Let's Think About It Podcast

Awakening Spiritual Intelligence

• Morice Mabry • Season 2 • Episode 44

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What if the greatest untapped resource for leadership excellence isn't another business strategy, but something deeper within us? Dr. Yosi Amram reveals how spiritual intelligence can transform both our leadership effectiveness and personal fulfillment in this thought-provoking conversation.

Drawing from his remarkable journey from military commander to startup CEO to spiritual intelligence researcher, Dr. Amram shares the pivotal moment that changed everything—a profound spiritual awakening during a massage that ultimately led to professional crisis but personal transformation. This experience launched him into pioneering research that now demonstrates how spiritually intelligent leaders create more effective teams and better business results.

Spiritual intelligence isn't about religious belief but about developing 22 core qualities including purpose, gratitude, compassion, and presence—qualities that naturally arise when we connect to our life force energy. Dr. Amram explains how these qualities can be systematically developed like muscles at the gym, offering practical guidance for identifying which qualities to focus on first and how to strengthen them over time.

The conversation explores fascinating intersections between ancient wisdom traditions and modern psychological research, showing how spiritual intelligence represents a convergence of timeless human insights with contemporary science. We learn how even challenging emotions like fear, anger, and grief can serve as messengers when approached with mindfulness and discernment.

Perhaps most powerfully, Dr. Amram offers a vision of human connectedness that transcends our perceived separation. Like specialized cells in the human body that serve unique functions while remaining part of one organism, we each have distinct gifts to contribute to the greater web of life. Finding alignment between our individual purpose and our service to the whole creates the meaning and fulfillment we all seek.

Ready to develop your spiritual intelligence? Subscribe now and visit yosiamram.net to learn more about Dr. Amram's work and take a free assessment of your spiritual intelligence profile.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the let's Think About it podcast, where we embark on a journey of thoughtfulness and personal growth. I'm your host, coach Mo, and I'm here to guide you through thought-promoting discussions that will inspire you to unlock your full potential. In each episode, we'll explore a wide range of topics, from self-discovery and mindfulness to goal-setting and achieving success. Together, we'll challenge conventional thinking and dive deep into the realms of possibility. Whether you're looking to find clarity in your personal or professional life, or seeking strategies to overcome obstacles, this podcast is your go-to source for insightful conversations and practical advice. So find a comfortable spot, chill and let's embark on this journey of self-improvement together. Remember, the power of transformation lies within you, and together we'll uncover the tools and insights you need to make it happen. So let's dive in. Welcome to another episode of the let's Think About it podcast. I'm your host, coach Tmo, and I'm here with another special, unique guest. His name is Dr Yossi Armram Doc what's up?

Speaker 2:

What's up, doc, coach Mo? Yeah, yossi, what's up? As you and I are here, we're going to have some fun conversation and engaging, interesting, and your smile is here and I'm enjoying it. So that's what's up right now.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. Tell my audience where you're checking in, from where you're at in the world today.

Speaker 2:

I am at the moment in the San Francisco Bay Area, actually south of it, in Santa Cruz, near the ocean, where it's storming, there's heavy winds and rain and stuff, so it's an exciting moment. We need some rain here in California, indeed.

Speaker 1:

Yes, indeed, I'm in Sacramento, so much needed rain. I agree with you 100%. So tell my audience who you are, what you do and what's the value that you bring for people.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, how many days do we have for the recording?

Speaker 2:

Do your best, do your best. Okay, let's see. Professionally, I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I work as a leadership coach and a therapist. I work with couples, and then I work with primarily CEOs as individuals, startup CEOs in Silicon Valley, and I've worked with over 100 of them. Many of them have built companies with billions of dollars in revenues and thousands of employees.

Speaker 2:

My research area and passion is around this thing called spiritual intelligence, and I'm happy to talk some more about what that is. But my passion, my calling, is helping awaken greater spiritual intelligence in myself and the world, and I think we live in critical times, in our exciting times and critical times. Our human IQ landed us on the moon and split the atom, deciphered the genome. We have learned over the last several decades about the importance of emotional intelligence, which is the ability to be aware of and draw on emotional resources to manage our own and others. But yet the world's a bit of a mess right now. The anxiety and depression rates are skyrocketing, suicide rates are skyrocketing, there's political polarization, there's environmental dangers, catastrophes, there's wars. Despite all the progress, we have some challenges, and both individually and collectively, and I think the missing piece is this thing I called spiritual intelligence.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for bringing that up, because you also mentioned passion. So take through how you develop this passion that guided you to what we call spiritual intelligent leadership. Spiritual intelligent leadership when did that passion come from? And then take us through the definition of what spiritual intelligent leadership is.

Speaker 2:

Okay, great. So basically I have to tell you my whole life story because I feel like we live our life moving forward right. Time runs forward, but we make sense of it looking back, and I never would have thought or saw or predicted that this is where I'll end up. But when I look back at it, everything really led up to this, what I'm doing these days. So it started out.

Speaker 2:

I was born and raised in Israel, a war-torn part of the world, as in the news always. Fortunately, I was drafted into the military during peaceful times, like all young men in Israel, despite being a pacifist in my leaning. I had to serve three years in the military and I was a shy, introverted, math and science kind of kid, but somehow I found myself thrust into leadership positions, winning all kinds of awards, having the fastest promotion record in the history of the regiment. So, despite being successful at it, so to speak, the command and control model of the military, which is important and necessary in battle, you don't have time to, you know, go into a conference room and say think about it, let's build some consensus, you have to make some quick decisions, and that's a command and control model and it's effective in battle, but it's not really good for the human spirit and of course neither is wars, and it doesn't help us actualize our highest potential. So that kind of led me to have a lifelong dream and an aspiration to see how, what kind of organizations can you build that would be more humane? See, what kind of organizations can you build that would be more humane and more support the growth of the individual in a community or in a team environment, team spirit, context.

Speaker 2:

So that led me to come to the US and study engineering and I got my bachelor and master's at MIT and then my MBA at Harvard and so on. So I got all these credentials with the dream to one day start a business as an entrepreneur. And that dream came true and I started a company and it was the first company to do personalized interactive newspapers. So we had software learning agents that would take Mo's profile and produce a personal newspaper for Mo on your fax machine. This is well before the internet. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the days of fax machine, but that's how it worked and you would tell us which articles were relevant or not, which weren't, and then the machine learning would tune itself and so the name of the company was Individual Inc. Which stood for this idea of individualized, personalized news. But it stood for an organizational philosophy that supported the actualization and growth of each individual in this team spirit environment. So I was very passionate about it and very driven. I was working 70, 80 hours a week.

Speaker 2:

I was getting burned down and then the internet came and it became clear that everything we're doing and we're selling as premium service for executives for getting this personalized news, was going to become free and ad supported on the Internet. So I got scared and frozen and got depressed and I couldn't face my employees and tell them how we're going to manage this transition. To manage this transition, by then we had raised tens of millions of dollars from the top venture capital firms and the newspaper chains, the big top newspaper chains in the country. But I just didn't know where we're going to go and I froze and I got depressed. But thank God, somehow I persisted. I found the tenacity, the energy, the spirit and we turned the business around, became an internet company, high flying. I took it public.

Speaker 2:

Our stock price was growing and I was trying to relax one day and get a deep tissue massage. And while I was lying on the table, relaxing in this deep tissue massage. I went into this deep state of spiritual awakening and, like my separate egoic identity dissolved, I felt like I was one with everything. Everything was made of one field of consciousness. My body was made of consciousness. There was no separation. The floor that I looked through, the face cradle, felt like it was inside of me and it blew my mind up my circuits. I just couldn't make sense of it. It was so different than how I was conditioned to think about who I am and what reality is and what's the relationship between objects.

Speaker 2:

So that threw me into a manic episode, because I had this big download and all this ideas and I wanted the company to move very quickly in the world of the internet. But my team and board couldn't keep up and they felt like I lost it, which I did. And so there were all these. The board put me on a voluntary leave of absence. They said, hey, go, chill out, get yourself together before you can run this business. And I fought them, I wouldn't go for that. It got messy and they pushed me out and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times had headline stories about how I was emotionally unstable, was very embarrassing and shameful. And they were right. Our stock price got cut in half and so on. But all of that kind of got me to ask these deep questions about myself. Why was I so driven? Why did I burn out? Why did I get so identified with the business? Was this awakening experience spiritual experience real or was it delusion? Was it like, was I on some kind of psych, psychedelic that that precipitated it? And so all that changed the direction of my life.

Speaker 2:

Eventually, I went and got a PhD to study these questions and that led me to stumble on this idea called spiritual intelligence. I was like, oh, that sounds very interesting. I know about emotional intelligence, this could be parallel to that. But what is that and how do we measure it and how does it contribute to leadership? And that's what became my research area to define it, develop a valid academic measure for it and then study do leaders that have higher spiritual intelligence lead teams that are more effective, more committed, have lower turnover and so on?

Speaker 2:

And that was the subject of my research and that showed that spiritually intelligent leaders were more effective. And then, since then, there's been a lot of other research by many other researchers that showed that they produce better financial results for their organization. They have better mental health, better resilience, better all kind more productivity for the individuals. So that's my long, short life story about how I got here and how my whole story through leadership, the spiritual awakening, the dark night of the soul that I experienced, the awakening and the academic research lead me to this day where I am a passionate believer that spiritual intelligence helps us become more effective leaders and more fulfilled human beings, and it helps us individually and collectively. So I'll pause there. I said a lot, but I want to keep this in.

Speaker 1:

I appreciate that journey and all the detail behind it and it was like this awakening for you. And then you took the steps to deeply explore it to the extent of you got your PhD, deeply explore it to the extent of you got your PhD, did very deep research. But now here's my question spiritual intelligence. Why isn't that really talked about? When you look at in society, we hear so much about emotional intelligence, but where does spiritual intelligence come from and why isn't it talked much about?

Speaker 2:

That's an excellent question. Let's look back at emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence was first developed as a concept by two academicians, salovi and Meyer, in a paper in 1990. And up until then in our culture we had a dichotomy between emotion and reason. If I asked you, do you know people in your life? You consider emotional? And you might think, oh yeah, they're probably pretty dramatic and they have intense emotions and they're a bit out of control or whatever. They cry at a puppy commercial. But then came along, emotional intelligence said no, there's no dichotomy between emotion and reason. You can use emotions intelligently and that helps you function. Now in our culture there's a dichotomy between spiritual and practical.

Speaker 2:

Spiritual is associated with a bunch of wool. It's non-scientific. You can believe in God or the old man in the sky or whatever. Your conception is of higher power or God. You can believe in the eternity of the soul, the reincarnation. You can believe in angels, whatever it is, but people don't see that as scientifically based and practical. So spiritual intelligence comes along and says wait a sec. No, that's not what spiritual intelligence is. It's not a belief like a belief in God and it's not a momentary experience. You can meditate or whatever, or it's not like even it's not the experience I had while I was waking up, where I had my awakening experience on the massage table, because I had the awakening experience and then I behaved very erratically and then I took egoic pride oh, look at me, I had this great experience and I was arrogant, frankly, because I was ungrounded, I wasn't relational, I wasn't taking other people's input like you're moving too fast. I had a spiritual experience, but I wasn't spiritually intelligent. I didn't really learn to embody it, and so it took years of practice and I'm still on that path.

Speaker 2:

To answer your question, why aren't people talking about it? One, because, as I said, spirituality and practicality are seen as dichotomies. Secondly, what made emotional intelligence catch on was that there was a lot of research. Then they would develop method measures of what emotional intelligence is, and then there are all these studies that show that people that have greater emotional intelligence were better leaders, had better relationships, they were more empathic, they were all these things, and so that caught on in the zeitgeist.

Speaker 2:

Now I'm trying to affect the same thing in spiritual intelligence and we're, for better or worse, at least 20 years behind emotional intelligence, but my hope is that in 10, 20 years it will be just as broadly understood. And then you know you and your podcast and other people starting to talk about it and realizing there's a huge body of academic research. Now that highlights its benefits. My research has now been cited a thousand times by different studies, different people, because they're doing other research on spiritual intelligence, whether it's using my measure or some other measure or different theory of what spiritual intelligence is. But all of that momentum and critical mass is what it takes to bring a new idea like that into the culture.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so then let me ask you this I'm a leader, I'm up and coming, I'm thinking, I'm doing a great job, but I carry a lot of frustration, a lot of what we call the inner critic, doubts, certain emotions that really limit me. Right, how do I learn more for myself about spiritual intelligence? How do I learn more for myself about spiritual intelligence? I know I can go out and research and look up studies, cases, read about it on the internet. I get that. But what does one need to know about spiritual intelligence to grow as an individual?

Speaker 2:

Okay, great One thing I still haven't defined what it is. I'm dancing around it, so let me try and do that. So, spiritual intelligence, like emotional intelligence, the ability to draw on emotional resources and information. Spiritual intelligence the ability to draw on spiritual resources and embody spiritual qualities in daily functioning and daily lives. What are those spiritual qualities and resources?

Speaker 2:

I did interviews with 71 teachers across all the world's major traditions, whether it's Hinduism, buddhism, islam, christianity, judaism, shamanism, to see how do they live, and they all have very different theologies. Right, if you're Christian, you believe Christ was the Messiah, and if you're, if you're Christian, you believe Christ was the Messiah, and if you're Muslim, you believe Muhammad was the final prophet, and so on. Each tradition has its own cosmology, its own theology, but what was very interesting to me was that, regardless of what their belief is, they focused on a number of core qualities and values. You might call them virtues, a number of core qualities and values. You might call them virtues, and these are purpose, service, trust, gratitude, humility, integrity, presence, higher self, and so on. And so, regardless of your tradition, these are the qualities and these are the resources. So, spiritual intelligence, the ability to actualize and embody these. So that kind of tells you what it is.

Speaker 2:

And then to your question okay, I'm a human being, I'm a leader, I'm not, and we're all leaders in one way or another. What is a leader? Someone that influences others. So you're a leader through your podcast. You're a leader in your family. You're a leader in your community. You're a leader in your sports team. You're your family. You're a leader in your community. You're a leader in your sports team. You're a leader in your work team. You're a leader in your neighborhood. Whatever it is, you're influenced.

Speaker 1:

You're a leader of self too.

Speaker 2:

You're a leader of yourself. Yeah, which is a critical point. You can't lead anybody else until when you can lead yourself. You can't inspire anyone else until when you're inspired yourself. So how do you become spiritually intelligent human being? Let's just say, forget about leader, just. Let's just say as a human being.

Speaker 2:

So I talked about these qualities of purpose, service, gratitude, forgiveness, compassion. So first you have to set an intention. It all starts with an intention that says, okay, I want to cultivate this, I want to become more spiritually intelligent. It's like saying I want to be in better shape physically. Okay, I want to become healthy Because, like in our body, if you want to be more fit physically, there are many muscle groups.

Speaker 2:

You have triceps and biceps and abs and whatever. So you go to the gym and you have a workout routine and you're working on each of these muscles and you don't just work on one. So spiritual intelligence has these 22 qualities. You can think of them as 22 muscles, like I mentioned purpose, service, compassion, et cetera, gratitude. So you have to first pick one and say, okay, I'm going to work on my purpose.

Speaker 2:

What is my purpose? And how do I get to to define my purpose? And you ask yourself.

Speaker 2:

First of all, life gave me a gift, first and foremost the gift of life itself, but beyond that, it gave me some gifts. Different people have different gifts. Some guy is really talented in math and numbers and someone else is talented in music, and someone else has a great sense of humor and someone else knows how to write well, etc. And so each person, when life gives you a gift, it's an invitation. It wants you to actualize those gifts and use them to serve life itself.

Speaker 2:

And that's the most fulfilling when we find the alignment, or the Venn diagram between our talents and gifts and what we're good at and how to use it to contribute to others. That gives us fulfillment, that gives us meaning. So we have to ask ourselves what is life, what gifts do I have? And if I'm good in this and that, maybe I'm a software engineer, that's my calling. If I'm really good in music, maybe I'm a musician, maybe I'm a stand-up comic, Maybe I'm a painter, maybe I'm a great listener and empathic and I become a therapist or whatever, it is that our gift If I'm trying to find my purpose.

Speaker 1:

Let's say I'm just somewhere, I'm owning up and come up, but I've just never been sure and I'm trying to get locked in. And someone said to me, working with a coach, or got advice from a mentor that you need to find your purpose first. That's the first thing that I would recommend you do. Right, and that advice of finding your purpose is really a component of spiritual intelligence. Is what you're searching for. One component of spiritual intelligence is I'm searching for my purpose.

Speaker 2:

Finding and expressing my purpose is a component of spiritual intelligence. Another one that's basic and people may not think about it as spiritual intelligence, but it's gratitude. There's all this research about the benefits of gratitude. So you just, every time you go to sleep at nine and you wake up in the morning, you think of all the things you're grateful for. I'm grateful I got another day. I was grateful for this great conversation I had with my friend on our walk. I'm grateful for my talking to my kids today and you know my connection with them. I'm grateful for the yummy burrito I had for lunch or the sunset. I enjoyed, enjoyed whatever and then helps our mood and that makes we are counting our blessings, and so that's part of spiritual intelligence.

Speaker 2:

So I said there's 22 qualities. You can't work on all of them, just like you can't work on all your muscles in one shot. Now you can go to the gym and exercise a few of them with spiritual intelligence. I recommend that you pick one, you work on it for a month, you build some habits, you figure out your purpose, then you build a habit of gratitude, then you build a habit and practice of mindfulness, then you build a habit and practice of opening your heart with more compassion and you just start to pay attention to suffering. You see around you and instead of turning away, you're like oh, let me bring my heart, energy and connect that suffering and wish those people or that animal or whatever well. And we think that through compassion is going to hurt us because we're extending compassion to people we're suffering. But it actually feels good, we feel more connected when we are compassionate, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

But you know, what I also hear is we're building a better you, right, a better whole you, and spiritual intelligence is a great word to define me building a better me, or you building a better you. And when we start to dissect it, right, what's your purpose? Incorporate more purpose, gratitude, better attitude, mindfulness, all of these different pillars trust, relationship, honesty.

Speaker 1:

all of these different pillars start to come up and, like you said, we can't do it all at once. But it's up to me as the individual to be able to choose. Where do I want to focus first? And if I'm new to this awareness, how would one know where to choose first? If they have low awareness around this whole spiritual intelligence concept? Where would one person start?

Speaker 2:

I think you just follow your guidance, your intuition, you can't go wrong. I think a couple of places that are always good, I would say, is gratitude, because it's universally valuable. The other one is purpose. I think those two would be my first go-to places. And then the other one is intention. Intention kind of points you in the right direction. Now one thing if I was listening to this and just to play devil's advocate, I would say, hey, I'm talking about purpose and gratitude, and humility and integrity.

Speaker 2:

Okay yeah, these are virtues that everybody's talking about.

Speaker 2:

Why are you calling it spiritual intelligence? What is the thing here? First of all, I'd say yes to that. Namely, for example, there's a field of positive psychology. That's a third wave psychology. It used to be all kind of Freudian analysis of your trauma and your childhood, and then cognitive, behavioral. And then positive psychology came and said we don't want to just study mental illness, we want to study qualities that support well-being and thriving and so on, not just remove disease, not just only focus on disease, but define health. And so Marty Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology, developed thing called character, strengths or value in actions, and they have a measure of 24 qualities, and over half the qualities of spiritual intelligence map into the qualities of positive psychology. So I'm saying, yeah, a lot of these qualities other people are saying are good for you and represent mental health and including even transcendence. And then in the field of leadership, all the leadership research is about finding the purpose, express gratitude, be service-oriented, servant leadership. So the same qualities appear there. And I could cite all the studies. So you have convergence between thousands of year traditions, millennia, like the traditions I talked about, that I interviewed the Jewish and Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and Taoist, et cetera, between those qualities that they didn't have positive psychology. They didn't have statistical regression analysis and correlation studies and statistical packages to study these things, controlled experiments and so on. But they did the inner sciences. They looked at inside their soul and found, over teacher to student through the lineage, what are the qualities that made life more meaningful, more fulfilling and the same thing. Okay, so now we have a convergence between the spiritual traditions and modern science.

Speaker 2:

Point number one. Now again, why call it spiritual intelligence? Because these are qualities that all the spiritual traditions have been talking about for thousands of years. Number one. Number two these qualities naturally arise when you're connected to your spirit. Now, what is your spirit? Your spirit comes from Latin, which is the animating breath of life, meaning your life force. So when we connect to our life force, energy, we naturally find our purpose. We naturally are present, we naturally compassionate and forgiving, we're naturally grateful. So, in a sense, spiritual intelligence is the highest and deepest expression of your life force, energy, of your spirit essence. I hope I'm making sense about why it makes sense to call it spiritual intelligence, because it emanates out of our life force and it's the fullest expression, the highest expression of our life force is these qualities. You called it a better human being, a better version of you. It's a better version of you is because it's the full actualization of your life force.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's what I'm talking about, and so let me ask you this I'm looking behind you and you have your book. I'm looking behind you and you have your book Spiritually Intelligent Leadership Is that what's being taught in your book?

Speaker 2:

Tell me more about your book. My book talks about what spiritual intelligence is and then for each quality it looks at how it applies to leadership and, as I said, I've worked with over 100 CEOs and they've built companies with thousands of employees, etc. So each chapter, each quality has case studies of a leader. And these people are just like you. We're all human beings, fumbling with life, with our imperfections. So you think, okay, they're CEO, etc. But they're still trying to find their personal purpose. They're still trying to line up their personal purpose with the company's purpose and mission. They still face fears, they still face their inner critic. They still have mood issues, like I had. I was a CEO. I got depressed, I got scared, I disappeared for a week because I couldn't face my employees. I didn't know what to tell them about, what we're doing with the Internet and how we're going to survive and thrive. So they're human beings. But back to the book. Each chapter looks at one of these qualities and it starts with a case study of one of my clients and how I work with them to uncover that quality and develop it within themselves. And then it has exercises that anybody can do.

Speaker 2:

How do you guide someone to find their purpose. What are exercises that any of us can do to develop compassion for ourselves and others as a CEO? Take an example you have to do a layoff because you're running out of cash. Your board is more money. There's no more money to raise. I can't meet payroll. You hate to do it, okay. So you have to be fierce. Sometimes you have to make really hard decisions on the one hand, and on the other hand, you want to be humane, you want to be compassionate to the people. It's like how do you do the synthesis between the yin and the yang? You need both. You need the fierceness and the clarity.

Speaker 2:

Like it or not, I hate to do this layoff but, I, care about my people and even if I do it, I don't want to be ruthless and cold-hearted about it. So in the book I talk about all these cases that are real life dilemmas that people are facing, and how you work to integrate, develop these qualities. And then there are exercises for people to, because spiritual intelligence is not. You read this book. You'll get the idea. No, you got to go to the gym. You don't just read the book about health and you're healthy. You got to go to the gym and exercise those muscles or go out. You got to put in the reps.

Speaker 1:

You got to put in the reps.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

You got to put in the reps yeah.

Speaker 2:

So the book has exercises that people can do self-guided and people that are not in formal leadership position. These same qualities apply how you develop compassion, how you develop. Same qualities apply how you develop compassion, how you develop, how you work with your intention. No-transcript virtues that they apply in the leadership role, but they apply for all of us.

Speaker 1:

That's powerful because if I'm on a fence, hypothetically speaking right, I don't know what's next for me. I'm struggling as a leader in my role, and I just need to understand what my compassion is, what that looks like, what my purpose, how do I better engage with people, how can I maintain meaningful relationships outside of work? It sounds like your book Spiritually Intelligent Leadership can be the blueprint for someone to help define what area they want to improve as it relates to spiritual intelligence. Is that what I'm?

Speaker 2:

hearing yeah, Define what area and then work on it. So think of it as like a recipe book. Okay, so that these all these qualities I'm talking about, and then you can pick any of them and say, okay, this month I'm going to eat purpose, Next month I'm eating gratitude. And then I know if you want to cook a linguine with marinara sauce this week, that's my, that's what I'm going to cook for the week. So you open your recipe book and it tells you this is what you do and this is how you make linguine marinara. Next week you want to make beef tenderloin or whatever. I don't eat meat, but I'm just making it up. Yeah, make this. You open your recipe book and it tells you how you do that. So this has. You can think about it as like it's a map of all these qualities, and then you say I want to go there, and then it gives you the exercises and the tools and the recipe for developing that. Am I making sense?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you're making 100% sense. This resonates with me big time and I'm sure it resonates with a lot of the listeners out there. How do we find this book?

Speaker 2:

You find this book anywhere. Books are available online, certainly. Barnes Noble, amazon, etc. You can go to Barnes Noble bookstores and get it. It's available in hard copy. It's available electronically, it's available as an audio book. Choose your way. And yeah, the audio book. If you could stand my voice, I'm the one narrating it and then I do, and then I do the guided meditations with my voice. I guide people through the exercises and going inward. So it's a different tone, like right now I'm explaining the theory and the map, but when I'm guiding people through a meditation or an exercise or an inquiry, it's a different tone.

Speaker 1:

Okay, okay, I like that. So now I have one more question that I want to ask you before we sign out. We're human, we run into certain fears and doubts and things like that comes up for us. Right, apply spiritual intelligence when a certain doubt, fear, critic, inner critic or one of the negative emotions start to show up for you. What does that look like? What for yourself to move forward? I?

Speaker 2:

think Martin Luther King said there's a beautiful quote about don't turn away from fear, just face the fear head on. Okay, I believe that everything is a messenger, that, okay, I have fear. Then I have to ask myself what am I afraid of? And go into the fear. And sometimes the fear is asking me to run away because it's dangerous and sometimes the fear is asking me to develop courage and face the fear and go into the fear. I just this morning was talking to one of my clients and he was like I was telling him some of the things he needs to do and he was like he's scared and I was like, yeah, okay, you love your kids, right, and your kids? If one of your kids falls off train thing onto the train tracks and a train is coming, you're scared but you jump in there and you pick them up. So now, of course, that moment is, it's a momentary, reflex reaction, you don't have time to think about. You have fear. Okay, that's not a problem in and of itself. You have to talk to the fear, face the fear fair in the face and say what, what am I afraid of and what do I? And then you have to find discernment. Your higher self says, okay, this is dangerous, and the wise thing is to move away from the fear. Sometimes the your higher self says oh, you're afraid, that's, that's okay, this is what courage is for, and then you move forward. I know people talk about negative emotions, positive emotions, etc. And that's fine. Certainly, joy and love is more pleasant than anger and fear. But nature, evolution or you can think of it as God created us as human beings, with fear and anger and sadness, and so they have a purpose, they serve a role and, as I said, I just gave you examples on fear.

Speaker 2:

We talk about anger, we get angry. Okay, so we get angry. So the thing is, I'm angry, I want to become mindful of it and see what is going on, what is being threatened. Usually we're angry. Mama bear gets really angry when her cubs are threatened and that mobilizes a certain level of energy and force to get the predator or the threat to back off. So I'm angry at my employee, I'm angry at my spouse. I can go into calling them names, throwing shoes, throwing know, throwing plates and acting out. That's not what the anger is inviting me to do. The anger is saying, oh, there's something I value, maybe my boundaries or something are threatened and what the anger is, mobilizing a certain energy that says no, you can't cross this boundary. This is something precious to me and you can't violate it. There's value in the anger. It gives us strength, it gives us power If we channel it correctly. It's not acting it out, like I said, by cursing, calling names, throwing shoes at someone. Let's anger.

Speaker 2:

We could talk about sadness or grief. Of course grief I'd rather be joyful than than sad but when we lose something or someone we love, the sadness the grief is telling is pointing to the love or the value that was there and it's just inviting us to let go of something so something new can open. And it would not make sense to go through life without grief. We lose loved ones. You know what that? Just you're going to be sad, and that's healthy.

Speaker 1:

And if you inquire into the sadness it points to, to love right, it's the invert of love. It's a natural emotion when you lose, that you're going to feel the opposite, because you lost something. I love that. Where can people find you?

Speaker 2:

I have a website. It's called yosiamramnet, so it's just my name and maybe you could put in the show notes. The other way you can find me is just a website called awakeningspiritualintelligenceorg. It's a nonprofit one word or awakening SI, just the short the SI for spiritual intelligence, so awakeningssiorg, awakeningspiritualintelligenceorg or yamramnet, and there are many resources you could do free assessments of your spiritual intelligence profile. I have a YouTube channel at Awakening Spiritual Intelligence. Again one word I have a blog on spiritual intelligence, on psychology. Today there's just one that's gotten published today about devotional love. So if you go to my website you can register and we'll do some exercises and stuff Any last minute thoughts before we sign off Last minute thoughts.

Speaker 2:

I think you know, the harshest prison sentence that human beings get is solitary confinement, and people go crazy when they're put in solitary confinement and without. We put ourselves in solitary confinement when we believe we are some kind of a skin encapsulated ego, that I'm separate from the rest of existence. There's me and there's the rest of reality and I'm disconnected, whereas in reality I'm just inhaling. I just took in oxygen that's produced by the plant here on my desk. You can't see it, but I have a couple of plants here on my desk and then I exhaled carbon dioxide and that is what the plant is inhaling.

Speaker 2:

So each of us are cells in this bigger web of life, in this bigger organism of life, just like in the human body, there are many cells. They all come from the same DNA, from the same stem cell. So all of us human beings are in essence coming from the same blueprint. If you want to use the Bible, we're all in the image and likeness of God. But put that aside. We're all homo sapiens, we're all human beings and we're all brothers and sisters part of this web of life. And if we understand that, that doesn't mean so some people say oh, we're all one. I think that's simplistic and it bypasses the truth that we're also not the same. So in the human body every cell comes from the same DNA and same stem cell, right, but it differentiates.

Speaker 2:

It somehow knows my role is to be a kidney cell, or my role is to be a liver cell, or my role is to be a liver cell or my role is to be a thyroid cell. And so it's part of an organ, part of a community of cells that have a function in the broader thing. So each cell has to take care of itself. It has a cell membrane, it has a distinct identity and it has to take care of its indistinct identity. But if the organ or the organism gets toxic, it's ultimately going to die. So you can't just take care of your individual cell and say the hell with the rest of it.

Speaker 2:

My being is finding the alignment between my role in my organ, in the broader organism, and understanding. I am part of one web of life and that gives me a sense of connection, a sense of meaning and a sense of contribution, a unique role. So I have my distinct, individual role to play and that's what life invites me to do, and when I do that in service of that greater organism, that greater web of life, then I'm connected, I'm aligned, I have meaning, I have purpose, I'm sharing my gifts, and they are unique. There's nobody else throughout the history of the universe or in the future that was born with the same, will ever be born like Mo, and that's when you realize that as well. I'm a unique experience.

Speaker 1:

Amazing, amazing, dr Yossi Amran. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you. Thank you for dropping all the knowledge today.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Thank you for being a force for good and helping us think about things deeper. Let's think about it. Let's think about it. Let's think about it who we are and why we're here, and what's the meaning of all this craziness. Let's think about it.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

What's the meaning of all this craziness? Let's think about it really, because we got to find the truth and we got to find the reality, otherwise we're lost. There it is.

Speaker 1:

Thank you, sartham. Thank you, thank you for joining me in this episode of let's Think About it. Your time and attention are greatly appreciated. If you found value in today's discussion, I encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Remember, the journey of self-improvement is ongoing and I'm here to support you every step of the way. Connect with me on social media for updates and insights. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook, at Coach, mo Coaching, or LinkedIn at Maurice Mabry, or visit my website at mauricemabrycom for exclusive content. Until next time, keep reflecting, keep growing and, most importantly, keep believing in yourself. Remember, the most effective way to do it is to do it together. We're making incredible strides toward a better and more empowered you, so thank you, and I'll see you in our next episode.