Men & Grief Recovery: The Real Reason Men Avoid Grief (And The Tool That Changes Everything) feat. Jorge Ruiz

Or, you know, we'll get in to all the different things. But I know Jorge has been working with men around the grief recovery method. So we're going to get right into that. So Jorge, again, welcome.

Thank you so much for your time. I'm excited to talk with you. And if you don't mind, let's start off with just a little bit about your journey finding the grief recovery method. Well, first of all, thank you.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here with you. Also, we've been blessed if I didn't say that I thank you off of what you're doing. I do believe that the grief recovery method is foundational to any type of growth that you want to do, whether it's personal, professional, it doesn't matter.

The way I came to the grief recovery method is that for about three years, I was running a couple of homes, foster care homes. I had 10 teenage boys and 10 teenage girls. And in the process of helping these, these kiddos, I had two amazing folks, three amazing folks that work with me, the staff that work with me. One of the young ladies, Dawn and her husband, Jay, helped me run the girls home.

And so Dawn had herself been through so many challenges in her life. She said therapies and all these different things. And she, you know, when we had conversations, this is kind of a little funny anecdote. I would call my guy Dave to see how my boys were doing as it relates to appointments, medicine, you name it, attorney visits.

I was done with him after phone in 30 minutes. When I called Dawn to check my girls, I'd be on the phone with them for two hours. And the simple explanation is a voice for the most part in men we played checkers. Women are playing chess when it comes to moving and thinking and emotions.

But I needed to make sure I knew exactly what was going on at a home so I can be there for them to be best in my ability. Well, on those phone calls, on those two out on phone calls, Dawn began to tell me, you got to check out the grief recovery method. I've done so much work. And finally, I have found something and I feel that there's progress.

I feel that there's growth. And she bugged me for quite a bit. And so I finally said, listen, I don't do anything. I don't, I don't tell people to do anything.

I don't do first. Let me find the specialist. Let me go through it. And I got to be honest with you.

I was very analytical. I was more so going through it to figure out, let's see what principles are here that are going to help me heal. Man, I fell in love with it immediately because there's principles there that are so deep, psychologically, neuroscientifically, even in quantum physics that are there that I was blown away. I got trained here in Tucson, Arizona by Bobby Rio.

And she's just phenomenal. I mean, that woman is incredible. And so after that, man, I was working at this place, helping youth. But then they started a program in which they would take folks that were coming out of halfway houses or needed a second chance.

They began a cooking program. Ten weeks free, you show up from 8 to 5, but they needed life skills. They needed finance and they needed a little something else. And so I started helping them with finance and life skills.

And I got certified. And Cole, I began teaching free recovery. I asked the chef, can I do this? And he says, do whatever you want.

And so now, now I started teaching this. And what I began to see, my God, you know, blew my mind. And I'll tell you one thing, identity is extremely important. Because who you become is what you go on to do.

What you believe you are is what you get. Everything is affected by your identity. So imagine this, if you've been in prison and you were hurt, and this say that you began drinking because of that. Okay, so now people start telling you, people that love you start telling you, you are an alcoholic and you battle, you're not that your identity, you're not an alcoholic.

Now you're in a state prison and they tell you, not only you an alcoholic, you're also a prisoner. Okay, now that starts beating on your identity. And so when you finally say, okay, I am there, but you don't have the tools to build from there. And then I come in trying to teach you life skills and I'll new way of thinking, I can't teach that identity that I just can't.

It's very difficult. But, free recovery allowed me to go into your soul, essentially, and just like a laptop man, pull the poison out. Come on, let it go. And then once that place was clean, now the software can come in.

And we did that in practice with these folks that are coming out of prison and things like that. Man, women, old, young, it didn't matter. When they were healed, it was new. You know, in the Christian vernacular, they used born again.

Man, for me, I kept seeing the same thing over and over. Okay, so identity, it's extremely important. And a lot of times, and you know this, go, you spoke about this in a variety of ways, the way that I speak about it is, when you don't heal that loss, when you don't process the loss, that loss becomes your anger. And so you're no longer in the moment.

In the moment when things happen to you, whether they're good or bad, the person reacting is more so the person that's still in the past and pain. Right? And then when you think about the future, you're not thinking about the future from the moment. You're once again thinking about the future from that past.

And so any type of loss, one of the 40 some losses, until it's processed, it is essentially anchoring you to the past. And how you feel is pretty much who you are. Right? And so once we go, we visit, we take that poison out.

And these people finally think like this. And give you an example of a young lady, she grew up in Wattis, I'm very difficult life. I was abused mentally sexually. And for obvious reasons, she started drinking, partying through all these things and ended up in the prison system.

Well, here's the thing that happens to call that the most important thing that that grief recovery I believe does. When you realized that no, you were never an alcoholic. No, you were never born to be in a prison system. Because once you're convinced that that's your identity, you live from that identity.

Right? But what the grief recovery method did is that it gave people the opportunity to visit back, process that. And then all of a sudden they said, wait a minute. I was never an alcoholic.

I just didn't know what else to do to heal. I needed to know my, wow, you know, no one ever looked at me as a person that was in pain. I was always judged as the person I had become because of all this horrible pain that I was feeling. Well, when that distinction happens, your identity changes.

That's what I call the born again moment. And then all of a sudden people make themselves their way from the past to the pressing moment. Boom, they're here. And they go, wow, leave them here.

Because why? Because your brain finally said, thank you. We finally processed that I can stop buffering. Now this plan for the future based upon this new identity, this, this free identity, this, what I call peace.

Once you have peace, you can be creative. And to me, it doesn't matter what you go on to do with your life. My question is always do you have peace? Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. That is so profound, Jorge. Thank you for that.

It's interesting. No, no, dude, I'm going to let you run. I'm going to let you run. I'm going to be my job today as to be as quiet as I can because again, you really, you're really locked in on some great stuff.

And you know, one little kind of brief history, which I love about this work is originally this work was really picked up by funeral homes. And it was like, okay, we're going to work with griebers where someone died, you know, some odd months ago, right? And this work beautifully. And then we had people from the outside looking in and saying, I think I could apply grief or cover method in this area or this area, right?

And it's, it's so hard as a, as a leader of this work to know how to market and message this work because again, it is so much deeper than just what people look at when the, with the word grief, right? It's like, yeah, yeah. Like, we've had a gentleman from prison and we did a podcast where he's, you know, he's literally the word and let him do this podcast from an office in the prison, right? And just, yeah, and he just, it was incredible what he was talking about.

But again, it just backs up a lot of what you're saying, which is for a lot of us grief, one of their primary losses in their life is loss of identity, right? And they don't think they have a choice in it and their belief system and, and, and, and, you know, the things they had to do, whether it was because of the pain or whether, hey, this is how I thought I had to survive, you know, and then I end up in these places and then we can take these tools and help people. So anyway, no, I love that. So anyway, keep going.

So you, you start seeing the power of the method. You're working inside in prisons. You're working in halfway houses. You're helping foster kids.

I mean, what amazing work. And then kind of where did it, where did all this lead you? You know, in the biggest thing I want to say to your audience, my gosh, understand that we all have a different journey. We all try to difficult paths.

I understand that some of you may be in the very beginnings of a moment that is very painful. Some of you may have healed. Some of you may have healed by accident. And what I mean by that is that you have people around you that you love, and they listen to you and spend time with you.

And that's all okay. I can tell you that when, when we meet, when you meet with the specialist, what you're going to get is it's a person that cares, a person that loves you, you know, unconditionally, a person that's not going to judge you, a person that will listen to you. And that processing it of itself is what heals the soul. Okay.

And so, so understand that, you know, I'm very passionate about this because I'm passionate about the identity change, but also I'm passionate about shooting to the stars. And so what I continue to do, man, I went on to work with different nonprofits. I went on to another nonprofit and they had an amazing program where it helps our single moms, you know, that we're going to school, get going and keep going forward and can provide money and education and things like that. So I convinced the director there at the time, I said, here, listen, let me incorporate grief, I will not charge.

I was already working there as a development officer, outreach specialist. I said, here, let me just get in there and give these ladies the grief recovery method as well. And she's like, well, you know, and I said, look, is evidence based? Just give me a chance.

I'm sorry working with these folks. And again, and I did it again. There's something about life skills and finance and all these things that people assimilate much easier from a place of peace. And if they're still caring, because even what we're trying to get is a tool, you know, when I will teach you my method, the whole thing that I do is call, we're out here trying to find peace.

We often use goals and things like that. You know, if I can only get, if I can achieve, if I can become these things, I will find a semblance or a sense of peace. Then we get there and we go, well, that didn't work too well. I still don't have it.

So then I teach you to change your mindset, which is the acronym I created, which is focus. Faith overcomes challenges on leashes success. But that ended up as a meditation. There's a structure to it.

I teach you how to literally use psychology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics to change your mindset. But sometimes it's hard to focus if you're at pain. If you're at pain in your heart, my brother, there's not much I can do or teach or throw at you all these different ways of thinking if you're hurt. So that's when we dive into the grief recovery.

So that's what makes any sense. Outside to the mindset, drop to the heart. And not when we reverse it. Now we go from the heart to the focus to the stars.

Right? And so the biggest thing that I was working with these ladies is, you know, they have their life skills. They have money coming in, stipend to help them with school. And in a lot of us, what we begin to think, like I began this conversation is, well, if I have this, if I do this, I will have peace.

You become more resilient to a degree and you find a sense of accomplishment. But peace comes from healing, a period. You know, so a lot of people will go on after these goals, thinking if I can achieve, I will have peace. So then who are they really?

If pain that they have is taken into go after these things. And sometimes they're not good things. Right. So when I was finding out with these ladies, is that while they were doing all the work and I was going in and listening and helping them process loss, man, it was multiplying the progress because they weren't focused on saying, if I get this grade, if I get this home, that'll give me peace.

No, no, no, it was not necessary. That was just kind of the icing on the top of that cake. It was, it was that they have found a place to finally heal. You know, and I can say that in my work, about 90% of the people, man, they have, I guess you can say a, a, a, a, a, a, born again type moment.

They do. And, and the ones that don't necessarily have that, you know what, what happens is beautiful. They become very open to continuing work, whether it's through therapy or whatever it looks like, because for the first time in their lives, they feel this into it. And so, and so I continue to do that for now, proper to man.

And then, you know, I currently work for the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona. I'm a development officer, but I started my own business on the side. And then I figured out a way to, I just described to you, you know, and you mentioned, grief recovery sounds death and divorce, right? And so people kind of run away from it.

It's, it's hard work. It takes a lot of courage to do. So then I started thinking about how fundamental it is to me personally. Man, you can have every other thing in your life.

You don't have peace, you're broke, right? So then you think, well, what gets you peace? What, what are the things that get you to a place of peace? Well, that's inner work, period.

Once you can heal the heart, now you can build your life. Okay, so to me, I was like, wait a minute, I'm passionate about all these things, I created all these things, but it was always the foundation for my structure, for my, for my building, for my map to hope, if you will. What was the grief recovery? Nothing.

Yeah. Without it, who in my coaching? Yeah, right? A person that is still looking for that piece outside of them, where my coaching someone that's finally at peace, and you can say, man, today I'm just going to breathe and I can't wait to do it.

You know, yeah, that's where you want to put in that software. So yeah, yeah. Now that, and that's the thing that we try and explain. A lot of people come to this certification and they have different tools they use, different things that have been impactful life-changing in their lives, right?

You've developed clearly like this really key thing that helps people and and put very simply, we have just found over time a lot of us that applied different modalities, hey, grief recovery, just put it first and then your other tools work that much better. One of the best people. Like it's not, it's not that we're saying, hey, grief recovery is the end all be all, we're not saying there's nothing, all these other worthy pursuits in your life with self-development. All we're saying is most of everyone you meet is bleeding to death emotionally, right?

It may, it to you on the outside, it may look like an arterial bleed, it may look like a cut, but make no mistake, they're losing emotional blood every moment of the day. And when you can help them treat those wounds, right, and stop the bleeding, all of a sudden, I don't care if you're a strength in performance coach, I don't care if you're an alcohol, a drug to an alcohol coach, I don't care if you're a, you know, executive business coach, the list goes on, if you can help people stop the bleeding emotionally, all these other tools, they're going to run with them, but you're, you and me are so in alignment. What I think the sad part of our kind of current society is there is no emphasis on self-reflection, right? There is no training in that, it's like, hey, hey ladies, let's go watch the Kardashians so we can judge them.

Hey guys, let's go focus on your fantasy football team and worry about, you know, these guys over here in sports, and so they're doing it across the board. They're offering as many distractions as they can, and we walk around with this thing in our pocket, and they're like, great, you know, we can distract you for, you know, 24 hours a day if you want, and really, it's like you said, man, the key is, it, how do you find peace if you don't know how to go internal and look at the things that you need to complete emotionally that are unfinished for you? It's incredible, you know, and you understand this, it's all dopamine, it's really, and people are looking for that dopamine because, you know, obviously that's how we're wired in the first place psychologically, but they throw it at us in such a way that, and here, let's take responsibility.

Sure as being created, sure as being pushed upon us, but we still have a choice. The problem is, we don't have the awareness, we haven't, you know, a couple of things I can tell you is, man, for example, which is my passion to work with, I work with ladies as well, but I've realized, you know, I heard some stats not too long ago that if you go to a more virtual hospital, and there's more bodies that are there that I committed suicide, three of those bodies will be male bodies, and that breaks my heart, you know? Yeah, great to hear. And so, and so to me, you know, one of one of the things that I needed to bust through is that the idea that, you know, that when a man of any type of man, whether it's a super strong man or a sensitive man, it doesn't matter.

The idea that when they process pain, when they find someone they can trust and finally let go of all that poison, they somehow become weaker. You know, I've worked with some pretty strong males, man, you know? Yeah. And one of the things that that I can tell you guys, if you're listening, listening, you're a hammer, you're always be a hammer, as far as I'm concerned, but not everything in your life is a nail.

And the only thing that gives you the distinction between that is that, whether you use yourself as a hammer to create or to destroy is your heart. It's your heart and what you've gone through and what you've lived through. And so, one of the things that that's happened when I work with these fellows, you know, I tell them here, I just start working to trust me, you know, I grew up kind of rough myself. And I tell them, this is what I want you to do.

If we start with the work we're doing, anytime you're about to just abrupt and blow up and become a hammer to the world, just talk to yourself and say, it's not time for that now. I'm working on it, I'm not running away from what I feel, but I meet with Jorge next week. And what that began to create for them is focus, meaning that all of a sudden they could go, okay, okay, now I can go and work and do and create and do all these things, but only based upon the fact that I will not continue to ignore what I'm feeling because all that is creating is creating energy and power. A brother, whether it's energy or power, if it's not used positively, it can be used negatively.

And power and energy and all that in a negative way destroys. Yes, period and the sentence, so we got to figure out a way to, you know, I kind of liken it to a waterfall. You will never be able to just stop the waterfall, but you can create aquedice. You can create aquedice.

And if you do that now, your heart is the power that it has. I believe us men are exactly that picture. But emotional intelligence, processing pain is what helps you do that. You know, in talking to Ed, I'm sure, you know, he's somewhere right now, but he, one thing that I've been telling men for a long time is that the hardest thing you can be as a man is the toughest thing is the soldier.

And when you're sent out and which, by the way, veterans, my heart goes out to you. Thank you, God bless you for what you do. The sacrifices you make and because you make those sacrifices, your families also have to do the same. But these cats, toughest cats, you'll get.

No no no greater sacrifice, no greater no greater loved and to lay your own life for those you you would love and care for. That's the bottom line whether it's women or men. These cats go on missions and often they have a good mission. Sometimes they have very difficult missions.

Nonetheless, when they get back to headquarters, they debrief, they talk about they figure out what went well, what didn't go well. For the sake of the next mission, being a better mission, being more prepared. That is very much what we do at degree recovery in that institute. You have a lot of missions in life and sometimes I'm not going to go well, some other don't.

But until you go back and debrief and process with yourself and someone else, my man, it'll be very hard for you to find a lesson because you're running away from the dragon. You know, and the dragon unfortunately keeps chasing you, man. And so you meet him at the cave, cut his head off and you go into his game and find the treasure. You know what gets I'm laughing because I'm very visual, man, because my, my language is Spanish and so I didn't speak English so I was 16 and so I've always been very visual in order to comprehend and understand.

And when I tell the guys this, it always gets, I think guys by design were visual too. And I tell them, you know what loss is like, you know what this pain and this grief is like, it's kind of like every time you're hurt, you know, a growth, a loss opportunity, a loss of bodily function, loss of expectation, you know, any, any type of those losses. Every time that happens to you, a little meaning you is born. Looks just like you, where's the same close you do, and now he hangs out with you.

Now everywhere you go, he's following you. And every now and then, certain things happen around you, he starts pulling on your pants. He's like, hey, and you're like, man, leave me alone. I don't have time to do this right now.

Now imagine three, four, five, six different losses. You got a crew following you around that are always tag, you know, talking on you. And all I want you to do, all I want you to do is to pick him up, put him on a table and say, what? What?

Okay, talk to me, listen. And then that little you will begin by saying, hey, remember that time? That hurt really bad. That made me feel like this.

To me, it's so powerful that once you do that, that little meaning you say, okay, thank you. Now you got less. Yeah. And this visual is important because sometimes you work so hard to ignore that little meaning you that you start doing other things to make that happen.

But that's a stir. That's a short-term energy with these behaviors that only last a couple of days. So a lot of brothers, it's specifically speaking about men, they don't become addicts because they love to party. That's silly.

It's because they feel that they can go to this place and at least find numbness for a couple of days. Right? Unfortunately, it's a physiological so your brain's like, oh man, that felt good. Let's go back to it again.

And now all of a sudden you become dependent based upon pain that you did not process. Because pain can compound you lost a girlfriend. Okay, you're dealing with it. There's other fish in the sea.

Oh, now you lost your job. Man, I lost my girlfriend. Lost my job. Now you lost something else.

Man, I'm a piece of shit. You know what? Screw it. Yeah, we don't want to do that.

We don't want to do that. You know, most men think that resilience comes from running against the wall as hard as you can. And while you're bleeding and falling apart at one point, the wall's going to break and that's resilience. No, no, no.

I believe resilience is going through the mission coming back debriefing, figuring out what went well, what could have could have come better, what went bad. Now you picked up a tool. So next time you see that wall, you're going to go, huh, there it is again. Yeah, maybe I'll go around it this time.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if you're okay with the hooray, just because it's really on my mind too, I can't tell you since 2020, but even before that, but since 2020 to now, I've buried so many friends to suicide. And like you said, the statistics show that it's a lot of men opt out that way.

Sure. And so it's heavy on my heart. It has been for a long time. And so I just, you know, what you're talking about.

And one of the things I've identified is very sad for men in general and kind of society right now. And I don't know how it was in the past. I don't know. It feels like we're all losing community, you know, families spread across the country.

People have less kids, you know, you're not hanging out with cousins and uncles already. So now it's friends. But so many men have have, you know, or choose or were trained. They do not discuss anything.

I mean, the isolation that men deal with nowadays is heartbreaking to me, right? And it's like I wish they would have a guy like you, a guy like me, a guy like Ed, where when they shared something, we didn't, we didn't immediately excuse it or, you know, say, yep, that's just part of life or hey, you know, you got to be hard or you know, all the things we do to do that, I just wish that we could start educating more men to just be there and listen to other men. I have a, I have a friend of mine. We hang out quite a bit.

Our family's hang out quite a bit and he's going through some emotional stuff and none of my other friends really thought to reach out to him on this, you know, and they're all good guys too. They just don't know how to do that. And I reached out and I said, hey buddy, I know you're going through it. I would love to grab coffee with you.

I'll just, I would just listen, you know, I'm here if you need me, brother. You know, and he said, hey, I really appreciate that. But I know this gentleman, I, I, I don't think he has really anyone to talk to and he hasn't followed up with me. And that's how so many men are doing it these days, you know.

Large percent. Yeah, you know, and I know, you know, I know from, I know from, because we're all kind of a friend's circle, I know that the, his wife is, is sharing respectfully, but she is sharing with other people what she needs to share, right? And so you have this woman who innately kind of knows how to do that. Maybe it's okay in society for that to happen.

But the guy is like on this island, you know, and it's just sad because it doesn't have to be that way. You know, it, I know for a fact, one of the beautiful gifts that my dad gave me, you know, and I think you know this, he was a soldier, right? And man, you know, we'd be walking through a rough part of town. We, you know, when I was young, we, we live in kind of a rougher neighborhood in LA.

And we'd be walking through the neighborhood, and it'd be my mom and me and my dad. And if there was any kind of weirdness going on, my dad could just turn on the Vietnam Thousand Yard stair. And nobody was messing with that dude on the other street. And I felt so safe, right?

But I felt safe because he, he could go all the way to the other side of the spectrum. And if someone was crying, he'd get down on his knees, he'd look you right in the eye. And he, and he'd be the softest, most loving guy you've ever met, right? And he had the balance.

And he knew when to swing that balance into play. And I am forever grateful to John James for setting that example for me. Because again, right? In each of us, we yearn to be a warrior, we yearn to be a protector.

A lot of us appreciate training towards those ends. But if that's the only gear you got and your wife needs a emotional partner or your child or your little eight-year-old girl, need someone to connect to emotionally. You don't have that gear. Guess what?

Like it or not, in 2026, that's what it, well, that's what's expecting of, of us as men, right? There, there may be other eras in, in time and history where your only job was to wield an axe and farm and protect the village. But that those days are past, right? And so we need to learn these other gears.

Number one for ourself, number two for our family, number three for the other men in our lives that desperately need someone else to process stuff with, right? Yeah, of course. What I say, let's do it all. And it's welcome in because as long as we can degree, as long as we can process, as long as we have each other to process, come on, man, let's go.

Whatever it is, you know, there's a quote. I recently, I spent a trip with a health startup, it's a telehealth, it's called Harold Health. And what these folks are trying to do is address mental and emotional health and physical health for men as well. So I was blessed, I was honored and they invited me to go to Costa Rica to spend about seven days there with a group of about 15 to 20 men with the idea of teaching the system that I teach, including healing.

And I also have another startup I'm working with is cognitive behavioral therapy in virtual reality. It's incredible, man. So I went over there and I was ready to grow, I was ready to do what I do. And, um, man, it was phenomenal and it is my prayer, my God willing, I will be continuing to partner with these folks.

But one of the things that I did, we had a chat on what's happened, you know, you're in Costa Rica, you're going to use a different mode of communication. And there's a quote, and I'm kind of paraphrased because I'll probably butcher it if you remember it, you can kind of fix it. But it's better to be a warrior in a garden, then a gardener at war, right? That is, yeah, that is that warrior spirit.

I wrote that to the guys, but then I followed it by something I wrote. And I said, but sometimes it's good for a warrior to learn to garden so that he can have peace because you're not always a warrior. And I believe that a man that has flexibility, emotional like you, it's a man, what a warrior that is, that's a leader. You know, it's being a hammer is not always necessary.

But when you have pain in your heart and you've learned, you know, when I was coming up, I didn't speak English, man, I had a pretty rough time in and it was, it was not until I got mad that I began to defend myself. But now I picked up a fear, you know, I'm sorry, I picked up anger, right? As my shield and my sword, the problem is that as I began to learn and get better, people approached me and said, well, no, you got to put that anger down and I could it. You know, when I didn't have anger, look at what was happening to me.

And so what I say is a lot of times these gentlemen, they pick up these tools, these weapons, if you will, from a very young age and they go out to achieve because there is fire and anger that will get you to go. But here's the saddest thing that happens, cool. And it may have happened in your life, you know, you see these men charming, good looking, very successful. They show up, they light up the whole part and you think, man, you know, girls want to be with them and guys want to be them, right?

And then they take their lives, and then now you find out, my God, you know, what was going on? When no one knows, because people ask you how you do and then they say, good, all right, let's go. Because if I ask you how you doing calling you say, you know what, you know, that you ask, I might go, never mind bro, I got to go, you know, no one really asks, fellas. Yeah, man.

And again, fellas, listen to me, listen to my heart. I like sports. I like watching stuff. I like having a good time.

I'm not telling you that because all you do is that, there's some wrong with you, not at all my brother, go go on, go on, go on, whoever you like, all I'm saying is that we're deeper than that. The most challenging opponent we will ever face is not the Cowboys or anyone else is you, you, if you can heal you, if you can find a way to master you, man, you're going to stop watching other teams and be part of what. And so by any means, don't think that because we understand that we're all distracted. You know, Cole mentioned it.

We're all distracted in some way, shape, or form. There's no perfection, but there's progues. Oh, yeah, I mean, look, just to call myself out, earlier this morning, I'm having coffee and I'm on, I'm on the computer and I'm building out this squat rack from this gym company because I'm kind of obsessed with building out a little home gym at part of my shop. Oh, that's nice.

And yeah, I'm super excited. And there's this little, you know, there's this little voice in my head that's like, once you get this, this, you know, this rack, you're going to be at peace. You're going to be happy, right? Laugh at the laugh at myself because that, you know, that can enter my head to this day.

Yeah. Is we get our priorities mismatched and we, and we, you know, again, we think that things are going to give us peace and happiness that will for two minutes or whatever. That's all, I mean, that's all of us, right? But it's like, I just, you touched on something a couple of minutes ago, I'd love to go back to, right?

Which is, we, men, especially, we want to say we're fine. No matter what, I'll give you an example. I've had the honor of hanging out with some really amazing, you know, military warriors, right? That are, that are, that are very high level in our military and they're, they're tremendous men.

And I ran into some of these guys a couple months ago and they, they had a death of a comrade of theirs, a friend of theirs, right? And I was like, hey, I just want to say I'm really sorry to hear about that loss you guys had, you know, and I mentioned the gentleman's name. And I, I kind of know the response and these are great men, you know, but I know the response and I see the, I hear the response over and over and it's always something like, you know, when it's our time, it's our time. You know, oh, yeah, that was, that was a tough hit, you know, we never, we never know where to go.

It's, it's always, it's always this compartmentalized thing, right? Well, but I know the brotherhood they have. I know that the, the, the, the moments they've shared. So I know there's so much underneath that, right?

And it's like, I, my hope and prayer for men is we can get quiet and at least find one other guy to share more than just that, right? That's what we're asking. It's like, I don't think Jorge or me, I can speak for me, but I doubt Jorge is spending a lot of the time in the fetal position and uncontrollably crying, right? So we're not saying you have to go to some, so, so I don't, you know, we're not trying to make you a caricature or something out of a movie about emotionally in touch man, but when we need to cry, you know, when my dad's dying and I have tears about that when I'm carrying them from the bed to the bathroom, you know, and I think about that and my son's in the room, you know, you know, later on and I want to cry, I'm going to cry about that.

When he's going to ask me why you crying, daddy, I'm going to tell him why. You know, because that's a human being and that doesn't make me any less capable of protecting my family, doesn't make me any less masculine. In fact, the some of the scariest dudes I have ever met, we're in touch with their emotions, right? You want to talk about real power.

You take a guy that's very capable in the traditional masculine sense and then you give him tools to actually talk about how he feels to and connect like on that level with his friends and his buddies and his wife and his kids. That's a very impressive man, in my opinion, you know, you know, so it just skills. It's just new tools you need to pick up because we're not taught this. You know, one of the things and I'm going to turn the talking rock back to you or hey in one sec.

The other thing I think is I've been thinking about this, you know, and this isn't the case across the board, but you know, I grew up in the 80s and with there was plenty of school yard fights I had been in. There's fights in high school. I, you know, men, boys are acquainted with violence, you know, and if I talk to my wife, for instance, I'm like, you know, hey, how many times have you been punching the face? You know, and it's the answer is zero.

Yeah, and hope we hope none, right? And so there is a, I don't know, there's a familiarity, I think with men sometimes with violence and, you know, and that can be very scary, right? I remember the first time I got punched in the face, that's a scary thing. And I need to turn that fear in real time into anger to cover any of that fear, right?

And I see that a lot in our men is just like we want to go to fear, oh, sorry, we want to go to anger because we don't want to show fear. But a lot of the time when our 30s or 40s, we work at some corporate job or we work at some blue collar job and the danger is not at the level that maybe it was when we were younger, but we go to, we overcompensate with the covering of fear with anger because that's what we did younger when we kind of had to, you know, and it's like we need tools to not, you know, because what you were talking about earlier too, right? With people who they don't feel like there's a choice, they're triggered. We would call it stimulus stop feeling action, but modern times we're calling it, you know, I feel triggered.

And then I'm a wind up toy and I got to play my part in whatever the scenario is and I don't get a choice. That's, that's what people believe is the truth when it isn't, right? I can, it's my responsibility to catch myself in real time and be like, whoa, I'm overreacting here. I don't need to go to code 10.

That's not what's worth it here. And yeah, so, you know, it's just all those things, you can learn and agree for covering, but you wouldn't necessarily see that on a flyer, right? So you go, you know, yeah. So it's tricky.

It's very tricky. And that's one of the reasons that I figured out a way to to, okay, you want to grow, you want to develop, I can teach you that. Not into you here. Not into you.

Yes. Because that's the most important thing, you know, one of the things I tell the fellas is, uh, crime. And I, when I work with folks, I sound like, listen, then you should understand something. You're going to be sitting across from me when we get through very difficult times.

And if I want point, you start crying and you're making bubble boobers and doing all these things. Yeah. I'm going to let you go. I'm going to let you do it.

Yeah. I'm not going to hand you nothing. I'm just going to be comfortable with that. So expect that just be, right?

And then I tell the fellas and the ladies as well, the tears actually wash the soul, man. Who doesn't want that? Go. Let that happen, you know.

Yeah. We don't, we unfortunately, we're not taught that in the obviously there's there's a, there's balance, right? If you're always walking around extremely emotional, well, no, that's that, that's work on that. And one of the things you'll find out too is that a lot of men that, that, that feel like, man, I'm, I feel, I don't have drive and all these things.

That's just who I am. So then I tell them, well, let's go. Let's do some work. Let's heal.

I don't, I don't say here, follow this, this pattern, a way of thinking, let's heal. Let's heal. Let's, let's go, let's go. You know, one of the things that I, that I use, I'm very visual again.

And so when you consider an hourglass, it was a motivational speaker that says, look, you know, the sand on the top of the hourglass is the past. It's the past. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's the past.

The, the, the, the sand at the bottom of the hourglass, that's the future. What you got is this, that little sand trickling it, right? So you got to be there. You got to be in the moment.

But my, my idea, my constant behind that is that's, that's fantastic. That's great. But if you're going to travel to the past, to do two things, to find gratitude, out of where you've overcome, in the blessings of the past, or to heal and go to the past, travel back your bags, get your plane ticket and travel. Now, if you're going to go to the future to have anxiety, to have depression and all these things, don't go.

But if you're going to go to the future to see the invisible, to dream, to, to have gold, to see the invisible and become the impossible, and pack your bags. But go into the past for depression and regret and all those things, stay in that flickering set, you know. And so, making sure that we can teach little concepts like that. It's not so much that that men sometimes don't have that alpha energy based upon who they are because there's levels of expression as it relates to men, right?

And they're all beautiful. They're all great. And they're all needed. But sometimes the men that are over sensitive that can't really in certain circumstances, they may lose their cool or, or they don't even want to be in front of people at times.

Well, once we go back and do some work and they find some things, once they process, they go, oh man, there's my confidence. I was just, I was that person because of this untold thing that had happened to me. So, so then all of a sudden, you get, he becomes the person he already knew he was, which is why he was unhappy in the first place. Yes.

And balance is what we're going after. Brother, I enjoy sporting events. We're here in Tucson, Arizona. And right now, the U of A, basketball team college is number 117 and all that's not.

They beat up. Wow. Arizona State University. Man, it's exciting.

It's exciting. There's balance though, right? I enjoy that. I enjoy having fun with my boys.

But then there is times, you know, for diving deep. And essentially, it is the grief man. How are you? How's work?

How's personal life? How are things in the past that you finally, you know, get over that? Let's talk about it. It's, it's plan, right?

This, this, this has a mastermind that involves traveling to the past to heal and find gratitude and traveling to the future to dream and see the invisible. There's nothing wrong with it. And so my approach is, here, man, when you come to me, yes, you're going to get the evidence-based grief recovery method, which I think is life-changing foundational. But then I'm also going to help you with what I've created to get to the stars.

And so that's holistic. Yes. What I was going to have to holistic approach. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I'm, I'm, I'm really interested, it's, interested to hear more about that, that work that you do. Sure. But one thing that, that, and we'll get there in one sec.

But one thing that you brought up, right, is you hear these buzzwords and there's so many, you know, you, you scroll Instagram and there's all these, you know, men pages and masculine pages and, you know, there's buzzwords. Yes. Yes. Yes.

You know, one of the buzzwords, you know, that you always hear is like, be authentic, be authentic. And it's like, I agree. But again, if you don't know how to do that, because again, your self-confidence isn't where it could be, it's hard for you to be authentic. It's hard for you to show a little bit about who you are if you're scared, because you feel like you got to play this other part as a man.

And, and the beauty that I've seen of grief recovery for me, because I had, look, I grew up in the grief recovery household, but I watched the same Arnold Schwarzenegger movies that all my friends did. And I played all the sports, baseball, basketball, football, year to year, you know, you get hit by a pitch, you know, there's no showing emotion, you know, all those kind of things. And so I was not a guy that cried, you know, even though I grew up where it was okay to cry, I still was trying to be a good American boy, and that was no cry. Well, now, through grief recovery, like you said, every now, when the feeling comes, and the tears come, man, it feels good, and a man, I'm grateful that I have that access, right?

And I'm grateful I get to show my kids, and I'm not trying to hide it from them, and my wife seen me, you know, cry. So I love that. And again, but I didn't, now I would say that is authentic to who I am. I'm being authentic to all spectrum of who God created in cold.

But I didn't, you know, but I didn't have that skill until I did enough grief recovery to really have the self-confidence to understand who I am, you know. And so it's hard to just be authentic from an Instagram scroll. Sure. If you got a whole backpack full of rocks or like you said, or hey, which I love, you got a lot of little use tugging at your pants.

And hey, dude, do you remember that last thing? Like, why'd you handle it that way? Or why'd that person do that to you? Or, you know, whatever.

So, you know, that's what we're talking about is don't take the buzzwords. A lot of some of them are good. Some of that out there is garbage, you know, but, but if you want to get to these places, there is work to be done. You there is work to be done.

He raised the most, you know, when I was when I was in Costa Rica, I got to spend time with some pretty incredible men from different walks. And one of these men, and I'm going to shout them out right now, it's Joe Demaggio. Yes, Joe Demaggio is somehow related. And I don't want to get this wrong either.

Third cousin or cousin of the great Joe Demaggio. Wow. But even if you look at, if you just want to Google him at some point, you look up Joe Demaggio or chef Joe Demaggio. He was one of the older gentlemen that was there in his career.

His life is just incredible. One tidbit I can tell you is that he during the filming of Scarface, he was cooking for Al Pacino the whole time. Wow. And that's just one story.

But one of the things, you know, I began calling him general, he's my brother now, man. We're pretty much brothers for life at this point, but I began calling him general because during his beginning of his career and his life, and this, this dude is amazing. But one of the things that he was, he was a Marine. As a matter of fact, let me correct myself, Jody, in case you watch this, one's a Marine, always a Marine.

That's right. My father and lots of Marines as well. So my apologies, gentlemen. But he was an interrogator with the Marine.

So this man pierces your heart, man. He sees you and feels you instantly. And one of the nights, when we were up there, you know, we sat down around the table for us. There was two of us.

There was three of us. And pretty soon there was at least 10 of us. And you know, Jordan Marge was sitting there with us. And the whole conversation called us, what is manhood?

What is a man? And we had a variety of different types of young folks, older folks, you know, we were just going in, man. There was a doctor there. There was an artist, where we're going on artists there, myself, crypto guys, you name it.

We're all sitting there. And the one thing that Joe said, you know, now this man's about his family, he's about, he mentors, he's meant to 1000s of chefs and does on all these great things. But this is the one thing that I'm going to tell you fellas, speaks louder than anything else. Joe says, manhood is allowing all men to sit at the table with you.

That's all you need. Now you need to be accepted in spite of and whatever it is you're dealing with. There's no week, there's no strong, there's no, can you come in, sit at the table with a bunch of guys that have gone through some shit and not be judged, be loved and be listened to. When we do the grief recovery method, we essentially provide that to everyone else.

But see, fellas, you think you don't think, man, you just avoid it. But it's time. That's the truth, that's the truth right there. That's, I mean, we could, we could stop the record right there because we, we avoid, we want to avoid it all costs.

Let me tell you this and I spoke to Ed about this and I tell everyone else, it's always been the case that we've needed this type of work since the beginning of time. But we've always been distracted and some of those distractions have created this wonderful world and cities and planets and all these, at least different, not planets, but all these things. It's necessary. We've used this energy with alchemist the energy, sometimes of pain to create nothing wrong with that.

Okay. It just so happens that we're living in a day and age where men, women, children, everyone's like thinking, wait a minute, I did everything I was meant to do and supposed to do. I got my degree, I got my career, I got money, I got everything. And it turns out I haven't found peace yet.

Why? Because maybe you have pain that you haven't processed right? And so all we're offering is an opportunity to have you sit down and be a part of someone that will listen to you and finally realize that the whole time, man, when you were thinking of just talking to us because we provide at the time in the safe space, what you need is to listen to you, listen to yourself, express yourself and you mentioned our authenticity. Be authentic or who you are.

No better way to do that than to express it. We just hear you, we love you, we care for you deeply and we give you the time and the space to do that. Once you hear yourself though, oh that's a secret sauce, man. That's a secret sauce because once you tell the things you've navigated and you can take that breath and go, oh man, there's power.

Yes, there is. And it's like find those guys that are farther along the path that have explored these things. Find guys like George, or me, or Ed, or you know, we have, I mean, I want to say thousands, but for sure, I know hundreds of amazing men that are trained in this work that can help you navigate stuff that maybe you didn't feel you know, safe to navigate, right? And we can do a confidentially, we're not judging, we're not analyzing, it's not going on paper, it's literally, we will be a heart with ears to hear the stuff that you've been dealing with, you know.

I'm excited to announce our premium in-person certification training, individuals who have a desire to help other people with grief and loss, join us for a four-day event that you will remember forever. This is based on the proven four-day certification we've done before. The curriculum is the same, but now you're going to get a ton of stories and education and training from Sandy. These are tangible tools that help people in any area of their life.

You're going to get a ton of stories and education and training from me. We will have double the amount of trainers to answer questions you have. I want to help people. I'm missing information, this and this and me.

I'm an advocate for the grieving process because I know that's like, why would you not tell somebody to heal? There's going to be some tears in there and there's going to be some tissues, but I think what will surprise people that are considering this training is if you sat outside of the room when this training is happening, you wouldn't believe how much laughter is happening in this training. You wouldn't believe how much joy and hope you can see on people's faces as we're breaking and people are coming out of the room. It's everything.

The thing she was saying made me feel seen and normal and validated and not insane. I saw grief as this really bad dark thing instead of seeing it as the actual healing process. As someone who's been in this field for 15 years now, I would have loved to have been trained under these circumstances. It's just such a premier training.

You're going to probably walk away with some like lifelong friends. We did not want to say goodbye to each other at that end of that four days. Be able to help walk them through that and give them that same light bulb that came on in my head and it was trying to transform it over. It was such a rich time of learning and engaging, listening to people's stories, being present, being focused with who you're talking to is such a big part of the grief recovery work.

I had done a lot of things. I had done coaching. I'd been in therapy. I had done a lot of other modalities and they were helpful.

But when I did the grief recovery method and when I walked through the method and continued to use the tools, life began to have color. I went from being very emotionally disconnected to being very connected. Do not wait. Seeds are filling up.

Sign up. You will not regret it. I cannot wait to see you. Have a great day.

There's a lot of power in this. Let me tell you one story that I wanted to tell you. I wanted not to miss it because it's important. I started working with this young man.

He's a bit younger than I am in his wife. Both severed. They were going through a very difficult time. One could say that they were actually separating.

The gentleman was like, we can't do some work and I said, well, here, there's things that I do all over the community. But this is my foundation. He's a strong man. I said, if you want me to be your brother and help, we're going to start here.

Are you willing to do this? He says, well, this is up to my wife. Maybe she wants to do it all. I said, great.

I began working with both of them. This is extremely important to me. I would tell them both here. Listen individually.

I would say, my intent is for, I'm not working here to get you back to get. I'm not working here to say, oh, yeah, she's right. He's right. That's the least of my concerns.

I deliver peace. That's what I do. My intent is to individually deliver peace to you in the best way possible, which I happen to think is a brief recovery method. I told them whether you end up together in the process or you end up going your own ways, if you can have peace, then I did my job.

I'm objective here. I'm not going either way. You understand that? They said, yes.

This is what happened, man. It was kind of scary. So at one point, the gentleman calls me and says, hey, man, this is after we had both the Las History Graph. He said, hey, which, by the way, which, transformational for him?

Oh, yeah. He said, how do you feel about my wife and I sharing our Las History Graphs with each other? And I said, man, I don't know. That was not in the cards.

I've never done that. I really don't want to do that, but I'll tell you what, if there was ever a time to do that in your relationship, it's now because it seems that you guys are on the outs. It seems to me that what was going to be lost might be already on that process. So let's try anything and everything.

I said, okay, but if you're going to do that, here's the guidelines. No touching, no clean legs, no tissue, no nothing, you're going to look at your wife. I just say, human being, not your wife. And I told you the same thing.

You're going to sit across each other and listen to each other intently. And you're going to be as honest as possible, no judgment. You are just creating a safe space. You're creating a time for this.

If you guys can promise to do that, go for it. And then I'll wait and see. Well, they're back together now. And my prayer is that they remain, but whoever's been married, no challenges are real.

But the one thing I can tell you that happened, and I feel even ashamed a little bit because I haven't been as transparent, perhaps, and my relationship with my wife, with me and vice versa. We've been extremely transparent, but not lost history, graft-transparent. If you know what I'm saying. And I think that a lot of folks are married, my brother, and they don't really know each other.

Well, it's funny you mentioned that because I actually, when you were talking Jorge, I was, I was like, has my wife ever seen, I mean, I've demoed my lost history of graft for thousands of people across the world. And I'm kind of like, does my wife see my lost history of graft? So yeah, I feel you, dude. I completely heard.

Now I understand the depth of each relationship, and they're all different. They're all beautiful. They're all challenging. But love is never an emotion.

Love is always the choice. And it's a beautiful thing. But yes, I started thinking about how many couples, my wife and I are unblasted. She's an amazing woman and we've shared quite a bit.

But man, there's something about the lost history graft. And then you consider that concept, right? And then you think about, imagine a husband and a wife, detached from the title of marriage and anything else, and sitting across each other, and getting to know each other in death, perhaps for the first time. And what they learned, they told me this, he told me this, is a lot of the triggers they both had were not coming from each other.

Yes, they were coming from the spains that they had, these things that they go with. To me, my bro, that's, now it took so much courage, man. And my prayer is for these two wonderful, wonderful people to remain and stay together. I did not expect this to happen.

I knew healing was going to happen because I'm so confident in this thing. But I often don't know what healing will look like because what happens is when people find healing in peace, sometimes they become a whole different person. And sometimes this cat might want it to be the CEO of this corporate company because he thought he would find peace and worth and all that good stuff there. And then we finish and they're like, oh man, I can do anything.

You know, I can do anything because now I bring peace with me. I don't go looking for it. So that's a story I want to tell you. Does it work every time?

I don't know. Will it stay forever? I don't know. But they get to really see each other in the most humble of ways and listen to each other and learn about each other more than they ever have.

Yes, they did. Yes, they did. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No. And you bring up a really good point, which is, again, time and time again, I'm working in a room and it's about 70% women. And you know, and they do this courageous work and they're working on self-reflection.

And yeah, just kicking butt, you know, getting insights on their partner and you know, and it's all good. And it's so and I so often want, man, I wish your husband would come to, man, I wish your husband would come to because the truth is, right, in most all of our marriages, we have a part and the other person has a part. And the beauty of what I see grief or recovery do is when you do a relationship graph on your partner, let's say, right? Of course, you're crystal clear on all the hurt, but a lot of the time when you do this exercise and you tell your brain and your heart, hey, go find a bunch of the above the line happy stuff.

You fall back in love with them and you're reminded of this whole person versus like the herd of you stuck on the below the line stuff, right? And it's like, I am so grateful that I have these tools in my marriage, right? Because marriage is hard. And they're, you know, in the divorce rate we have in this country, does not have to be the divorce rate we have in this country.

Let me just say that, right? If people had these tools, both both the husband and the wife or the partners, whatever, it's like, it would be a whole different ballgame. If we knew how to emotionally communicate, if we knew how to forgive and apologize and see what our part is and see what they're part of, and the other thing too, which I don't just because we're on this topic, if we learned that expectations equal plan disappointments, that would help marriages across the board, right? Because so often I see, you know, wives have expectations about their husbands.

They don't bother to tell their husbands. They just, it's in their minds, the expectations. And, and, and, and men do that too, of course. And we have a bunch of these expectations we haven't communicated or let's say expectations that let's even say extreme, that other person's not even capable of doing.

And then time and time again, we're hurt. And it's like, so that's another thing like you touched on earlier. One thing I love Jorge, and, and if you've been doing grief recovery for a while, you're picking up on what Jorge is doing. He's taking these concepts from grief recovery and then he's he's painting these beautiful visuals around them, right?

And, you know, and, and one of them was the present moment stuff, you know, one big concept is grief recovery is present moment. And if you float into the future, you're going to find a lot of worry unless you know what you're looking for. And if you float into the path, you're going to find a bunch of regret. And, you know, and he had this kind of travel example, which I love.

But that is so much of what we are doing in our in our marriages is we're floating out of the moment and we're floating into the future and we're creating scenarios. And of course those scenarios aren't going to get met, you know, 90% of the time. And then we're hurt, but we don't tell the other person we're hurt about a scenario we dreamed up in our head and they don't know. And that stuff builds.

And so, with the beauty, one of the beauties of grief recovery is you can, you can gain skills to process and and process those things in real time so you don't accumulate them. Right? Because it's like, I look, I met my wife when we're 15 years old. We have a lot of history to get it.

Right? We we've been together over 20 years. I'm 44. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, I'm 44 right now. But we, you know, we have a lifetime together pretty much. And you you accumulate stuff. That doesn't mean you have a bad marriage, doesn't mean you have a good marriage, it just means you've been together, you accumulate human stuff.

You know, but you can't expect just your wife to go do emotional work, you know, and it'll be okay. Like you have to evolve emotionally too as the guy you have to, right? Like that again, that's just part part of the deal in 2026, you know, well, the lie, the big lie has been that that emotion, I guess, is operated or may not be needed. But let me let me let me challenge that.

Anything that we go on to do as in the beings, and we do it big and we do it great, is always driven by emotion. Again, you know, it's it's a waterfall. We need to make aqueducts and control it, you know, a garden that you get that power from it. But anything you do in life, man, it's your feelings are extremely important, but you must hate your feelings.

The feelings can lead you. There's a time for that which is to recover, that's that you allow those feelings to go ahead, lead me now, feel, don't be afraid to feel. But then once you do that, your system itself recaculates, one needs to be at it now or one needs to be changed, once your system feels, and I call it a system because one of the things that I tell the man is this, it's going to be two things, ri