"It's the olive oil."

One of these stories is mine.

Two were told to me by Martin Garcia, my great teacher and good friend.

These are three simple stories about simple, everyday things. Yet, they are profound in what they can offer you.

I tell these stories because often, I read parroted rhetoric— words that are recited, but to the people reciting them, they don’t mean anything.

This is common in spiritual groups and consciousness circles— people reciting things, but it’s like being in 7th grade where they “studied for the test.” They memorized the words, but don’t see how those teachings display themselves all around us.

I have broken this piece into three parts:

-It’s the olive oil.
-It’s the sauerkraut.
-It’s the cigarette.

Hope you enjoy.

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“It’s the olive oil.”

I was talking to my coach, Ian Maxwell, this week about business.

As of this month, my LLC is officially registered in New York. I asked him if there needs to be all of this “formality.” Like endless paperwork of “offer stacks” or whatever the hell AI told me there needs to be.

Throughout my life, it seems people put tons of documentation in places where it’s unnecessary. Meanwhile, I seem to have an easy time with the bare minimum.

I likened this to being in grade school, and always being the first one done with a test.

I’d sit there for ten minutes in silence, questioning why I was the only one not “still working,” questioning what I fucked up, only for every time, the paper to come back with “100%” written on it.

I have faced this countless times since grade school. Questioning my speed and efficiency.

Taxes, for example— friends would worry on about quarterly estimated tax. They would tell me all of this complexity, tell me how hard it all is. But I read one simple line: “put away 30%.”

Seemed easy.

Turns out, that was the answer. Mountains of complexity I agonized over only to be correct in the simple thinking of “put away 30%.”

I find myself doing the same thing now about needing paperwork for my services.

I asked Ian, “Can’t I just say ‘Here’s what I can do for you, here’s what it costs, here’s how you pay me.’”

He said, “That sounds brilliant. How many times can you do THAT in a week? And can you do it without the extra step of wondering if you’re missing something? What would that be like?”

I said it was like the olive oil…

In 2022, I had taken a small dose of psilocybin, not enough to trip my face off, but just enough to lose the ego. I walked through the world with completely relaxed neural pathways, and my knee-jerk responses and deeply embedded beliefs just melted away.

I was dating Martin at the time, and we went to Whole Foods to eat. When I went to put olive oil on our salad, the bottle was empty.

Back then, I still had this strong pull of “you don’t inconvenience people by asking for things.”

Yet, when I went to ask the employees to refill the olive oil, I felt nothing. Every rehearsed belief and feeling was completely absent.

I was suddenly aware, again— it’s all made up.

After that session, I got a new tattoo to remind me that my beliefs about business are the exact same as my beliefs about olive oil.

Ian’s response was pretty good too.

Nothing matters. It’s all made up.

“It’s the sauerkraut.”

Martin once told me a story about a man named Yazith who visited him.

I’m not exactly sure where he lived in the world, but where he lives, it’s not common to eat sauerkraut.

Martin ate a lot of fermented foods, as he followed a strict diet.

At the time, Yazith did not particularly enjoy the sauerkraut, but weeks later, he called Martin and told him he was having a craving for it.

This was how Martin explained to me the phenomenon of “your system recognizes what’s good for you, even if you don’t.”

Any new environment can be a cause for resistance, but your system recognizes things that will be beneficial.

I took Mario to float once, and he hated the entire thing. He couldn’t float in the tank so he sat. He hated the lack of sugary sweetness to the tea with the adaptogenic tincture. He couldn’t be with the silence. Yet, his system recognized it as good.

A month or two later, he initiated a water fast for 36 hours. It was a beautiful thing to watch a man I’ve known my entire life choose anything other than fried food, baseball, and breastaurants.

It’s the sauerkraut.

I often lead spaces that are deeply intimate and that people resist, but their systems know they are good for them. Every time I see someone being completely disinterested but yet leaning in, I know “it’s the sauerkraut.”

I have patience, and play long games.

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“It’s the cigarette.”

Everything you do will first be met with resistance.

The universe wants you to achieve whatever you want, but early on, there’s almost always a “test.”

Martin told me the story of when he was quitting smoking, and walking along the streets of Chicago, he found a perfect, whole, unlit cigarette lying between the cracks of the sidewalk.

Whenever I would start something, and I would encounter the universal resistance, he would simply say to me, “It’s the cigarette.”

The cigarette is the universe’s way to ask, “Are you sure you really want this?”

I remember it happened when I started Day 1.

The first week or two of its inception, I received a long, unrelated, psychotic message from a woman either on drugs or deep in psychosis. It was about a person I knew from a previous life I led.

At the time, I was just beginning to become the human I am today, and I had all of these old beliefs about how I needed to “handle” and “manage” people— ESPECIALLY a person like that. I read it and felt a hollow pit in my stomach, back then being so deep into codependency and feeling I truly, 100% needed to “save the world.”

I kept juxtaposing that with the power of launching my first group that very month. I didn’t want to be dragged into melodrama from my past life.

It was the cigarette, the universe asking me, “Do you really want to be this new person?”

The answer was yes.

I blocked the person and moved on with my life. Didn’t give it the courtesy of another thought.

Even when I was creating Humans 2.0, there was an early series of events that one of my good friends and members said could have easily derailed any group. Yet, it didn’t with this one.

I thought at that time “Fuck this. I could just delete this shit and never look at it again.”

Yet I knew it was the cigarette— it was the familiar resistance you get tossed when building absolutely anything and everything. Everything you do will be met with a cigarette in the sidewalk crack when you’re craving it.

The status quo is alluring and desirable, and the safety of it feels like the feeling you get the minute you take a drag of a cigarette when you’re craving one.

I know, because I too have quit smoking, and I have thus been able to understand the unfamiliar feeling in your body when you’re completely rewriting your life is the exact, identical feeling to craving a cigarette.

There is a bunch of science to this, which basically is: your brain is an efficiency machine. It builds neural pathways around whatever you repeat, and those pathways become the default route because they cost less energy.

When you choose something new, your nervous system does not immediately experience it as freedom. It experiences it as unfamiliar, inefficient, and potentially threatening. So the body throws up craving, panic, doubt, nostalgia, irritation, fatigue, melodrama, and every old doorway it can find.

A cigarette craving and a nervous system response to change serve up a similar discomfort in the body.

The universe always wants to test if you’re really going to jump to the new timeline, or pick up the cigarette and continue the old charade.

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Life is actually very simple.

There’s profound wisdom in all of your lived moments, but if you’re caught in grasping for a physical outcome in the manifestation, you’re going to miss it.

I want to end this piece with Tao #67.

“Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”

Stay beautiful. ✨