The Blue Collar Buddha Podcast

Episode 13 | You Must Define For Yourself What Love Is

I jumped out of bed to record this one. That's how I knew it needed to be said. I spent most of my life letting everyone else define love for me. My parents. The church. The culture. Shakespeare. The self-help books. Esther Hicks. Wayne Dyer. The list goes on. And I took all of it in and I tried to live inside somebody else's definition of a thing I desperately wanted and couldn't seem to hold onto. Four marriages. Four divorces. Multiple DUIs. A drinking problem I was using as a slow suicide. A man who thought of himself in the third person because he felt so separate from who he actually was — so broken, so unlovable, that it was only a matter of time before anyone who got close enough figured it out and left. That man needed someone to say: you're not broken. Your thinking is maybe a little jacked up, but you're not broken. This episode is about what I had to do before any methodology or process or tool could work. Before Abraham. Before Neville Goddard. Before any of it. I had to decide for myself what love was supposed to feel like for me. Not what anyone told me. Me. Until you do that, you're going to spin. I promise you that. I said all of that and then went back to bed with my wife and ate cookies. That's the dream come true nobody tells you about.

Episode 12 | What If It Was You Holding Your Own Hand?

I didn't plan this one. I almost didn't record it. This morning during my little ritual before I got behind the microphone, something hit me that I've never let myself think before. I was beat with an extension cord as a child. And in that moment, I dissociated — stood across the room watching it happen, holding the hand of what I thought was an angel by the window. This morning I wondered for the first time: what if that was me? What if it was my 57-year-old self holding that little boy's hand, squeezing it gently, saying it's going to be okay? I've got tears going down my face recording this. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. This episode isn't about the how. It's not a method or a process. It's a confession and it's a truth — that you are an extraordinary person in a world that has spent a lot of time making you feel like you aren't. And at some point you're going to have to get a little selfish. You're going to have to turn toward yourself with the same compassion you've probably spent your whole life giving everyone else. Maybe it's time to kneel down, hold your younger self's face, and say it'll be okay.

Episode 11 | The Only Person Who Can Make You Feel Small Is You

I had a day at work today. The kind where you're face to face with people's attitudes — verbal, sometimes physical — and you have to just take it because that's the job. And it got me thinking about something I've said before and will keep saying until it lands. Nobody can make you feel small except you. I know. I know how that sounds. Stay with me. This episode is about the inner conversation — the one you're not paying nearly enough attention to. Because here's the thing: if you talked to yourself the way you actually deserve to be talked to, what other people hurl at you wouldn't land the way it does. The N-word. The insults. The dismissiveness. You're the one deciding what those things mean and how much weight they carry. That's not victim-blaming. That's the most empowering thing I know how to say. You can't control what people think about you. You can't control what they say. But you get to define the meaning. Every time. Pay attention to what you say to yourself. That's the conversation that's actually running your life.

Episode 20 | Sunday Stroll 02 — The Heart Will Always Know

* If you are sensitive to frank discussions about the death of infants and children, then you need to skip this episode. - Chase ______________________________________________________   I almost didn't post this one. I recorded it the same night as Sunday Stroll 01, still Saturday May 23rd, now 11:25pm.  Still Malachi's birthday three days gone. Shit... Fuck... There are moments that.... I gave myself permission to feel what I was feeling instead of suppressing it. So that's what this episode is — me feeling it out loud with nowhere particular to go. I talk about my grandmother's biscuits and gravy and fried green tomatoes and how I can recall every detail of being with her and how for every one of those moments there are 15 to 50 of the other kind. I talk about finding Malachi. About mouth to mouth. About what I still remember 27 years later that doesn't go away and probably won't. And then I play you a song. I wrote it years after he died. I composed it myself — I'm a classically trained flautist, been writing my own music for years, never produced it publicly until now. The lyrics came straight out of my soul. No AI. No editing. No machine touched it. I played it tonight because it's what the moment needed. By 11:25pm I was okay. Not performed okay. Actually okay. That's the difference between where I was and where I am. The tools work. Not because the grief goes away. Because you learn to sit with it without drowning in it. Maybe I'm talking to the me that needed to hear this. Maybe I'm talking to you.

Episode 19 | Sunday Stroll 01 — The 99 People Who Didn't Fuck With You

This is the first Sunday Stroll. Less structured than the regular episodes. More rambling. Different intro music depending on how I feel. That's just how this one works. I'm recording this on Saturday, May 23rd at about 10pm with a Mexican cerveza because Malachi's birthday was three days ago. He would have been 27. He died July 31st, 1999 at two and a half months old. That's not what this episode is about, but it's the weather system everything else is recorded inside of. The day job is ending soon. Life is shifting. And I started thinking about my father — born 1942, me born 1965 — and how his worldview got installed in me before I had any say in the installation. How he told me white people couldn't be trusted while sending me to an all-white school. How I accepted it anyway because your parents are God when you're a child. And then I started thinking about the 99 people who didn't fuck with you. You've met a hundred people. Maybe 99 of them left you alone, treated you decently, or were outright good to you. One person says something sideways — calls you a name, dismisses you, confirms your worst fear about yourself — and that one person becomes the organizing principle of your entire identity. Ninety-nine people get no weight at all. That's not their power. That's yours. And you can take it back. Come back next Sunday.