All right, thank you for tuning your heart's in for another episode of the Hearts rise up podcast. I'm carol chapman, your host along with my co host and Siri and Concetta antonelli. We share our own personal experiences, tips and strategies along with powerful stories and compelling insights from guest interviews. We're here to inspire and empower your conscious evolution, help you tap into your inner wisdom and rise to your heart centered higher self. Together we can rise to a higher level of consciousness, an elevated state of being and experience more love, joy and freedom. Well, hello again and welcome to all of our heart centered listeners. Thank you for joining us again for another fantastic episode of the Hearts Rise up podcast.

I'm thrilled to have a very special guest today. His name is Heath. Armstrong. Heath is an author, the co founder of rate create and an e commerce maniac. He's also the creator of sweet ass affirmation decks, motivation for your creative maniac mind, also several sweet ass journals and the host of a never stop peeking podcast, motivation for your creative mind. After waking up face down pants down in his garage during a rock bottom breakdown Heath adopted the strategies of a 100 plus creative entrepreneurs that he started interviewing around the world with the help of a few magical strangers. In 2016 Heath retired his traditional career in concrete construction, sold all of his belongings and scaled his bootstrapped E Commerce startup to hit multiple six figure mumps while wearing mostly on these.

Since Then, he has worked location independent from over 20 countries, some one of the world's largest freestanding volcano survived rafting the Nile river witnessed exorcisms and Indonesia and fallen in love with the culture and experience of East African digital education for Children. He's also the co founder of several other businesses. A real serial entrepreneur heath. Welcome to the show. Thank you. You have such a lovely calming voice so my heart definitely started to rise up and I appreciate you sharing all that information and I'm happy to be here. Oh, thank you for that. You are such a sweet asshole and I love what you are creating in the world and we certainly want to hear your personal story of rising up and what you're bringing to the world with rage create and all of your adventures.

But first how did you get to be face down pants down in your garage? Yeah, No, sometimes I like contemplate how I got there physically and mentally and spiritually. It's like, it's a large tornado of things and I think every day I'm still learning like how I got there and and how I keep myself from being there now right? And I didn't remember the first, I don't know, 48 hours before I woke up there, but I had an awareness of the type of person that I was interacting as in this world, over the past, you know, six or seven years before that I had this weird interaction with a guy on a plane In 2009, which was several years before I woke up on the garage floor and briefly before getting on that plane I had this crazy dream experience where I had, I was like drinking constantly. I was taking narcotics. I mean I was doing anything that I could to put into my body because you know, I had these jobs or these studies of things that I wasn't interested in to make money that I really didn't necessarily need or at least need for the things I was spending them on to buy things that I didn't really need to impress people that I didn't really care to be around.

And I was addicted to a bunch of things like these vices, these these drugs to sort of numb my sense of reality of who I was and what I was doing in this world because I was deep suppressing this creativity within myself. I had this dream where I woke up and there was this, I wasn't, I didn't wake up yet, but there was this face and it was, it came to me like in space and it was a night that I was out doing blackout rampages of some sort and this face came to me and it was like the the darkest eyes like this dark black color that I can't even really describe in this sort of world of colors that we know. It was just this floating like an indigenous like very ancestral dark crazy face and it wouldn't go away no matter where I looked in this dream, it stayed right in front of me and it wasn't talking to me through the mouth but it was basically sending a message telepathically into my head that was like if you do not make changes right now you're coming with me and because the eyes of this thing were so scary, like I got the message really quickly and I came out of that sleep state and I was laying on this, it was a mattress on the floor actually in this you know college type, whatever ridiculous home that I was living in near a campus and I could not move any parts of my body.

I was completely paralyzed. I didn't have any idea of like sleep paralysis or anything that could have happened that would have made me not be able to move my limbs. So in that moment I honestly after about a minute of laying there which felt like forever and being awake in this room and after having that dream and then not being able to move any of my like I couldn't even move a toe or a finger or like my neck or anything, I started to think like oh my God am I going to be like this forever And it felt like forever in the moment. And I just kept thinking about this face and then I started like slowly being like okay, I have to focus and like, wiggle this toe or this finger and like finally, after about 15 minutes I started to be able to like move a finger and then I started to get a little bit of feeling back and then I started getting all those tingles that you get when, like, you sit on your foot or your ankle and it goes to sleep and then my whole body went through this tingling and then I was able to like get up and move around, but it was the wildest experience. And I got on this plane, like, I don't know, maybe three months later and I was flying to Houston from Nashville to go do a job interview and this, this guy gets on a plane and I had a middle seat next to me and he's like, he's getting on and I'm like, please, dear God, don't sit in this middle seat as most people do when they're on the plane, but like, especially who I was back then, like with this whole judgment, like, I don't want some weird person standing next to me, like, my heart wasn't necessarily rising up at that point, it was very suppressed, although it really wanted to, I feel like I have a deep connection with my heart now and and I probably always did, but in life were always sort of just peeling back the layers that have been slapped upon us from religions or politics or parents, traditions or all of these things that teach us how to be aren't really our true expression of our inner child and ourselves.

So I was judgmental and I was arrogant and I had an ego and I had become all of these things and I'm like, dude, don't sit next to me, but he comes up and he's like that, you know, he's got tattoos all over him, he looked completely different than anybody I had ever really hung out with. He had brands on his arms, like huge scars. He smelled really bad and he was like, brother, can I get in there and sit down? And I was like, oh no, he's going to come right here and you know, that happened because I didn't want it to, you know, so secretly something deep down it was like, okay, this guy is going to sit next to me, how can I not make him talk to me because I really don't want to be, you know, talk to because that's just how I was also closed off is another side effect of having layers stacked upon, but to not expand into like, great insane depths on this story because it could be kind of long. He basically asked me a very quick question. He was very adamant about not leaving me alone. So then I was like, I gotta just answer this guy, he won't, he's like, and he kept saying, what are you doing? And I was telling him where I was going. And then he was like well why are you doing that? Like I'm going down to you know Houston interview for this job to work on oil Riggers and the gulf to repair like concrete structures on these shipping tanks or whatever.

And he was like, huh, that's interesting. So do you love doing that? No one had ever asked me that question before. Like do I love it? What? I love doing it? I don't, I mean well who are you to ask me that? You know, like why would you ask me that? And I had all this like anger and emotion come up about it and I got insecure but then he starts telling me about his journey and how he was being extradited from by NATO from Rwanda where he had been imprisoned for the last like four months every day. They couldn't hold him overnight because of some like some agreement between countries, I don't, I'm not sure, but they would pick him up every day, put him in shackles, take them back out. And he essentially was fighting for gender equality. He grew up in the same area that I grew up in in Tennessee but he took a rapidly different path when he was younger because he was listening to this sense of awareness. He was listening to this, this muse he was listening to this calling that he kept getting to go to africa and he was able to activate on that at such a young age where he's like showing me pictures of like him with these tribes and like getting the brands and getting initiated into these different villages and he had a picture of him with a black mama snake and its head chopped off and this giant lizard coming out of its body that came into his hut and it just blew my mind open to the possibility of what really is out there in the world and in life.

I had never met someone who was like a real indiana jones. I've never been around the idea that you could do things that were out of this little box that we put ourselves in And for the next three or 4 years to sort of answer your question in the longest way possible. I struggled with that, I didn't know how to integrate that. I kept thinking about him because when I saw him I got a flashback from that face and that was like oh I have to listen to this guy. But it also made me more scared of him and then I kept getting more flashbacks in different areas of my life over the next few years, every time there seemed to be an important decision or a hardship, I get this flashback of that face floating in that dream and then I would think of Jared the guy that was on the plane and it was like these, these signs that I didn't know how to interpret. It was like the universe was trying to talk to me, but I couldn't understand how to to perceive the messages and bring them in. I hadn't made enough space yet. I hadn't purged anything so I struggled and I kept drinking and like I basically just drink myself into a numbness because I didn't know how to integrate it and I didn't really, I guess I maybe wasn't ready yet.

Right. I think we're all on a different timeline. But when I woke up, face down pants down on my garage, my head was propped up against this wouldn't step going into the house and my dogs were standing there staring at me. It was the most like heartbreaking look that they were giving me and my car was running in the front yard, like still turned on parked in the middle of a yard and a legit residential neighborhood. I knew I couldn't, I couldn't do that anymore. I knew if I did it again, I was going to go with that thing and I knew that whatever the message that was trying to get to me through Jared whatever that was, I needed to try harder and figuring out how to activate that in my life and and move forward. So it was a really weird roundabout a couple of years later after I had made all these transitions that you talked about when you're introducing me and I was at one point flying back from africa with all these, you know, duffel bags full of beaded jewelry for the school that I had been working with to try to help basically leaning into digital education and also helping the mothers who are victims of the genocide out there, which in return has really just been a massive help for me, discovering what an ego is and and how truly interconnected our cultures are.

No matter how different of a place we come from, I didn't know how to function and I think that's why I hid under all of these things and I used all these vices, but luckily I was able to come out of that and start making changes and sort of move into this new life. And sometimes it takes all these little nudges over time sort of twists and turns and then recollections back to things that we have experienced or learned like you did with the face that you saw that paralyzed you practically. And then this gentleman that was on the plane and it was all for a reason. It's all these little tiny wake up calls perhaps. Yeah, yeah. There's a whole bunch of those that happen to everyone I feel like, but most of us maybe it's like you can walk down the street staring at your phone and allow your phone to suck your life force energy, you might walk right by your future wife or you could have been wife or your could have been business partner or a best friend or opportunity to create something beautiful in the world.

So it's like, are we paying attention and how open is our awareness to perceiving these messages? That the universe is really putting out their constant? I believe when was the moment where you actually said, I'm going to make some changes, I'm going to take action. What happened at that time? And what was it two years Actually, it was, I think February 2013, I'm starting to get my years jumbled up. It wasn't very long after the incident with the garage, I struggled for another, I don't know, eight months, 8-12 months after that before I finally figured out what it meant, but I had in the back of my head like I'm going to slowly wean myself away from this destructive lifestyle, I just don't know how yet, but I did start doing creative projects that like kind of taught me different skill sets and things that came into play later, I woke up another just terrible blackout rampage and I remember pulling myself down into this oversized jacuzzi tub in my, my ridiculous, you know, I had like a four bedroom house and like all the things that they said that you need to make you happy and I bought right into all of that and you know, now I live in a van and I have like a couple backpacks worth of belongings that I find so much happiness and the minimal approach to things away from the materialistic attachments.

But I it was the first time that Apple had, I legit thought I was going to die. I actually, I had suicidal thoughts. I had what's od thoughts I had. There were just so many different things going through my head, but none of them were actually connecting emotionally with my being. I was just, I was stuck And it was the first time I noticed that Apple put the podcasting app on the phone forced it. I didn't know what a podcast was but I clicked on the app and it just happened to open up and then I clicked on a random interview and it just so happened that the universe was giving me a message through this interview. It was an amazing woman named Amber ville Hauer. Her performer name was Amber Ludwig then she's still around, she's incredible. She runs a company called no guts, no glory enterprises. She was being interviewed and she told her story about like just overcoming all these hardships and like abuses and then like making something of herself and creating this company and like helping other people share their visions and something about her, There was some sort of energetic connection with her voice and it was something like I have to reach out to this woman and it wasn't something that I normally would do because I'm very shy and introverted and nervous and I had never asked for help before, which is why I had stayed stuck because help is so important and if you're not telling people and speaking, I think that's where you know a lot of us get lost for a long time.

I sent her a facebook message because she shared like her name, I don't know, I looked up on facebook and she replied to me, you know this woman was being interviewed on this big show, I thought there's no way in hell she's going to reply to me, why would she talk to someone like me all the impostor syndrome stuff And she replied immediately. And not only did she reply, she asked if she could call me like that week. She's yeah, she's like I'll just call you, I just want to talk to you for like 30 minutes and so I don't know if she sensed like something or she had a message herself like or she was just playing like we're all playing now like you and I are playing in this just conversation of sharing stories and like in transcendence ideas and whatever it was, she was connected and She called me and I talked to her for like 15 minutes about all of these reasons why I couldn't do this or that or I can't and she just called me on all of my bullshit the whole time just like shooting down to every single excuse that I had and then she said, do you know why you're not really successful right now or you haven't been able to do things that you love?

And I was like, no, I don't know. She's like, because you have no morning routine, she's like, if you need, if you had to get up every morning really early in the method of like doing something for yourself and you really feel what it's like to get in that groove. You're not going to choose to stay out drinking or not, you're going to choose to use these substances when you start to feel what it's like to get high on your own supply and she's like, you need to do a morning routine and start there and then all of these things that you want to do, like travel the world or create your own businesses or write for a living. All of these things can unfold from that simple foundation of connecting with yourself every morning. So I want you to read this book and I'm going to connect you with this man and his name is Hal Elrod and how L Rod is the author for anyone who isn't familiar the Miracle Morning, you know, international best selling series. So it's just an incredible message. How is a great dude, She connected me with him and I got his book and I actually got to talk to him and then I ended up having him on my podcast in like 2014.

And it was like mind blowing just to talk to somebody like that. And then she introduced me to another guy who basically was a podcaster and he was doing stuff in the app world because I had mentioned to her that I wanted to be doing stuff in the app world, Which isn't something that panned out for me when I realized that 12 year olds in those ap classes were kicking my asks the whole time. Yeah. So she was like, you can learn how to podcast from Paul and then you can go out and ask people what they're doing. You know, you find people that are doing the things that you love and ask them how they're doing it. And then I was like, oh my God, this is like, she's given me too many easy things here. Like all I have to do is this, like, she made it too simple for me to to deny. I couldn't make excuses, right? It was like, I can't make excuses, she's just putting it right in front of me. And so I made a commitment to myself. Right? Then I was like, okay, I'm going to start like learning this morning routine which led me into meditation and journaling, which led me into, you know, affirmations and all of the things that I'm deeply interconnected with now.

But I'm also going to start talking and learning from paul. And then maybe I'll get enough grit and myself to be able to find some people to ask questions to via like, maybe I'll create a podcast or whatever. And I did, I ended up doing that and once I started that podcast I was committed because I was like, well I'm not going to quit now. I've already got you know, this Hollywood director said yes to me and then somebody else said yes. And before I knew it, I was 20 interviews in, you know, interviewing creative entrepreneurs around the world about how they were able to do it. And through that process I met so many amazing people and I learned so many great skill sets and I basically just started applying them to my life and seeing what was working and in that like Inferno of chaos and madness. Yeah, I was able to find out what was truly valuable to me, I was able to get rid of everything that I owned and I moved across the country, I quit my job, I started businesses that led to more businesses that led to failed businesses that led to more failed businesses and then more successful stuff and that's how we learn, right?

That's how we become, you know, more successful. We've got to fail. Yeah, it's just been all that. So that's kind of how it got initiated. So the podcast, I mean, have you been doing that? Never stopped speaking podcast. Was that the original podcast where you were doing the interviews? No. Okay. It was another podcast. It was called the Artsy Now Show. Ah yes, Yes. I remember seeing that on your website. Yeah, I remember reading because it's been a while and you you had indicated that maybe the links might not all be working. Yeah. You know, it got a pretty big, I had a good amount of traffic. I didn't know what to do with any of it back then, but what I did know is I was talking to all these amazing people who were like, heartfelt, sharing things in the deepest way. I think when we all come from somewhere, right physically in a community and we identify with it. But then once you realize like you pull those layers back and you kind of discover yourself again, that inner child that you have, you might not be able to find other people that are exactly thinking the same way as you in your area and you can't really force anyone to do that, even though it might be best for all of us, you know, to do it, everyone's on their own timeline.

So, I think when you start to realize that there are people just like you around the world and maybe the way to connect with them first is through the internet or getting out of the town that you live in and traveling when you start to find the people that are like thinking and doing things similar to what you believe in. I think it gets a lot easier. It's like, oh I can't have support, we can be co supportive of each other. Like there are great people in this world doing amazing things and I don't have to be stuck in this place. That's what it felt like. Absolutely. And then sort of the rest is history. I mean you just started, once you had let go of everything, the need to have all that weight of the house and all the things, it freaks you up to do more interesting things that were released that burden. And is that when you started becoming more location independent and traveling? Yeah, yeah. I wrote one of the things that I do to make myself really effective with action because I think there's this really important balance that we need to consider between masculine and feminine energy in our creative process and masculine being this forceful I need to take action right now.

I need to be, you know, put this into play right now and the divine feminine approach, which is like, I'm going to sit back and let this die and I'm going to let this rebirth and I'm going to just let it be and I'm going to surrender over and over again and just watch this flow on its own. I'm going to be in flow. It was like how do I approach this with both sides? How do I trust in the process of like leaning into mystery constantly, right? Because everything is reactive Yes, it's like going into the unknown, right? Yeah. And everything that presents itself is something that you're going to have to react to. And I felt like in those moments of leaning into location independence, the option was like, I'm going to get myself in so many uncomfortable positions with people and places and cultures that I've never been, that essentially I'm going to rebirth myself every single day. One of the things that I did every single day for two years leading up to that was it was an action based thing, but it was also balancing that divine feminine in it was a trust in affirmations.

And I was taking this note card and every day on one side I was writing my affirmation and at that point it was I am location independent. And then the other side, I was writing the date that I wanted to be location independent by and I was writing to actions I was going to take every day to move towards that affirmation. And so that's what I had started doing around 2,014 in 2016 is when I finally became fully location independent. This is something that I suggest everybody do get a pack of no cards. You don't need any resources to do this come up with an affirmation vision that you want to become and put it in the present tense and then put your heart into it and put your grit into it and your emotion into it and every day write that on the no card in the morning as part of your morning routine and two little baby things you're going to do that day to move towards it. That is a perfect, you know, you're, you're asking to play with the universe from your divine feminine side and then you're also putting action into play with your masculine side. It'll blow open your world, those little things of consistency over a long period of time, how that can transform your whole world.

Yeah, well I love that because really what it suggests is that you've got to be crystal clear on what you want, don't be wishy washy, you don't have to be like so specific specific specific, but be clear enough and be consistent and put everything into it, Your emotion, your belief, your feeling from your whole body into it. And I love the way that you talk about the balancing of the masculine with the feminine because that is so important. If you don't take the opportunity to do that, you could be constantly in that doing mode and not in the being mode and sometimes you need to be in the being mode to receive the guidance that you need to take the next step. Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning that I like because I really, I watched that Kickstarter that I just did go kind of bananas and I before I was like action, action, action, action thinking I needed to do all these things. But then the day before it was launching I was like, oh my God, I have completely just completely eliminated like any sort of like my surrender and flow of just being with this.

So I did this big ceremony on the beach in Mexico where I like basically just gave a bunch of things back to the ocean and surrendered and was like, I don't, you know, I'm getting rid of all the expectations of this project and what's going to happen and I'm giving this back to like the divine feminine side of me because I don't think I'm gonna be able to handle whatever happens from the masculine side because more of a baby side in my life. I'm like way more, you know, emotional and like way more of a baby when it comes to that. But and then it just kind of took off. But I was just talking about how I was balancing the masculine and feminine, I was basically giving up all expectations of what I thought it was going to happen with the Kickstarter project. And then once I did that Everything unfolded like 10 x what I thought was possible. So don't underestimate how beautiful it can be just to be just to like I am here now and remove the here and now and just I am right. It's like tata erick this my an oracle that I study with and have just I mean the blessing to have even come across this unbelievable man and ah he always says we don't pray for rain, we pray rain.

It's like remove this space in between right like we are rain. We are part of this. We I am and I think a lot of that that mindset it does go towards the divine feminine side of things. Mm mm mm I love that. And a lot of two of what you're referring to is just surrendering, surrendering to the universe and when we surrender and we let go of expectations or attachments to outcomes. We can allow whatever to come in that's going to be for our highest good life is just a constant series of letting go until the greatest let go of. All right. I I think I honestly I'm always looking at this idea that most of the world, everyone's kind of scared of death and dying and we put this bad rap on death like it's here to take everything beautiful that we've ever known away from us. But the truth is about death is that it's really the only thing that gives purpose to life. It's the only constant reminder of how beautiful our moments are and if we can look at death as sort of a best friend as sort of a guru as a guide for us to be better in our moments to to spend more time in our moments doing the things we love with the people.

We love the things that excite us and not worry so much about getting wrapped up in like separatism or chaos or you know, I have this opinion and you have that therefore we hate each other type mindsets, it could be a much better life for us, individually and collectively. Exactly. And just based on your experience, you know, based on what's going on in the world right now, what's your advice for people? How are you dealing with things in your own life and what's the seeming madness of the world right now? It does feel very mad, right? I had a long, Long three months thinking about this really deeply from the beginning of March. You know, I climbed Kilimanjaro and the end of 2019 I get back to the states in january and things just started feeling a little bit chaotic at that point. I ended up by following universal signs really. I ended up at this medicine ceremony in Mount Shasta with with this Mayan culture and it was like the most beautiful, that's where I met eric who I was talking about and you know how I got there was all these weird little things that happened to put me there, but one of them was kind of cool, which I'll share is I was feeling super depressed.

I actually had lost a business at that point, I didn't know what to do. Like I was like starting to work on the new affirmation decks that I was doing and all these things were happening, but my friend Olivia called me and she's just this like very shamanic beautiful being, just like a mother earth being and she was like, hey there's this medicine ceremony happening and I think, you know, I don't know why, but it keeps coming up for me that you should be there. And I was like, okay, yeah, there were like wildfires everywhere. At this point it was like the height of chaos. I was living in Portland Oregon where you had the media of depicting all of these things that weren't necessarily happening as extreme as they were depicting it, but you had, you know, antifa and all these things happening at once and I'm sensitive. So I was feeling a lot of chaos and I was like, okay Olivia, if the universe gives me like a sign or two, then soon then I'll probably end up out there. She's okay with the deposit is $750 and like you can just send it to, you know, my friend raven and his name is raven, that's cool or whatever and then like we can hold your spot or whatever.

I was like, okay, I'll think about it if something pops up like three minutes after that I get a text message from my mom and she's like, I don't know if you need this, but it came in the mail today and it was a check from the state of Oregon from some like years past tax and it was for $750 exactly. Oh my gosh, what a sign. And then right, it couldn't have been more clear. And then I was driving to the store to get some stuff from my dog and her name is Sochi to Nanda, she's incredible little being. And as I was driving there was this giant telephone pole on the side of the road and somebody had spray painted in giant black letters, raven down the side and I was like, whoa! Like this is for sure where I need to be. So I, I ended up there and you know, I sat in a combo medicine ceremony, which I don't know if you're familiar with combo. It's k. Inbio combo is a frog medicine from the amazon And it's really only about four or 500 years old and our knowing of what this medicine has been in the world, it was Channeled through Ayahuasca ceremonies about 500 years ago as a medicine that they needed to go find in these visions to help people with physical detox of pain and purging and so combo is not psychedelic, but essentially you burn what's happening is they make little burns on your skin almost like if you were to take an incense stick and burn your skin and then the medicine is placed on the burn which then goes directly into your bloodstream, which goes to your heart and pumps throughout your body.

And it creates a physical purging of what could be, you know, the most intense sort of trauma purging that I could ever explain or experience. It kind of feels very flu like, but it could be anywhere from an hour to, in my case, you know, six or seven hours where your face down, you know, puking purging from both ends in this. But you're in the medicine with this frog and it's like you're, it goes through and cleans out all of your organs. And it's really interesting because like when you're actually purging as it's working on particular organs, different colors of things come out of you in unison. So like it might work on your liver and you might be puking up a bunch of yellow, but then you might, it might get down into your abdomen or something and you might actually end up puking up like a black sludge which is precancerous and then obviously the most intense thing, you can puke up his blood, which does happen. This medicine was, I can't even like, it's like you go to this space and you, you see all these things and you learn all these things and then you come back and you don't have a hard drive that's big enough to retain or share the information that you just accessed and I think that's the same with my experience with Ayahuasca and other other types of plant medicines.

I went through combos ceremony healing in this just really sacred Mayan tradition, mayan fire ceremonies to Moscow sweat lodges where you know, we're all naked in the sweat lodge is praying to the directions. And I had been in ceremonies before that that we're really intense. That allowed me to, because I do think the most important thing for anyone in any case to heal anything at all is to spend time in nature and if you're doing that in like what feels like something that's so old compared to the way I was. I grew up, he's just really old lineage traditions because in my, in tradition they don't write stuff in textbooks to teach it. It's all lineage holders, like you're trained from a young child to, to basically hold the staff and carry it and to learn these medicines and to learn how to collect all of the things for your fires and how to arrange the fires based on your astrology. And it's just this whole world that opened up to me that was the most healing pathway. I met Tata erick there and we talked about the state of the world a lot, what you're asking about and and I told him like, hey, you know, I'm in Portland's, it's like constant activism.

It's like people are hating against hating. I mean, I walked my dog one day down the street there and this guy was on the other side of the road and he made a point to run across the street at me and scream at me because I didn't have a mask on and tell me that I was trying to kill him and all of the elders. It was the most neurotic, crazy thing. You know, I'm by myself in this city walking my dog and this guy feels like I'm not putting blame on him because it's a product of, you know, the system that's making this happen everywhere, but I'm not an activist and I was talking to him about that. Like, I don't feel like my path, like I'm sensitive, I'm empathetic. I like to create, I like to share. I like to love my method is to love to love all beings no matter what to sit with this and be like, okay, why do you feel this way? Let's channel this into something, Let's let's release this and and make space for something new. And Tata erick was like, he went on this and I couldn't even begin to tell you all the beautiful things he said, but it started basically with, you know, we are, we are in a state of the world and and if you look at what they teach, it's, it's, we're moving out of the stage.

That was basically the people made of corn And the people made of Corn was really the last 5000 years that you have white, black, red and yellow corn and it's separatism, right? And the prophecies that we're moving into an age of the people made of honey, which is a melting together and a unity, but there's like this weird cusp that you go through, that's like a giant test, is that if we're going to get there or not, and we're currently in that position, he was like, you're not, you know, we have people in this circle in these medicine circles right now that are activists, that's their role. Their role is to make their voice heard, to get out there, to make sure that people aren't pushing things over on us silently in the background, that's going to harm everyone but me in particular. He was like, you know, you're a creative house, you're a creative architect. Your role is to simply create things and bring them into form so that others can get the message to get activated to join the team to bring the light as well and then find their way. So the most important thing I could do for activism is to share my messages and my love in my own creative way to activate others.

That might actually be activists that go out into the world and do it externally and every single one of us has a different role. I mean if anyone is interested, like looking into your Mayan astrology is something I recommend it because it's all linked to the moon cycles. It's all linked to the earth. Every single day in the Mayan calendar has a purpose, whether that be we're praying to our ancestors all day today or we're planting seeds in our garden all day today, there's a purpose. It's very different than the Gregorian calendar, which seems to be more like a let's control things type of approach. But I've been going whenever I feel angry or stressed or tired or I feel myself getting sucked in. I just remember his words of saying, don't fight chaos with chaos, you know, fight chaos with love. He's like, all you need to do is remember to love and the more people that we can get to love and remember this and not judge somebody for their decision on whether or not they're going to wear a mask or whether or not they're going to get vaccine. But to understand all people's points of view and just melted together into like a people made of honey type scenario.

The more we can appreciate and love each other, the more collectively you're going to hell. So that's kind of where I've been sitting in this process the last year and and that started with him saying, okay, you got to go and you got to go spend a lot more time in water to start this off. And so I did that. I just started swimming all the time. Yeah. And it reminds me of a conversation I've had with a few people recently around practicing neutrality and it's about, you know, there are no sides and that's just kind of what you have just described. And there's only love really. I love the fact that what he said to you is that you're creator, and you need to use all of your talents for that particular benefit and bringing that to the world. Tell us more about your sweet affirmation, Dex your journals, how they help others too. And I'm assuming that's that's that's part of what you're, what you're bringing to the world is to help others really kind of prime their own creativity, pump their own creativity and energy.

So share a little bit more about that, because this is really getting juicy. You know, I don't think that life is really about what happens to you. I don't think it's about the beauty that happens to you, and I certainly don't think it's about the bullshit that happens to you, but I do believe that life is about how we choose to react when it happens. And so we either can take these hard moments or this chaos or what seems like a mass psychosis or a trance or whatever is going on. We can take all these things that can feel really draining or resistant or scary and we can shut down and we can let the fear and the resistance gremlins come in and have a disco party in our brain until we end up on our couch watching television and giving all of our life force energy away too our phones or distractions or we can use all these hardships as motivation and fuel to move towards a greater version of ourself. And what I kept seeing when I was making my transition was like one of the most impactful things I ever did was minimalism and that was me packing everything up in my house at once and putting them all in boxes and saying okay, you know, Over the next 30 days, if I need something, I can go find it and pull it out.

But everything else is going bye bye and when you do that, you don't give yourself a chance to continue your attachments with your things. But what I understood after I got very minimal, it was like the value of the things that really did mean a lot to me. And then what I started seeing was like how many things in the world are built just to knock you off of your focus and your value and your magic in just a couple of seconds, Like my awareness is just growing around like okay, what's valuable and what's not? Where is it good to spend my attention and where is it not and why are all these things constantly set up to try to pull my life force energy away from me. Like why am I constantly getting text messages that pull my eyes to my phone? Why am I constantly getting social media notifications? Why our emails all the time coming through? Why are their billboards on every corner of every street? You know, why is there an advertisement everywhere for all these things that I don't really need? And most of it is fear based and most of it can be propaganda. Why is it that we are constantly in this mirage of these things that are trying to keep us away from our attention And well it's because if you spend time learning about yourself in a minimal way, if you spend time maximizing like what it means to have a relationship with your heart or your mind or your gut or the people that you truly love or what truly excites you, that makes you really, really dangerous to fear.

And resistance these systems really feed a lot off of your ability to give away your life force energy to them to spend your money on their products, you know like to do all these things that really leave you sitting in this chair of like, oh I'm just kind of like sometimes I get money and then I spend it on this and I give it back to this person, but I'm not doing anything that I love, I just have these distractions that make me think that I'm doing okay? And I wanted to make, I was like, oh my God, like the fortune cookie is so cool because you open it, you get this like little magical reminder like, oh this is cool. This kind of lights me up. Why are there not more things in the world that helped remind us of our magic when we see them as opposed to pull us away from of our magic? And so I decided to start writing journals and which really led to the main like the initiation of like the pattern interrupter, which was the affirmation decks. Like I want to interrupt your pandemic lifestyle with a little reminder of your magic. You know, I want to interrupt this non focused, whatever scatterbrain social media that you're scrolling with right now with something that can remind you to get off of social media and go do something that's important.

And as a writer, somebody at least I wanted to be a writer in that moment. And I was, I've always had these weird channels where I get downloads these messages that come through my riding, They're coming from somewhere else. They're coming from space. And and I know that I'm just sitting there as a vessel and I'm channeling them and I know that it's my duty and you know, part of the agreement of me coming to earth was to do this. And so I just started trusting and surrendering into that notion of like how do I make little magical reminders in how do I get them out into the world? So more people can feel good, so more people can peel back those layers and really, truly deeply connect with the nature within themselves, which will allow them to then make things that can help activate others. And then there's that huge domino effect that happens, what can I do to make that that happen. And so that's why I started making the sweethearts affirmation decks and that's why it's working for you and it's obviously very popular because when you had first approached me about coming on the podcast, I had coincidentally, I actually wasn't a coincidence, but at the same time, person I know that's part of a mastermind group that I'm in, she was talking about your sweet affirmation deck.

Yeah, I remember you sent me that email was like, that's so crazy. Yeah, and she said, I just I love this deck. And then when I told her that I was interviewing you on the podcast, she was just elated, She couldn't believe it and she can't say enough about your decks. I mean, they're just incredible for her, just her whole personality. I mean she definitely kind of resonates with everything that you're about and what you're doing and I think what you are creating in the world is really helping people to bust through their own creative blocks and visualization blocks and manifestation blocks too. Help them get to where they need to go and you have so much wisdom in you from where you have been and the travels and the insights and How you have integrated things into your life. It's like I can't even, I can't even describe it. You know, it's like a complete 180, but it's more much more than that. I mean it's like turning everything inside out upside down, right?

It's like unlearning everything and my sort of spirit parents are these just two amazing people that I love. They do like a NCO ching unlearning with people. Like it really is just a peeling back of all these things that you thought you knew that were attached to your ego and realizing that like the only thing I know is that I know nothing. And is there anything really more important than sitting around a fire, you know, staring at somebody that you love or multiple people that you love in the eyes and saying like I love you and check out these unbelievable stars above us and look at this fire that's keeping us warm. And what about this glass of water? And like what had, how old is this water? How did it get into this cup that's now going to nourish my body and become part of my energy and what am I going to do with that energy and can I give it back to the world in a positive way and yeah, it's just just never ending play, like there's so much to learn in every moment of every day and I'd love for you to share a little bit more about what's in store for you in the future, what's on the horizon and I know you just completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, maybe you can share a little bit more about that and what your future direction is.

Things might have just changed a little bit with that campaign because it went sort of bananas compared to what I thought. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. It was just crazy because I mean, I think as a, as a kid who had a dream too, right? And now realizing that it's sort of like I am a writer and I am having impact. It's it's still hard for me to integrate what that means. But with this campaign, like once we fulfill all the decks that were sold throughout it, there'll be 14 or 15,000 decks of these cards out in the world somewhere floating around that people are sharing and that's a big deal. I think obviously I'm going to continue to channel these messages that I can and share them in the world. I've been working on a book a lot too over the past year, this book, it's similar writing style to my affirmation cards, but it's actually a lot of stories of my interactions around the world tied into some sort of like lesson If you've never read any of my writing, it's all a little bit ridiculous and extreme, but it's all true and that's the project that I'm really leaning into right now and I hope to start putting out into the world in some form, but I just got done recording a whole bunch of episodes for a new podcast that I have called Power affirmations for your maniac creative mind in 60 seconds which just went up not that long ago and I am going to be traveling, I am going to head back to Africa, I work with the school out there, which I love and just continuously pushing myself in uncomfortable situations basically, and seeing if I can come out a better person in the moment, you know, it's somebody who can help other people become better versions of themselves as well in any capacity that I can that's not saying that I don't suffer, I don't have bad days, you know, I do have really deep depressions and I do have I have a whole community of support for that because I think support is really important, but if it's taken me a long time to get there and it's just we've got to keep leaning into love and letting our hearts rise up, right, and that's exactly the right answer.

The answer to everything is we just got to lean into our hearts late, lean into love and our hearts will wise up, no doubt about it. Life takes so, so many twists and turns. But we just need to write it and go with the flow unless we resist, the more beautiful life will become for us. And and it opens up so many doors because when we resist, we're resisting because of our own preferences or our own fear or or whatever or our own previous programming from years and years and years of conditioning. But you're doing some great stuff in the world before we talk a little bit about where people can connect with you. Do you have any parting comments for our listeners today? I think one thing that's just consistent for me all the time and I mentioned it a few times, the importance of hanging out in nature. There's an affirmation that I've used for a while. It's very direct and it's as I submerge my body and mother Earth, I heal all my hurts. And this is an affirmation that recently made it into the new deck that we just launched.

But the principle behind this is something that I've been thinking about that I think could be valuable and sharing in today's world because we are real boxy, you know, and there's a lot of fear and propaganda out there trying to get you to stay where you're at and there can be certain levels of that that could be healthy. You know, if you are trying to prevent somebody who might be able to get sick or whatever. You know, we all have our agreements on that. But before there were concrete jungles and rubber shoes and sterile hospital delivery rooms and carpets and paints and plastic bottles and cubicles. Our ancestors, your tough as ancestors, my crazy maniac ancestor, you know all of our ancestors evolved and survived over millions of years in direct connectivity with the earth. So they were bear asked, they were absorbing any oxidants and vitamins and critical amino nose and dense nutrition's through untainted soils and natural water sources and rejuvenating sunlight and you know through the bottom of their feet, through the back, your shirts off and the sun is coming through Nature is the ultimate healer, physically, mentally and spiritually.

There is a reason why ideas explode. There is a reason why inflammation disappears. There is a reason why stress retreats when you're outside exploring the outdoors, talking with nature, sitting quietly with nature, spending more time there, it's hard to to remove ourselves from boxes completely. But if we don't, you know, we're basically removing our connectivity with the earth because of these shoes, right? You shouldn't necessarily be stuck in these positions. You should be outraging in your undies in the middle of a rainstorm, climbing up an apple tree, shedding tears to the beauty of the natural world. You should be yelling cowabunga as you swing down from a branch into a glorious puddle of mudd and you know, rolling around in this beautiful elixir of earth when you walk barefoot on the Earth, you are absorbing a supercharge of free electrons from earth's electrical current through the fashion on the bottom of your feet. Now these electrons, they act as antioxidants and they neutralize the excess positively charged free radicals in your body.

So if you're free radicals are not neutralized and by the way like free radicals are created from Mainly like electromagnetic frequencies from your computer, from your your router. All these different, you know 5G whatever all these our whole world, the reality is we have these electromagnetic frequencies around us at all times that causes cell damage that creates free radical. If free radicals are not neutralized, they steal electrons from other atoms in your body and then they end up creating an ongoing damage across your cell structure. So the beautiful thing about antioxidants are antioxidants can lend electrons to free radicals without becoming unstable themselves if that makes sense. So this results in basically a neutralization of the problem basically in a simple form, free or mobile electrons from the earth's core can resolve chronic inflammation by serving as a sort of natural antioxidant to your body when you're in connection with the earth. So the cell repair and the increased functioning as a result has a mass of other health benefits.

Like these are proven health benefits. I'm not a doctor, so don't sue me on any of this. But I can tell you my experience of being outside and there are a lot of scientific studies around this, if anyone's interested, there's a free documentary on earth thing dot com about the Power of Earth thing and you can actually get mats and stuff to sleep on at night where you can ground yourself to the earth because when you're sleeping, it's like the most important time to have a connection with the electrons from the earth because that's when your body is doing all the repairs for yourself. If you're disconnected, you're like, you're just cutting yourself off from the magical power portal and it just doesn't make a lot of sense. So a lot of benefits, you know, it creates detoxification of the body. It decreases inflammation and improves blood flow and oxygenation. It boosts your immune system, it decreases, decreases anxiety, stress, better sleep restoration of the body's natural state, all these amazing things. And then in return, because you feel better, you have less information than you're able to be more creative, right?

You're able to step into a higher happiness zone, you're able to overcome resistance easier. You're able to have less fear. You're able to have less anger. All these things that usually will capture your attention. So I just suggest whatever you do in whatever capacity that you can try to get outside for a while with your shoes off. Try to sit in the sun, try to go swimming in the ocean or the lake play in the sand and if nothing else. And on top of everything else, you should get unearthing matt or something that you can put under your computer while you're working to take your voltage down to zero. But you know, getting a map for your bed would be the best thing ever. And you're going to see not only a better feel for your entire life from your body and your mind, but you're also going to expand your creativity and that's going to create more opportunity which will lead you to more creativity and more opportunities. So there's really no downside to this, give it a shot, like there's nothing you're going to lose. That's great advice and you have, you know, direct experience with it.

And so that website is er thing dot com, correct? Yeah, that's the original, they did a documentary, they've got products, I use their sleeping mat, their mattress covers, their incredible. I bought them for my parents because my parents don't seem to leave their house much and they have pains and you know, you know, autoimmune stuff happening and like I bought these mattress covers for them and there have been improvements I notice when I don't sleep on one now that I have, I didn't know my whole life, but like once you start sleeping one on one and it's like, whoa, this is, yeah, there's, there's a big difference here exactly how much time do you spend in nature. Well a lot of my morning routine is walking around barefoot outside no matter what the weather is, but ultimately I've designed my life to be location independent so that I can be in nature all the time. So I live in a van And because I live in a van, I, you know, I take calls and I work from this van that's usually parked in the middle of nature. So I would say that I try to be 80-90% of my time in nature and it wasn't always that way.

You know, I used to work Career jobs, I worked in a concrete construction factory for $13 an hour making these concrete product receptacles that carry human feces underground and I remember I only had five days of vacation per year and there's nothing wrong with that job. I think it's a perfect stepping stone and it's perfect for anybody who needs a little money hustle and to provide for certain things, but it's just when we start to give all of our life force energy to a job and think that we can actually be ourselves or pursue creativity is that it becomes a problem. And that was a problem for me, you know, I was doing that and I had to get away. So now it's really important to me to be in nature and so I probably spend a lot more time there than most people, but I would never recommend less time. Yeah. I think of more of us really put a focus on a goal of just being more independent and not being tied to so many material things and pursuit of accumulation, consuming more and more.

I think we'd be a lot better off. Oh yeah, yeah. The the pursuit of accumulation. Oh that was me. You know, that was me and yeah. And you can't imagine going back to that. No, it's just you can't I think all of us at some point we kind of get trapped there and you really like, you don't really realize it because you're basically spending your time and your money to take care of all of these things. Like they don't own them, they really do own you. I remember I used to have five fish tanks and I had five televisions on these different rooms of my house. I live by myself just like a bachelor, 4-bedroom house in the suburbs, working in this concrete construction industry, drinking every day and you know my materials were my sanity. I would like, okay I'm going to clean these TVs and this fish tank today and then tomorrow I'm gonna do these ones and then it just starts back over again the next we can you you get stuck in that cycle. So it's really important. I think the more minimal you can be physically mentally and digitally, the more you're going to pay attention to what truly excites you and what truly causes you paying and maybe you need to feel that pain so that you can break open those blockages and release it and make space for other stuff.

So it's not necessarily a bad thing to feel pain or to feel depression or to feel sad. Sometimes you have to feel that way to get to the other side and you know, it can be really encouraged. Absolutely, I just want to thank you again for coming on the show and for people to be able to connect with you. I know we've got a couple of websites Rage create dot com Heath Armstrong dot com that will put in the show notes and any other websites. I think you've got other business websites that are very interesting and intriguing. We can put those on there as well as your social media handles and links. Yeah, I think those two are fine. You can find anything you need about me at, at heath Armstrong dot com if you want to check out the decks and stuff, Rage create dot com is where it's at. Yeah, I met heath fist pumps on instagram. If you know, if anyone has any questions or feel free to reach out. I love connecting. I know how important it is. Don't be shy, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's been amazing. I always get so excited to like just connect on this level. Well thank you so much for being here and I want to thank all of our listeners for taking the time to listen in today.

We're so delighted to be able to bring another fantastic show and guests to provide just nuggets of wisdom that will help you open the door to seeing, thinking, feeling, being in the world, seeing things and and doing and being differently than you have before. Thanks so much for joining us and until next time. Keep rising up. Bye for now. Mhm Yeah, we hope today's show helped to bring a bit more joy and happiness into your heart. We hope it inspired you to unleash your inner power and rise up to your best and loving heart centered, highest self. We'd be grateful if you'd leave us a review on itunes. Those reviews are important to spreading this valuable message. We'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast and share the show with others. Visit hearts rise up dot com for heart centered courses, guided meditations and are popular notes from your higher self until next time, keep rising up and may all that you love thrive