Quiet Your Mind, Escape the Red Zone, & Reclaim Inner Peace with Tommy Stoffel’s Stoplight Chart

I'm in the studio today with Tommy Stofel, a guy who knows exactly how you feel or how you have felt, where the noise inside your head is so loud, it's so chaotic that it ruins everything.

And at one point in Tommy's story, it all comes to a head.

When everything falls apart, but at the same point, when everything is falling apart, everything's finally coming into view.

And ironically, for him, it came in the vision of a stoplight from the green zone to the yellow zone, to the red zone.

That stoplight, that vision, it would change everything for Tommy.

He would combine that with, ironically, off-roading.

Yes, out in the woods with jeeps getting dirty, having fun.

He learned by combining the two, well, he could quiet the noise.

And if he could quiet the noise for himself, well, then he could quiet the noise for others as well.

My hope with today's conversation is that it does more than entertain you.

It does more than just give you another podcast to listen to.

But I truly hope that it can help you to empower you and to give you hope that if the noise inside your head is too loud, then my friend, there is a way to quiet it.

Now, if you want a little something extra to go along with today's interview, be sure to check out the link at the very top of today's show notes where I created a custom song to go along with today's episode called Quiet the Noise.

Again, click that link right at the top of today's show notes if you would love to explore this idea even further by way of a song.

So listen to today's episode, enjoy it, get what you can from it.

If you think of somebody who could benefit from hearing it, share today's episode with them.

And then hey, click the link at the top of the show notes, jump over to the soundtrack for our guest today.

And at the end of the day, I just hope that one of these, the podcast, the song, something can help you.

That's the whole point in this podcast.

I'm your host, Kevin Lowe, and this, my friend, is episode 408 of Grit Grace and Inspiration.

Yeah, I got Grit Grace and Inspiration on my What's going on, and welcome back to Grit Grace and Inspiration.

I'm your host, Kevin Lowe, in the studio today with another awesome guest, a guy who I have been so excited to finally get to sit down and talk to.

And that, of course, is Tommy Stofels.

Tommy, my man, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00: Kevin, thank you so much.

Very excited to be here with you today.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man.

Well, I'm excited for us to dive into your story, so many different assets of your story.

And honestly, Tommy, where I would love for us to begin is kind of back in that point in your life, which I'm gonna say is kind of probably the beginning of our conversation today, is when things I would say from what I know on the outside looked great.

Job, family, but maybe on the inside things were kind of tearing apart.

Would you take me back to kind of that part of your life, that chapter?

SPEAKER_00: I will.

Thanks for asking.

So, timing-wise, it was about 20 years ago or so, and I was living life like all my friends.

I had a good job, had a good partner in life, I had a house, I had, I was living, I was actually living on a lavender farm.

So I was doing okay.

Money was there, the home was there, the relationship was there.

But what was happening was I was, well, first drinking myself to sleep every night because I didn't know why at the time.

It was just that that's what happened.

I was, you know, whatever gin turn, gin and tonics turned into gin.

And then by 11 o'clock every night, that would, I would finally the brain would shut off and I would pass out.

And then, like clockwork at three o'clock every morning, the alarm clock would taunt me and I would look over and see it.

I would wake up and I my head would go, oh shit, not again.

And and and bam, my brain just clicked on and it just started.

I was a worrier.

I was a great worrier.

I would worry about everything.

And so from 3 a.m.

to 6 a.m.

when the alarm went off, my head was just running around with all these worries, these worry loops, this worry, this, this worry, this worry, this, that worry.

Just the worries were endless.

And and that's the way I lived.

And it was building pressure.

And after about however many years of that, I hit a breaking point where my brain stopped thinking well.

I could wasn't making decisions anymore, clear-headed decisions.

And I actually pulled a crazy stunt.

I walked out of a party in the middle of a party on a Friday night.

I just needed to escape.

I didn't know where I was going.

I walked in freezing cold temperatures without a proper clothing.

I was dressed, but I was dressed for a party in the house, not cold temperatures.

And I walked 15 miles in the middle of the night with a full moon to the nearest town, city where I lived by.

Almost fell asleep in some guy's man cave because I was so exhausted.

I found some, I went to some guy's garage, actually, and I laid down or I sat in his chair and I almost fell asleep.

And I might have not have woken up from that, but I got myself up and went to town.

Anyhow, that next day, Saturday came and my head was, I was hearing things, I was hearing voices, all this weird stuff was happening.

And I finally made it, I made it back to the house that I, you know, escaped from the night before.

And I just walked into the house at around one o'clock in the afternoon, and I just laid on the floor and I asked my wife, I said, at the time I said, call 911.

And she goes, What's wrong?

And I go, My brain's not working.

I just don't know what's going on.

So the ambulance came, took me to the hospital where they admitted me, and I stayed for two weeks in the psych ward because I was coming in, I was highly manic.

I was out of, you know, my brain wasn't, like I said, wasn't making clear how to decisions.

And that was the beginning of it.

The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.

Yeah.

What really happened was the next morning I woke up in this hospital room.

Wow.

And I've it's clear in my head, it was a baby blue walls, you know, walls.

And and the night before, when I was put in there, I was somewhat coherent because they gave me a shot in the ass and it calmed my head down.

And and so I I knew when I went to sleep the night before that that there was a bed in the room with me, but the bed was empty.

Well, when I woke up in the morning, there was somebody in the bed.

And and I looked over, and it was a young kid, maybe in his mid-30s, and he was strapped to his bed with the with the leather straps that you see in movies.

I'm like, oh my God, what's going on here?

And I looked under his wrist straps and there were fresh bandages there.

So sometime in the last eight hours since I closed my eyes in this in the psych ward of our local hospital, this kid had tried to kill himself and he didn't succeed, thankfully.

And he was sleeping there in this bed next to me.

And at that point, uh, and excuse the expletive, but this is the way it came out of my head.

I go, and I said this out loud.

And I didn't say this out loud, I said this in my head.

I go, what the fuck am I doing here?

And I and I got an answer.

Like, I don't know, it came from within.

It was like powerful and it was true.

And it said, you were here to learn.

This is your education.

This is your opportunity to find out what goes on inside the minds of people that get them agitated, worried, stressed, overwhelmed, and to the point where they snap and lose it.

Because that's what had happened to me.

I'm like, and I'm like, okay, I'll take that challenge.

I I was already working on my spiritual path that already opened up a few years before.

I was kind of gaining some insights on into the human behaviors and psyche.

And I'm like, okay, if this is something, if this is the way I'm going to school, then I'll spend two weeks here in school and I'll see what's going on.

And then I asked a second question, and this one really sealed the deal.

I asked the universe, I said, what's the difference between me laying in this hospital bed and somebody that's free to walk on the street right now?

Somebody else that's walking on the sidewalk.

And that's when this image kind of came up in my head, and I say it came up on the wall of the hospital, but it came up in my head.

And there's a green box at the bottom of this image, and there's a yellow box stacked on top of that, and there's a red box stacked on top of that.

And that I call the chatter chart or the stoplight chart now.

But what that represents is the amount of noise in our head.

Like we have a baseline noise level in our head.

And I was waking up at three in the morning, and my chatter level was like high up in the yellow zone.

It was in near the overwhelmed location.

And it didn't take much during a day to trip me into that red zone.

And that red zone, I don't know if you've experienced it, but I most times when I talk to people about this, they're like, oh yeah.

You just kind of intuitively know what that feels like.

And so that was a blessing for me, just to that insight to see this in a visual representation, a very simple visual representation of what was, I would say, wrong with me, what was going on inside of me, what was going on inside my head.

I had too much chatter in there.

I had too much noise in my head.

And so I had already Wow.

Yeah.

So that's so that's it.

I saw now I walk around with this, you know, this chatter chart, this stoplight chart.

And that's the basis of everything I'm doing.

You know, for myself, I got myself.

I I learned some techniques that reduce the chatter in my head pretty clearly.

I live in this green zone right now, and I have been for the last 10 years or so.

Pretty steady state.

And my purpose now is to help other people get out of that chatterhead, to get out of that monkey mind, uh, whatever we call it, and to get out of the red zone and whittle down your yellow zone and and make the green zone your home place.

Because that's where that's where we're level-headed, right?

That's where we can think straight.

That's where we have clarity, that's where we can pay attention to what's going on in the moment without a bunch of you know head noise corrupting us.

And so that's that's probably a good starting point to give you the the intro.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.

Now, out of curiosity, before this all started happening, before the the 3 a.m.

being up, you know, with anxiety, worrying and stuff, had you ever had anything like this happen before in your life?

SPEAKER_00: No.

Nope and looking back on it, it you know, it kind of built up over life and and I I kind of hit this this breaking point.

Okay.

But it but I didn't have any, no, and I didn't have any sort of instances like this prior to that.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: Now, my second question is how long did it go on for you, this this the 3 a.m.

to 6 a.m.

morning, the the building kind of this boiling pot until that moment when you you said that you left the party in the middle of the night.

How long had that been about?

SPEAKER_00: That was probably going on for about four years at that point.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Wow.

Wow.

So we're talking about we're talking about a guy who it spent, I mean, four years is a long time to be living like that.

So to say this pot of boiling water with with all of this or this building up in your head, yeah, you you were at the breaking point.

SPEAKER_00: I was.

Yeah.

And and you know, the I wasn't living at that breaking point, right?

Like in those four years, and even before that, in the stoplight chart, there's a scale going up from green to yellow to red, and there's and at the bottom of the yellow zone, as you get into the yellow zone, you get like agitated, right?

And then you get worried, and then you get stressed, and then you get short-tempered, and then you get overwhelmed.

So it's kind of a buildup.

So that buildup was happening over those four years and and the time previous to that, right?

My whole life, you know, I my whole life, I can I can look back on it now and I can see the initial, the initial trigger point when I was 12 years old that kind of set this whole ball in motion.

And yeah, and I'll and I'll mention that too, because I think that's important.

I think, you know, we all, not we all, but a lot of us have traumas, different things that happen in our lives.

And some of them are, you know, harsher than others.

And and as a 12-year-old boy, I was running around playing, having a good time.

And one of my best friends was my dog, a Dalmatian named Shatzi, which means my love in German.

And I came home from school one day, and my dad told me that Shotzi had been killed by a bus earlier, and he had already buried Shatzi and over there in the rock garden.

And at that point, this 12-year-old being shut down, didn't want to feel anymore, shut down his heart and got really angry at God and my dad and love in general.

And from that point, now I can look back on that.

From that point forward, though, when I shut down my heart, I shut down my sensing, my energy sensing, my uh, my intuition.

Think about that as a child, you know, you can kind of understand things, you're sensitive to energy, and and all that got shut off in an instant.

And what happened then is I had to start thinking about things all the time because I couldn't sense if a place was safe, right?

I couldn't sense if somebody was telling me the truth anymore.

And now I had to start thinking at all those things.

And that's when my brain started getting overworked.

So I became at 12, I went from a laughing, fun, joyful boy to a kind of serious kid who, you know, always had something to think about.

And my brain started getting busier and busier, and that that lasted what 30 years until I hit the breaking point.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Wow, wow.

So going back to this amazing kind of revelation that you want to call it in the psych ward, this traffic light type image that you have, in that you you talk about the chatter in our brain.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but you've actually identified is it like you call it seven different flavors of chatter?

Is that is that how you refer to it?

SPEAKER_00: Yep.

Yep.

During that four-year period where it was ramping up, I came across a teacher from India who was actually teaching about chakras or seven chakras and how they get blocked.

And they get blocked by different thought patterns, actually.

So for me, I took that class, I took that class a couple of times.

It was starting to help.

And then I still had this, you know, this breakdown, and maybe it was sparked because this class was opening up stuff in me or different alternative options.

And as I took that class in about the chakras, I understood it to be that this this chatter in our brain is what locks up those chakras.

So one of the examples, and and I already mentioned it, one of the seven flavors.

So this is this is awesome news, by the way.

So I'm gonna back up just a step, right?

We have these heads on our shoulders.

They get they get full of chatter.

Everybody has chatter, everybody has some, but it's it's not all the noise in our head.

It's not our thoughts, it's the negative stuff.

It's the worrying, it's the self-defeating talk, it's the comparison with others, it's the kind of neediness or clinginess that we get to or we get stuck in relationships with.

There are seven flavors of that, and I'll go through each of those real quick.

But I'll start with the one that I was suffering the greatest from, and that was worry.

Worry is one of the seven flavors of chatter.

And I was learning, and I learned how to reduce my worries and just by looking at some logical stuff.

Like, like the teacher said, Hey, do you know 99% of the stuff you worry about never happens?

And I was like, oh, okay.

So, you know, an engineer with a calculator, I'm like, okay, I can do the math on that one.

And logically, logically, you start thinking, okay, if I have a 1% chance of something happening, do I want to spend all my brain power and all of my energy worrying about stuff that's never going to happen?

Or would I rather just stop worrying, which is one thing easy to say and a little more difficult to do, but or or just stop worrying and then I have more brain space to handle that 1% issue when it happens, when it props up, right?

So very logical ways of looking at worry.

Where, you know, a brain, the brain gets in the same size.

Of course.

Yes.

Right?

Worrying about that same thing over and over.

And it may go on for hours at a time, right?

Where the brain's looking for some ultimate solution or it's one, the, you know, the 10% that it hasn't figured out yet.

Well, you're not going to figure it out yet, because you're not meant to figure it out yet.

But but just that worry loop thing, once you've realized that you have it, and everybody has them, I started paying attention to when they came up.

And I'm like, okay, well, get off of it.

Get off the worry.

It's like a worry ground.

Go just get off the worry ground and think about something else.

And so we were just bringing awareness and consciousness to these unconscious loops that we get in the habit of, you know, we get trapped in.

And so I, with that and a couple other examples and the book that we'll talk about that I wrote, has all this information in it.

It also has exercises that a person can do to actually, you know, reduce their worries.

And I went to work on myself and I reduced my worries.

And now I wasn't near that red zone anymore, right?

You took some pressure out.

So now your baseline chatter level, the one at the one I was waking up with every morning, was less, was lower.

Now I'm in the yellow zone.

I'm not up at that red zone anymore.

So think of these as a pyramid, and at the base of the pyramid is fear.

So fear is like a big category, but fear is basically all these, all seven of these chatter sources are fears of different sorts, but fear itself is at the base.

And so that's that's a big noise maker in our heads, right?

Fear of the unknown, fear of embarrassing ourselves, fear of whatever, right?

Fear of spiders, all that is chatter.

It's all noise in our head.

And to distinguish fear from, you know, I'm not walking around carelessly running out in front of vehicles.

There, that's that's danger.

There's fear, fear is false evidence appearing real.

Fear is head noise.

Fear is our synapses firing in my brain.

It's not real.

It's not danger.

It's not headlights, you know, I'm not driving down the road and all of a sudden the headlights swerve into my lane.

That's danger.

And you want to have a clear head to be able to deal with that situation.

But when these fears are running willy-nilly in our minds, and so many of us have them, because they get planted there through so many ways, right?

Media, TV, earthquakes, tornadoes, you know, things that things that you're not in any danger of right now.

But people, we we get these fears built into our system.

And to know that they're just thoughts and they're just electricity firing in our brain, is again great news because you can then reduce those.

And again, the book has examples on how to do that and exercises.

So that's the number one down at the root chakra level.

And that blocks our root chakra, and our root chakra is where we kind of are supposed to like feel safe here on planet Earth.

Like we're rooted to the earth, we're grounded, and we're safe.

So that and an open open root chakra is one that feels grounded and safe and secure.

And these head noise, the fears, is what kind of blocks that root chakra from staying safe.

So the second one has to do with uh our energy of feeling content, like we're oh, like we're okay, we're content in the world.

And that doesn't mean that we don't want new things or we don't want something else, or we don't want to, you know, to get go for an education.

Content does not mean lazy.

Content means if you feel the real power of the word content, it's like right now, in this moment, I'm okay.

I have what I need.

And what messes that up are desires.

And just that word desire.

Some people will go to sex right away, but that's not sexual desires.

It is that's part of it, but it's also, you know, the desire to have a perfect friend or a great mom or a good partner.

And well, I'll start with relationships because that's an easy one to think about.

But it's also stuff, right?

Oh, I need more of this, I need more money, I need more of that, I need over and society again.

Is just a master at flooding our brains with things that we can desire, things that we want.

Right.

And they they look they'll even tell you that you have some that you might have some crazy disease, and then they'll you know make a make a desire or a need or a want for you to get some crazy medicine to have some to fix some disease that you won't have.

So so this is this is everywhere, right?

Our society is just laced with fears and desires and worries.

And so the desire stuff, think about this.

Think about like a relationship that you want to improve in your life.

And let's say it's a uh let's say it's a parental relationship, like I want to have a better relationship with my mother.

So what our head does is it goes out and it makes a list of criteria, right?

Well, I want us to have this kind of talk, and I want us to be this kind of friends, and I want her to behave this way, and I want her to treat me like that, and I want to be able to, right?

And we have this list, we have lists, lists of desires in our heads.

Well, again, those lists become chatter.

And where this wreaks havoc is that A, those lists are always changing, right?

You see some TV show and there's a really nice mother, you know, son or daughter relationship, you're like, oh, oh, I wish my mom and I had that.

So you add that to your list of desires, right?

So the desires are always changing.

And now when you're in relationship with that person, you're judging and comparing.

You're like, you're, oh, is this, is she meeting these criteria?

And I check, check, X, X, X, check, check, X, X, X, right?

So that just creates even more noise and chatter in our heads and maybe insecurities and maybe, you know, relational problems.

So one of the big exercises that that you'll see in the book is making lists, getting these random lists out of our heads and onto paper.

And then I encourage people, usually without lighting fire to anything else, to burn the lists just to get it out and gone, right?

And that then that then reduces your chatter.

Now you're in the middle of the yellow zone, right?

You're so each each of these steps, you're getting closer and closer to green.

Third one is worry.

That blocks our chi center, our energy center, our power center, our courage.

And if you feel that, right, or our self-confidence, you can you can feel like when I was worried all the time, I was worried about everything so much that I really didn't have a lot of self-confidence.

I didn't have a lot of inner strength, right?

I was all getting, that was all getting weakened or buried underneath all these worries.

So that's the third one.

Fourth flavor is love and love and be love.

Now, this is the unconditional love of just being in, you know, just the love you feel for a dog, the love you feel for a tree.

And and and honestly, we're it'd be nice if our relationships had that element of love in it.

But all too often we get into feeling like we need somebody to love us.

We need to feel approval.

We need to feel it to get somebody's attention.

And that need for attention, that need for approval again becomes a source of chatter.

Like, oh, am I worthy of this?

Oh, I don't have this, oh, I'll I'll never find true love.

Well, all that is head noise, right?

And we all have that in different flavors too.

So that's the fourth, that's the fourth chakra blocker of that kind of that neediness and uh and that can turn into clinginess and and really not clean energy dynamics between two people.

So that's the fourth flavor, and that messes up real, that real energy of the love, that that universal love that kind of can flow through us when we get our our head noise under control.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

So I was gonna ask, so before you continue, so let me be sure that my mind is right.

So when we're talking about these different flavors, these chakras, so am I gathering that these are things that we ultimately are realizing we want to try to clear from our mind?

SPEAKER_00: The idea is that that this chatter is not helpful.

That and thanks for saying this too.

If you think about the whole stoplight chart, the green, yellow, red, as it goes up in chatter, our life also goes up in stress, right?

Yes.

So this is the this then the physical condition of stress.

You know, the stress in our mind creates stress in our bodies, tension, muscle tension.

It creates, and we know that it reduces our immune system.

Stress does.

We know that it you know can make us sick.

Yep, you know, through stress.

So thank you for bringing that in.

And that is one of the key motivators for reducing the chatter in our head.

One, to have clarity, yeah, and two, to have less stress.

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Yes.

Okay.

Okay, perfect.

All right, cool.

You you may continue.

I just had to be sure.

I'm like, wait, I gotta be sure I'm on the right path here.

SPEAKER_00: So thank you for calling it out.

That's like a we call it the chatter chart, we call it the stress chart.

So, so it it they go hand in hand.

The amount of noise in our head, this in our head equals the amount of stress we have in our life.

And and we know a lot of us are walking around pretty uptight.

unknown: Okay.

SPEAKER_00: So as I was, right?

Yes, exactly.

Uh the fifth one is very interesting.

So the fifth one is our unique self when we're in our power.

It's our authentic self.

It's the gift that we have that we brought here, or that we come to planet Earth with, or that we're in this life with.

And that gets locked up.

This one's very interesting.

That one gets blocked up by all this comparison that we do.

So you think back in life, right?

You know, I'm smarter than I'm getting grades that are worse than or better than somebody else, I'm smarter than somebody, dumber than somebody, I'm taller than shorter, then prettier than uglier than this, right?

And and we all do this.

This is again part of our society here on earth loves to compare ourselves to, you know, other things and other ways.

And if you just feel that comparison under the surface of that, if we're comparing ourselves to somebody else, we're liking ourselves less in each of those situations.

Or maybe we like ourselves more.

Maybe like, I'm, you know, king of the mountain.

I've got, you know, all the money in the world, I'm the best of this and the best of that.

And well, well, that's a runaway ego, which we'll talk about at number six.

But but but most of us into this.

unknown: Yes.

SPEAKER_00: And we and that's our self-critic, right?

And that's our self-not loving ourselves.

There's a part of ourselves that we don't like that we think could be better or should be different.

And so that's this one is is is is pretty gnarly.

And and so again, there's there's exercises and the readings in the book, um, there's lessons in the book that can help you help a person untangle those comparisons that we get stuck in.

Those comparisons lead to also lead to other things like envy or trying to keep up with the Joneses, or which mixes in with desires.

And so these seven flavors, all you can just look under the surface a little bit, they just wreak havoc on our lives, in addition to causing stress.

You know, they're just mindsets that aren't, they're not healthy for us, not healthy for our self-love.

And then, and then if we're not healthy in our own self-love, then we're really hard to be healthy in our relationships with others, too.

So that fifth one's pretty powerful.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

The sixth one I just alluded to, that's kind of our this thinking mind that, you know, that thinks it's separate, that hasn't realized yet that it's part of the universal energy of this loving energy, this one love energy.

And it's all this chatter built up together, and it's our identity, like I'm a warrior and I've got a job, and I own a lavender farm, and I, you know, I'm driving myself crazy, and and I drink myself to sleep every night.

That's that's you know, my that was my ego.

That was my ego mind.

That's what blocks our intuition center, or some people call it the third eye, is our ability to see the energy of things or sense the energy of the world and deal with the world in an energetic perspective, as opposed to a I am an individual over here who has all these fears and all this stuff, all these desires and all these things I have to protect and I have to worry about it.

And I'm in some weird relationships, and I'm always comparing myself to everybody else.

And I need to build a wall to keep you on your side of the of the fence, right?

I need to, I need to build a wall between Mexico and the United States to keep you out.

I need to, right?

That's that's where this number, this number six lockup comes to.

It's like all that built up together, and now you feel like you have to protect yourself.

Like you're scared of people can get scared of the whole world, right?

And their ego mind is has to like make a job for itself and save you from all these worries and all these fears.

And and it's actually its job is not really needed.

So this idea actually has come to me since you and I talked the first time.

Okay.

Because what I just said there about this number six energy, our ego, is like, then people can get like, oh, the the chatter is my ego, and I've got to re you know, kill my ego, or you know, and people, the old, old spiritual stuff would be like, you gotta, you know, eliminate your ego.

And what I what I'm doing instead is I'm talking to my ego from my inner sage perspective, because that's my intuition now from my kind of my my third eye perspective.

My my the part of myself that knows that I'm a spiritual being, that I'm an energy being in this body.

That's my inner sage.

That's my intuition.

Now I can kind of talk to my ego because that inner sage is in control of this being now.

That's the title of the book is Take the Wheel, and the intention there is for your inner sage, your higher self, to actually take the driver's seat and take back the steering wheel of life.

And now I can look at my ego and say, okay, ego, I'm not eliminating you.

You're not a threat.

You're not, you're not, your job isn't at risk.

But look, you don't have to be so fearful.

We don't need to go into the fear world anymore.

So that part of your job you can let go of.

It's heavy anyhow, and it's not good for either of us.

So just let's let's work on reducing fears.

And we do that for all seven of them.

You know what, ego, you don't have to worry so much anymore.

Life's okay.

We're not in any danger.

We're doing all right.

Let's, you know, let's lay off the worry a little bit and we'll do some exercises and we'll we'll get that down.

So so it's almost like I'm retraining my brain.

I've retrained my mind, my my thinking mind, my ego mind, to just to not have the fears and the desires and the worries and the and the need and the and that constant comparison.

And so that then my that ego mind then that blocks my third eye, my intuition, my higher self, my inner sage, it has plenty of stuff to do.

Like my ego mind is talking to you right now.

It's, you know, it's but it's not talking through fear and worry and anxiety anymore.

So it still has a job.

I used to talk about like if you think of your being as a aircraft, there's two seats in the front in the where they fly the plane from in the cockpit.

There's a pilot seat and there's a copilot seat.

Somewhere along the way in human history, the co-pilot, which is our ego mind, bonked the pilot over the head, which is our inner sage, gagged it, bound it, and threw it in the back of the plane.

And it's doing everything all by itself.

Seven days a week, 24-7, doesn't need any sleep or coffee.

Let me keep going, going, going, going.

And that's and high stress, uptight, full of worries, fears, anxieties, all this stuff.

That's that's the way the ego mind somehow forms in our beings and runs the and tries to you know fly this or drive this, whatever this you know craft is that we're these this body and mind that we're living in.

So that metaphor helps me kind of Yes.

Wow, I love that.

Helps the pilot get back in the pilot seat, right?

And the co-pilot still has a job, but it's not doing everything.

Yes.

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01: I love the metaphor.

SPEAKER_00: And and the seventh one is they call it the crown chakra, and that's our connection to the universe.

That's our connection to source, that's our connection to divine energy, whatever the one love, whatever that feeling that we get into sometimes when we're peaceful, we're quiet, we're meditating, we're walking through trees, we're walking in a forest, right?

Or we're just sitting by ourselves and with nothing else going on, and we can drop into that peaceful green zone.

This is a green zone experience.

That's that energy.

That's that energy that we live in.

But all the chatter from these six other chatter makers block us from kind of being in that sometimes.

So, right.

So if now we'll go back to this stoplight chart.

Being in this green zone is a nice way to live.

You don't have a head full of noise.

Your body, mind complex is working in a nice way, you're kind of energetically not on guard all the time, there's no hypervigilance, there's no amygdala firing, you're just walking and living life in this body the way I think it was meant to be, walked in and lived in.

If that final seventh like connection to source is, if everything else is yellow or red, if your fears and desires and worries and needs and and uh comparisons and this and this ego is all like in full control and in yellow or red zone, in this uptight high stress mode, then overall we kind of have a sense of lack or a sense of it's always rains on my parade or nothing ever goes my way.

Or and then we, you know, we're always complaining or blaming, you know, pointing fingers at something else.

So that's so it's those those thought patterns that that block our connection to the infinite source of love and energy that we're actually plugged into.

So yeah.

Pretty lengthy seven flavor description.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I mean, I I appreciate you taking the time to to walk us through it and explain it all, because I mean that's where it it all starts to make so much sense and gives context to exactly what you're talking about.

But the question, Tommy, that I keep kind of thinking in my head is I mean, the wisdom that you you have to share today, I mean, it's like you have this wisdom inside of you, but I can't help but think, like, why did you have to go to that lowest point of leaving a party in the middle of the night, walking through the cold, end up having to be committed to reach this pinnacle of finally realizing and seeing the stoplight signal and all of this starting to click together?

Do you feel like you have a reason for it?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a beautiful question.

The word that comes up is relatability.

And I don't feel, especially in topics such as this, which deals so much interpersonal, right?

This is this is inside.

This is your insides, this is your life, the way you think about life and feel about life.

And I'll say a teacher can walk around with this new information and say, hey, everybody, I haven't experienced any of this pain and suffering side of this stuff, but look, you can be, you know, in a beautiful, loving relationship if you just let go of your need for attachment.

So it's, I think it's relatability.

And Eckhart Tolle said it to us once.

I was sitting with him, a bunch of other people, and somebody asked him how his expression of the power of now came out and became so popular.

And he said the reach of this, the experience of this, and the reach of this, you know, in a healing mode was only as big as the depth and the darkness that I went through to find it.

So yeah, and that resonates too.

There's somebody suffering out there in the red zone.

You can't just be living a whole green zone life and tell them, you know, what to do.

You have to say, okay, yeah, I've been there.

I I know what that feels like, you know.

And and here's what I did about it.

Another metaphor that, you know, this this pit of despair that we get into the red zone, where, you know, that's where depression sits.

That's where suicidal tendencies sit in that red zone.

This is where, you know, severe PTSD is.

And you can't just tell somebody to snap out of it, obviously.

But I have I found for myself, so let's say, let's let's go to a visual that somebody's down in the bottom of a pit, and it, you know, the pit's 20, 30 feet deep in the middle of a road, and they're down there and they're stuck, and they can't they can't climb out.

Well, I've been in that pit, and here's what I did.

And I'll so I'll throw down some wood and I'll throw down a saw and I'll throw down some rope and I'll give them instructions on how to build their own ladder.

Right.

But the rope and the and the wood and the saw is what I use.

Those are the tools I use to get out.

And and if they help somebody else, then then, you know, the tools with the instructions and how to do it yourself, that's what this is about.

So again, relatability and experience in the in that darkness, in that red zone, and coming out of it.

That's I feel why we have to suffer the depths of suffering in order to help other people out of similar depths of suffering.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.

No, I I I agree completely.

Yeah.

So Tommy, my next question is in my opinion, that people are gonna be like, say what?

Like, what interview did we just skip to?

Because I don't understand how it's even gonna connect, but all of a sudden there's a part of your story that includes us off-roading.

Um, would you like to uh connect the dots?

SPEAKER_00: I will, I will absolutely connect the dots.

So off-roading, jeeping, driving over big rocks and up and down steep hills in cool vehicles at three or four miles per hour.

What does that do for you?

unknown: Yes.

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: Let's go back to yellow zone, red zone, a yellow zone, red zone mentality and something that a lot of people talk about PTSD, right?

We all have, we all have some degrees of PTSD.

Some of us have it much worse than others, first responders, war veterans, you know, all that.

That red zone behavior, that we're we're using a part of our brain, the reptilian mind, right?

People talked about the reptilian mind or the amygdala.

When we get into a heightened state of vigilance because something happened to us, where we're always looking over our backs, we're always on guard, we're always tense, we're always nervous, we're always like worried about something happening to us.

That is using our amygdala mind.

And that's where it's firing.

And so that is not a healthy place to be operating our brain from.

And what the jeeping does is it takes us away from our life where we have these stresses, where we have this, you know, this pension to be worried about the future or or or reliving some past event, right?

So now we're out of time.

We're in the future or the past.

When we're jeeping, when we're driving this vehicle, when our hands are on the wheel and our feet are on the floor and our ass is in the seat, we're really present, being mindful and almost meditating and driving over rocks.

Now we're using the prefrontal cortex.

Now we're using the front part of our brain that is supposed to be paying attention to the world, paying attention to the moment.

This is the power of now.

This is where we are.

And so the Jeeping gives you a visceral green zone experience.

It gives you a several hours at a time of being out of hypertension, hyper-vigilant, monkey mind, and being just present, focusing on the rocks, focusing on the dirt, focusing on the nature you're driving through, the sounds the vehicle's making, the feelings of it bouncing around.

It just absorbs all of your senses in this moment right now.

And it doesn't have to be jeeping, it doesn't have to be off-roading.

People have their own ways, right?

You know, everybody has something they they kind of really enjoy doing that brings them into the moment, that helps them focus their attention and stay in that green zone.

This is just one way of kind of doing it.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

Well, I think that's amazing.

Now, would you mind just to give more context to this whole aspect?

Do you have any stories that you could share?

Because I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, you literally, I mean, you take groups out to do this experience to help them, maybe, I don't know, maybe first responders or anybody helping them to move from the one zone to the next.

Do you have any kind of experiences that you could share with us?

SPEAKER_00: I do, thanks.

Some years back, I started buying more Jeeps than the one I had because I wanted to, and at the time, I was thinking, oh, I'll I'll take this to corporate events.

You know, I'll we'll get C level people out of their high stress, high tension mode for a day and have them lower their chatter score, you know, in a day.

Where if they're up near near the top of the yellow zone, they'll come out of that day, you know, lower in the yellow zone and they'll know it and we'll experience it and then we'll Motivated to do more and get more stuff out of their head.

So we did a pilot project back in 2020 with the LAPD.

One of my Jeepers, Zen Jeepers, we called it, he'd been coming for a while and he was really getting the benefits from it.

He brought five of his uptight, hypervigilant LAPD officers.

We had five Jeeps for them, and we put them in the Jeeps for six hours.

In the morning, when we took pictures of these kids, you know, he said, hey, smile next to your Jeep.

You know how somebody really tries to force a smile?

It's like, uh, like you can tell that they're so uptight and so tense because they live in a because they're living in hypervigilance.

They're living in total alertness, like they're on guard, on guard all the time.

You can imagine a cop, right?

And you now you can imagine a cop in LA.

And this is now we got five of them ready to jeep for a day.

And I tell you what, eight hours later, we're in a restaurant together after a day of jeeping, and they were kids again.

They were relaxed.

They were slapping each other on the back, they were smiling for real because they had gotten out of that hyper-vigilant mode and they had experienced life being aware, aware of your surroundings, aware in the moment.

And somehow something switched in them that day to switch out of alert, hyper-vigilant, tense mode into relaxed awareness.

And my buddy, the lieutenant, said they really, they haven't really gone back to that level of tension since.

And this is five years ago now.

Wow.

So just a day of this can really think that they have to come jeeping.

Yeah.

They have to find their own green zone experience and immerse themselves in it.

I also saw a guy cure himself of ADHD, adult ADHD, because he was his mind was distracted.

You know, the monkey mind was distracted by so many things.

And he jeeped, we jeeped together.

He did it for like two years, and one day I looked at him and I go, Man, you're different.

He goes, Yeah.

He goes, the rocks are my my therapy.

He goes, when my mind's on the rocks, it's nowhere else.

So having it and creating or finding practicing your own green zone experience is the key to success here.

In addition to going through the book and doing these exercises to get some of that chatter out of the way so you don't creep back up into the yellow zone or red zone.

That's like the one-two punch.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Well, we're gonna get to the book in one moment, but before I ask you about the book specifically, do you have any other examples of green zone activities for somebody who's maybe thinking, well, what could I do?

SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.

Yeah, a lot of people go to like more physical things like rock climbing or mountain biking.

But honestly, my grandma used to crochet quilts for us.

And there were stories about some of the big football players crocheting some years ago, right?

It's a it's any activity that just takes your attention.

It just all your attention is focused on that activity enough so that you're not thinking about, you know, the chatter.

The chatters, there's no space for the chatter.

So you're just giving yourself a breather from the chatter.

I was at an event last weekend, two weekends ago, and there was an artist there, a gentleman by the name of Christian.

And Christian offered us um a little art class.

And so he sat with us and he had to start to doodle on our page.

And he started helping us doodle and then turning this doodle into patterns and then connecting and then coloring in some of the squares and stuff like that and boxes.

And just that was a very mindful, calming, present green zone experience.

So we just need to find them.

And just once you and put this out to the universe, like ask the universe to help you find your green zone experience.

And and ask like that to the universe will get you answers.

People will show up in your life and give you examples.

You'll pick up a couple.

Do you have any?

Do you have something that you that you do that calms your head, that gets you into this kind of green zone space?

That breath work, meditation, grounding exercises, is there something that you do?

SPEAKER_01: I don't have anything in particular that I can think of other than moments of just prayer in the morning, first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee, when I say the the rest of the world is still asleep.

Yep.

And you can just kind of sit there in the quiet.

I always say the the morning with the first cup of coffee is my favorite part of the day because the rest of the world is still asleep.

And and if you don't immediately turn on the phone listening to something, but actually just sitting in the quiet, in the still, and that is where it is for me.

And then the second thing, honestly, and I know it sounds cheesy, but it's getting fully in-depth into the interviews that I do here on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00: Yep.

SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, I'm sitting in a little recording studio where that used to be a walk-in closet, converted that to a studio.

I'm in here with headphones on, the doors shut, just totally keened in on my guest.

And in again, eliminating all the chatter and just being focused in on this conversation.

There you go.

SPEAKER_00: Right?

Prayer in the quiet time is a green zone activity, being present, so fully present and quiet in your head during interviews.

So you're listening, listening.

You know, listening is what you're doing a lot of.

That's a very present moment activity where your head's not, I think, ahead of what to ask next, right?

But you're just in this moment, listening, paying attention.

It's paying attention to the moment.

That's what I do.

And I take people out, and Saturday we're taking a bunch of people out.

I teach them how to pay attention.

Really?

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: And pay attention to the moment.

But but what I want to say though is let's just be honest.

Totally lame compared to Jeeping.

I mean, I would much rather get to just come out to California and get to ride in a Jeep because I mean, whoo, baby, that is my kind of stuff.

I mean, you're talking to a guy who before I went blind grew up on the back of a of a dirt bike and four-wheelers.

So yes.

SPEAKER_00: You're you you know you have the invitation, and and I'm looking forward to meeting you in the Jeep.

And we'll do that sometime together for sure.

SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Well, well, Tommy, so talk to me about the the book that you that we've been referencing.

I'm curious to know how the book even came about, and then of course, what the book can do for somebody who wants to take our conversation to the next level.

SPEAKER_00: Right.

So, really, you go back to the stop by chart, green zone, yellow zone, red zone, the book is all about that.

There, each of us, you know, has a kind of a baseline chatter level.

So on our website, offroadmonks.com, because the book is written by two of us and we're both off-roaders, and we got nicknamed Off-Road Monks when somebody made a documentary about us.

That if you look at offroadmonks.com, there's a stress survey out there, and you can take a 10-question quiz and it'll tell you where you are on that chatter chart.

First off.

So, and then the book does that.

It's like, okay, where are you?

Are you in the yellow zone?

Are you in the green zone?

Are you in the red zone?

Do you want to like improve or reduce your chatter?

The first half of the book then talks about being in the moment and how important that is, you know, paying attention and how we get pulled out of paying attention by distractions, by the chatter in our head, by, you know, worrying about the future or worrying about the past.

So it really is like a bit of a look into the power of now.

And that's the first half of the book.

And so if you're already like a pretty good, you know, practitioner of meditation or you have some practice, present moment practices like we just talked about, first half of the book will just be some different way of looking at that.

The second half of the book is the seven flavors and how to reduce the chatter in each one of those and the benefit you get for each of those seven areas when you reduce the chatter.

So that's what's in the book.

My writing partner, Brian, is gifted in his writing skills.

He's like talking to your soul.

He's like it's like a soulmate talking to your soul.

We call it soul talking.

And that's the way the book is written.

So it's talking to your inner sage, talking to your wisdom, it's talking to your higher self and saying, hey, you want to, you know, get back in control of this being, you want to get back in the pilot seat.

Here's what you do to, you know, to kind of retrain or help your ego mind lessen its load, lessen its burden, not have to do all this heavy lifting on worries and fears and stuff like that.

And so that's the second half of the book.

And together, it's a kind of a do-or-yourself self-help book for getting out of the yellow and red zone and being in more of a present moment, peaceful in the quiet zone of life.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love it.

Now, remind me the the name of your book and the best place to find it.

SPEAKER_00: So the book is called Take the Wheel.

So that's you know what we're doing when we're jeeping out there is it's your inner sage taking the wheel, taking back control of your life.

Get back in the driver's seat of life is part of the subtitle.

Yeah, and you can find it on Amazon or Barnes Noble, where um we have an audio version coming out probably in another week or two.

We recorded an audio version, so that'll be hitting the stand soon.

Yeah, it's out there where books are found.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, well, fantastic.

Well, I will be positive that all the links are are in the show notes for anybody interested in learning more about getting in touch.

Now, is it through the uh the website, theoffroadmonks.com?

Is that where if somebody is in the California area or interested in the off-roading, is that where they can uh learn more about that as well?

That is in there too.

SPEAKER_00: Uh Zen Off-Roading, soul coaching or our pages on the site.

Yep, you can find all that.

You'll see some cool pictures of some of us jeeping and some of the things we do.

The book and its and ways of buying is in there.

That stress surveys in there, so you can see where you are on the chatter chart, along with our kind of mission statement of helping people have these green zone experiences.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.

Well, well, Tommy, man, been such a pleasure to get to talk with you today.

Uh, I really appreciate you being willing to share your personal story and just these unimaginable just insights that you have gained and that you've been able to share and to help so many people.

I think it's a really powerful story, and um, it's a real honor to uh to get to have you on the podcast.

So um truly thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00: Well, Kevin, I thank you too.

I mean, that the title of your podcast, everything about it ever since I first heard of you.

I'm like, um, this is a man doing doing the work, you know, helping people doing what I'm doing, helping people get out of that, you know, that that that stressful part of life get, you know, and and all the all the stories that you bring and some of the podcasts I've listened to of yours are all are all like in the same vein of of helping us help ourselves, of helping us heal from these traumas that we have or these the suffering that we have in our head.

And so thank you too for being a fellow warrior of sorts of helping people.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.

Well, well, thank you so much, man.

That that means a lot to me.

For you listening today, if you're still with us, well, first and foremost, that means that you are interested enough that you have no choice but to go down and check out today's show notes where you can grab the links, access the book, get all the resources that have been mentioned.

Please be sure to not let this end here.

And of course, my friend, whether it's you or maybe there's somebody in your life, a family member, a close friend, somebody who you think that they can really benefit from hearing today's conversation, well, please be sure to share today's episode with them because I know it would mean the world to them, it would mean the world to me.

And you know what?

If we can all just focus on helping out just one person, then I believe we stand a chance of making this world a better place.

Until next time, I'm your host, Kevin Lowe.

And of course, this was another episode of Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

SPEAKER_00: I've got grit, grace, and inspiration on my mind.