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

Kevin Lowe: I'm in the studio today with Tommy Stoffel, 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.

Kevin Lowe: 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.

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

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

Kevin Lowe: He would combine that with, ironically, off-roading. Yes, out in the woods with Jeeps, getting dirty, having fun.

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

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

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

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

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: So listen to today's episode. Enjoy it. Get what you can from it.

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

Kevin Lowe: And then, hey, click the link at the top of the show notes.

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: That's the whole point in this podcast.

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

Podcast Intro: Yeah, I got grit, grace, and inspiration on my mind.

Kevin Lowe: What's going on? And welcome back to Grit, Grace, & Inspiration.

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

Kevin Lowe: And that, of course, is Tommy Stoffel. Tommy, my man, welcome to the show.

Tommy Stoffel: Kevin, thank you so much. Very excited to be here with you today.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, man. Well, I'm excited for us to dive into your story.

Kevin Lowe: 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 going to 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: I will. Thanks for asking. So timing wise, it was about 20 years ago or so.

Tommy Stoffel: And I was living life like all my friends. I had a good job, had a good partner in life. I had a house.

Tommy Stoffel: I had, I was living, I was actually living on a lavender farm. So I was doing okay.

Tommy Stoffel: Money was there. The home was there. the relationship was there.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: I was, you know, whatever gin, gin and tonics turned into gin.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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 my head would go, oh shit, not again.

Tommy Stoffel: And, and, and bam, my brain just clicked on and it just started. I was a worrier.

Tommy Stoffel: I was a great worrier. I would worry about everything.

Tommy Stoffel: And so from 3am to 6am 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, that's that worry, just the worries were endless.

Tommy Stoffel: And, and that's the way I lived. And it was building pressure.

Tommy Stoffel: And after about however many years of that, I hit a breaking point.

Tommy Stoffel: Where my brain stopped thinking well. I wasn't making decisions anymore, clear-headed decisions.

Tommy Stoffel: And I actually pulled a crazy stunt. I walked out of a party in the middle of a party on a Friday night.

Tommy Stoffel: I just needed to escape. I didn't know where I was going. I walked in freezing cold temperatures without proper clothing.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: I found some, I went in some guy's garage actually, and I'd laid down or I sat in his chair and I almost fell asleep and I might've not have woken up from that, but I got myself up and went to town.

Tommy Stoffel: Anyhow, that next day, Saturday came and, and my head was, I was hearing things.

Tommy Stoffel: I was hearing voices, all this weird stuff was happening.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 around one o'clock in the afternoon.

Tommy Stoffel: And I just laid on the floor and I, I asked my wife, I said, at the time I said, call 911.

Tommy Stoffel: And she goes, what's wrong? And I go, my brain's not working.

Tommy Stoffel: I just don't know what's going on.

Tommy Stoffel: So, so the ambulance came, took me to the hospital where they admitted me.

Tommy Stoffel: And I stayed for two weeks in the psych ward because I was coming in, I was highly manic.

Tommy Stoffel: I was out of, you know, my brain wasn't, like I said, wasn't making clear-headed decisions.

Tommy Stoffel: And that was the beginning of it. The beginning of the end or the end of the beginning.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah.

Tommy Stoffel: What really happened was the next morning, I woke up in this hospital room.

Kevin Lowe: Wow.

Tommy Stoffel: And it's clear in my head. It was a baby blue walls, you know, walls.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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 thirties.

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

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

Tommy Stoffel: So sometime in the last eight hours since I closed my eyes in this in the psych ward of our local hospital 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 yeah and i got an answer like i don't know it came

Tommy Stoffel: from within okay it was like powerful and it was true and it said you were here to learn this is your education.

Tommy Stoffel: This is your opportunity to find out what goes on inside the minds of people that get them agitated, worried, stressed, overwhelmed, and, and to the point where they snap and lose it. Cause that's what had happened to me.

Tommy Stoffel: I'm like, and I'm like, okay, I'll take that challenge. I was already working on my spiritual path that already opened up a few years before.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And then I asked a second question and this one really sealed the deal.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And that's when this image kind of came up in my head.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 I was in near the overwhelm location.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: You just kind of intuitively know what that feels like.

Tommy Stoffel: And so that was a blessing for me, just that insight to see this in a visual representation, and 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.

Tommy Stoffel: I had too much chatter in there. I had too much noise in my head.

Tommy Stoffel: And so I had already, yeah, so that's it.

Tommy Stoffel: So now I walk around with this, you know, this chatter chart, this stoplight chart, and that's the basis of everything I'm doing.

Tommy Stoffel: You know, for myself, I got myself, I learned some techniques that reduce the chatter in my head pretty clearly.

Tommy Stoffel: I live in this green zone right now and I have been for the last 10 years or so, pretty steady state.

Tommy Stoffel: And my purpose now is to help other people get out of that chatter head, to get out of that monkey mind, whatever we call it.

Tommy Stoffel: And to get out of the red zone and whittle down your yellow zone and make the green zone your home place, because that's where we're level-headed, right? That's where we can think straight. That's where we have clarity.

Tommy Stoffel: That's where we can pay attention to what's going on in the moment without a bunch of head noise corrupting us.

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

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, yeah. Now, out of curiosity, before this all started happening, before the 3 a.m.

Kevin Lowe: Being up, you know, anxiety, worrying and stuff, had you ever had anything like this happen before in your life?

Tommy Stoffel: No, no. And looking back on it, you know, it built up over life and I kind of hit this breaking point.

Kevin Lowe: Okay.

Tommy Stoffel: But I didn't have any, you know, I didn't have any other mentions like this prior to that.

Kevin Lowe: Yes, yes. Okay. Now, my second question is, how long did it go on for you, this, the 3 a.m., the 6 a.m.

Kevin Lowe: Worrying, the building kind of this boiling pot until that moment when you said that you left the party in the middle of the night? How long had that been about?

Tommy Stoffel: That was probably going on for about four years at that point. Yeah.

Kevin Lowe: Wow. Wow. So we're talking about a guy who, It's been, I mean, four years is a long time to be living like that.

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

Tommy Stoffel: I was. Yeah. And, you know, I wasn't living at that breaking point, right?

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And there's, and at the bottom of the yellow zone, you're getting to the yellow zone, you get like agitated, right?

Tommy Stoffel: And then they get worried and then you get stressed and then you get short tempered and then you get overwhelmed.

Tommy Stoffel: So it's kind of a buildup. So, so that buildup was happening over those four years and, and the time previous to that, right?

Tommy Stoffel: My whole life, you know, 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, this whole ball in motion.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And one of my best friends was my dog, a Dalmatian named Shotzi, which means my love in German.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 Shotzi over there in the rock garden.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 intuition.

Tommy Stoffel: Think about that as a child, you know, you can kind of understand things.

Tommy Stoffel: You're sensitive to energy and all that got shut off in an instant.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And now I had to start thinking all those things. and that's when my brain started getting overworked.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 lasted, what, 30 years until I hit the breaking point.

Kevin Lowe: 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 talk about the chatter in our brain.

Kevin Lowe: 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 how you refer to it?

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Or seven chakras, and how they get blocked.

Tommy Stoffel: And they get blocked by different thought patterns, actually.

Tommy Stoffel: So for me, I took that class, I took that class a couple 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 alternate options.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: So this is, this is awesome news, by the way. So I'm going to back up just a step, right? We have these heads on our shoulders.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: Worry is one of the seven flavors of chatter.

Tommy Stoffel: And I was learning, and I learned how to reduce my worries.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 you start thinking okay hey, 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 gonna happen?

Tommy Stoffel: Or would I rather just stop worrying, which is one thing easy to say and a little more difficult to do, but, or just stop worrying.

Tommy Stoffel: And then I have more brain space to handle that 1% issue when it happens, when it crops up. Right.

Tommy Stoffel: So very logical ways of looking at worry.

Tommy Stoffel: Kevin, you haven't ever gotten a worry loop or know what I'm talking about.

Tommy Stoffel: If I say the word worry loop, where, you know, the brain gets in the same side.

Kevin Lowe: Of course. Yes.

Tommy Stoffel: Right. Worrying about the same thing. over and over and it may go on for hours at a time, right?

Tommy Stoffel: Where the brain's looking for some ultimate solution or it's one that, you know, that the 10% that it doesn't figure it out yet.

Tommy Stoffel: Well, you're not going to figure it out yet. Cause you're not meant to figure it out yet.

Tommy Stoffel: But, but just that worry loop thing, once you realize you have, 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.

Tommy Stoffel: It's like a worry go round, go just get off the worry go round and think about something else.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And now I wasn't near that red zone anymore, right? You took some pressure out.

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

Tommy Stoffel: Now I'm in the yellow zone. I'm not up at that red zone anymore.

Tommy Stoffel: So think of these as a pyramid and at the base of the pyramid is fear.

Tommy Stoffel: So fear 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...

Tommy Stoffel: Is at the base. And so that's, that's a big noisemaker in our heads, right?

Tommy Stoffel: Fear of the unknown, fear of embarrassing ourselves, fear of whatever, right?

Tommy Stoffel: Fear of spiders, all that is chatter. It's all noise in our head.

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

Tommy Stoffel: That's, that's dangerous. There's fear, Fear is false evidence appearing real.

Tommy Stoffel: Fear is head noise. Fear is our synapses firing in my brain.

Tommy Stoffel: It's not real. It's not danger.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

Tommy Stoffel: Media, TV, earthquakes, tornadoes, you know, things that, things that you're not in any danger of right now, but the 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: Sizes so that's the number one down at the 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 our energy of feeling content like we're like we're okay we're content in the world

Tommy Stoffel: 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 go for an education. Content does not mean lazy.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And what messes that up are desires.

Tommy Stoffel: And just that word desire, some people will go to sex right away, but that's not sexual desires. There's a, it is, that's part of it, but it's also, you know, the desire to have a perfect friend or, or a great mom or a good partner.

Tommy Stoffel: And 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And society again is just a master at flooding our brains with things that we can desire and things that we want.

Tommy Stoffel: Right. And they, they'll, 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 might have.

Tommy Stoffel: So, so this is, this is everywhere, right? Our society is just laced with fears and desires and worries.

Tommy Stoffel: And so the desire stuff, think about this, think about like a relationship that you want to improve in your life.

Tommy Stoffel: And let's say it's a, let's say it's a parental relationship.

Tommy Stoffel: Like I want to have a better relationship with my mother.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And I want to be able to, right? And we have this list, we have lists, lists of desires in our heads.

Tommy Stoffel: Well, again, And then those lists become chatter.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: So you add that to your list of desires, right? So the desires are always changing.

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

Tommy Stoffel: You're like, oh, is she meeting these criteria? and I check, check, X, X, X, check, check, X, X, X, right?

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: And then I encourage people, usually without lighting fire to anything else, to burn the lists just to get it out.

Tommy Stoffel: And gone. Right. And that, that, that then reduces your chatter.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Third one is worry that blocks our chi center, our energy center, our power center, our courage.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: So that's the third one. Fourth flavor is love and love and be loved.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And, and, and honestly, it'd be nice if our relationships had that element of love in it.

Tommy Stoffel: But all too often, we get into feeling like we need somebody to love us.

Tommy Stoffel: We need to feel approval. We need to feel it to get somebody's attention.

Tommy Stoffel: And that need for attention and that need for approval, again, becomes a source of chatter.

Tommy Stoffel: Like, oh, am I worthy of this? Oh, I don't have this. Oh, I'll never find true love.

Tommy Stoffel: All that is head noise, right? And we all have that in different flavors, too. So that's the fourth.

Tommy Stoffel: That's the fourth chakra blocker.

Tommy Stoffel: Of that kind of that neediness and that can turn into clinginess and really not clean energy dynamics between two people.

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

Kevin Lowe: Yeah. So I was going to ask, so before you continue, so let me be sure that my mind is right.

Kevin Lowe: 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?

Tommy Stoffel: The idea is that this chatter is not helpful.

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

Kevin Lowe: Yes.

Tommy Stoffel: So this is the physical condition of stress.

Tommy Stoffel: Now the stress in our mind creates stress in our bodies, tension, muscle tension.

Tommy Stoffel: It creates, and we know that it reduces our immune system. Stress does.

Tommy Stoffel: We know that it's, you know, can make us sick, you know, through stress.

Tommy Stoffel: So thank you for bringing that in. And that is one of the key motivators for reducing the chatter in our head.

Tommy Stoffel: One, to have clarity, and two, to have less stress. Yeah.

Kevin Lowe: Yes. Okay. Okay. Perfect. All right. Cool. You, you may continue.

Kevin Lowe: I just had to be sure I'm like, wait, I got to be sure I'm on the right path here.

Tommy Stoffel: Thank you for calling it out. That's like a, we call it the chatter chart.

Tommy Stoffel: We call it the stress chart.

Tommy Stoffel: So, so it, they go hand in hand, the amount of noise in our head equals the amount of stress we have in our life.

Tommy Stoffel: And we know a lot of us are walking around pretty uptight.

Tommy Stoffel: So as, as I was right.

Kevin Lowe: Yes.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: I'm taller than, shorter than, prettier than, uglier than this, right?

Tommy Stoffel: And we all do this. This is, again, part of our society here on earth loves to compare ourselves to, you know, other things in other ways.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Or maybe we like ourselves more. Maybe like, I'm, you know, king of the mountain.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And well, well, that's a runaway ego, which we'll talk about at number six, but, but, but most of us, and we get, and that's our self-critic, right? And that's our self, not loving ourself.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And so that's, this one 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And so these seven flavors, all you can just, if you 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: So that fifth one's pretty powerful.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, absolutely.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: That's, that's, you know, my, that was my ego. That was my ego mind.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 fence, right?

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

Tommy Stoffel: I need to, right? That's where this number six lockup comes to it.

Tommy Stoffel: All that built up together. And now you feel like you have to protect yourself.

Tommy Stoffel: Like you're scared of people can get the whole world. Right.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And, and it's actually, it's job is not really needed.

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

Kevin Lowe: Okay.

Tommy Stoffel: Because what I just said there about this number six energy our ego it's like then people can get like oh the the chatter is my ego and i've got to read 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, the part of myself that knows that I'm a spiritual being, that I'm an energy being in this body.

Tommy Stoffel: That's my inner sage. That's my intuition.

Tommy Stoffel: Now I can kind of talk to my ego because the inner sage is in control of this being now.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And now I can look at my ego and say, okay, ego, I'm not eliminating you. You're not a threat.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: So that part of your job, you can let go of it's heavy anyhow, and it's not good for either of us.

Tommy Stoffel: So just let's, let's work on reducing fears.

Tommy Stoffel: And we do that for all seven of them. You know what ego, you don't have to worry so much anymore.

Tommy Stoffel: Life's okay. We're not in any future. We're doing all right.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: So, so it's almost like I'm retraining my brain.

Tommy Stoffel: 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, uh, and the need and, uh, and the constant comparison.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: So it still has a job. I used to talk about like, if you think of your being as a, as an aircraft, there's two seats in the front and where they fly the plane from in the cockpit, there's a pilot seat and there's a co-pilot 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

Tommy Stoffel: any sleep or coffee let me keep going going going going and that's a 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 and tries to you know fly this or drive this whatever this, you know, craft is that we're, this body and mind that we're living in.

Tommy Stoffel: So that metaphor helps me kind of.

Kevin Lowe: Yes. Wow. I love that.

Tommy Stoffel: Helps the pilot get back in the pilot seat, right? And the co-pilot still has a job, but it's not doing everything.

Kevin Lowe: Yes. Yes. Yes. I love the metaphor.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: That's that energy. That's the energy that we live in.

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

Tommy Stoffel: So, right. So 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Your body mind complex is working in a nice way.

Tommy Stoffel: You're kind of energetically not on guard all the time. There's no hypervigilance.

Tommy Stoffel: There's no amygdala firing.

Tommy Stoffel: You're just walking and living life in this body the way I think it was meant to be walked in and lived in.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 comparisons and this ego is all like in full control and 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.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: So yeah, pretty lengthy seven flavor description.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah. But I mean, I, I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through it and explain it all.

Kevin Lowe: Because, I mean, that's where it all starts to make so much sense and gives context to exactly what you're talking about.

Kevin Lowe: But the question, Tommy, that I keep kind of thinking in my head is, I mean, the wisdom that you have to share today, I mean, it's like you have this wisdom inside of you, but I can't help but think, 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?

Kevin Lowe: Do you feel like you have a reason for it?

Tommy Stoffel: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. The word that comes up is relatability.

Tommy Stoffel: And i don't feel especially in 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 in a beautiful, loving relationship if you just let go of your need for attachment.

Tommy Stoffel: So I think it's relatability. And Eckhart Tolle said it to us once.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: So, and that resonates too, right? There's somebody suffering out there in the red zone.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: I know what that feels like, you know, and here's what I did about it.

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

Tommy Stoffel: That's where suicidal tendencies sit in that red zone. This is where, you know, severe PTSD is.

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

Tommy Stoffel: But I, 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, you know, the pits 20, 30 feet deep in the middle of road and they're down there and they're stuck and they can't, they can't climb out.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And also 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Right. But the rope and the, and the wood and the saw is what I use.

Tommy Stoffel: Those are the tools I use to get out.

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

Tommy Stoffel: So, again, relatability and experience 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.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, yeah. No, I agree completely. Yeah.

Kevin Lowe: So, Tommy, my next question is, in my opinion, people are going to be like, say what?

Kevin Lowe: Like, what interview did we just skip to? because I don't understand how it's even going to connect.

Kevin Lowe: But all of a sudden, there's a part of your story that includes us off-roading.

Kevin Lowe: Would you like to connect the dots?

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

Kevin Lowe: Yes, exactly.

Tommy Stoffel: Let's go back to yellow zone, red zone, yellow zone, red zone mentality.

Tommy Stoffel: And something that a lot of people talk about PTSD, right? We all have, we all have some degrees of PTSD.

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

Tommy Stoffel: People talked about the reptilian mind or the amygdala.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 worried about something happening to us, that is using our amygdala mind, and that's where it's firing on.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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, this pension to be worried about the future or, or, or reliving some past event, right?

Tommy Stoffel: So now we're out of time. We're in the future or the past.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Being mindful and almost meditating and driving over rocks, now we're using the prefrontal cortex.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: This is where we are. And so the jeeping gives you a visceral green zone experience.

Tommy Stoffel: It gives you several hours at a time of being out of the hypertension, a hypervigilant 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And it doesn't have to be jeeping. It doesn't have to be off-roading.

Tommy Stoffel: People have their own ways, right?

Tommy Stoffel: Everybody has something they kind of really enjoy doing that brings them into the moment to help them focus their attention and stay in that green zone.

Tommy Stoffel: This is just one way of kind of doing it.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, well, I think that's amazing.

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

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: Maybe, I don't know, maybe first responders or anybody helping them to move from the one zone to the next.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: You know, 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 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And then we'll be motivated to do more and get more stuff out of their head.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: He brought five of his uptight, hypervigilant LAPD officers.

Tommy Stoffel: We had five Jeeps for them and we put them in the Jeeps for six hours.

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

Tommy Stoffel: You know how somebody really tries to force a smile? It's like, ah, 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.

Tommy Stoffel: Like they're on guard, on guard all the time. You can imagine a cop, right?

Tommy Stoffel: And now you can imagine a cop in LA. And this is, now we got five of them ready to Jeep for a day.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: And somehow something switched in them that day to switch out of alert, hypervigilant, tense mode into relaxed awareness.

Tommy Stoffel: And my buddy, the lieutenant, said they haven't really gone back to that level of tension since. And this is five years ago now.

Tommy Stoffel: So just a day of this can really... Wow. Yeah. And I don't want people to think that they have to come jeeping.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 his mind was distracted.

Tommy Stoffel: You know, that monkey mind was distracted by so many things.

Tommy Stoffel: And he jeeped. We jeeped together.

Tommy Stoffel: He did it for two years. And one day I looked at him, I go, man, you're different. He goes, yeah.

Tommy Stoffel: He goes, the rocks are my therapy. He goes, when my mind's on the rocks, it's nowhere else.

Tommy Stoffel: So having and creating or finding, seeing your own green zone experience is the key to success here.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, we're going to 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 that, For somebody who's maybe thinking, well, what could I do?

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: And there was stories about some of the big football players crocheting some years ago, right?

Tommy Stoffel: It's any activity that just takes your attention.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

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

Tommy Stoffel: 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 a little art class.

Tommy Stoffel: And so he sat with us and he had to start to doodle on our page and he started helping us doodle and then turn this doodle into patterns and then connecting and then coloring in some of the squares and stuff like that and blocks isn't just that was a very mindful calming present green zone experience so we just need to find them and just once you 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 we'll get you answers people will show

Tommy Stoffel: up in your life and give you examples you'll pick up a couple.

Tommy Stoffel: 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?

Kevin Lowe: I don't have anything in particular that I can think of other than moments of, of just prayer in the morning, first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee.

Kevin Lowe: When I say the, the rest of the world is still asleep and you can just kind of sit there in the quiet.

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

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

Kevin Lowe: 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.

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

Kevin Lowe: I'm in here with headphones on, the door is shut, just totally teamed in on my guest.

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

Tommy Stoffel: There you go. Right. Like prayer in the quiet time is a green zone activity.

Tommy Stoffel: Being present, fully present and quiet in your head during interviews.

Tommy Stoffel: So you're listening. Listening, you know, listening is what you're doing a lot of.

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

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

Tommy Stoffel: It's paying attention to the moment.

Tommy Stoffel: That's what I do when I take people out. And Saturday, we're taking a bunch of people out. I teach them how to pay attention, really, and pay attention to the moment.

Kevin Lowe: But what I want to say, though, is let's just be honest, totally lame compared to jeeping.

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

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

Kevin Lowe: So, yes, you know.

Tommy Stoffel: You have the invitation and I'm looking forward to meeting you in the Jeep.

Tommy Stoffel: And we'll do that sometime together for sure.

Kevin Lowe: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, well, Tommy, so talk to me about the book that you that we've been referencing.

Kevin Lowe: I'm curious to know how the book even came about.

Kevin Lowe: And then, of course, what the book can do for somebody who wants to take our conversation to the next level.

Tommy Stoffel: Right. So really, you go back to the stoplight chart, green zone, yellow zone, red zone. The book is all about that.

Tommy Stoffel: There. Each of us, you know, has that kind of a baseline chatter level.

Tommy Stoffel: 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, 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.

Tommy Stoffel: First off. So, and then the book does that. It's like, okay, where are you?

Tommy Stoffel: Are you in the yellow zone? Are you in the green zone? Are you in the red zone?

Tommy Stoffel: Do you want to like improve or reduce your chatter?

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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 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.

Tommy Stoffel: So that's what's in the book. My writing partner, Brian is gifted in his writing skills.

Tommy Stoffel: He's like talking to your soul. He's like, it's like a soulmate talking to your soul.

Tommy Stoffel: We call it soul talking. And that's the way the book is written.

Tommy Stoffel: So it's talking to your inner sage, talking to your wisdom, 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.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Tommy Stoffel: And so that's the second half of the book. And together, it's a kind of a do-it-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.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, I love it. Now, remind me the the name of your book and the best place to find it?

Tommy Stoffel: 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 stage taking the wheel, taking back control of your life.

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

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

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

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

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, well, fantastic. Well, I will be positive that all the links are in the show notes for anybody interested in learning more about getting in touch.

Kevin Lowe: Now, is it through the website, theoffroadmonks.com?

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

Tommy Stoffel: That is in there too. Zen off-roading, soul coaching or pages on the site.

Tommy Stoffel: Yep, you can find all that.

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

Tommy Stoffel: The book and ways of buying it's in there. That stress survey is in there.

Tommy Stoffel: 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.

Kevin Lowe: Yeah, yeah. Well, Tommy, man, it's been such a pleasure to get to talk with you today.

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: It's a really powerful story and it's a real honor to get to have you on the podcast.

Kevin Lowe: So truly, thank you so much for being here.

Tommy Stoffel: Well, Kevin, I thank you, too. I mean, the title of your podcast, everything about it, ever since I first heard of you, I'm like, oh, this is a man doing the work, you know, helping people doing what I'm doing, helping people get out of that, you know, that stressful part of life, you know, and all the stories that you bring and some of the podcasts I've listened to of yours are all like in the same vein of helping us help ourselves, of helping us heal from these traumas that we have or these,

Tommy Stoffel: the suffering that we have in our head.

Tommy Stoffel: And so thank you too for being a fellow warrior of sorts of helping people

Kevin Lowe: Yeah yeah well thank you so much man 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.

Kevin Lowe: 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.

Kevin Lowe: And you know what? If we can all just focus on helping out just one person, then I believe we stand a chance at making this world a better place.

Kevin Lowe: Until next time, I'm your host, Kevin Lowe. And of course, this was another episode of Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

Podcast Outro: I got Grit, Grace, & Inspiration on my mind...