The Blue Collar Buddha Podcast

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

12 min · 26 de may de 2026
Portada del episodio Episode 12 | What If It Was You Holding Your Own Hand?

Descripción

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.

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29 episodios

episode Episode 26 | What Does Their Relationship Have To Do With You artwork

Episode 26 | What Does Their Relationship Have To Do With You

Sharon and I were watching a YouTube video about an interracial couple — he's from Ghana, she's from the Netherlands — and the comments were full of people telling them they'd betrayed their respective races by being together. And I thought — what does their relationship have to do with how you feel about yourself? That's not a rhetorical question. That's the whole episode. Because if you're getting upset about what two people are doing in their own relationship — calling them names, feeling outraged, feeling betrayed — that's not about them. That's about you. That's your relationship with yourself showing up in the only place it knows how to show up — in your reaction to what's outside of you. I also take a swing at the everyone is me pushed out crowd today. Not to be cruel. But you can't say everyone is a reflection of you and then get upset when they do something you don't like. That's not how it works. You don't get to have it both ways. What I'm talking about on this podcast — all of it, every episode — comes down to one thing. How you see the world is a direct reflection of how you see yourself. Change that relationship and the world stops looking the way it did. I know this because I lived the other version for a very long time and I'm not going back. Sit the fuck down somewhere, be quiet, and just listen.

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episode Episode 25 | I Wasn't Her Caregiver. I Was Her Husband. artwork

Episode 25 | I Wasn't Her Caregiver. I Was Her Husband.

I'm recording this at 12:34am because I realized I'd missed some upload days and I wanted to address that honestly before moving on. But something else happened first. Sharon and I went to a PRG gathering in Chesterfield — somewhere between five hundred and a thousand people — and they called for survivors to stand by years. Fifteen years. Ten years. Five. One to three. Newly diagnosed. And they referred to me as the caregiver. I wasn't her caregiver. I was her husband. Her partner. The person who was fully prepared to do whatever was necessary for her to stay with me for as long as we have life on this earth. You can call that caregiving if you want. I'm not arguing the word. But the word doesn't fit what it actually was and words matter — not because I'm being precious about language but because how we define our relationships shapes how we experience them. This episode is also about the gaps. The missed days. The fact that this is just Sharon and me doing all of it with no team, no Upwork, no Fiverr. Learning hashtags at 60. Figuring out transcription as we go. Life doesn't always go to plan and we have to be okay with that without beating ourselves up about it. It's okay to bump your fucking head. It doesn't make you a lesser person. It just means you bumped your head.

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episode Episode 24 | Don't Pay Your Light Bill And Tell Me Time Is An Illusion artwork

Episode 24 | Don't Pay Your Light Bill And Tell Me Time Is An Illusion

It's 11:33pm on a Monday. I watched a YouTube video about how time isn't real and it got under my skin enough that I couldn't go to bed without getting behind this microphone. Look — if crystals work for you, keep doing crystals. If affirmations work, keep affirming. If you're deep in Neville Goddard and living in the end and revising your past, do your thing. I'm not here to take that from you. But don't tell me time is an illusion and then show up to work late. Don't tell me there's only now and then spend your now trying to manifest someone into treating you differently instead of asking yourself why you're okay being treated that way in the first place. That's the question. That's always been the question. What I do here is blue collar. Down in the dirt. No quantum this, no vibration that. Just a person sitting with themselves long enough to ask the uncomfortable questions and then being willing to actually hear the answers. My son Malachi died July 31st, 1999. It'll be 27 years this July. All the deals I made with God didn't change that. All the revision in the world didn't bring him back. What I have is now. This moment. And the willingness to ask myself what I'm actually feeling in it. You're going to have to get comfortable with I don't know. That's as close to an absolute as I ever get. Write down 10 things that represent what love is to you. Don't tell me you already know. Write them down anyway.

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episode Episode 22 (21-B) | From Whence I Come (Part 2 of 2) artwork

Episode 22 (21-B) | From Whence I Come (Part 2 of 2)

I went back and listened to the very first episode I ever recorded. It was terrible. Not terrible because the ideas were wrong. Terrible because it wasn't me. I was trying to be subtle. Measured. Some version of what I thought a podcast host was supposed to sound like. What the fuck was I doing? This episode is about where I actually come from — the foundational texts, the real ones, the ones I use as philosophical tools rather than religious weapons. The Bible isn't a cudgel I'm swinging at you. It's a set of allegories I broke down until they meant something to me personally, stripped of every pastor and parent and institution that tried to use it as a control mechanism. You don't have to share my foundation. You have your own. What I'm asking is that you look at it honestly and make sure it's actually yours — not something handed to you that you've been carrying ever since without examining it. I'm not here to beat you down. I'm here because I know what it's like to be down and I know there's another way. That's it. That's all this has ever been. Part 2 of 2.

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