 Now, I know you might have felt the tug before in your life. You felt that something is not right. Maybe it's been on a date. Maybe it's been with an interaction with a health care practitioner. Maybe it's just been the general feeling you've had most of your life. And now decades later, you're just getting around to the point where it is a scream and no longer a whisper. In this video, I thought I would talk about something very important that I see as a general kind of existential crisis that comes up a lot. And I think addressing it is very, very important in the healing journey. Hey, I'm Dr. Alex Hine, Chinese Medicine Doctor, acupuncturist and author of the health book Master of the Day, which you can check out on Amazon. I've included two links right below this video. The first is a free download, which is four daily rituals that can potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine. And the second is if you want to become a patient of mine, either locally or online via telemedicine, you can check out the link below to my clinic and my contact information. Our modern life and our society is very weird because we often build a life that becomes a prison for the spirit. You know, one of the things that makes me think about this quite a lot is Brownie Ware, the hospice nurse who wrote that book, The Regrets of the Dying, where she talked about the number one regret being I wish I had lived a life true to myself and not what others expected of me. Some of this is complicated because we do have familiar responsibilities. You know, if you're a parent, you can't just go off and do the Communo to Santiago when you have three kids to feed. Obviously, that's not feasible. And sometimes there are cultural beliefs. This is how women should act in a relationship. This is how men should act in a marriage or in general. This is how you should treat your career. This is why you should use a career you don't like, but it supports your family or you should choose a career you don't like. But that adds prestige to our family. There are all these contractual obligations that we have as a combination of culture and upbringing and even our own beliefs about what we think is proper. But a very few of those things are really listening to what we feel really called to do. Now, my upbringing was really no different. You know, my dad as an immigrant from Haiti said, what if you made $70,000 at a finance job, right? Wouldn't that be awesome? And then my mom was from a more established wealthier family who said, you know, you should go after what you want and what you dream about. So even these two messages are almost like mixed marketing messages, right? They're suggesting two very different approaches to life. One is outwardly focused security. One is internally focused excitement. Now, this dichotomy represents a lot of what we humans struggle with in our lives. Now, this video obviously falls in the bucket of psychomotional, psychological, psychospiritual healing, whatever term you like to use, but it involves how you feel internally when no one else is around. Now, I know for me personally, when I did work, i.e. medicine, that was not only personally interesting and fulfilling, but meaningful because I saw it contributing to other people's lives and I saw it helping other people. That was a profound upgrade in the way that I felt on a daily basis. It made a profound change in the way that I felt even on the days when I'm tired, even on the days where I don't want to do what I'm doing, just the feeling that there are people, my patients that need me, that need me at my best, that need me to keep studying every day, that need me to physically come in and see them. That by itself has been such, you know, kind of like a strong safety line that internally holds things together because any of us have days where we don't want to do things, any of us have days where things are exciting and then the next day they're incredibly boring, but often it's meaning and satisfaction that transcends our own personal will that is incredibly important. I shared it here before, I think, but I shared the story of, it might have actually been Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop Lab story, a show on Netflix, and they had a bunch of their employees go down to Jamaica where they did magic mushrooms as part of one of their Goop specials or their episodes. The woman and the therapists down there that were assisting in this psychedelic therapy session had said that, you know, the shamans down here and the people down here use this magic mushrooms, the psychedelic psilocybin, when they're chronically ill and they can't find a solution to their illness, they use it for their healing. But the funny thing is you foreigners, you Westerners, Americans, come down here when you don't have any physical illness, but you say you feel disconnected or you don't feel connected to anything or like this life has no purpose. And she said that, well maybe that's actually your illness and that's your pathology. And I think a lot of us can relate to this. All the material needs having been met, all the contractual obligations with our family and our career having been met, but internally we feel empty and that's a problem. So besides this being just a typical rant, the point is that often working with my patients, a very difficult thing I see across the board is encouraging you to build a life and career that is true to you, true to you, meaning true to what you want to do, not what you feel obligated to do because you have a family, true to what excites you, even if it doesn't make the most money at the moment, true to what you feel intrinsically called towards, something that's deeply meaningful even if it doesn't work out. Now it doesn't mean you quit your job and you give up on your three kids and your family. What it means is just lean into it. Maybe it's an hour, one afternoon or one evening a week after work when the kids are in bed or before watching a Netflix show. Lean in for one hour and begin experimenting with that thing. It's like if your inside has become this walled off charred door, it's all blacked, there's little cracks there. Sometimes the light shines through. The light is your real true self of what you really want to do. So you begin exploring for an hour a night and that crack just opens up a little bit. The light, you know, the light cracks through just a tiny bit. You get one little light ray coming through and then over time, over months, maybe that opens up even more and then over a couple of years, maybe that whole doorway has been cleansed and you feel completely differently internally. And maybe guess what? You get even the same results you got externally, financially, and you can meet all your obligations as a parent or a father. So I find that addressing this is so difficult and so important to the healing of the person. You have to build a life and career true to you, true to your actual desires of who you want to be and what you want to become. It's not easy. It's a Joseph Campbell Heroes journey, but it's one of the most worthwhile things you can ever do. All right. That is it for my impassioned psychospiritual rant for today. But again, before you go, a link below is if you'd like to become a patient of my locally or online via telemedicine is a link to my clinic. And there's also a free download for daily rituals that can help you add years to your life potentially with Chinese medicine. All right, guys. That's all I have before you go. I have two other videos related right here.