to access. For me, doing the work has created the conditions in which I can practice letting life unfold.
Lesson / Teaching
The practice of allowing life to unfold becomes more accessible when we address the unresolved experiences and patterns that keep us reacting to the past.
Tags: doing-the-work, trauma-recovery, embodiment, presence, emotional-processing, boundaries, letting-life-unfold
Domain: self-actualization
6. From Surviving Life to Experiencing Joy
Summary
I spent much of my life believing that financial security, professional achievement, and external success would finally allow me to relax. I now recognize how much of that pursuit was organized around survival rather than fulfillment. After years of recovery, exploration, and personal transformation, I find myself experiencing genuine gratitude and joy in simple moments. Reading in the sun, observing nature, and being present in my body represent a profound change in how I experience being alive.
Lesson / Teaching
A fulfilling life may emerge not only through changing external circumstances but also through transforming our relationship with ourselves and the present moment.
Tags: survival-mode, joy, presence, embodiment, self-actualization, gratitude, inner-freedom
Domain: self-actualization
7. The Right Work at the Right Time
Summary
Randy and I built Get Unstuck around material that had already changed my life, but we struggled to bring the program into the world. Although our initial group experience was meaningful, we lacked the audience, marketing resources, and ongoing capacity to sustain the project. Setting it aside felt disappointing, particularly because I felt responsible for making the investment successful. Six years after meeting, we are returning to the work from a different place, with more experience, greater capacity, and a renewed understanding of what we want to share.
Lesson / Teaching
A project that cannot move forward at one stage of life may become possible again when the people, circumstances, and capacity surrounding it have changed.
Tags: creative-capacity, timing, letting-life-unfold, meaning-making, get-unstuck, creative-process
Domain: business-and-systems
8. Lived Experience Becoming a Shared Practice
Summary
My relationship with Randy began as an opportunity to help translate his decades of professional knowledge into accessible material. Through that collaboration, I became both a participant in the methodology and someone helping structure it for others. Now, years later, I am returning with my own lived experience of recovery, awakening, and transformation. I see the potential for our different perspectives to complement one another as we explore the practice of unfolding and the work that supports it.
Lesson / Teaching
Lived experience and professional knowledge can offer complementary perspectives on personal transformation, especially when both remain open to inquiry.
Tags: lived-experience, knowledge-extraction, embodied-leadership, collaboration, healing-journey, get-unstuck, the-unfolding
Domain: embodied-leadership
9. Inquiry as an Invitation to Awakening
Summary
As Randy and I prepare to introduce The Unfolding, I am thinking about how our conversations can invite people to examine their own lives rather than simply receive information. I want to explore questions about feeling stuck, unresolved emotions, shame, survival, neurodivergence, and the systems that shape our experiences. I recognize that awakening can take different forms, including recognizing trauma, discovering neurodivergence, or questioning the conditions under which we have been living. I want inquiry to be part of how people engage with this work and discover what is meaningful in their own experiences.
Lesson / Teaching
Questions can create openings for self-recognition by inviting people to examine assumptions, patterns, and experiences they may not previously have questioned.
Tags: inquiry, awakening, self-awareness, neurodivergence, survival-mode, meaning-making, collective-awakening
Domain: meaning-making
10. Structure Supporting Neurodivergent Creative Expression
Summary
I am excited to share my story and begin recording conversations with Randy, but I recognize how easily the preparation process can become overwhelming. My bottom-up processing and ADHD-related tangents make it difficult to determine which details matter most and how to organize a complex story into a coherent conversation. I am seeking a repeatable structure that will help me feel prepared without restricting my natural way of expressing myself. This is part of a larger effort to create sustainable conditions for visibility and creative expression.
Lesson / Teaching
Supportive structure can reduce the cognitive demands of organizing information while preserving spontaneity and authentic expression.
Tags: bottom-up-processing, neurodivergent-creativity, creative-expression, visibility, overwhelm, capacity, supportive-structure
Domain: neurodivergence
Transcript
Good morning. Monday, October 19th, 2026.
I am making this recording in preparation for my call with Randy, in which we will be recording our very first podcast episode together. The purpose of this recording is to help me organize my thoughts and create an outline of sorts so that I can go into this interview and conversation with some structure, and with an idea of how best to bring forward the insights and stories relevant to our conversation that will capture what I’m trying to get across.
I’m especially interested in capturing this as a moment that is passing through. It feels really important to me to be creating content that is getting published and going out to the world. At this time in my history, it has been really challenging for me to put myself out there due to visibility and due to the amount of work it often takes to get something like this out into the world.
The reason I find that challenging is due to my bottom-up processing as an autistic person. I find that I have a really hard time structuring information. I get lost in the weeds, I get stuck in the big picture, and I don’t know which details to zoom in on.
Instead of going into this blind and going on my ADHD tangents, my hope is that I will go into this prepared. I’m seeking to find some sort of format or structure that I can use in the future for planning podcast episodes so that this process doesn’t feel so stressful, and so that I feel genuinely prepared and excited to talk about these things.
I am excited to share. I just get into a state of overwhelm, overthinking about saying the right things and not missing things.
Without further ado, this episode is meant to be an introduction to Randy and myself. I’m essentially planning to share this with my existing audience, which really is friends and family, and Randy will be sharing it with his friends and family. Our hope is that it will go beyond and get shared with others.
Because we have a story to tell. And that story involves a project that we built together that never really got off the ground. But now we find ourselves, all these years later, five to six years later, in a position where we can come back together, revisit the material, and share it with the world in a different way.
Part of the story is going to be our story and how we met. I think what’s really beautiful here is that there’s a lot of serendipity in our story. The way that we came together feels very magical and aligned and meant to be, if you ask me. That’s an important part of the story to touch on.
I’d like to speak about how, in 2020, I had left Oaxaca, Mexico. I was living as a digital nomad and traveling around the world while working for a serial entrepreneur who had hired me to essentially turn his ideas into a business, which was a content marketing agency.
He was teaching me how to do all the roles so that I could build everything and wear all the hats, from operations to writing to social media strategy to implementation. I was very busy at the time doing work that I actually really enjoyed.
[Portion of recording unclear.]
The idea was that the work I was doing upfront would make up for all the money that I didn’t make in the beginning. I was really excited about this model at the time.
I was a budding nomad. I was in my early days of becoming a digital nomad, and running a company and building a content marketing agency felt really special to me.
This was full-time work in a startup model that had the potential to really pay well in the end if I was willing to hustle and wear all these hats and work hard.
That just felt so perfect for me because I was someone who was very hardworking and very capable of wearing many different hats.
At the time, as this new digital nomad, my vision was to lock in an opportunity that would require sacrifice upfront but would eventually pay out.
That’s essentially what I wanted. I had been living paycheck to paycheck my whole life. I was so tired of being poor. I’ve been poor my whole life. I’ve been in survival mode my whole life.
When I took a leap of faith in 2018, I got sober. I knew I had to change the way I was living because I was going to die. I was an alcoholic.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was numbing and suppressing my past and my identity. I was essentially on autopilot.
I was just working day in and day out, trying to find the thing that would make it possible for me to finally relax. And in my mind, that was money.
I just needed money to be able to survive and get by and change the way that I was living.
At the time, this was a really important job for me. It was like my in. I had an opportunity to do what I was setting out to do, which was to build capital and build experience. To say that I had built a business from the ground up felt like a huge win for me.
When COVID hit, I was in Oaxaca, Mexico, and I had decided to stay because we all thought this thing was going to blow over.
Then things started feeling dangerous in Mexico, flights were canceling, and I realized that I was going to get stuck there. So I jumped on a flight back to Canada.
I literally opened up the Airbnb map to everywhere in Canada. As a Canadian citizen, I figured I’d have access to healthcare. I’d find somewhere near the great outdoors so I wasn’t stuck in a city with all these curfews and rules that were keeping people indoors. I would have some sort of respite.
I ended up finding this converted barn that had been converted into a yoga studio, and then the yoga studio failed and they turned it into a one-bedroom.
It was incredible. It was this huge space in Nova Scotia, with access to walking trails, the ocean, and a beach. It was heavily discounted because of COVID.
I made the trip, did all my quarantines, and got to this really remote place in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I didn’t know anyone there. I kind of just dropped in, did my quarantines, and was working.
I’m a worker bee. I’m a Capricorn. I love my work. I was happily living alone in the middle of nowhere. It came very unexpectedly, all of a sudden one day, when I heard a knock at my door.
Here I am, no friends, no connections. Nobody knows I’m here, really. Who, what, how is there someone knocking at my door?
I opened the door to this very jovial, large man who seemed very sweet and kind. He’s like, “Hey, I’m Mark. I heard you work on the internet.”
I just remember being like, “What the fuck? Where did this guy come from?”
He was like, “Oh, I know your Airbnb hosts, and they told me that you work on the internet. I have this friend. He’s my mentor, and I want to help him get his ideas and his work onto the internet. Do you know how to do that?”
I was like, “Yeah, I do, but I don’t really have time for this. I’m running this content marketing agency, and I don’t know who you are.”
It all just felt very strange, standing at my door being like, “What? Who are you?”
Anyway, I did end up letting him in, and we chatted.
He was going through recovery as well. He was sober, and this mentor he was talking about was the person who helped him stay sober.
He wanted to help him get his methodology and knowledge out into the world because it had helped him so much.
Mark had this vision of helping Randy Berlin, his mentor, somebody who was a close friend and guide in his life. Randy was in his 80s, and Mark was, I believe, in his 40s.
This opportunity just appeared.
I want to honestly state as part of the story that I was annoyed by this.
Here’s this person showing up and needing me, essentially. It felt like pressure. It felt like, “I have this problem that I need you to solve.”
I was like, “Who the fuck? What? I don’t really understand why I have to solve this problem for you. This is not my problem.”
But he was nice, and there was a lot of serendipity. He was going through alcohol recovery in the same way I was, and he was a kind, good person.
I ended up getting connected to Randy, and Randy was this lovely man.
Truthfully, here I was in the middle of nowhere with way too much on my plate. I was wearing so many hats, working 12-hour days, and just overdoing it.
I didn’t have capacity for what I had taken on.
When this happened, it triggered me because I realized I don’t have capacity for this. And now I feel bad that I don’t have capacity because I genuinely want to help these people.
I am a helper, and this is exactly my world. This is alcohol recovery. This is trauma recovery.
At the time, I really didn’t know anything about trauma recovery, but I knew Randy was a clinical psychologist who helped people in alcohol recovery, which was exactly where I was in my life.
What I want to document here is that this amazing opportunity came to me, and my response was to be angry, to be honest.
I felt this fire inside of me that was like, “What the fuck? I don’t have time for this.”
I think I probably genuinely wanted to follow the lead, but because of the situation I found myself in, it created stress and anxiety and pressure.
I didn’t feel I had capacity because I didn’t. I had overcommitted already.
I had already gotten myself stuck in a situation I’d been stuck in many, many times before, where I overgive, abandon myself, and take on too much.
Here I was, sort of subconsciously reacting. My subconscious was reacting because this was something that I wanted to do. This is my speculation. But I genuinely couldn’t because I had way too much on my plate.
My response was, “I don’t have time for this.”
I don’t really remember how I would have come across or what I said, but I do remember having this feeling of being pissed off.
Like, “Sorry, dudes. I don’t have time for this.”
I realize now that my frustration was with myself because I had overcommitted myself and gotten myself stuck in this situation where I had no capacity for doing things that I love or care about.
I was controlling all my time, obsessed with this goal of making money and having this acclaim that I had built a business from the ground up.
I was willing to kill myself for it.
Obviously, that’s not what I signed up for, but this is where I found myself. I did not have capacity to do what I was doing, and yet here I was, and now I was being tested.
During this time, I was reading the book The Surrender Experiment.
I think this book was given to me by Mark because Mark and I sort of hit it off. He was in the area, and we ended up chatting. I think he gave me a copy of The Surrender Experiment.
I devoured it. It really spoke to me at the time.
I had already read The Untethered Soul, so I was familiar with the author, Michael A. Singer.
I was starting to think about more spiritual material, but there was no spirituality in my life at this time at all.
I had a very basic understanding of spirituality. My understanding was that religion and spirituality were tied together. I thought spirituality and religion were the same thing. If you believed in God, then that’s what spirituality was.
I didn’t have an understanding of God.
I really was beginner-level spirituality.
This book really spoke to me.
The most ironic thing is that this book, while I was reading it and while this was happening, literally said that opportunities will come to you.
It’s essentially teaching how to let life unfold, not try to control everything, trust in the universe, and notice when there are synchronicities and when things come your way that don’t make sense or aren’t aligned with your controlled plan for how you think things need or should be.
I think there was even an example of the author sitting in the woods, meditating, and having this whole plan about becoming a meditation teacher.
Then someone came to him and asked him if he could build something for him.
He was like, “I’m not a builder. I’m not a carpenter. Why the fuck is this guy asking me to build?”
He could have easily said no. But because he was in this practice of surrender and meditation and letting go, he was like, “You know what? Why don’t we just see why this opportunity has come to me and follow the lead and surrender to what is naturally occurring?”
He ended up surrendering and doing this project, and then it led him to this and it led to that. The story is really incredible.
I noticed that I was in that same position.
I was trying to control the outcomes of my life. I wanted to become this money-making entrepreneur with clout, with a project and a business under my belt.
That is what I was choosing that I wanted.
And this opportunity did not suit my vision. It was interrupting my work.
It was also challenging me and saying, “Maybe this isn’t the right path. Maybe this isn’t what you want. Maybe you need to open yourself up to other opportunities.”
I was feeling really challenged by all this.
But I was also listening.
I ended up saying to Randy, I think, “Why don’t we start with something really small? I don’t have capacity right now. Maybe you and I can start working together in some capacity to start developing things, but that’s the best I can offer you right now.”
It ended up working out.
Instead of working full-time together, I think we started by developing blog posts.
Slowly but surely, over time, I ended up meeting with Randy on a regular basis, helping him talk about what he wanted to put online.
Essentially, what he wanted to do was take his 50 years of practice and extract the things that helped people the most.
Through his observations and experiences over those 50 years, what were the things that really helped people create change in their lives, heal, move forward, and live a more fulfilling life aligned with what they wanted to live?
Through this interview practice, I helped extract all this knowledge from Randy.
Once I had interviewed him, determined what the topics were, and determined what the methods were, I was able to start having a vision of what he was teaching.
The beauty of this was that we had entered into some sort of agreement where he would share his knowledge and I would apply that knowledge in my own ways.
He would guide me through the process so that I had an understanding of it because I was his ideal client.
I was someone in recovery who was seeking to build a new way of living that did not involve alcohol or sacrificing myself.
I did not know at the time that I was sacrificing myself, that I was living under control, that I was essentially unfulfilled and not pursuing the things that actually served my highest good.
I was pursuing survival and money and power.
This engagement really helped me start doing my own work.
A lot of what he was teaching was about cleaning up the past and taking ownership. Much of the work he was teaching came from AA and the 12 steps.
There was knowledge here that seemed really accessible to me. It was stuff I could apply and think about.
Through doing this work with Randy and applying myself to it, I ended up going through an insane awakening.
And this was just the first of awakenings. The word awakening will come up a lot.
This was the first time I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. I’m carrying a lot of trauma.”
I specifically remember the day Randy said to me, “You were severely abused as a child.”
It was the first time anyone had ever validated that to me.
In my mind, the story was that I grew up in a strict home, that I had behavioral issues, and that I was reprimanded and punished due to my own behavior.
I was too much. I just couldn’t get my shit together.
I lived in a home where there was lots of screaming and yelling and punishments, and it was for my own good.
At 15, my father and stepmother got rid of me, essentially, and dropped me off on my mother, a stranger.
I hadn’t really spent time with my mother aside from vacations once a year for Christmas or summer.
At the age of 15, I was dropped off without any supervision, no parents, no authority.
I didn’t have a mother-daughter relationship with my mom.
When I got out of that household, I really just started hustling from that day forward.
I took care of myself. I took everything on. I pushed and pushed and pushed, in survival mode, and kept going and kept going until I became an alcoholic, until things started to fall apart.
I never knew that I grew up in an abusive home.
I think I had considered that my parents were abusive because of all the yelling and screaming, but I had been convinced, I had been brainwashed, that this was my fault.
Any time I thought I was abused, I felt this huge sense of guilt and shame that I was treating my parents that way.
They were just trying to help me.
I wouldn’t allow myself to believe that it was true.
That moment when Randy spoke those words to me unlocked something that forever changed me.
It was like I finally had permission to look at my life differently and see that I didn’t do anything wrong.
I was being abused. I was being mistreated. I was being emotionally neglected, mentally abused, emotionally abused, and physically abused from time to time.
That cracked open Pandora’s box for me.
I started getting memories coming back. It’s like my brain finally had permission to really look at the truth of the past.
I started having visions and memories of abuse.
I had been sexually assaulted by my half-brother many times between the ages of seven and 14, and that had all been blocked away.
There was tons of shame and guilt and all this stuff that I had suppressed all these years.
It suddenly became very obvious why I was drinking and trying to put this stuff away.
This was really the beginning for me of starting to do the work.
The fact that Randy came into my life and was teaching me literally step by step how to do this work was so special.
It unveiled a path that I could start to follow.
This was my healing journey.
I realized that I had trauma, and I started applying Randy’s methodology.
We started turning this into a group coaching program where people could go through the process like I was.
There was a methodology to help people clean up the past and provide them with a framework for moving through life without shame and guilt, and for letting life unfold without constantly reacting and feeling triggered.
Here was this gift.
I had this gift that I was able to apply myself to, and Randy was able to get his thoughts out of his head, his intellectual property out of his head.
We turned it into this amazing Get Unstuck group coaching program.
He essentially paid for me to be a digital nomad.
I ended up losing my job at the content marketing agency because, essentially, the serial entrepreneur who had taken me on had, I’m going to say it, used me to build his business.
Once I had built the whole business and written all the SOPs on how to run it, he gave that to a VA and paid the VA a very small amount of money to run the business.
Then he got himself out of having to pay me.
He did give me some lump sums that, in my opinion, made him feel better for using this tactic.
It’s not an uncommon tactic for serial entrepreneurs who want to get their businesses built. Find some sucker who’s going to put in the initial work, build the infrastructure, and then pay someone something cheap to run it.
I ended up losing that job and needing income.
This was when it was so serendipitous that I had Randy because he was able to invest in me, and we were able to build this project.
I was also able to survive.
Randy was such an important part of my life through this process.
He was also there to guide me because I had opened up Pandora’s box.
I was going through all this crazy healing stuff, processing emotions and memories.
This is a lot when you crack open the truth and realize that everything you ever knew and believed was wrong, that you had been lying to yourself, that you had been lied to and manipulated, and that the patterns you experienced with your parents were now repeating in your life.
I was around these narcissistic, rage-aholic parents who treated me in such a way that I could not protect myself.
I could not speak back. I could not have my own voice, my own opinion, or my own identity.
I went out into the world unable to protect myself, use my voice, speak up, or even know what I wanted.
I ended up getting myself into all these situations where I attracted narcissists who were mean to me, verbally abusive, often sexually aggressive, and often taking advantage of me.
I stayed stuck in those situations because I wanted to help them.
This was a very familiar pattern for me, helping people who were not kind to me because I could see the good in them.
I could see that they were just human beings and that the reason they were being mean or evil was because they were hurt, not because they were bad people.
That kept me stuck in this pattern of wanting to help these sick people who were really just human and really just suffering.
They were dumping their suffering onto me, and I was willingly taking it on.
That was super toxic.
I experienced a lot of abuse in my life between childhood and the present, which was my mid-30s.
I was in horrible relationships where people treated me awfully, where I was sexually abused, where I was raped, where I was screamed at, mentally abused, verbally abused, emotionally abused.
All those things just kept repeating in my life.
I felt so naive for falling into these patterns over and over.
But Randy was able to help me see that these were habits. These were ingrained habits.
He helped me really do this work.
We launched the Get Unstuck program.
We did a beta run so that we could get a practice run, and we let people into the program for next to nothing, like $100.
But it is a high-ticket program. It’s a $1,200-per-person program to do the work.
And doing the work is asking a lot.
You’re excavating the past. You’re working with your deepest traumas.
This is the kind of thing that has to be supervised, and you need peers. That’s why we have this group coaching program and why we were testing it out.
I was certified as a trauma-informed coach, and I was working with somebody who had understanding and had done this type of work in the past.
We did the first beta run, and it was beautiful.
Everyone got something out of it. Lives were changed. Literally, lives were changed.
We got our testimonials, and it was like, “Fuck, we did it. This works.”
Then, as soon as we started trying to put it out to the world, it was impossible.
Nobody wanted to pay high ticket for such a challenging experience.
We’d have people left, right, and center saying, “Yes, this is what I want. This is what I need. This is it. I’m stuck. You’re describing exactly the work I need to do.”
We’d have people lined up and ready for the next cohort launch, and then crickets.
No one wanted to actually do the work.
It was too scary to take that leap.
Randy didn’t have an audience online. He didn’t have social clout, and neither did I.
I didn’t have an audience beyond my friends and family, the same place I’m in now.
We were never really able to sell this program.
It was so upsetting to me because here I had somebody invest in me, building this program.
Randy was paying me my hourly rate to build it, and it took us a long time to get it to become an actual thing, with video and audio and transcripts and funnels.
It’s a big project.
I felt guilty for not being able to deliver something that could get off the ground.
Randy was an 80-something-year-old man who was like, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to market this. I’m not an online person.”
We had to really market this program, and I didn’t have capacity for that.
We had already invested so much time into this project, and I was getting other opportunities.
Randy wasn’t able to invest in the marketing of the program.
We came to a standstill where I had to find a way to make a living, and he wasn’t able to continue investing in the program.
It just kind of got set aside.
I had made a sort of promise to Randy that we would come back to this and figure out a way to sell it.
Then, of course, I’ve just been in survival mode ever since.
I went on my own healing path.
I ended up working at retreat centers, and I followed what was serendipitously playing out for me because I had learned how to let life unfold with Randy.
I started pursuing other paths while we remained in touch.
We tried all sorts of different things. We tried to sell it to retreat centers, to recovery places, and tried referral programs.
It really did get to a point where we were like, “All right, maybe this isn’t meant to be for now. We’ll set it aside.”
I went on my path. He went on his.
Now we find ourselves at a point six years later where we both have time and capacity to reinvest in this.
What’s interesting is that all these years later, I’m no longer the person I used to be because of Randy’s teachings.
I have now been through trauma recovery and a spiritual awakening where I worked with plant medicine and learned a lot about consciousness and spirituality in so many different depths.
I really started studying what exists out there in terms of spirituality and what my beliefs are.
I’m now in a place where my life looks a lot different thanks to Randy and his teachings.
I am probably in the best place I’ve ever been in my life.
I am feeling joy and genuinely blessed every day of my life.
The little things, the mundane things, bring me so much joy.
Just reading in the sun, being in nature, watching the birds, watching the clouds, watching the bugs.
I am just enamored by everything in the present moment.
I’m so present in my body because I can be in my body now.
I’ve processed a lot of the deep shit that was making me feel anxiety and discomfort, that was suppressed, unresolved, and sitting in the back of my attention.
I gave time to all those things. I was able to move through them, and I don’t feel that burden anymore.
I feel blessed. I feel so truly joyful and grateful to be alive.
I’m just following each moment, every day, and trusting in the process.
I’m letting life unfold.
I’m able to do that because I’ve done the work and cleaned up the past.
There’s stuff that isn’t just nagging at me, and I’m not carrying other people’s shit because I’ve learned what’s mine is mine, what’s theirs is theirs.
I’ve learned boundaries.
There are so many topics related to Get Unstuck that I want to teach about now because they’ve changed my life.
That’s why we’re coming back together now, at this beautiful place where I have actually reaped the benefits of living the methodology that Randy brought forward.
I am living proof that it works.
I personally am now on a mission to help people go through this process as well.
I find myself at a place where I now have capacity to do this work.
I have capacity to talk about these things, to put myself out there, to create content, to start being visible, and to really make it my career and profession.
To be of service and help people walk this path, this healing journey, this spiritual journey.
Everything Randy brought to my attention and helped me bring into awareness, live, understand, and process, these are all things I want to share with others.
I have this blessing that Randy is here still with us and that we can have these conversations and put this out to the world.
He’s supporting me at this time where we’re able to start working together again.
That’s why this podcast is coming together.
That’s what this first episode is all about.
Introducing Get Unstuck, the premise of unfolding, the premise of the practice, which is the practice of letting life unfold.
And then there’s the work, which is doing the work that allows us to have the capacity to let life unfold.
That’s cleaning up the past. That’s becoming aware of the shame we’re carrying. That’s the boundaries we have to set so that we’re only carrying and processing our own shit and not taking on everything around us.
This is just episode one of telling our story and unlocking this wealth of information and wisdom that we have to share.
Me, from my experience of going through the healing and spiritual awakening journey, and Randy, from his 50 years of experience teaching people and supporting people going through the process of awakening.
Together, we’re coming together and starting this podcast series that will allow us to share this information with the world.
Now I would love your help, Atlas, to turn this into an outline that I can riff off of.
Perhaps there are questions I can pose to Randy so that we can move the conversation in a certain direction.
I’d like to work with the timeline as well.
2020 is when we met, and that’s when my healing journey unraveled. We launched the program in 2022, and now we’re coming back together here in 2026.
The purpose of putting this out in the world is to attract people this speaks to.
People who find themselves feeling stuck. People who are looking for a way to move through the world. People who are looking to do the work.
People who recognize that they’re carrying a lot of unresolved emotions from the past. They’re carrying shame and guilt.
They’re ready to go through a process of awakening, or they’ve already had an awakening.
There’s many of us waking up to neurodivergence diagnoses. There’s many of us waking up to the reality that we are stuck in a system, and a lot of our energy goes toward just surviving.
We’re not able to actually thrive.
These are the things we want to discuss with people.
We’re opening up conversations.
An important part of this is that there’s an inquiry process here.
What are the threads of inquiry that we want to open through the podcast?
What are the questions we want to ask?
What are the questions we want people to contemplate when it comes to all this?
I will also introduce the Get Unstuck methodology, which I will share with you here as well.
The methodology really is a number of topics to explore so that you can bring your own life story to this.
We can have workshops, work one-on-one with people, and podcasts. There’s so much potential for how we can use this material, start putting it out into the world, and teach.
We have a community we’re building called The Unfolding, which involves teaching the practice and doing the work through group coaching.
This is the beginning. Here we are.
Help me turn this into a podcast outline for our first episode.
Yay!