#50 - Eric Balance | Crafting a Conscious, Intentional Life - From Addiction to Purpose

00:00 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Welcome to Self-Directed. We are your hosts, cecilia and Jesper Conrad, and now it's time to welcome this week's guest. So today we are together with Erich Balans. I got an email where you were presented as a good subject for a guest on our podcast, and I read up a little about you and I was like, yes, let's do it. So here we are, welcome to our podcast, which is called Self-Directed.

00:31 - Eric Balance (Guest)
It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited to get to know you both and really, you know, just connect deeper. I always get fascinated by meeting great people and I look forward to seeing how we can inter-connect our awareness.

00:49 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yeah, erich, I'm a curious soul. And then when I see someone has a last name as Balans, then I'm like oh, is that a given name or a taken name? At least there must be a story. And I would like, by letting my curiosity gets what it wants, because otherwise it would be nagging me in the whole conversation. So what's the story about the last name?

01:14 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Great question. You know a lot of people ask me this like down the line, after getting to know me for months or years, and then they finally ask me this question, so it's nice to hear it come up immediately. So Balans is actually something that I've yearned to find in myself for a very long time. It's an artistic name that's been given to me by a great teacher of mine and something that I've always been seeking, you know, especially when I started out, and Balans was what was within our, is within all of us, and it was something that I needed to find within myself to really discover what does that look like? And in multiple different facets, in multiple different ways.

02:01
And you know I can go on in terms of dichotomies and you know light and dark, and masculine and feminine, but focal point is really, you know, understanding. My last name is Leitschuk and it's spelled Polish and it's very difficult to pronounce when you see the spelling, and a great teacher of mine that really spoke to me when was like you know, you really bring balance to a lot of people's energy and because you're consistently refining your own, and that gave me a thought and that thought became my artistic expression and now it's what I bring to most environments when we're able to cultivate a meaningful expression, especially for purpose on purpose. So yeah, I hope that helps.

02:58 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
It absolutely did what it needed for my curiosity, but I am more curious. So when did you, did you take that step in your life? When? Where are we? What happened that made you say, okay, I really need to to, to figure out and find my balance and help others with it.

03:18 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Well, it's been an interesting journey, for sure, since I was a little boy, you know, when I was 16 years old, I got into drought, drugs first selling and then using them, and being addicted to crack cocaine from the years of 16 to 19, where there were six months at a time where my parents had no idea where I was. And this something that their faith and their determination, something greater than themselves and each other. It gave me the compass of recognizing that there's something within, not just ourselves, but within them, that gave me a direction that is necessarily focused on meaning and emotion. And when we can give meaning and emotion to our lives, we can start to really advance and move forward in a very integral way. And so this journey, although it was something that you know may have created hell at my age of 16, and I walked through hell like I owned it, although that point was not just from that moment when I was a little boy, at the age of five, you know, my grandfather is and was a very integral man, and I remember looking to his eyes and recognizing the depth of his spirit and being able to really read him, and not only understanding why I could see the things that I could see, but what it allowed me to identify was that I could see something that most people can't, and I didn't know what I didn't know at that time. I just thought it was who I was or who everybody is at that time.

05:11
However, as I grew older, the external world continued to tell me things that I didn't necessarily understand because they didn't make sense with my internal compass, which is what led me to them, to doing a lot of things that I didn't understand, because everything that I internally was identifying with the external world was telling me it was wrong. And what the external world was showing me was that materialistically and achiever and striver type of lifestyle is actually way more important than the internal peace and abundance, and so that's what kind of drove me to not feeling welcome, not feeling understood, not feeling really heard in society and school and university, and it's what drove me into drugs. However, my parents were also this type of people that they would light up their faith and the level of conviction in the way that they were able to take care of each other and support each other and us as a family. It was really something that, like I love being at home, you know, I love being with them, I love time with our family.

06:38
I still do and I remember like all I would want to do is just like be with my family. But then the external world would tell us that I have to go and do X, y and Z to be successful. And X, y and Z mean, you know, have a good paying job, live in a cubicle, have a white picket fence, get married, have kids, and that would be the extent of your success. And when I reached that one point later on, I was unfulfilled, yeah, and so for me, this became something that I just didn't. It didn't make sense and I needed to drive that inner behavior to understand and get more curious about why it didn't make sense.

07:31
And that's what started on this journey.

07:33 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
You talk about the what I would call social norms of the external world demanding you or inspiring you or somehow luring all of us into doing things that if we, if we look inside, maybe maybe that was not exactly what I wanted, but the looking inside is not something that is a social norm in most Western countries, most families.

08:04
The looking inside, the whole reflection, the meditation, the you know, the what's up with you question, how do you feel with a real answer, is actually a rare question to be asked to between people. You know, and our podcast is called self directed because the standard that we hold really high as the personal freedom thing to to be able to do and be and feel what is right for me is what is just so very, very important and that's what we want to. To make sure we we just brought me to the options for everyone listening out there. We've been talking a lot about unschooling and it's very nice to not talk about unschooling, so what you're really saying is that I'm just trying to understand here. You grew up with actually a strong self sense of self, a strong inner world, yet use somehow got I will not say, the effort, so I have to work, sight track.

09:19
Thank you by the external world. So your mission now, with your name, balance and your project what is that?

09:34 - Eric Balance (Guest)
So the mission is really simple.

09:37
It's really focusing on embodying and being, and so it's interesting how so many people are focused on doing and that's been such a incongruity in needing to prove oneself, and because the external type of belief is how I need to get things done in order to prove who I am, versus just being myself and sharing my abundance, my wisdom, and this is in all of us right.

10:16
So really focusing on making sure that joy, peace, abundance is really how we are communicating with each other and to do even more for ourselves and others by embodying that, by being able to communicate effectively in that and utilizing that conscious awareness and that conscious communication inside of organizational culture, inside of community culture, inside of really defining and understanding that it's the relationship that with yourself that you will ultimately refine.

11:03
And when you have that relationship with yourself, you'll build it with something greater than yourself. You know whether you want to call it spirit, you know God, you know energy and then, as a result, you'll start to recognize that value inside of other people, because what I believe and this may not be very common, but I do believe that our great teacher, you know it speaks through all of us, and so if we really learn to listen, we can learn to actually hear, not just through our language, meaning what's being said through our mouth, but through our facial expressions, which is actually 38% of communication, and then our physiology, which is 55%. And if we really start to pay attention, we can actually see the beauty of consciousness. Creator, our great teacher, God, whatever you want to call it everywhere.

12:11 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
How was that? A simple mission. So, simply put, I'm just joking a little bit because this is complicated stuff and I'm just you know.

12:25 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Is it complicated? I think is the mind is the mind, trying to make it complicated, because, you see, the cognitive way of thinking is oftentimes let's make it difficult, but really is it something that we just need to tap more into our heart's wisdom and just trust in what we're feeling and how we're being.

12:49 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
That's where I think that the whole unschooling world we come from aligns with some of the things you are talking about, as we have taken a very big step in choosing that. Our children are free as people to choose their own direction in life, and that means that their life is so different to my own that sometimes I can have difficulties guiding them, because I am a product of many, many years of externalizing my own self-worth, first through 10 years of going to school where I should excel in stuff, or I was tested or I needed to perform to be there as a person, and then later I quite easily jumped into a career in the media world where I ended up being productive. That I have this sense of self-swirled when I'm productive. And now I'm 49 and there's a weird mix where I still love, as a person, to create but at the same time I'm also evaluating myself. That I feel better when I'm creating than when I'm just sitting and reading a book, for example, or just speaking in the world with my family, and this is really difficult, a difficult balance to take, and I can just see with my children, who haven't been asked all the time to perform, that they are more at ease in their life. We our oldest son just turned 18 and he knows what he wants and he's doing the things he likes and it is just way more personally chilled than I was when I was 18, where I was all over the place trying to impress the girls and my friends and everything. So it's interesting to see this connection of where we are.

15:08
There's also something you said that made me think about religion, because it's a subject I've been pondering about that. I see a lack of talks about the inner world, where I think that the religions earlier on actually I hope they fulfilled this area for people. They had a community around going to the church. They had a common language about speaking about their inner life and God and what they believed in, and as the world has become less inclined to be down thinking about one God or another, then I think that people have lost their common language to talk about their inner life. I know I'm babbling a little, but it was some of the things that came up to me. Is there?

16:01 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
a question.

16:02 - Eric Balance (Guest)
There's no question yet You're not babbling. You're making a lot of extreme sense and the fact is that religion has been cultivated and put into different boxes for an external purpose, to create some sort of ways of believing. The great thing about the leaders of each of these ways of belief the leaders actually didn't create the church. It was someone, after 10, 20, 100 years later, that created the box that most people are actually stepping into, because they created a structure around the belief system.

16:56
If you actually listen or read the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible or any other scriptures, there's a lot of patterns that you'll start to recognize that are very similar.

17:06
What everyone is saying is very similar. It's actually being philosophized and communicated in a very different way in today's day and age, because people are deciding that they want to live in a box. If we continue to live in a box, where we look at the same box or we drive in a box or live in a box or whatever, and we're not literally willing to be creative enough to start doing circles around the box or live outside of the box, which is what so beautifully our children and your children are doing, because they're allowing that creativity to come through, they're allowing that creativity to come out, where they're realizing that the box actually doesn't exist. As a result, this creativity is allowing them to really unfold and they're starting to manifest their own life. This manifestation becomes a beautiful way of them taking way more responsibility of their own lives and, instead of allowing the external society to project, reject and explain things, that actually limits not them but the external world.

18:22 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
We just met. I just need to say I couldn't agree more. I totally agree with most of what's happening in our lives is in the mind of not everything, and we must definitely Exactly. In many ways we'll create our own reality, and the internal world is where 95% happens. I also am totally on board with this. You know just the extended arm or whatever part of the greater energy that created everything we all are. I'm not special in that way, and the tapping into the listening to all the different ways that what I call God is talking to us is actually something I'm in the process of writing book about. So I'm with you here.

19:17
At the same time, I think we have to recognize the context. We have to recognize that even my unschooled children are living on this planet. In this world we all breathe the same air, and gravity is a thing, and so is consumerism, and there is only so much I can do to let's not go down the aisle of talking about the kids. I can just talk about myself. I'm in this world. I will need to eat, I'll need a more place to sleep, I will see the billboards and the other people and move around in cities as well as mountains and be affected by whatever's going on around me. And I just think there is a risk, when we talk about these things, that it's in the mind that we have to work with ourselves, to put too much load on the individual and say, hence, it will be your fault if you don't overcome this pressure. And the pressure is there. Our kids are in school, they're fairly old and they also do live in this world. I don't see it as a way that they can just freely manifest the lives that they want and be completely. You know, they know other people, they watch the movies and I'm talking about the kids again. Let's try to avoid that. I think balance is a very, very important word in this conversation.

21:05
In my personal life, I feel I'm always walking on this top of a house or mountain and sometimes I fall down one side and sometimes I fall down the other side, and I just need to keep coming back up to that edge where I've got this. I'm in the world, but I'm also not in the world, but not of it. As you can read in the Bible I'm here, I am here, I'm not losing it, but I'm still connected. And I think also when we are in the business of giving advice to other people, that we have to recognize how big this pressure is, how much the idea of the corporate job and the wife and the fence and the dog and the whole thing is being pushed upon us, and how hard it actually. I know it makes it harder to say it's hard, but sometimes I think it's cruel to say it's easy.

22:11
I think that's my point, that we, when I work with people, sometimes they are really stuck in some sort of reality that it's not enough to meditate. You can't just break free from it. There are circumstances. There could be physiology, there could be trauma, there could be economy, there could be family members that are really, really important and you can't get away from it. So what?

22:47
am I saying what's your take? Will you always just say it's in the line, just go work with yourself, or how do you see this on Flake Defences?

23:00 - Eric Balance (Guest)
So I just spent about a month in India with some amazing people from around the world, but also some great transformational leaders being there. It's really fascinating to see how a culture is developed around grace and ease, and it's interesting because we get to choose if we want to live in a suffering experience or a beautiful experience, and most people they don't know that they have that choice. And so, although the external world is going to give us challenges maybe sickness, maybe finances, maybe uncertainties or some sort of a challenge that we don't know or we weren't expecting whatever your approach to that situation is, and whichever way you choose to show up in that situation with your state, with your physiology, with your focus and with your language, that will be how you get to influence that situation. So it's not necessarily what's happening in the outside world that affects you. It's the way that you choose to approach that situation, and if you're able to be in a state of beauty and peacefulness, with also certainty it's not the certainty that comes from the outside world.

24:52
Once you understand that you are the certainty, you create the certainty and, as a result, you can change the behavior of the external world if you're willing to work enough on that balance within yourself, to navigate the masculine and feminine energy that we all have. And from this place, when you're able to show up in a difficult scenario because it's easy to show up in a beautiful experience or energy, when the situation outside of you is easy or beautiful or exciting or happy or joyful the real mastery comes when it's difficult, when the external world is projecting all of these limitations onto you, when the external world is telling you that you can't do this or your family is sick or situation is not working, or that is where the mastery shows up. That is where you get to show up If you choose to, if you've done the work within yourself, and from this place you get to influence an environment that manifests and changes the narrative for the next generation.

26:18 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
During you have, some weeks ago, around New Year, I've been very, very sick for a week and it ended with me having a deep sense of meaningless in the world and I tried to go down that path and I was depressed for a couple of days and it was even more depressing because no one in my family found me fun to talk with, because I was really like, oh, life is meaningless and we will die anyway and everything is shit. Why do I need to do anything? And then what happened was I actually got bored of being depressed because no, no, I mean, I was seriously down and I thought everybody was stupid because they couldn't see the meaningless of the world and I was like, why do I even need to bother? And then I looked at it and nobody wanted to talk with me because I was really down and not fun to talk with.

27:21 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
And I yeah no, especially you.

27:23 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I took it for a walk and we talked and I was annoyed with everything. No, but it helped me and I ended up turning around inside my mind and saying, okay, it's kind of boring being this depressed as I was, and then I started going, going back. But sometimes the the way I'm going with this story is that, seen from the outside, we live quite a nice life. Now we're here in Mexico, we're here for over the winter and then we will go to the States and we have been full time traveling now for, for, yeah, five and a half years.

28:00
Sometimes I miss and we just saw the matrix recently with our kids and I miss taking the other pill, just going back to my daytime work and that someone else take the decisions for me. So where are you with this? Do you sometimes miss an even easier life where you just follow the stream and you don't need to consider everything? Because I feel there's a lot of inner work being going on in our life. So many talks, so many things we go over. So many times we look at our values. Take what's going on in our life and look at our values compared to them before we move on. It was really easy to go to work and have a house and come home and watch some telly. Sometimes I miss it, so where are you with this?

28:55 - Eric Balance (Guest)
I don't miss it. I made a very conscious decision and I'm on a path of deep-aiding, and I know what my responsibility is in this lifetime, and so my excitement is to be blessed with having this resilience and this strength and this courage and my resolve, because I've been on this path now for almost seven years, and for a lot of the beginning of that time, people would tell me to go back and make it the easier way, or do things that were more focused on simplicity in terms of making my life easier, but I knew that if I didn't walk the path that I could never guide others to the same place, and so the resolve comes from the experience. You know, a belief is a poor substitute for an experience. Once you have the experience now, there's nothing or nobody that can shake you or move you. Now there's a space that you walk through and, as a result, you're able to hold a space that creates an outstanding level of standards for the people that come as well after, and so for me, it's been a blessing from something greater than ourselves to guide me in this direction.

30:48
And you know, there's beautiful saying by Rumi what you seek is seeking. You is a gift, and I get to experience that beauty and bliss every single day and I get to listen and pay attention with that relationship that I have with the divine in such a magical way and I love it and it's something that gives me the magic of life and I am here in this world to experience all of it, with abundance, peace and so much magic.

31:23 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Well, I don't miss it either. Just for the record.

31:25 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
No.

31:27 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
With you and this one, I think I might get kicked off the whole, or sorry, I don't know my metaphors in English, but I totally sometimes get lost and need to find my way back. But no, I wouldn't want to eat the other pill. If you want to do the matrix thing, it's once you're out there, it's. It's just such a very much more interesting life.

32:01 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Oh yeah.

32:01 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
That you get to have and I think that you know your two day depression thing you have going on when you get lost in some sort of logic that you don't even believe in.

32:13 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
No.

32:14 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
If I quiz you today, so that happens to me now and then. And what I was trying to say before about the price of the external world is that I want to recognize that it's not necessary. Well, it is easy, but it doesn't look easy from some perspectives where you might happen to find yourself. It didn't look easy to you that day to come back to a meaningful and wholehearted life, and some of the people I work with If you're a single parent with a whole lot of children and trouble paying the rent, it's very hard to manifest the time to do in a work. And I developed the 60 seconds meditation technique for that exact reason, because in some contexts, in some face, it's just a few years, it's not your entire life.

33:15
What you were probably doing and what many people in the spiritual world are doing, it's great, but it's not from for everyone to walk that path, to take their first steps in that path, and therefore I think we just well, at least I am not pushing you to think or feel or say anything, but I have to recognize that what I'm doing is not necessarily. It doesn't look easy and it might not be the same path that everyone has to walk, because there is sometimes so much pressure and I'm saying this, I have a lot of children personally and also I've been very close to dying from a cancer disease. I've been hanging over that cliff and just hoping to survive. So I've been under pressure and, yeah, I developed the 60 second technique meditation technique when the kids were small and I had great spiritual life when I had chemotherapy, and so I'm contradicting myself.

34:28
I just I don't know. You know a lot of techniques. I know I was scrolling through your podcast feed and listen to some of it, but I'm going to admit I also know many of these things already, so I didn't have to. So what's your favorite? What would be your favorite?

34:51 - Eric Balance (Guest)
I would presuppose the. Where I'm starting is when we say we know something, we don't know anything until we're actually living it. So the knowing is not of the mind. The knowing is actually of the consistent and never ending construction of it, embodied every single day. That is what knowing is.

35:11
And for what I'm hearing for you know, these people that you know you're saying, that are going through these experience the most beautiful thing that we can offer ourselves first is compassion. So whenever we're going through these things of saying, hey, I know it, but we're not living it, like let's be compassionate to that part of ourselves and then actually say, okay, I'm doing the best that I can with the knowledge that I have, and then, as a result, what can I do better to actually live it Right? What can I do to then actually experience it and embody it? Because compassion is really what is part of our world. And when you're saying the spiritual world in our world, it's the same thing, right, like where it's all spiritual, it's all consciousness, like everything that we are aware of in this moment. It's all consciousness, right.

36:09
So there is no separation where so many people are trying to create, like spiritual world and physical world, and it's, it's, it's, that's. That's a whole dichotomy. That's bullshit. It's bullshit that our life is a spiritual journey. Our business is a spiritual journey. Everything is a reflection of our internal world the way that we're showing up in our life and our experiences, and how we're being compassionate to ourselves and others. In moments where you have maybe six children running around and everything is like.

36:41 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I want to rip my head out.

36:43 - Eric Balance (Guest)
This is a spiritual expression, and then you get to decide how you want to approach that situation. That is spirituality the relationship that you have with each other and the way that you communicate with one another and how you are able to hold space. You know for Jesper when he was having that depressive state that is a spiritual expression. That is how you're able to cultivate and this mirror, this relationship that you've had with each other, and how you've honed in on that relationship. That is a spiritual journey. Everything is consciousness, so all we need to do is just be aware of the mirrors in front of us and, as a result, we'll start to take even more compassionate roles in those relationships with ourselves, with our greater power and with each other.

37:41 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
What would your 17 year old self on crack cocaine say to you if you met up today? Man, that's a gap here. Life has passed.

37:55 - Eric Balance (Guest)
He would say thank you. He would appreciate his gratitude. When my father asked me the question if you can go to rehab not for me, not for yourself, but for your future self it was a disversion of Eric that I saw.

38:14 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Nice yeah.

38:17 - Eric Balance (Guest)
And now, when I look at what I'm doing for my next future version self, it's a really profound observation to pay attention to.

38:28 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So what is that? So this was actually one of my pre. Why can't I speak English today?

38:39 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
You prepared a question. It's okay, it's fairly fluent. I don't know.

38:44 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
The Danish part of saying no, it's okay, I have prepared five questions just to encase the bold and roll. But it does. But anyway, one of my questions was where are you heading?

39:05 - Eric Balance (Guest)
What's the next? Where am I heading in terms of business, or just like my life, or do you want to just know?

39:12 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
kind of my vision. What's the next learning journey for you?

39:17 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Yeah, so the best thing, you know, I'm really extremely excited for the integration of conscious organizations and how I'm implementing these conscious ways of being inside, of culture around organizational behavior and how that gets to be cultivated so that these organizations actually then are able to expand into their communities and from the communities, towns, cities, so on and so forth, and so that's something that I'm really excited to be doing alongside great leaders, you know, like Christian G and Tony, and doing things that are very meaningful, focusing on how that can all come together within these different organizations.

40:03
So I'm learning where, you know, I can't really say, but there's a CEO of a very beautiful company that is going to, that has done really beautiful things for Mother Earth and also in terms of multinational corporations really focusing on conscious capitalism in the US, and he and I are going to be spending some time together to learn how we can refine that and implement that into more organizations around the planet so that, as a result, you know, these organizations are taking even more of a reinvention in the culture and the behavior of how we're showing up, because teal organizations and when I say teal organizations, they're very focused on being an organism, so everybody is self-directed, everybody is self-managed, and so this comes from a shared purpose, a shared vision, a shared understanding.

41:08
And inside of these organizations, if more people are self-directed like your podcast or name of your podcast then it gives the empowerment of that organization to move towards together, because everybody is running towards the same purpose. And so it's interesting because then, if more of us are doing that, is it possible that if more organizations are self-directed, and then that's translating into community, and then that community is translating into the city and more organizations are doing that across that same city, that then that same city becomes an organism that's self-directed and supporting each other, and then maybe that can happen into the state, and then maybe that state can turn into the country, and then maybe that country can turn into the continent, and so on and so forth. Who knows, anything is possible.

42:08 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So you were sort of attacking the problem on a company level where we are doing the ground-up work of just not conditioning the children into listening too much to the get a wife, get a job story.

42:30 - Eric Balance (Guest)
I'm not attacking anything. The word attack doesn't Okay. Well, that's exactly right.

42:38 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
But approaching this situation from that level and we are usually more working on that. Why would we? Why wouldn't we just let the next generation grow up as free spirits with an expanded consciousness and a good sense of self and powerful knowledge of who they are and why they are and what direction they are heading and why? I think that's well. That's where our main focus is, but the end game is more or less the same. It's just interesting.

43:20 - Eric Balance (Guest)
It's all together.

43:24 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, we're together.

43:25 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I would love to talk a little about addiction, as you have succeeded in battling it, and I myself is early. I smoked so much weed in my twenties and was totally addicted in the way that I smoked every day for years and years, and since then I've been living a nice and wonderful life and have and have, except for those two days. Except for those two days.

43:58 - Eric Balance (Guest)
But I still wonder the background of the addiction thing.

44:03 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I never really became good friends with alcohol in the way I was always questioning myself why am I having a glass of wine Friday evening with some friends? Is this because something is this? So there was always this nagging thing in my mind and I'm now in the dark, totally quitting alcohol. I drank wine maybe two times a week, not too much, but enough that it affected my mood the day after. And there was this question in my mind as I had the addiction in my past. So now I'm just going totally clean and it's a wonderful journey. And what I'm doing, I think, is just asking you, after the really wild youth you had, did you have any later stench with some kind of addiction? Or had you gone totally clean after that? And do my personal story resonate with you where you have been?

45:05 - Eric Balance (Guest)
So, like what I'm hearing, is you're asking if I've relapsed since 19.

45:11 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yes, but also I mean would alcohol have been relapsed for you in your world?

45:16 - Eric Balance (Guest)
No, no, no.

45:17
So I love wine and I enjoy having a glass of wine with dinner regularly, and I also love and enjoy great Bavarian beer, something that I grew up with and something that I can do very socially for myself. For me it's like I grew up around alcohol all my life and because of the dinner table, alcohol was like a glass of wine with dinner was just a normal thing, and so for me that is like. I do it, maybe once a month or once every couple of months, or sometimes maybe twice a week, in the odd week, here and there, but there's never been for me like a hunger or like addictive personality towards alcohol. I don't drink heavy liquor, I don't like it, I don't enjoy it, but I do love an amazing glass of red Malbec or a beautiful Bavarian hefeweizen. These are, for me, the beauty of life, the taste, the richness and parts of the things that I really can appreciate and enjoy. Just like I love steak, like I eat meat and I enjoy it, I love to have myself some lamb or a nice ribeye. I am a very cognizant man of what I like and what I don't like, and I really don't care what people think, and so it's beautiful to appreciate and understand where it comes from as well.

47:18
And there's in terms of relapse. I wouldn't say I relapsed. There was a time that maybe I got really scared and I thought I was going to, but it was not something that took me back to that place. However, when I did spend time in the jungle in the Amazon, I was curious at one point if I was kind of addicted to being in the sky of awareness, of listening to something greater, and I realized that because I was asking myself that question oh, am I addicted? I wasn't, so that was just.

48:05
The beautiful part is when you have that own awareness of like. Oh, is that addiction here, of like wanting to just be alone, because I do like to be alone. However, it's not because I'm scared to communicate or have a conversation with people. It's because I like to really know what I need to focus on and have that clear direction moving forward. So that was something really beautiful. I find that whenever you ask yourself a question, am I actually like this? The truth actually is this like because you're asking that it's like yeah, the truth is actually usually because you're asking yourself that question, you're not.

48:56 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Or at least you're on the way out. I mean sometimes we have a process going on.

49:04 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I would love to talk a little about your podcast. It's called the Resilient Minds the Resilient Minds podcast. Thank you.

49:16 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Don't speak English.

49:18 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yeah, and you have talked with a lot of people. Is it possible for you to pinpoint one or two that have really given you something you have taken away and where you can see yourself grown afterwards?

49:36 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Every single person has given me countless, countless, countless learnings and teachings, because they're all mirrors. The reason that I started the podcast was really to learn more about people and why they go through what they go through. It was a way to learn more about myself. Although I wanted to learn about them, I also wanted to understand myself. It gave me the capacity to also have a great ear, to learn by listening and also to share. I would say the greatest thing that I found is that when you're and this is just from the podcast in general is that when you're willing to create something meaningful that you can reach anyone, when you have that platform, your capacity to get in front of people that you have never thought that you could before changes, yeah.

50:49 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I didn't answer the question.

50:52 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
No, but it was a good enough answer. I wanted to use it also as a bridge to invite people to listen to your podcast. Also, I would like you to share if people wanted to get in contact with you. Where do they find your earring and how is it you can help them on that journey? Yeah.

51:17 - Eric Balance (Guest)
So we're actually just launching our conscious casual accelerator right now, where we're really helping if you're a new creator or a new artist or a new entrepreneur.

51:30
We just started a really coaching program that's going to be releasing at the end of March, so we just opened up slots to really get people into that. So if they go to balancemediaventures, click on our programs tab, hit the conscious casual accelerator, they'll be able to apply and really get some new information about how the 12 weeks looks like. So we really go through the cognitive, emotional and physical states to how to integrate that into a business aspect. Because, as you know, conscious entrepreneurship and conscious organizational capacity we've been doing that now for almost a decade and, as we continue to grow, we want to really have people that are new to also have access to these types of awareness and to really implement them.

52:25
So we're really excited to be launching this accelerator for those that really just don't know what's going on and how they can implement it inside of business. But just start, because the unconscious creator stepping into a conscious creator, all it takes is a vision. Without a vision, people perish and when you step into that vision, you start where you are. You just make things happen, so we're guiding people along for 12 weeks.

52:54 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
That sounds wonderful, and we will also add the link to our show notes. Eric, it's about time, so I will thank you that you had the time to talk with us. It had been a pleasure, and I look forward to listening more to your podcast and grow deeper into it. Thank you.

53:12 - Eric Balance (Guest)
Thank you and I just wanted to add one last thing Appreciate you both for taking the time. I know the focus and dedication it takes to create a podcast and to be really in flow and to have great conversations. So just acknowledging you both for your determination and focus and creativity. It's really beautiful and blessed and I'm grateful to have met you both.

53:39 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Thank you. I was looking down, looking almost distracted. I'm sorry, but I wanted to write down. All it takes is a vision and my little notebook here because it's a good, it's just a good sticky note to put on the fridge, I think For what? So thank you for all your inspiration. It's been fun to talk to you and now we are going to the blowhole with the large group of people we're hanging out with here in Mexico to see how nature will just it is stunning.

54:15 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yeah, thanks a lot for your time. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you liked that, then please share it with all your friends and family. We would also love it if you gave our podcast a review. Thanks, and if you want to support our podcast and work, then you can find us on patreoncom slash, the Conrad family. We will continue to travel full time and if you want to tag along, then please follow us on Facebook and Instagram at the Conrad family, and you can also read more than 100 blog posts on our website, theconradfamily. Until next time, make a wonderful day, thank you.

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